by Jerry Cayford
“Failure is the foundation of success, and the means by which it is achieved,” says the Tao Te Ching. The current competition between our two parties to gerrymander the country—Texas, California, Virginia, Florida—is a stunning failure for democracy reform efforts. Gerrymandering transfers power from the people to the parties, and Americans hate it. By the time this year’s mid-term elections are over, huge numbers of us will have representatives who, we feel, don’t represent us and won unfairly. Many of us will live in states without a single official in Congress from our own party. Nevertheless, we all support this district grab, because we can’t let the other party seize power by gerrymandering more districts than we do. Where are the means to success in failure this big?
Spilt Milk
No one is feeling more defeated than the good-government activists who have worked so long to end gerrymandering and make our elections more fair. The need to respond to extreme gerrymanders has forced them to support the torching of their own work. They are “backpedaling furiously,” as one such activist bluntly puts it: “Decades of reformer work is going up in smoke.” Renewing forward movement will require understanding what happened. Alarmingly, there are signs that the reform community will learn nothing, that it will interpret this defeat as an aberration rather than a refutation of its past work and will return stubbornly to its failed strategy. A different response to failure, though, could build a foundation for success.
What the reform community appears to be overlooking is the golden opportunity this ugly war to gerrymander everything actually presents. It is the opportunity not only to formulate a better strategy, but also to use the power of public anger to solve the problem of creating fair districts once and for all. Redistricting has been mostly a wonkish, back-burner issue, briefly irritating to the public from time to time, but never before commanding the intensity of concern it does now. Right now—with huge amounts of money, political power, and public outrage all focused on gerrymandering—now is when reform can succeed.
To diagnose what is keeping reformers stuck, we need to look at voting methods as well as redistricting. Currently, redistricting is done mostly by state legislatures, and election winners are chosen by plurality voting. The trouble with this system shows up when it’s seen in political context (as summarized by Paul Krugman): “In short, we are in the midst of an unprecedented power grab by America’s oligarchs. This power grab is arguably the most important fact about contemporary U.S. politics. In many ways MAGA is just a symptom.” Behind the power grab are certain conditions and mechanisms: a congenial legal structure (oligarch-friendly decisions such as Citizens United), a siloed media environment, an increase in the number and wealth of billionaires, etc. Gerrymandering and plurality voting are among the most important mechanisms enabling such power grabs. They make political power conveniently grabbable by concentrating it in the hands of the two parties’ leaders: plurality voting gives power to the parties by forcing voters to choose only between those two (or waste their votes); and in gerrymandered districts even that little bit of choice is lost. In this way, our electoral mechanisms lodge political power in two parties that are largely invulnerable to voters but quite vulnerable to big money. (And what works for oligarchs works more generally for all authoritarians.)
The goal of democratic reform is to restore control of government to the people. The reforms that will do this are ready to hand: for redistricting, a strict mathematical algorithm should replace state-by-state discretion; and for voting, winners should be chosen by ranked choice voting rather than first-past-the-post plurality voting. Together, these two reforms are as vital for the health of our democracy as the secret ballot (taken for granted this last century and more). They may also be the most effective way to thwart the “power grab [that] is arguably the most important fact about contemporary U.S. politics.” Unfortunately, the reform community seems paralyzed by its focus on the wrong reforms.
The assessment that “reformer work is going up in smoke” is in an article by Steven Hill titled “The Collapse of Common Cause’s Vision for US Democracy.” Common Cause is the leading advocate for having citizens commissions do our redistricting instead of legislators. It is also one of the biggest and oldest organizations advocating for good government on diverse issues. (Full disclosure: I was on Common Cause Maryland’s Board of Directors a dozen or so years ago.) Hill describes the quandary the organization finds itself in: “In a recent policy statement commenting on this unfolding mid-decade debacle, Common Cause leadership declared: ‘Independent redistricting commissions are still the best mechanism we know of for achieving fair representation.’ And now that strategy is in utter tatters.” I agree with Hill that commissions are not the answer (though we disagree on what is). As he said in an email, “Common Cause leaders…are pretty stumped by what to do next.” They are simply unwilling—so far—to give up on the commission model into which they have sunk decades of work.
