Time to dump the Electoral College

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

They only way I'd really be comfortable with keeping the Electoral College would be to require every state to award EVs proportionally (like that 2008 Colorado ballot initiative). Possibly coupled with an increase in the size of the House, maybe implementing something like the Wyoming Rule, to ensure greater proportionality.

And while we're at it, if nobody has an Electoral College majority it'd probably be better if it led to a top-two runoff rather than having Congress pick a winner.

I don't know about proportional allocation of electoral votes, but the Wyoming rule would fix most of the problems with the electoral college. Gore would have won in 2000 for instance with a larger House and consequently a larger and thus more representative electoral college. This change would also make it essential for the two parties to try for all the big states once again as they would gain substantially in Electoral Votes.

I think it general needs to be fixed, but I don't think it needs to be dumped. The problem it has is that it relies on its component parts to do their intended roles. The House is not currently because the districts are too large and thus it isn't serving its role as the voice of popular will.

[Southern Senator North Carolina Yankee]

As they are drawn now and as they are always going to realistically be drawn, it's horrendously unrepresentative. Yes, in this magical fantasy land where Republicans and Democrats actually come together to caring about electoral reform, proportionality, and open election laws, it could work, but that's not going to happen. As it stands now, doing things the Maine-Nebraska way would heavily stilt the election against the Democrats.

If we said, used US house seats for a parliamentary system, they'd actually be pretty representative by international standards. IIRC, the average house district seat is like R+1.5, which is largely due to the Voting Rights Act creating 40 all-black districts. And even then, being +1.5 tilted in a direction isn't really that bad.

For really amusing parliamentary districts, you can look at Manitoba. Where the PCs need to thwomp the NDP by around 10% in order to take a narrow majority. Or Singapore, where the PAP could still hold an majority if they managed to lose 40-60. Or Japan between 1945-1993 (the districts were even funnier because they were multi-member districts). A grimmer example is the South African Nationals triumphing in 1948 (and instituting apartheid), despite losing the actual popular vote by around 38%-49%.

Come on now.

What is your point about Arizona? That was a commission map that produced a 4-4 map in 2006 and then 5-3 map in both 2008 and 2010. The stuff up in the north was done to appease tribal differences. In the most recent process, that was dropped because the local tribes changed their opinion about being in the same district. I don't see how AZ is a good case against gerrymandering. There are far better examples. Going by how it looks on the surface can be very misleading, but indeed those are the ones people look at. The most common example is the complaints lodged by Democrats regarding MI-08. Have you have seen a more box like district?