politics

Judges shouldn't have political affiliations in the first place.

That leaves a huge amount of power to the "random" selection algorithm and any other eligibility rules.

This is fraught with problems, but just to make my point: those potential jurors go through the selection process where they are whittled down. Conflicts of interest, bias, and more are all taken into consideration.

There’s also the fact that many Americans are just idiots. A not insignificant number of people legitimately believe the earth is flat.

Having a district cross a state border will be a problem when a Rep has to navigate two separate state governmental systems when trying to access help for their constituents.

That's OK-ish sounding but I'm going to give the example of NY. NYC is a very different animal from the northern part of the state and local issues matter a great deal depending on which portion you live in. I imagine it's like that in other very large states and major cities in general.

I think perhaps there should be some accounting for population centers. Major cities simply have different concerns from rural areas, and it seems reasonable to have each be represented. But we may be getting into a "where does it stop" thing here.

I'm not sure how to skin that cat or if it's worth skinning. I generally agree with your proposal - the way it's currently done is absurd.

parties win seats based on a percentage of the vote they receive and can assign members (which they do already, just with more steps) as they see fit. Gerrymandering solved, also we just broke the terrible de facto 2 party system

Nope. If people only get one vote (vs, say, ranked choice) then they have to be tactical about their one selection. This forces "Abilene effect" voting.

See... That the problem, the quote that best comes to mind is.

" The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.

To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.

To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job. "

-Douglas Adams

Start with an automatic retirement age; no one over the age of 65 (for example) can serve as an elected representative.

Honestly, the same should likely apply to voter eligibility - to be honest - but that’s a whole separate argument for another time.

More representatives means more districts. More districts means smaller districts. The smaller the district the harder it is to gerrymander. If you take this to the extreme, a district is one person and that person is the representative, there is no gerrymandering and you’d have a true democracy.

To try and understand how/why adding additional seats to Congress would be a positive change (or really, ANY proposal) - take the most extreme ends of the spectrum:

With 1 single seat, 50.1% of voters would get 100% of the representation.

With 1 seat for every voter, 50.1% of voters would get 50.1% of the representation.

Obviously, not EVERY single person can be a congressman - so the goal should be to find the minimum number of representatives required to optimally represent the populace.

We'll it would be harder to pick some Democrats from this neighborhood and a bunch of Republicans from that neighborhood if the district size is only one neighborhood

Also it would allow for more specific representation. Using myself as an example, my district is basically my county plus a couple small parts of some neighboring counties. One end of the county is pretty rural, the other half butts up against a major city and pretty much just bleeds right into it. We have some ridiculously wealthy old money areas, and we have some that look like they were plucked from a movie about gang violence. There's a few towns here that I've legitimately never even had to drive through. It's kind of insane that all of these different areas are being represented by the same person, we have very different and sometimes conflicting concerns. And if I needed to go to my representatives office for any reason, I'd have to drive about an hour to get there because of course she's set up shop at the far end of the county from me.

Personally, I think the ideal way to draw districts is to kind of have voters do it when they vote. Give them a map, have them select the areas where they live, work, shop, drive through regularly, or have other connections to until they've selected an area with a big enough population to be a district. Then feed those maps into a computer and have it average them all together to generate the new district map.

Yes it does!

It's much harder to herd 10,000 cats than it is 100. Those in power who play defense for the status quo will definitely notice the difference.

The US started that way. They ended up having parties again almost immediately.

The FF tried that and it immediately failed, leaving us with a system ill equipped to handle political parties.

I'd argue that it is a lot easier to inform the public when the campaign doesn't have to cover as much area and that it becomes more difficult to buy every race when there are more of them.