When it comes to reforming the House of Representatives, it’s time to think bigger

Recently, Professor Danielle Allen has written a series of columns exploring what would happen if we increased the size of the House of Representatives. After years of postponing the necessary maintenance, Allen asks us to consider our Founding Fathers’ vision of the People’s House as a body that would grow with the population of the country it represents. Could increasing the size of the House help unlock Congress’s potential and “get our politics working again”? 

Professor Steven Lubet recently responded with an emphatic “no.” “Adding members to the House,” Lubet insisted, “will only increase partisanship and feed extremism” because state legislatures “have perfected the art of gerrymandering” and will simply allow dominant parties to entrench their positions. 

His fear is understandable. Partisan gerrymandering has succeeded in rendering many congressional seats “safe” for the incumbent party — leaving the legislature’s mapmakers with more say in who is elected than the voters themselves.

To add insult to injury, the natural geographic sorting of “red” and “blue” voters has steadily continued to increase the share of districts that clearly favor one party over the other. Even in states that have all but eliminated the invidious forms of partisan gerrymandering through independent redistricting commissions — as in Arizona, California, Colorado and Michigan — the vast majority of districts in those states nonetheless remain uncompetitive.

What if we could increase the size of the House while effectively ending gerrymandering and the effects of geographic sorting at the same time?

Most democracies today use some form of proportional representation, where multiple legislators are elected at the same time from a district according to their share of the vote. For instance, if Republicans win roughly 50 percent of the vote in a six-seat district, they would likely secure three of the seats. Instead of our current system where a majority (or even a plurality) in a congressional district wins the only seat available, these systems elect members in multi-member districts representing both majority and minority interests, whether they be Republicans in blue states or racial minorities in majority white states.

The kicker? Most multi-member districts make gerrymandering practically impossible. 

Here’s how it works: by combining a state’s individual districts into a smaller number of multi-member districts, the line-drawing exercise becomes largely irrelevant. This setup makes it prohibitively difficult “to predict the exact seat distribution in every district due to the higher number of parties entering the race and the smaller percentages separating winners from losers.” As a result, researchers find that the risk of gerrymandering all but disappears once districts have five or more seats.

Often, proposals for expanding the House are coupled with a shift towards proportional multi-member districts, such as those from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and my own organization, among various scholars.

By pairing House expansion with proportional multi-member districts, gerrymandering could become a thing of the past in most states, better securing the benefits articulated by Allen of a more functional Congress. Even the most self-serving state legislatures couldn’t help but draw fairer maps. 

To be sure, such a change isn’t without its drawbacks. Allen extolled the benefit of smaller districts as decreasing the costs of running political campaigns for the House. While it is possible that candidates could succeed in winning a seat by targeting their efforts at a concentrated area or community, multi-member districts may lead some candidates to spend more money reaching more voters across a larger area. 

Like the current cap on the number of House members, there is also a statutory requirement that members of the House be elected from single-member districts. Dating to 1967, the requirement was federally imposed to prevent the judicial imposition of “at-large” elections, which would have produced even less representative and less proportional outcomes. The mandate succeeded at avoiding the harm threatened at the time, but has also prohibited states from pursuing even more proportional systems of representation for their House delegations, in lieu of single-member districts.  

Proportional representation means that voters who are in the minority in their community don’t just get a ballot to cast on election day — they get a chance to see someone who represents their views and their community earn a seat at the table to participate in the political process that writes laws affecting them. 

The idea of giving people a seat at the table to ensure their voices are heard in our government is baked into our understanding of the Constitution from its earliest days. In Federalist Paper 51,  “comprehending in the society so many separate descriptions of citizens” was key to preventing “an unjust combination of a majority” to commit what the founders described as the “evil” of oppression of the rights of the minority. 

As important as ensuring that minorities had a voice in government, the gradual increase in the number of members of the House, and the rough ratio of one representative for roughly each 30,000 people  were kinds of “security” baked into the design of the House. 

We hit the pause button on that process almost a century ago. But kickstarting a reboot by increasing the size of the House and reforming the way we elect its members may be just what we need to get closer to realizing John Adams’ vision for the chamber as “an exact portrait of the people at large.”

Cerin Lindgrensavage is counsel at Protect Democracy.