Before, during, and after the election, many of the Democrats in my Facebook feed keep complaining that the current districting system is unfair and leads to gerrymandering and overrepresentation of Republicans in Congress. They also complain that, even independently of that, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans in the general population isn’t reflected in the ratio of Democrats to Republican in Congress.

Response: Well, sort of… I mean, gerrymandering is morally suspicious and no doubt affects representation in unfair or self-interested ways.

But here’s the deeper problem. The political science literature is rather clear that first-past-the-post voting is not a good system if you care about having real representation in the legislature.

If you really care about proportional representation, you’d favor some sort of proportional representation system over first-past-the-post + districting. Or you might favor a more complicated voting system than that. The alternatives to first-past-the-post are also flawed and imperfect, but they’re generally superior.

But if we did replace first-past-the-post with some sort of proportional voting system, we’d most likely end not with more Democrats in Congress, but fewer. Why? Because a proportional voting system would lead to there being a larger number of viable parties (where a viable party = a party that is able to get a seat in Congress). The two-party system is an artifact of our voting system. That’s political science 101. We all know that.