Using the STV to End Gerrymandering

Though gerrymandering is widely disliked by both the Republican and Democratic general public, solutions to gerrymandering have not been very forthcoming. Independent commissions are often independent in name only, and fair redistricting is a harder problem for computers to solve than most would expect. But ranked-choice, instant-runoff voting, often called the Single Transferable Vote (STV) is a possible solution.

As this study outlines, movement to multi-member districts with STV voting could effectively end the gerrymandering problem. The STV allows for the most widely-supported candidate to win. However, STV alone won’t solve gerrymandering, since that widely-supported candidate would still likely be the candidate from the party for which the lines were drawn to protect. Thus, the need for multi-member districts.

Large multi-member districts bring their own problems, though, which the STV would remedy. Specifically, large distracts would hinder the ability to create majority-minority districts, which are imperative to the Voting Rights Act. If a state has just a few large districts, they may not have a large enough minority population to make one of those districts majority-minority. And therefore, state legislatures could use this as an excuse when drawing district lines to dilute the minority vote by dividing them among separate districts. Therefore, some minority groups may not even be able to elect one representative, bringing us back to the state-of-affairs before the Voting Rights Act. The STV, therefore, is required to ensure that there is some acknowledgement of the minority viewpoint. STV could, as Supreme Court Justice Thomas said, “produce proportional results without requiring division of the electorate into racially segregated districts.” In addition, STV makes election more competitive and difficult to predict, and therefore make manipulation of district lines more difficult to successfully implement.

Unfortunately, STV’s political feasibility is iffy. As we’ve discussed, candidates support policies that get them reelected. And, gerrymandering is a very effective “policy” that gets incumbents reelected. So, efforts to curb gerrymandering are bound to face significant political hurdles.

As a final note, Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem tells us that no voting system is perfect. A multi-member district with STV will not solve all of our problems. Still, it will probably leave us better off than before.