Advanced Floterial Districts

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Can't happen unless Congress acts.  U.S. law requires single-member districts.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

2 USC 2c trumps 2 USC 2a(c) since it was passed later.  Multi member at-large districts are verbotten now.

Overlapping districts are not directly addressed, but it clear that the Federal law did not envisage the possibility of an intermediate position between all single-member non-overlapping districts and statewide at-large representation.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

2 USC 2c trumps 2 USC 2a(c) since it was passed later.  Multi member at-large districts are verbotten now.

The US Supreme Court (6-3) has ruled differently  Branch v Smith

You didn't think so back in 2008.  https://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=76144.15

I know I'm bumping an old thread here, but I'm interested if something has changed here.

Likely that he came across Branch v Smith.  But even so, 2 USC 2a(c) only allows for statewide at-large districts in the event that no redistricting plan is passed,

Also I'm going to have to reverse myself because I've now seen Wood v. Broom, 287 U.S. 1 (1932).  I had said that:

Overlapping districts are not directly addressed, but it clear that the Federal law did not envisage the possibility of an intermediate position between all single-member non-overlapping districts and statewide at-large representation.

but the legislative history makes it clear that the requirement for compact districts of roughly equal population was deliberately allowed to lapse, so there's no legislative bar to floterial districts.  Still rather unwieldy things that only a mapmaker or a gerrymanderer could love.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Note that arguably my proposal for Advanced Floterial Districts does not contradict 2 USC 2c.

"... there shall be established by law a number of districts equal to the number of Representatives to which such State is so entitled, and Representatives shall be elected only
from districts so established, no district to elect more than one Representative ..."

Just want to reiterate that if 2 USC 3 were still in effect, your floterial district proposal would be a non-starter.

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[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

2 USC 3 made no provision for weighting.  Even if one were to accept that you could fractionate voters so as satisfy the equal population requirement, floterial districts definitely do not meet the compact territory requirement.

Incidentally, South Carolina has some experience with the concept of fractional votes, thanks to the chaos Reynolds v. Sims indirectly caused.  The legislative delegations for each county had also served double duty as the county council of each state.  It was over a decade before independent county councils were up and running, and in the interim, members of the General Assembly whose districts covered more than one county ended up serving on multiple county councils with a fraction of a vote in each council equal to the portion of their representation was located in that county.

It was not good.  We had a number of rural counties that had had 1 Representative and 1 Senator which therefore required them to agree to do anything when acting as 'county council'.  Until home rule was set up, many of those counties still had 1 of each, but the Representative since he wasn't spread as thin as the Senator was a 1 man majority who could do whatever he wanted. Hazard County should have been located in South Carolina, not Georgia.

That experience also points out why your floterial district idea would likely not pass constitutional muster.  It dilutes the political power of those with low fractional votes compared to those with higher fractional votes.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

For simplicity sake, I'll use an arrangement of 4 original districts and 1 floterial that happens to have the same borders as the 4 original districts.

Ideal district size: 700,000

District 1: 750,000
District 2: 800,000
District 3: 850,000
District 4: 1,100,000

So in the floterial district,
voters in District 1 get 1/15 of a vote (50,000 overage / 750,000 total) each
voters in District 2 get 1/8 of a vote each,
voters in District 3 get 3/17 of a vote each, and
voters in District 4 get 4/11 of a vote each.

District 4 contains 4/7th of the votes in the whole floterial district, enough to elect a representative even if the other three districts don't want him.  Granted, block voting in each district is unlikely, but the floteral system has effectively granted District 4 two Representatives and the others only one, as the Floterial Representative cannot antagonize District 4 and win (re)election.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

The random vote idea does not address the problems with fairness, tho to a limited extent it does make calculating the votes easier, at the cost of ensuring that the random disposition really is random.  (What we often call random numbers really aren't and I for one would definitely not be comfortable with the use of computer-generated pseudorandom numbers for that purpose.)

Floterial voting does not solve any real problem and they add additional ways to gerrymander.  About the only way they might make sense would if you want to have most representatives elected from primary districts that never change due to a new census, with the overages being used to select top-off representatives elect at-large, not from secondary districts.