Lansing Lee
PSL Seminar
11:30 Section
12/3/2019
Redistricting and Gerrymandering Paper
Gerrymandering and unfair redistricting has become a huge problem in almost every state. As well has the fact that certain area’s state’s voters simply don’t have as much of a say due to the proportion of population to votes in the house and electors. While it is very difficult to stop manipulation of voting districts, I do think that there are several ways that we can work to solve that problem as well as, as well solving the apportionment problems.
First thing we need to do is to give house representatives, senators, and electoral votes to all the non-state territories in America. Citizens in DC, Guam, Puerto Rico, are American citizens the same as citizens in any state and their interests should be represented in congress, as well as when voting for the president. That should be very simple, either add seats to congress or realign the 435 congressional seats to include these territories. This could be difficult as current state’s representatives would likely not be too interested in giving up power of their states, but it is something that could be done.
On the other hand, I think that there is a very simple solution to the issue of certain states not getting a fair amount of representatives. During the census every ten years, we should determine a number or people that should represent 1 house vote, and give the state that number of electors based on it’s population. For gerrymandering, we should require all districts to have an equal number of people, and create a bipartisan council of people not in the state to approve the districts to make sure that the district lines are fair.
While I believe the American system is very fair to begin with, there are definitely ways to improve and make it even less corrupt. What I have proposed here would be sweeping changes, but I think if we look at each reform one step at a time, we could continue to improve our voting system to hopefully make it as fair as possible.