Smaller Legislative Districts = Better Representation

One of the most exciting things about the California Constitutional Convention Summit that The New America Foundation is co-sponsoring with the Bay Area Council next Tuesday is that it has the potential to act as a channel for focusing and combining the efforts of different political reform campaigns. Many of these have similar goals but are operating on parallel tracks.

For example, last fall Mark Paul and I drafted a proposal to radically reorder California legislative elections into a system of region-based proportional representation. One element of this plan was increasing the size of the state legislature from 120 representatives in two houses to 360 in one unicameral body.

At the very same time, a California voter named Michael Warnken was filing a detailed brief in a federal court in Sacramento. His suit claims that the massive size of California's legislative districts - greater than 400,000 people for each seat in the lower house - constitutes grossly inadequate and hence illegally poor representation for the state's citizens. At a hearing last month, a federal judge refused to dismiss the case. You can find out more about his efforts here at his site, California Commonwealth.

With Californians competing with almost half a million of their fellow citizens to get the attention even of the members of the State Assembly, how can their voices be heard?