The NPR Politics Podcast - Could Proportional Representation Fix Congress?

Episode Date: December 25, 2023

Most congressional general elections are not competitive. It's why some people feel like voting won't make a difference, or that their interests are not represented by the people who win. Advocates say proportional representation could fix that — a system that where each congressional district would elect multiple representatives, and House seats would be distributed roughly in proportion to the votes each party gets. NPR's Hansi Lo Wang wrote about the idea recently. This bonus episode was originally released for our NPR Politics+ supporters. To hear more episodes like this one, sign up at plus.npr.org/politics. You'll also hear every regular episode without sponsor messages — and you'll be supporting the show. Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid, and I'm here once again to mark the season of giving by giving you all a chance to hear an episode for our NPR Politics Plus listeners. If that is you, thank you so much for your support. And if it's not, please consider signing up. You might hear every episode without sponsor messages, and you could get a chance to be in an episode and play our trivia game. And twice a month, you'll get bonus episodes like this one. Learn more at plus.npr.org. With that, hope you enjoyed this bonus episode. Thanks for listening and happy holidays. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Ashley Lopez. I cover politics. Today's bonus episode starts with a question. Could proportional representation fix Congress? That question is also the headline of a recent story by NPR's Hansi Luang. Hey, Hansi.

Hey, Ashley. Hansi covers voting and elections for the NPR politics team. Also here is NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving, who has looked at this issue as well. Hey, Ron. Good to be with you, Ashley. So again, the question is, could proportional representation fix Congress? It's kind of a wonky experimental question that we thought would be interesting to unpack. Hansi, let's start with you. What made you want to ask this question in the first place? And please tell us what exactly is proportional representation? Well, I've been tracking a bunch of lawsuits that threaten to further weaken the Voting Rights Act.

And while speaking with some legal scholars, they're concerned that, you know, the conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court means that the Voting Rights Act's days may be numbered. And so the question is, how else without the Voting Rights Act can you ensure fair and equal access to the ballot regardless of race? And some scholars have brought up this alternate way of electing the U.S. House of Representatives, proportional representation, and it will be an alternative to the current way, which is a winner-take-all system. One candidate with the most votes wins the single seat of a district, but under proportional representation, there would be multiple winners because each district would have multiple representatives and House seats would be distributed roughly in proportion

to the votes each party gets. Yeah, and we'll talk in a bit about who supports this idea, but I want to start with what their argument in favor of this is. Well, supporters say proportional representation would better reflect the country's diversity. We're talking about racial and ethnic diversity and political diversity. You know, you could vote for a House candidate in one party, your neighbor could vote for a different party, and both candidates would have a good chance of ending up getting elected in a multi-member district. And with proportional representation, supporters say, the threat of gerrymandering goes away because seats would be allocated to parties proportionally based on how voters vote. Yeah, and Ron, I guess the idea here is that this would replace a system

where now most congressional general elections around the country are not very competitive because of gerrymandering and how voters have sort of sorted themselves into the parties. One party often dominates. And so it's sometimes seen as politically beneficial to be more extreme, right, to stand out in those primaries within your own party, right? That is exactly right. You are going to win a primary where one party or the other dominates a district, not by being the most reasonable or the most moderate or the most centrist candidate who might get that party's nomination, but by being their champion, by being, let us say, the person most likely to carry the standard for the party. That is what has been the pattern all over the country. And something like 90 percent of the districts now are pretty safe, either for Republicans or for Democrats. Yeah. You know, I was talking to a Republican in New York City, which is known to be this Democratic stronghold. But, you know, there are hundreds of thousands

of Republican voters who, you know, anywhere else could likely have a lot of influence in elections, but not in New York City. But under proportional representation, they could have more of a say in's making general elections less competitive and representatives less responsive to constituents who officials maybe assume they don't need their support in order to win or even stay in office. Right, because they only have to win that small section of their party in a primary and pretty much everyone else, which I guess is the bulk of the people they're representing, don't matter as much. Right. That's the idea, yeah. Yes, and no wonder a lot of people don't bother to vote in November because they know that the party that they're not part of is going to win. Or they know the party they are part of is going to win. They don't feel like there's anything they need to do. Yeah.

