AH Challenge: Have the US Use Proportional Representation

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have Proportional Representation used in the United States in at least 5 states for their legislature and/or one house of Congress without a major revolution. It seems like quite the challenge, as I know of no politicians in American history who have advocated for it, but I figure this subject is best in post-1900 because PR is mostly a post-1900 idea.
 
Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have Proportional Representation used in the United States in at least 5 states for their legislature and/or one house of Congress without a major revolution. It seems like quite the challenge, as I know of no politicians in American history who have advocated for it, but I figure this subject is best in post-1900 because PR is mostly a post-1900 idea.
The problem is that the electoral college really, really rewards a two party system nationally in the us.

Now, in Canada during the 60s and70s at least, the provincial parties were very separated from their national counterparts. With major local parties like the Union Nationale and SocCreds having no or little, repectively, representation nationally.

I could see solid democratic or solid republican states splitting internally. So state reps run Green vs Bluedog vs NewDem, or Tea vs Rockefeller vs Bushite, say, while electing a solid slate of democrats/republicans nationally.

Then, once that was formalized, you might get local PR.
 
The problem is that the electoral college really, really rewards a two party system nationally in the us.

Now, in Canada during the 60s and70s at least, the provincial parties were very separated from their national counterparts. With major local parties like the Union Nationale and SocCreds having no or little, repectively, representation nationally.

I could see solid democratic or solid republican states splitting internally. So state reps run Green vs Bluedog vs NewDem, or Tea vs Rockefeller vs Bushite, say, while electing a solid slate of democrats/republicans nationally.

Then, once that was formalized, you might get local PR.

There is also the fact that congressional representation is done by state. There are only 2 senators to a state and some states have only 1 house member. This means you can have at most 2 parties represented in the Senate in any one state. You would have to change the constitution so that the Senate and House members are elected nationally instead of by a state by state basis.
 
In theory you could have Congress mandate STV or open list representation for the House tomorrow if they wanted. Obviously it would become AV/IRV/PV/Whatever-You-Want-to-Call-It for states that have only one representative. Of course I find that less likely than Congress voting an assault weapons ban with bipartisan support on the same day.

To my understanding there are a lot more states than most people are aware of that do not use the one district-one representative formula. However to my knowledge all of those seats are elected at large with everyone able to cast as many votes as there are seats to be contested. There have also been several citywide attempts at PR. I believe that, at one time, Cincinnati and New York City both used STV as does a city just outside of Boston (Cambridge?) today.

I think the key is to have one of the various experiments with proportional representation here and there coincide with a city or state using multi-member districts and find that the idea becomes popular.

If memory serves, NYC adopted single transferable votes to prevent the regular Democratic sweeps of the city council. It worked and both parties were fairly represented for awhile and then it was abandoned because someone decided that a Communist might be elected.

If this fear-mongering didn't take hold and the city kept STV, I could see it having some chance of spreading statewide. In New York State the long standing convention has been to gerrymander the Senate for Republican control and to gerrymander the State Assembly for Democratic control. Those gerrymanders rarely fail. If the City's experiment with STV was allowed to continue, there is a chance that one party would use that has a way of ending the gerrymandering but allowing both parties a fair share of the power.* If New York manages to have proportional representation succeed, it could spread to other states. One state using it might be enough for it to become an alternative to majority-minority districts with nonsensical shapes spreading the concept even further.


*-New York seems to have a convention (in the British sense) that whenever redistricting is mandated the state will protect EVERY incumbent. For example, Long Island has five seats in the House of Representatives (4D, 1R) and nine seats in the State Senate (9R, 0D) with the party ratios rarely changing.
 
Simple. Just repeal a rule from 1967 mandating single seat races, then adopt proportional representation in US States that have 5 or less house seats. A 5 seat multimember district has a vote threshold of 20% for elections. A 4 seat district would have a 25% threshold, and so forth. States with more than 5 congressional seats, such as California, New York, and Florida, will have new multiseat districts drawn at a later date. I'm loving this TL idea.
 
Simple. Just repeal a rule from 1967 mandating single seat races, then adopt proportional representation in US States that have 5 or less house seats. A 5 seat multimember district has a vote threshold of 20% for elections. A 4 seat district would have a 25% threshold, and so forth. States with more than 5 congressional seats, such as California, New York, and Florida, will have new multiseat districts drawn at a later date. I'm loving this TL idea.

Actually the thresholds are even lower than that. To win a seat in a 5 seat district, a party or candidate just needs to get more than 1/6th of the vote--even if it is just one more vote than 1/6th. In any multi-seat election for N seats, only N parties/candidates can finish with more than 1/(N+1) seats.
 
PR is my pet project, so I think it would be interesting to do a timeline on it. However, I have more then enough obligations as is. PR is constitutionally viable in the United States, so I it isn't too far fetched. While the US has a history of of two parties, that hasn't always been true. Third party groups have mad their voices heard before. For this to work it would need to occur in the Progressive era. Then you would basically have four parties, the Dems, Republicans, Bull Moose and Socialist. Bull Moose and Republicans might reunite, but that would still be three distinct parties that would give PR a useful application. It would most likely also inspire others to form new parties if they feel their views are inadequately represented.
 
Maybe it could be pushed by Wilson? In OTL he mused about some forms of constitutional tinkering (introducing parliamentary government).

He could fit the bill. Very intellectual man. That could be the POD. He had a political science degree so he could have been exposed to it. Victor D'Hondt came up with a PR system in 1878 that could fit the bill. Maybe the POD is he is offered a job at Johns Hopkins (where Wilson was pursuing his graduate) and he listens to his lectures?
 
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