I proposed what to do next in an open letter in December to Common Cause (and former California Governor Schwarzenegger). I explained why citizens redistricting commissions are hopelessly inadequate; basically, they leave the dangerous power to gerrymander fully intact and as grabbable as ever, just in different hands (as a colleague of Hill’s details). We are now watching state legislatures one by one take that power back from commissions. A better plan takes political discretion off the table entirely by using a mathematical algorithm to redistrict. This algorithm plan is better than commissions in every way: more consistent, nationally implementable, easier to monitor, fairer, simpler, much cheaper, and impossible to game. (It is what an economist might call “Pareto superior” to commissions.) It eliminates the power to gerrymander—so there is nothing to grab—rather than just depositing that power somewhere for future mischief. Hill and others have a competing alternative, though, which brings us to what is paralyzing the rest of the advocacy community beyond Common Cause.
Another organization, FairVote, is widely considered the leading electoral reform advocacy group. (Hill is a co-founder and former leader of FairVote.) Other groups, such as Rank the Vote and the philanthropy/advocacy group Unite America, routinely defer to FairVote on a range of issues, though Common Cause may lead on redistricting, specifically. FairVote’s primary focus is ranked choice voting (RCV), which is indeed the essential mechanism for dispersing power widely—and ungrabbably—to citizens. (I discussed RCV’s benefits in a review of Lee Drutman’s book Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop.) FairVote has successfully campaigned for RCV to be implemented in many cities and counties over twenty-some years, and recently even in two states. These are major achievements.
When I sent FairVote my open letter on redistricting, however, a staff member responded, “FairVote continues to remain focused on adopting proportional representation (PR) to elect the U.S. House of Representatives as the best solution to gerrymandering.” This is the competing alternative, and FairVote is going to keep its powder dry for a future fight over PR. Consequently, at this moment of historic maximum leverage to end gerrymandering—with the country appalled by this battle between the parties to disenfranchise each other’s voters, and with a sensible, viable plan of algorithmic redistricting in hand—Common Cause responds, “Independent redistricting commissions are still the best mechanism,” and FairVote “remains focused on adopting proportional representation.” That is, Common Cause can’t act because it is still committed to the plan that just went up in smoke; and FairVote can’t act because it is committed to a plan whose time is not come.
With One Stone
Let’s turn, then, to proportional representation, which connects our two reform problems, districting and voting. The enticing promise of PR is that it solves multiple problems simultaneously. PR is not itself a mechanism so much as an aspiration: the aspiration to elect officials proportionally among society’s different groups competing for representation. The actual mechanism to realize this aspiration is multi-member districts combined with ranked choice voting. Multi-member districts, being much larger, are harder to gerrymander. Therefore, in theory, PR can solve voting and districting and also increase the political power of underrepresented groups. FairVote pursues these multiple goals by advocating for its flagship legislation, the Fair Representation Act (reintroduced by Representative Beyer in 2025 as H.R. 4632); the bill summary says its purpose is “To establish the use of ranked choice voting in elections for Senators and Representatives…to establish multi-member congressional districts, to require…redistricting according to nonpartisan criteria.”
I have two objections. The first is practical. Multi-member districts are going to be a hard reform to sell, both to the public and to Congress. They were outlawed in the Apportionment Act of 1842, and they have rarely been used for national offices since then; moreover, their illegality was reiterated and strengthened by the 1967 Uniform Congressional District Act. They are quite foreign to most Americans’ experience, would be a very dramatic change, and incumbents in office have strong reason to oppose them (about which I say more in my Doom Loop review). Consequently, national multi-member districts—whatever their virtues may be—are not a reform that is going to pass any time soon. As an NPR “explainer” puts it, “many of its supporters acknowledge it would likely be years, if not decades, before a majority of lawmakers allow such a big, untested restructuring of Congress.”
This is in no way a criticism of multi-member districts or the dream of proportional representation. It is a point about tactics in pursuit of a goal. The criticism here is of holding back more feasible electoral reforms by bundling PR together with them, as the Fair Representation Act does. Even ardent supporters of PR can see the wisdom of pursuing reforms sequentially, rather that all at once. As Nathan Lockwood, co-founder of Rank the Vote, wrote me, “Regarding what comes first, fair maps, ranked choice voting, proportional representation, etc., IMO, any of these things makes getting the next thing easier. It loosens the grip of unaccountable power every time you peel a finger off.” This is exactly right. As others put it, “incremental measures such as ranked-choice voting” need not wait on grander ambitions: “Practically speaking, narrow procedural changes are easier to achieve than deep structural reforms that reconfigure institutions in a fundamental way” (Didi Kuo, “Why Big Reform Is Possible”).