So the argument is that proportional representation would fix some of these issues that we've been talking about. And Hansi, I wonder if there are any sort of real proposals floating around out there to actually do this. There have been. There's this Fair Representation Act that's been floating around Congress since 2017. It was introduced by a group of House Democrats led by Representative Don Beyer of Virginia. And this bill would require states to use ranked choice voting for House races. And there would be multi-member House districts with up to five representatives in each district, depending on each state's share of House seats. And this bill was introduced most recently back in 2021. It died in committee, and I'm watching to see if it gets introduced again. And you also looked into the history of this idea. There's actually a law in the books passed by Congress in 1967 that bans a House district from electing more than one representative, right? Right. This is a legal hurdle for supporters of proportional representation because this federal law bans a House district from electing more than one representative.

And Congress passed this a couple of years after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At that time, courts that were hearing redistricting lawsuits were thinking about ordering states with challenge maps to use multi-member districts and hold statewide elections as a temporary fix. But that fix, many lawmakers didn't like that. And there were concerns that some southern states would use multi-member districts for the House and hold statewide winner-take-all elections to try to dilute the collective voting power of Black voters. So Congress passed this requirement of single-member districts for the House are being elected under a system that we've been describing, not only under the law of that, but also under the practical effects of that, they're not all that upset about those practical effects because they are themselves the practical effects. They would not like to see a system that for one reason or another moved them out. Yeah. And Ron, one potential consequence of proportional representation could be that it opens up more opportunities for candidates

from other political parties, right? And so do you think that would ultimately make it easier or harder for Congress to get its work done. This is not the moment to suggest that Congress is getting its work done. It's just not. And what we're seeing, I think, is the breakdown of the single-member district idea, which has been around since well before the Civil War. It's been the dominant form since before the Civil War. And for a long time, gerrymandering was there, but it wasn't as efficient. It wasn't as efficient. It wasn't as effective. It didn't produce a Congress like the one we have today. And that's partly because

now we have computers and the computers just get better and better at drawing districts that are totally locked down for one party or the other. You can take a 50-50 vote in a state like North Carolina or Wisconsin so that it produces two-thirds of the seats for one party or the other. And that is literally what has happened. So in that kind of an environment, producing the kind of Congress that we have now and the kind of gridlock that we have now, I think our system is in serious health problems, if not truly sick. So if you experimented a little bit with seeing what would happen with some people from a third party, they might negotiate with one party or the other. And they might force the two major parties to negotiate with each other.

Sure. And Hansi, one thing we haven't touched on is the number of house seats, right? 435. It's been stuck at that number for decades. Would a system of proportional representation necessarily have to increase that number too? Not necessarily, but some advocates of proportional representation think creating more House seats would make Congress more representative of the country. You know, generally speaking, the number of seats in the House grew alongside the country's population, according to the census, until after the 1920 census, when some congressional leaders pushed to leave the House at 435 seats. So for the most part, it's been stuck at 435 for the House's voting members since then. And what that means is that after every census, some states are bound to lose House seats, some pick up more House seats. But Congress can change this, too. And there are folks who have long questioned how representative the House of Representatives actually is. Because, you know, here's the thing. A century ago, there was one representative for about every 200,000 people in the United States. And today, there's about one representative for about every

800,000 people. Well, Hansi, thanks for talking about your story with us today. Thanks for having me. And Ron, thank you for joining. My pleasure, Ashley. We'll link to Hansi's story in the notes of this episode. We'll be back with another bonus episode in a few weeks. Before we go, a reminder that as an NPR Politics Plus supporter, you can enter for a chance to be a contestant in our politics podcast trivia game. To do that, just email us at nprpolitics at npr.org and tell us that you know the secret code word. That code word is Ron. That's how we'll know you're a subscriber. nprpolitics at npr.org, code word Ron. I'm Ashley

Lopez. Thanks for listening to and supporting the NPR Politics at NPR.org. Code word wrong. I'm Ashley Lopez. Thanks for listening to and supporting the NPR Politics podcast.