johnson.qxd
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The problem is our winner-take-all voting system, and the solution is to use the race-neutral voting system most of the world’s democracies use: proportional representation. Proportional voting systems give each political group an equal opportunity to elect one of their own by giving representation based on the percentage of the vote earned. If a political minority gets 33 percent of the vote, they would get 33 percent of the representation, not zero; a group with 60 percent of the vote gets 60 percent of the representation, not all of it.
If we want a race-neutral map, then we’ll need a neutral map, and that is impossible with winner-take-all elections. As long as we cling to the outdated notion that 51 percent of the vote should get 100 percent of the representation from a district, we’re stuck with a process where the drawing of the district boundaries is more important than what happens on election day. As these “gadflies and upstarts” well know, by changing the district lines they can change the outcome.
Dan Johnson-Weinberger
