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33 Stan. L. & Pol'y Rev. 135 (2022)
Toward Fairer Representation in State Legislatures

handle is hein.journals/stanlp33 and id is 143 raw text is: TOWARD FAIRER REPRESENTATION IN STATE LEGISLATURES Paul A. Diller* Many state legislatures lack democratic legitimacy in that they comprise leg- islators who, in total, do not accurately reflect the views of the state's voters. In several states,for instance, the party that wins a minority of votes for the statehouse routinely wins the seat total by large margins. This reality leads to all kinds of problems, including a disconnect between voters' policy preferences and the poli- cies that their state legislature produces. There are two key factors that aid this phenomenon: intentional partisan gerrymandering and unintentional gerryman- dering, the latter of which arises due to the geospatial sorting of voters. As much as reformers try to take the politics out of district drawing, under current geopolit- ical alignments, voters in more densely populated areas will be at a disadvantage at translating their votes into seats in the state legislature. Hence, to better align voters' preferences with legislative outcomes, more substantial reform may be needed than merely depoliticizing districting. As a proposal for such reform, this article uses a bill that has been proposed at the federal level-the Fair Representation Act-as a template for reforming state legislatures. By using multi-member districts and ranked-choice voting, the FRA aims to provide more diverse and balanced representation in the House of Representatives. States could do the samefor their legislatures, although the means of implementing such reform would vary by state, and there are a number of thresh- old questions each state would need to resolve for itself about such a system's scope and details. This paper walks through those steps and choices in an attempt to illustrate how FRA-type reform at the state level could make state democracy more representative. * Professor of Law, Willamette University. Visiting Professor, Lewis & Clark Law School (Spring 2022). I thank Mary Rumsey, Reference and Instructional Services Librarian, and Shannon Clausen for excellent research assistance. For excellent comments on earlier drafts, I thank participants in my Law & Society Association panel in May 2020, the State and Local Government Works-in-Progress Conference in September 2020, and the faculty of the Uni- versity of Oregon in November 2020. I also thank Benji Cover, Chris Elmendorf, David Schleicher, and Ofer Raban for comments, as well as Tim Johnson and the Willamette Uni- versity Center for Governance and Public Policy Research for funding essential parts of this research. 135

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