Fair Voting Solution To Current Court Challenge of Florida’s Congressional Districts

LEHIGH ACRES, Fla. - Aug. 3, 2014 - PRLog -- Recently a Circuit Court in Florida declared that two Congressional Districts, 5 and 10, were drawn in
2012 in contravention of constitutional
mandates. This obviously opens a huge
can of worms since redrawing those districts
would necessarily change adjacent ones.

There is, however, a simple solution to the problem put forward by The Center for Voting and Democracy that advocates voting methods that are more democratic, such as using the popular vote for election a president. The Constitutional hurtle involved can be easily overcome in this case by state legislators mandating that all of their electoral votes will go to the candidate with the most popular vote nationally.

Regarding the Florida problem mentioned above, the easiest solution and the fairest would be to use the Center for Voting and Democracy’s suggestion. “Instead of 27 individual congressional districts, our fair voting plan combines these districts into seven larger ‘super districts’ with three or five representatives. Any candidate who is the first choice of more than a quarter of voters in a three seat district will win a seat. Any candidate who is the first choice of a sixth of the voters in a five seat district would win election.”

The Fair Vote process allows voters to rank their choice of candidates and thus allows them to weigh in on all the candidates elected from their district. It would instantly eliminate the unfairness built in by gerrymandering and provide smaller parties and minorities with representation that they simply don’t get in winner take all single district elections.

Given the crunch of time to resolve the knotty problem brought up by the court, this would surely be the most direct solution to the problem while at the same time providing greater fairness for voters. Check it out at: http://www.fairvote.org/assets/Florida2014.pdf and also at http://www.fairvote.org/research-and-analysis/congression...