This is NOT representational democracy. This is rigging the election. But - there is a solution.

Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has an important piece of information. It’s about drawing up voting districts that accurately represent the voting public. Drum links to an article at the Washington Post: We have a standard for judging partisan gerrymandering. The Supreme Court should use it.

...There is a perfectly good scientific standard for determining whether there is partisan gerrymandering. This is the “partisan symmetry” measure developed by Andrew Gelman and Gary King. Essentially, symmetry requires that a specific share of the popular vote (say, 60 percent) would translate into the same number of congressional seats, regardless of which party won that share of the vote. For instance, if winning 60 percent of the popular vote in a state gives the Republican Party 65 percent of the congressional seats, then the Democratic Party should also win 65 percent of the seats if it wins 60 percent of the vote.

They have a key legal argument to justify the use of the partisan symmetry measure:

If the party that gets the most votes nationally is to get a majority of the seats, then state districting plans also have to treat parties equally — that is, satisfy partisan symmetry. If a redistricting plan violates partisan symmetry, then it necessarily violates the equal treatment of individual voters. Thus, the partisan symmetry standard is indeed judicially discernible from the Constitution.

It is possible today using the power of computers and software algorithms to draw up voting districts that give the party drawing those districts the ability to give themselves a “sure thing.” This is a problem in a number of ways, not least of which is that it increases partisanship and reduces incentives to compromise. For a representative coming from a safe district, the biggest threat is not the other party but the most motivated elements of his/her own base — and thus the race to extreme candidates and policies.

The gist of the WaPo article is that computers can also be used to draw up districts that reflect the will of the voters every 2 years, not the state legislatures every 10 years.

As Kevin Drum notes:

In the past, gerrymandering was a problem, but it was a modest one. Computers have changed all that. Anyone can now produce a map gerrymandered beyond anyone's imagination as recently as 30 years ago. That makes it a much bigger problem and a much bigger source of electoral unfairness. The Supreme Court will have a chance to revisit the issue later this year, and they should think very hard about how technology has affected the ancient art of gerrymandering.

Of course, that assumes the Supreme Court is going to be concerned with fairness...

This sounds like a technocratic policy of the kind that stereotypical Democrats love — so the point is to sell it on the merits, not the technology. If the work done by the people who came up with the partisan symmetry measure can be proven to be applied objectively and consistently, it should be an easy sell to voters. Tell them it’s all abut THEM picking their representatives, instead of the other way around.

The fight to making voting fair again is a fight Democrats need to pursue going forward. It doesn’t magically change red to blue, but it could reduce the tilt in the playing field. Combined with efforts like the Sister District Project, it’s what we need to do to Make America Sane Again.