Add to the benefits of sequential reform the immediate public outrage over gerrymandering, and a clear tactical logic emerges: do algorithmic redistricting now, then ranked choice voting, then the multi-member districts that enable proportional representation.
This tactical logic is strongly reinforced by a second objection to PR that we might call “political.” It is still not a criticism of multi-member districts or PR—properly implemented—but suggests that implementation may be more complicated than advocates are telling us. Did the date “1967” jump out at you? That’s right: the same Congress (basically) that passed the 1965 Voting Rights Act came back two years later to ban multi-member districts in order to protect voting rights! The reason is that Southern states were seeking to subvert the 1965 VRA (per NPR’s explainer) by “using multi-member districts and at-large, winner-take-all elections for the House to weaken the voting power of Black voters.” Multi-member districts turn out to be a two-edged sword; which edge of the sword you get depends on the voting mechanism.
To make the danger clear, consider the voting mechanism typical of school board elections: if there are three slots, voters get three votes; candidates often run in slates, and any voter may well vote a whole slate. The result is commonly that one group sweeps the election, i.e. the opposite of proportional representation. Ranked choice voting, then, performs work essential to making multi-member districts beneficial. Winner-take-all (plurality) voting makes them harmful. The lesson is that it is vitally important that multi-member districts NOT be implemented before RCV.
We can see, then, that the Fair Representation Act’s bundling of reforms is a risky strategy because—and here is the political point—the benefit or harm of multi-member districts is buried in the details of how exactly it is paired with a voting procedure. Opponents of PR will see that they can win by stealth if they can strip RCV out of the bill. And since the only experience most people have of multi-member voting is with elections like the school board one above, the public will not have strong intuitions about the importance of RCV to a bill marketed primarily as “Fair Representation.” Consequently, advocates and opponents will end up fighting over amendments that the public has little ability to understand. It will be the sort of battle that makes people hate politics. And success is by no means guaranteed. The correct strategy is sequential: pursue multi-member districts only after RCV is firmly in place.
The vehicles for carrying this better plan are practically ready. The Redistricting Reform Act of 2025 (H.R.5449 / S.2885), sponsored by Representative Lofgren and Senator Padilla, could be revised to mandate one districting algorithm nationwide, instead of fifty citizens commissions. (My open letter recommends the balanced power diagrams algorithm of Cohen-Addad, Klein, and Young.) The second step would be to fully support the Ranked Choice Voting Act (RCVA), sponsored by Representative Raskin and Senator Welch (H.R.6589 / S.3425). The RCVA needs no changes (other than to stop treating it reluctantly as a backup plan). The Fair Representation Act could then become step three, simplified to focus only on multi-member districts. The reform community can unify behind this sequence: evaluate it at FairVote’s “Mid-Year Learning” to prepare for real movement at their Mid-Strategy Review following this year’s elections.
Something else about PR deserves mention, something harder to articulate. I’ve read a lot of articles by reform advocates singing the praises of PR and urging support for multi-member districts. None of them mention that such districts can be and were used against minority voters. Only because the 1967 date made me suspicious and I went hunting did I discover this fact. Once discovered, it’s easy to find in many documents, and FairVote even has a dissertation on its website (buried deep in its archives) with a chapter on that 1967 act. But there is not much concern to educate supporters about that dangerous second edge. Similarly, many articles don’t mention the 1842 Apportionment Act, leaving readers with the misimpression that multi-member districts were legal from the founding until sixty years ago, thereby obscuring how thoroughly entrenched single-member districts really are, culturally and institutionally.
Hiding the weaknesses of multi-member districts hints at insecurity within the reform community, fear that the case for PR may not enjoy as strong support among the public as do the incremental reforms RCV and neutral redistricting (by algorithm or commissions). And yes, RCV is simply the right thing to do (anti-reform propaganda notwithstanding), and so is neutral redistricting, and pretty much anyone can see this with a little time and education. But that says no more than what everyone acknowledges: PR is a more difficult reform to achieve. It remains true that the most effective way to achieve PR is to lay the groundwork for it with other reforms. As Lockwood said, passing each reform “makes getting the next thing easier.” So, holding the easier incremental reforms hostage to the more difficult structural one is utterly counterproductive. Yet FairVote remains stubbornly steadfast in going for the grand slam, even in the midst of a national redistricting meltdown: “David Daley, a redistricting expert and senior fellow at FairVote…argues this moment calls for major structural changes.”
