[patrickmay]

> Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very large states.

The solution to that, however politically difficult, is to break the larger states into smaller ones. New York City, for example, shares very little politically or economically with the rest of New York. Similarly with the various regions of California -- Silicon Valley and Los Angeles are as different from each other as both are from the areas north of San Francisco.

[Jesus_Jones]

Breaking up the big liberal states has been proposed by conservatives, because they want to get more conservative leg members. We'd need to break up conservative states too. There has been discussion of breaking Seattle off into it's own state or country. That would add a Republican Senate and House Rep, since the test of the state is more conservative, so you have to do a 3 way breakup of WA state. Anyway, these things are all hard to achieve and infeasible in practice. IMHO.

[rocqua]

There is a similar issue with switching states away from 'winner takes all' in the electoral college.

If a liberal state does it, it costs liberals votes. If a conservative state does it, it costs conservatives votes. It seems pretty clear that such a system is fairer, and yet no-one wants to actually do it.

[lambertsimnel]

Twenty-three states have already passed the National Popular Vote bill, which will in effect switch all states from winner-takes-all when it covers a majority of the electoral college: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state-status

[openasocket]

The issue with that is demographics change over time, so any attempt to break states up into more politically/economically uniform pieces will become outdated over time (like if a large city expands beyond its current boundaries). So you'll have to change the state lines periodically, and then you've still got the issues of redistricting, only now on a national level instead of a state level.

[rojoca]

The other solution is to have mixed representation where a portion of the seats represent districts and the rest are allocated to match the proportions voted for by the state. In this case each voter gets 2 votes: 1 for their district and 1 for a party.