Not sure how that's supposed to work in order to ensure that each representative of a district represents roughly the same number of people.
Going by county, or even just city lines, you'd end up with one representative representing relatively few rural people, and one representative representing a lot of urban people, which goes against the purpose of representative government.
“Not sure how that’s supposed to work in order to ensure that each representative of a district represents roughly the same number of people.
Going by county, or even just city lines, you’d end up with one representative representing relatively few rural people, and one representative representing a lot of urban people, which goes against the purpose of representative government.”
That’s not correct. The business of having representatives represent the same number of people stems from the ridiculous Warren Court “one person, one vote” ruling in the 60’s.
Previously, legislatures were comprised differently, with towns and counties represented in the legislature. For example, I live in MA, and each town had a representative in the state senate, similar to each state being represented in the US Senate (same principle).
With “one person, one vote” individual towns and counties have been relegated to non-important entities, with representatives representing several towns at once or parts of towns (whatever they have to do to make the numbers even).
We had fully functioning representative government long before Earl Warren and his band of merry men got in the way.
Agreed. Some counties even have to be split. I think there should be a requirement to keep the district as geographically concise as possible. Computers could do that rather easily.
Making the Districts less overtly partisan, IMO, would do a lot to force our political parties back close to the center.
I understand what you're saying, and that is the way that it's generally looked at, but really, how much commonality do that rural district and the urban one have? I'd argue that by just using raw numbers to group them together, that both groups are ill-served.