Dear Editor,

The States are in a gerrymandering frenzy. Many States are allowing their congressional representatives to choose their voters instead of the voters choosing their representatives. Here is a response to this gerrymandering crisis that gives me some hope.

The current situation re: House Congressional Districts:

• The 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act (2 U.S. Code § 2c) legally mandated that all states elect their U.S. House of Representatives members from discrete, single-member districts, effectively abolishing multi-member or at-large elections (of which there were some examples at the time) for states with more than one seat.

• Single-Member Requirement: It prohibited states from using winner-take-all, at-large house districts where voters could cast ballots for multiple representatives.

• Historical Context: Congress passed the mandate largely to prevent Southern states from using at-large voting to dilute the voting strength of newly enfranchised Black voters following the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (which has effectively been neutered by the Supreme Court). Pairing single-member, winner-take-all districts with two strongly polarized political parties along with a lack of rules for redistricting has trapped us in today’s gerrymandering cycle. This battle has also left out large groups of voters who can’t find a political home: Unaffiliated voters. Voter turn-out is abysmal as a result.

A new approach:

Multi-member, multiparty congressional districts appear to offer a way out of this dilemma.

In brief, here’s how this would look:

• Congress would pass H.R.4632 – The Fair Representation Act, a bill recently submitted in the U.S. House to address gerrymandering.

• This bill requires most States to redistrict into a small number of multi-member districts that allow at-large candidates. In Colorado, this might mean 2 Congressional districts instead of the current 8. Colorado would still elect 8 Representatives.

• Non-partisan redistricting commissions would be required to create the districts to ensure fairness.

• Ranked choice voting would be used to elect candidates.

• Any number of political parties could run candidates in the districts, which in combination with Ranked Choice Voting would eliminate the current 2-party lock on elections.

• Representatives would be chosen based on the proportion of votes for candidates in each party in each district. For example, in Colorado, if Republican candidates received 25% of the votes, Democratic candidates received 50% of the vote and third-party candidates received 25% of the votes, Republicans would get 2 Representatives, Democrats would get 4 Representatives, and the third party would get 2 Representatives.

This simple description is not complete and raises many questions, so for a more detailed description visit Fairvote.org. For even more details listen to one of the numerous podcast interviews with Lee Drutman, author of “Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop”. This book provides even more background and has detailed explanations of all the concepts discussed here. Fairvote.org also has a link to submit a request to your Representative to vote for H.R.4632.

Respectfully submitted,

Eric Douglas

Golden