US House elections are designed to have approximately equal populations per district. This is accomplished by a census every 10 years. Redistricting is tricky if it is controlled by them majority party because they can manipulate the boundaries in ways that maximize their number of majority seats. One technique is called packing. If you can pack an 80% district for your rival party voters, that makes the outcome guaranteed, while thinning rival voters in "your" district.
https://www.thebulwark.com/what-role-did-gerrymandering-play-in-giving-the-gop-its-house-majority
Redistricting to your favor is called gerrymandering.
This simplified example shows an extreme case. A 60% blue majority can win 5 of 5 seasons simply by distributing voter equally (middle). But a 40% minority party can win 60% of the seats by packing 2 100% rival voter districts.
https://fairvote.org/new_poll_everybody_hates_gerrymandering/
Gerrymandering is considered unethical but necessary in a race-to-the-bottom. If Republicans gerrymander a disproportionate majority in Texas, then Democrats will feel the need to gerrymander a disproportionate majority in California. It is better for voters if an independent court or commission is set up to redistrict, but there's still no "right" answer. Or the primary criteria would be "compactness", closer to a circle than a snake, and using fixed city or county boundaries.
One confusing thing is that courts have ruled that racial minorities "deserve" representation, so then you might intentionally gerrymander "snaking" districts that maximize blacks into a supermajority district, which helps them always pick their candidate, but dilutes their voters elsewhere, if they lead towards a given party (namely Democrat), hurting that party's competitiveness in other districts.
The natural solution to this is to expand representation beyond single winner districts. A Proportional Representation voting method allows a 4 seat election where any united group of 20% of voters can pick a winner, and then at least 80% of voters can support someone they like.
A good method is called Single-Transferable-Vote (Variant of Ranked Choice Voting). Voters rank choices. Lowest candidate are eliminated, and fraction of winning votes can transfer to a next choice. Flowchart!
STV sounds a bit complicated, and it is is a bit complicated to vote, but it is easy to vote. You just rank candidates. You can rank as deeply as you'd like, but you don't have to rank all. The cost of not ranking is if all your choices are eliminated, you don't get a next choice. or if one candidate wins with a surplus, you may lose your fractional surplus transfer vote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote
@tomruen STV is not hard when votes are hand counted, but when you get to hundreds of thousands of votes being cast the reality is you need machine counting, but having a human readable paper ballot is also highly desirable. I have not seen an example of a paper ballot that a machine can read, allows candidate ranking and obvious and user friendly.
Oakland, for example, uses The Grid, which has the down side of not allowing a voter to rank more than 5 candidates (limited by the number of columns) and has shown itself to over voting ( accidentally ranking the same candidate as 1st and 5th choice or ranking 2 candidates 3rd. for example).
@antares Hard is always relative. Count is "hard" if you're error-prone and don't have good error-correcting systems in place.
And given Kari Lake just lost close election in Arizona and hinting at fraud against her, anything that makes elections more complicated has some risk.
@antares And STV does have a "randomness" with it, partly connected to a property called "nonmonotoicity" which basically means sometimes voting against your preferences can help you.
If you vote true preference A,B,C, you may find both A,B, losing and getting C, but if you (and others) voted B,A,C you might have A winning!
None of this is LIKELY, and you have no control, but it comes down to the idea that adding losing candidates can change winners due to sequential elimination order.
@antares I tried to sell STV to the Corporate Board election for the company I worked for. They had voting shares, 5 votes per share for 5 seats. So a weighted Cumulative voting system which is simple to count.
Forme the problem is you don't know how to distribute shares to maximize impact.
After my proposal was rejected, I learned some actually LIKE the vote distribution, like 25-25-25-25% for 4 choices, distributing widely rather than ranking which focuses vote on one top choice.
@antares The corporate board election didn't really need STV because you'd often have less than 10 candidates running for 5 seats, and all the candidates were employees and no one was really disliked, so it didn't matter than small shifts in votes might add or remove someone from the board.
Individuals might give 100% voting for themselves, YET they might not, because it wasn't that important to win.
@tomruen On such boards (and for leadership positions of organizations where membership selection already ensures a fairly homogeneous group -- like political parties or Non-Profit boards) acceptance voting often works well.
Voters are allowed to vote for zero or more candidates that they find acceptable. The most broadly acceptable win. (or in some case go on to a first-past-the-post election). Having 90% or more of the electors showing that the winner is acceptable (even if not their favorite choice) can be quite empowering.
The downside is that the strategic voting modality is bullet voting -- voting for only one candidate. The more this occurs the stronger the insensitive for other to also vote strategically and the system devolves into traditional plurality voting.
@antares
I also like the equal&even voting in Cumulative, so you can vote as wide as you like, and vote fractionally split between.
And again, you can still do an "approval" report for winners to show breadth of support without letting some voters have more influence tha others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting#Voting
@antares Oh, acceptance voting = Approval voting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
I think I prefer cumulative voting for winners, but you could have a second report that says what fraction of ballots each winner was supported above zero.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting#Use