Recently it has become apparent that the letter next to a Representatives’ name will determine whether they listen to you, regardless of
if you are their constituent. A democrat living in a conservative district meeting with his legislator might get a button and a meeting, but the legislator could care less about what you want him to vote on…he is going to vote with the party.
This is particularly the case in States like Ohio that have term limits and extremely partisan districts. With term limits, politicians are brought into the house by the party, instructed by the party how to vote, and then leave, without developing relationships with other legislators or their communities. Furthermore, the partisan redistricting ensures that they never need to listen to any person from the other side, they can simply vote with their party and be ensured reelection. Rather than continuing to believe the myth that legislators will listen to us in this current system we should fight for a more realistic electoral system.
There are several ways we could accomplish this. First, we could remove hyper partisan districts. This could be done in numerous ways, like California we could establish an Independent Commission to draw the lines, or we could place limitations on the percentage difference between districts (no more than 3% difference in the last presidential election).
But if we would like to continue with the party based electoral system, we should at least make it a bit more fair. Rather than using our outdated first past the post plurality electoral system, we could elect for one of the more modern electoral systems, such as proportional representation. This type of electoral system essentially bases the number of seats in the legislature on the number of votes received for the party. This could be accomplished in numerous ways, as it is executed very differently in various countries around the world. Fundamentally though, rather than the minority votes of a district being useless, they would still be represented by a minority. This would effectively strip the districting power away from the legislators, and provide more power to the people to change the legislature when it disagrees with any action they take. Furthermore, it would also likely lead to third parties gaining seats, which could be good for Ohio, providing a voice for many of the parties who could never get a voice in politics, including the green party.
