The damage done by single-member districting (the pain, the pain of it all)

Topic: White Water

The damage done by single-member districting (the pain, the pain of it all)

St. Petersburg Times
December 20, 1998 Martin Dyckman

Americans have been asking how the House of Representatives thinks it can get away with impeaching President Clinton when public opinion strongly opposes it.

"Why are they not listening to the people of the United States?" one caller wanted to know.

It's because they don't have to.

Congress doesn't represent the people. It doesn't even represent districts. It represents the dominant factions in its districts, and the rest be damned.

Single-member districting is the root of this problem. Gerrymandering and unlimited campaign spending, a monstrous advantage for incumbents, have made it worse.

Tens of millions of Americans have no chance to ever be represented by the people of their choice. Millions more have been overconcentrated, under the guise of upholding "voting rights," into electoral ghettoes where they are sure to elect African-Americans or Hispanics like them, but where they are invisible and irrelevant to the lawmakers who represent the "bleached" constituencies next door.

On Nov. 3, the Republicans won 51 percent of the seats in the House with only 48.8 percent of the votes actually cast in contested races. The Democrats won 48.5 percent of the House with 49 percent of the vote. Libertarians, the Reform Party and others wound up with the grand total of one seat -- independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont -- despite having polled 2-million votes, the equivalent of 10 congressional districts, nationwide.

The Democrats might have won control of the House if they hadn't decisively lost the battle of uncontested seats, 29 to 18.

Where the Republicans own most of their seats is significant. Not where pro-Clinton opinion is strongest, but in the South and the mountain West, where moderate Republicans are as unwelcome as the IRS and where the Republican right, a faction within a faction, controls the primaries.

The reverse is often true in Democratic states, creating a Congress whose members are more extreme, more polarized and more hostile to compromise than the nation they represent. The House Judiciary Committee is a pungent example.

An analysis by Ronald Brownstein of the Los Angeles Times pointed up last week how the Southern wing was driving Clinton's impeachment. While some moderates from pro-Clinton regions privately preferred censure, he wrote, "they lack the numbers and influence to force the party's dominant conservative wing to provide that option." Yet if there is a voter backlash, he noted, it will be the moderates who don't return in 2001.

It would be poetic justice if that cost the GOP its House majority, but it would be bad for the country.

George Washington's famous farewell echoes true: "Let me now . . . warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party."

The Constitution doesn't mention parties. It doesn't mention single-member districts either, although federal law now requires them. The law should be changed to permit the states to experiment with proportional representation in Congress.

Single-member districting was better than at-large systems where the dominant party took all seats at once. But without proportional voting, it can still take them all piecemeal. Winner-take-all is for sports, not self-government.

Quebec's recent election offers fair warning. The secessionist Parti Quebecois won 60 percent of the seats in the provincial legislature despite polling fewer votes than the Liberals. Its single-member districts could not have been redrawn to prevent that because of the heavy concentration of Liberal voters at Montreal.

The United States has its own extreme examples. Democratic candidates got one third of Oklahoma's congressional votes but none of its six seats because Democratic voters were dispersed throughout the state. In Texas, on the other hand, the Republicans won only 13 of the 29 seats though they had 51.5 percent of the votes. But among those 19 were three of the leaders of the Clinton lynch mob: Bill Archer, Tom DeLay and Dick Armey, whose districts are so stacked in their favor that only DeLay had a Democratic opponent. They can afford to thumb their noses at public opinion elsewhere.

As usual, most races nationwide were over before they began. The Center for Voting and Democracy, which promotes proportional representation, accurately predicted 358 of 361 winners more than a year before the 1998 election. The average victory margin was the highest this decade: a 43-point spread. Only 43 seats -- out of 435 -- were won with less than a 10-point spread.

Some 10.1-million Democrats voted for losers, as against only 8.5-million Republicans; both groups have no one speaking for them in Congress. That doesn't count 47 districts where incumbents were effectively unopposed. Florida was the nation's sorriest undemocratic example in that regard; 15 of our 23 incumbents weren't even on the ballot, and a 16th had only a feeble write-in opponent. That was more than a third of all the uncontested seats nationwide.

