Gerrymandering and Undrerrepresentation

A lot of people have come to recognize that Gerrymandering (the chopping up of political districts such that a favored party has a dominant majority) is a big problem in a lot of states.  A few states have tried to address this with nonpartisan or bipartisan districting commissions, with rules about irregular border and a few other things, but nothing really works.

A separate but related problem is that the present two party system strongly protects those two parties and does not allow third parties.  The libertarian and green party both have several percent of the voters, but do not hold a single seat of the 435 in congress.

My idea is that the delegation that each state sends to the congress must contain a partisan mix corresponding to the actual party vote in that state's US congress elections.   So, for example, a state has 10 districts, and the statewide vote is 40% Democrat, 40% Republican, 10% Libertarian, 10% Green, the states delegation must be 4Ds, 4Rs, 1L, 1G.  How the state chooses to implement this is up to the state.  Fixing Gerrymandering would be a start, but it does nothing for the parties that have significant votership, but no clear plurality anywhere.   My thinking would be to reduce the number of districts to 8 and have two "at large" candidates for the two smaller parties. 

Perhaps a better option would be to have even fewer districts--say, 5--and have the other 5 selected at large based on getting fair representation.  If some of those districts are severely gerrymandered, one of the two majorities may be getting severely underrepresented, and at-large representatives could be used to fix the balance.

The way voting would work would be you'd have your district elections as always, and there would also be an at-large election.  Candidates for the districts would also be allowed to run in the at large.  You specify (vote for) your party, and then you vote for a district candidate, and some number of at-large candidates according to the number at large seats available.   If a party needs at-large representatives, the at-large votes from voters matching that party would be tallied to select the candidate--the top vote getter from voters of that party would get the seat.  This would allow voters to cross party lines.