What the hell does it mean to be a single member district? Are all districts single member?

803 views

What the hell does it mean to be a single member district? Are all districts single member?

In: Other

3 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

No. Some districts elect multiple members. For example you could have a five-member district and apportion the 5 based on what percentage of the vote each party got. So if Party A got 55% of the vote and party B got 45%, you could give Party A 3 seats, and B 2 seats.

Generally multi-member districts want to be larger even than that, so they can more closely match the vote percentage. Ideally there’d just be one big district encompassing everything. This is *proportional voting*.

The reason you might not want single-member districts is because they’re winner-take-all. If there can only be one winner, then someone who wins the election 51-49% still gets 100% of the power, and the loser gets 0%. If all the districts are like this, you could get a vastly disproportionate legislature. Imagine if the voters of America were 51% Party A and 49% Party B, but they were perfectly evenly spread out across all the Congressional districts. You could have an election where Party A wins 100% of the seats, despite getting only 51% of the total vote. And Party B would therefore get 0% of the seats, despite getting 49% of the vote. That’s a distortion. You usually want the Congress to closely match the electorate in terms of proportions. Situations like this are usually the result of *gerrymandering*, which is where you draw the district lines to put the voters in a convenient spot. So for example, in 2018, in North Carolina, Democrats got about 50% of the vote state-wide, but they received only 3 out of North Carolina’s 13 seats in Congress. If it were proportional, they should’ve gotten 6 or 7. But the district lines were drawn such that most of the Democratic voters were intentionally crammed into 3 districts, and then the rest sort of sprinkled among the remaining 10 districts, so that Republicans could win those.

Proportional voting is superior to single-member districts in almost every way, but there is one benefit to single-member districts, which is that they give a particular geographic area one person who specifically represents them, rather than having the representatives only represent the country at large. Although some would say you want that, and representatives narrowly representing their districts’ interests is bad for the overall welfare of the country.

Anonymous 0 Comments

One representative is elected for a district depending where you are or which country you are in some large districts elect more than one representative

Anonymous 0 Comments

A single member districts only votes a single member of congress, or parliament, or local council, or whatever.

Your district might instead elect 3 congresspeople, or 10 members of parliament, or what have you. Those are not single member