The great mass of Floridians lost their right to vote because of the way the Legislature and the courts drew the lines -- first to favor incumbents and later to create "safe" minority seats with safe Republican seats as the other part of the bargain.

This is what Lani Guinier, an advocate of proportional voting, decried as the "triumph of tokenism." Having nominated her to head the Civil Rights Division, Clinton abandoned her in the face of false charges that she was a "quota queen."

Does it occur to him now that she was right?

What was the percentage of people who voted for the impeached president?

Congress doesn't represent the people. It doesn't even represent districts. It represents the dominant factions in its districts, and the rest be damned.

No, Mr. Dyckman....let them VOTE!......and we're not going to have any of this estimating the population either.

Cincinatus' wife

To: Cincinatus
Tens of millions of Americans have no chance to ever be represented by the people of their choice. Millions more have been overconcentrated, under the guise of upholding "voting rights," into electoral ghettoes where they are sure to elect African-Americans or Hispanics like them, but where they are invisible and irrelevant to the lawmakers who represent the "bleached" constituencies next door.

I find this paragraph to be an unbelievable mixture of self political interest - somehow no one noticed the problems of electoral ghettoes before 1994. Than we are told that people 'like us' are only those with which we share some racial affinities. Than it all ends with a full-blown racist slur, talking about "bleached" constituencies.

I propose that the author be outed as an unspoken racist of the imbecilic variety (that a race in itself) and be shamed into resigning his jobs and whatever insignificant public functions he might have performed - something on the line of that sport commentator who said that blacks can't swim well because their bones are heavier.

I believe that calling white people 'bleached' is at least as outrageous (not that I care) as one Reaganite cabinet member remark some years ago who demonstrated the diversity of his staff by noting that he had "a black, a jew and a cripple". This is exactly what today's extreme leftists mean by diversity (with a positive connotation attached to the term) without ever spelling out what it means in their view.

From: A Vast RightWing Conspirator (avrwc@hotmail.com) *
12/24/98 06:53:11 PST

To: Fraudbuster
Israel is the ultimate example of proportional representation. The entire country is one electoral district and seats are divided up simply along the percentage of votes garnered by each party.

This article ties the current electoral system with whining about Clinton's well-deserved impeachment. We should look at the electoral system without viewing a single political issue.

There are other ways than total proportional voting to open up the system. For example, have multiple member districts, say combine 5 congressional districts into one, and each voter then gets 5 votes.

In the past election, I believe 80+ seats were uncontested, that almost 20% of the seats. Election consultants say that in a typical year, only 5% of congressional elections are in play. This is unacceptable. They're supposed to represent the people and they don't.
From: kermit (ml3127@power-net.net) *
12/24/98 07:03:14 PST

To: kermit
There are other ways than total proportional voting to open up the system. For example, have multiple member districts, say combine 5 congressional districts into one, and each voter then gets 5 votes.

This is exactly what you would do if you wanted to divide the nation accross racist 'multi-cultural' and even gender lines. With such representation the black constituents would tend and be probably encouraged to contact their black representative, women would probably seek their 'congresswoman' and so forth. And you will still see disenfranchised. I can assume that not all congressional super-districts would have elected a mentally-retarded trans-sexual muslim woman to represent like constituents.
From: A Vast RightWing Conspirator (avrwc@hotmail.com) *
12/24/98 07:23:45 PST

To: Cincinatus
"On Nov. 3, the Republicans won 51 percent of the seats in the House with only 48.8 percent of the votes actually cast in contested races. The Democrats won 48.5 percent of the House with 49 percent of the vote. Libertarians, the Reform Party and others wound up with the grand total of one seat -- independent Bernie Sanders of Vermont -- despite having polled 2-million votes, the equivalent of 10 congressional districts, nationwide."

We should note that Dyckman makes no mention of the actual vote totals of Democrats and Republicans, using only percentages. Then in giving the results of the minor parties he uses actual numbers and omits the mention of their percentages--barely TWO per cent.

Anytime a "researcher" switches from PERCENTAGES to ACTUAL NUMBER one can be fairly certain that the "researcher" is, in truth, an ADVOCATE. And that which Dyckman advocates, proportional representation, is a highway to political instability.
From: Charles of Newark (csampson@uti.com) *
12/24/98 07:30:01 PST