A Proposal To End Gerrymandering

Posted this as a diary on MyDD:

Matthew Yglesias comments on Atrios' response to a Wall Street Journal editorial endorsing Arnold's attempted power grab in California by proposing that Democrats should change the terrain of the debate on redistricting and gerrymandering and consider multi-district elections. Of course it was this extremely reasonable idea of abolishing or combining voting districts and having multi-candidate at-large elections was exactly what got now Harvard Law Professor Lani Guinier called "Quota Queen" and "borked" by the Republicans when Clinton nominated her to be Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights in 1993.

I agree with Yglesias that a more nuanced position then "not all gerrymandering is bad" needs to be taken by Democrats as we respond to Republican attempts to build a permanent majority in the House of Representative through unconstitutional mid-decade redistricting.

I would call for consideration of a proposal that all states with less than 5 electoral votes (i.e. 3 House seats) run at-large elections where the top 3 vote finishers are elected to the House. Of course, this would have the unintended consequence of blurring the distinction between running statewide for a House seat as opposed to running statewide for a Senate seat. But in states with small delegations (ND, SD, MT, VT, DE, WY, AK, ID, RI, HI, NH, WV, NV, NM, UT all would fall under this proposal) running for a house seat is tantamount to running statewide.

There are other considerations, like should voters have 3 votes which they could distribute among 1, 2 or 3 candidates. It was this proposal that got Professor Guinier into hot water (it could be argued the proposal violates the "one man, one vote" principle of Baker v Carr).
Other drawbacks are that while candidates who had a strong following among a plurality of the state's population (say, in an urban setting) would still have reasonable opportunities to be elected. Rich candidates who could run strong statewide campaigns would be privileged, but no more so than they are under the current system. Comments?