[thaumasiotes]

> I'm not sure districts are inherently bad. The concept that people living in the same geographic area will have similar concerns that need to be addressed makes sense to me.

Yes, it would make much more sense to define the districts by any of various obvious methods and then not worry about whether they have equal population.

[em-bee]

but the point as i understand it is that then in most districts the minorities will never get a chance to elect representatives that favor them because they get outvoted by the majority.

but it bothers me that the solution to this problem is to redraw voting districts. and for a while i could not figure out why or what to do about it, but then i wondered, why not simply have multiple representatives for each district. say a dozen or so. that way there is enough room for each minority to be proportionally represented by candidates of their choice.

to make it more interesting, give each voter more than one vote, up to the number of representatives. then you add up all the votes and pick the top 12.

make the districts larger or add a second layer of voting to keep the total numbers of elected representatives down. with a second layer all elected would again elect a smaller number amongst themselves again allowing minorities to be represented.