No. of Recommendations: 13
We need to find a better way to construct voting districts.
Do we need to find something like that? I mean, we kind of know how to do it. It's not that big a mystery. Give the power to construct voting district to an independent, non-partisan panel with instructions to draw the districts with various non-partisan criteria (uniform population, compactness, try to match geographic and county/municipal boundaries) and don't let them use data on things you want to keep out of the process (like party registration). Easy-peasy. You can use an algorithm, or a commission of bipartisan elections experts, or whatever.
The obstacle isn't finding a way to do that, it's that you can't force anyone to do that. For the most part, having an independent panel constructing voting districts ends up disfavoring the people in charge, who would rather have that power for themselves. And in our system, the national government doesn't set the rules for elections and districts - the states do.