Even incremental change will need our unity. Both major parties’ leaderships oppose electoral reform (by and large). To overcome their resistance will require significant political power. Where will it come from? It won’t come from the billionaire oligarchs. As we saw earlier, they like power in the hands of party leaders who need their money. The only serious source of power for reform is the public. The public is usually discounted by political actors because it cannot cohere in agreement on a single course of action. Overcoming the resistance of powerful forces to electoral reform requires a substantial unity in the public’s perceptions that a course of action is simply and obviously right. It is already obvious that gerrymandering diminishes even the little power we felt we had. Once you look at it, it also becomes obvious that the best course of action is redistricting by a strict algorithm that takes the power away from politicians and commissions. Because of the gerrymander wars, the conditions exist right now to unify the public to end gerrymandering permanently. With leadership from FairVote and Common Cause, redistricting reform can be the first domino in a line from failure to success.
Coda: Sauce for the Gander
Last month, The Atlantic published an article about the Mellon Foundation titled “The Multi-Billion Dollar Foundation that Controls the Humanities.” It describes the damaging effects on the humanities of their largest funder’s turn to focusing heavily on social justice advocacy. That turn creates “an incentive structure that pushes scholars to fake or fudge an interest in social justice.” With funding from non-Mellon sources disappearing, humanities scholars feel pressure to contort their work to get grants: “Forced to choose between forgoing an opportunity to win a badly needed grant and twisting his research into a social-justice pretzel, he opted for the pretzel.” This critique of Mellon from outside the advocacy world resonates with some of the electoral reform puzzles inside that world that warrant investigation.
I came across Mellon’s philanthropy from a completely different direction. Steven Hill co-authored a very interesting study with Paul Haughey titled “Shaky Political ‘Science’ Misses Mark on Ranked Choice Voting.” (A summary on DemocracySOS has a link to the full paper and to their ongoing “Shaky Research” series.) A surprisingly high percentage of supposedly scholarly work on RCV opposes RCV based on analyses so shoddy as to be serious violations of basic academic norms. And a large majority of these shoddy oppositional studies are financed or produced by the Political Reform program of New America, a DC think tank.
The Political Reform program’s largest funder is, yes, the Mellon Foundation ($1,000,000), and its second largest is Democracy Fund ($775,000), which shares Mellon’s explicit focus on promoting minority interests. Nothing wrong with that, but the Atlantic article draws our attention to incentives to proclaim or invent pro-minority benefits. The danger these incentives pose for redistricting reforms is easy to see. The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) enshrined the use of districting to promote minority representation, which was successful. But protecting gerrymandering for one use protects it for other, less noble, uses. Now the less noble ones are winning, and majority-minority districts across the South will likely be gerrymandered away after the Supreme Court overturns section 2 of the VRA, as it will this summer (explicitly or practically). Yet still the Redistricting Reform Act bill trumpets its requirement that citizens commissions must implement the VRA, knowing full well such language will be illegal before the bill passes; and declarations that we will fight for the VRA are ubiquitous in reform literature.
In correspondence with Democracy Fund, I argued that the logic of gun control applies to redistricting: it is worth surrendering the power to gerrymander (or own a gun), if everyone else also has to surrender that same power. And when the Supreme court outlaws racial gerrymanders while protecting partisan ones—that is, takes our guns while leaving the bad guys theirs—the urgency will escalate to recognize this gun control logic. But sixty years of defending the VRA makes it hard to give up the false hope that citizens commissions will somehow be anti-partisan and pro-minority.
Proportional representation is similarly presented by its supporters as increasing minority representation. I argued above that PR is actually two-edged, and it will damage minority representation unless the groundwork of ranked choice voting is in place. The argument is quite compelling that reform should proceed in discrete steps, with PR coming later. Yet FairVote seems intent on keeping PR at the head of the line alongside RCV, and New America promotes PR while pushing RCV down with specious analyses. Why? What’s the agenda behind what frankly seems a betrayal of the reform community? Lee Drutman, who is a senior manager of New America’s Political Reform program, actively lobbied against the 2024 RCV referenda, which were defeated across the country by an onslaught of anti-democracy, pro-oligarchy propaganda. I don’t know if it’s simply that reformers are contorting to appear to serve funders’ agendas, or something else. But there are puzzles here that warrant investigation, and another article.