August 24, 2025

By Stephen Stofka

Sunday morning and another breakfast with the boys. This week Abel and Cain explore new election rules for electing representatives in the House. The conversations are voiced by Abel, a Wilsonian with a faith that government can ameliorate social and economic injustices to improve society’s welfare, and Cain, who believes that individual autonomy, the free market and the price system promote the greatest good.

Cain opened the conversation. “Did you hear that the Air Canada flight attendants ended their strike?”

Abel shook his head and he unfolded his napkin. “Didn’t know they were on strike. What for?”

Cain replied, “They wanted to be paid for boarding time.”

Abel frowned. “What, they’re not paid until they step on the airplane?”

Cain laughed. “Not them boarding. The passengers.”

Abel tilted his head slightly. “They’re standing there welcoming passengers as they walk on the plane. They’re not paid for that?”

Cain shook his head. “Apparently not. It’s been an ongoing practice for decades. Airlines did not pay flight attendants until the airplane’s doors were closed. A few years back, Delta was the first to pay for boarding time, then American Airlines and Alaska Airlines started similar policies (Source).”

Abel looked incredulous. “How can it be legal to not pay employees when a company requires them to be there?”

Cain sighed. “It’s not. A company I knew got busted for requiring some employees to be at a construction site to unload deliveries but not paying them until the truck showed up and pulled up to the building ready to unload. On a busy site, a delivery truck might have to wait in line.”

Abel asked, “And the employees just stood there waiting and not getting paid?”

Cain nodded. “A state auditor told me he regularly visited companies who shaved time off an employee’s paycheck like that. It’s illegal. The Department of Labor makes two key distinctions based on a 1944 Supreme Court case (Source). There’s a category called ‘engaged to work’ where the employee is under the control of the employer. ”

Abel interrupted, “Flight attendants waiting on a plane while passengers board means they are under the control of the airline, the employer.”

Cain laughed. “Obviously. There’s also the category of ‘waiting to be engaged.’ That’s where the employee is free to do whatever they want.”

Abel smirked. “Let me guess. Airlines have insisted that the flight doesn’t start until the plane’s door is closed. The airlines have paid flight attendants as though the attendants have been waiting to be engaged.”

Cain sighed. “Probably. These past few weeks, we have been talking about changes to election rules. I thought this story was a good example of how often people and companies don’t play by the rules. In a lot of cases, it’s more cost effective to bend the rules, then have your lawyers negotiate a settlement with a regulating agency. We need a new set of rules that encourage people to follow the rules.”

Abel nodded. “Don’t ask permission. A rule we learned as kids.”

Cain continued, “So let’s say all fifty states change their laws to give voters more representation. How likely is that the major political parties will play by the rules? Not likely.”

Abel finished chewing. “Texas is redrawing their districts in mid-decade to get five more seats in the House. Now California is planning to do the same. It’s a race to the bottom that does not represent the will of the people.”

Cain said, “We were talking about that last week. Drawing congressional districts in a straightforward manner. There’s an economics professor at Harvard, Roland Fryer, who suggested making districts as compact as possible while making allowance for county borders (Source). In 2011, he developed an index that measures how much a state’s districts are gerrymandered (Source). A score of 1 is like a benchmark that means that the state has totally compact districts.”

Abel asked, “What does that mean?”

Cain glanced at this phone. “The boundaries of the district have not been tortured to create an advantage for one party. Here’s Fryer: compactness … measures how much voters’ choices can move the scoreboard.’”

Abel nodded. “Like voters actually make a difference.”

Cain replied, “Yeah, parties are spending a lot of money so they want predictable outcomes. They want to minimize competitive races so they redraw district boundaries to move voters around like they are poker chips. A score of three suggests that the districts have been extremely gerrymandered. There are some states with high scores like Tennessee, Texas, New York, Massachusetts and New Jersey. Fryer has a number of state maps so you can see the difference between an ideal and the actual districting in a state (Source).”

Abel sighed. “Trump says he wants to get rid of mail-in ballots. Claims there is massive fraud. No evidence of that, of course. A few isolated cases but not enough to matter. I love the convenience of mail-in voting.”

Cain shook his head. “Yeah, he’s blowing smoke. For Republicans, the problem is that mail-in ballots make it easier to vote in densely populated areas. In less than a decade, the number of polling places has fallen by more than 50% (Source). There are far fewer places to vote in urban areas and minority neighborhoods, where people usually vote Democratic. Georgia closed ten polling places in districts with large black populations (Source). Why? Most black voters pull the lever for Democrats. It’s a game of power.”

Abel sighed. “Reminds me of Garret Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons. The dominant party in each state has an incentive to gerrymander and to make it more difficult for the other side to gain power. What makes sense to each individual state, though, is bad for what we have in common. It’s eroding the public trust in our political process. If the political process is just a game played by party bosses, that only creates more cynicism and alienation.”

Cain nodded. “Yeah, that’s what I want to reverse. But the fact is that voting is like war. A vote for A is a vote against B. Voters on one side are firing bullets at voters on the other side.”

Abel raised his eyebrows. “Boy, that’s a bleak analogy. Not exactly the rah-rah democracy we learned in school.”

Cain shrugged. “It’s the reality of the voting process. As General Patton said, winning a war is getting the soldiers on the other side to give up their lives for their country (Source).”

Abel smirked. “Voters are not killing each other.”

Cain laughed. “Voters aren’t, but their votes are. It’s a war of attrition. My vote cancels out your vote. That type of thing. We have a winner-take-all system in this country. Voting is about winning, not representation. Just like war. I want to change that. That guy Fryer said that we should have almost 600 House seats to keep up the growth in population over the past century.”

Abel asked, “Yeah, when were the number of House seats capped at 435? I don’t remember that in the Constitution.”

Cain shook his head. “It’s not there in the Constitution. There’s a minimum of 30,000 voters for a representative but there’s no maximum. Congress couldn’t agree on reapportionment after the 1920 census, then capped the number of House seats in 1929 (Source). Today each House seat represents like 750,000 people. There’s 174 million registered voters so that’s about 400,000 voters per House district (Source).”

Abel asked, “What about Great Britain? How many voters does a seat in the House of Commons represent?”

Cain fished in his shirt pocket and withdrew a small piece of paper. “Yeah, get this. The U.K. has less than a third of registered voters, like 48 million. There are 650 seats in the House of Commons, England’s equivalent to our House (Source). That’s about 75,000 voters per seat, less than a fifth of the constituency size in the U.S. Canada has a little over 80,000 per seat. We need a new set of rules. Voters in this country get poor representation because there are too many people per House seat. If there were 600 House seats, that would lower each constituency to about 300,000 voters. It’s better, but not great.”

Abel said, “Voters would get better representation if we had proportional representation. Make the districts bigger and have multi-member districts where several House members represent the district in proportion to the number of votes they receive. This past January, the New York Times had an article comparing what the House would look like under both a single member system like we have now and a multi-member system (Source). Under a proportional representation system, the House would look at lot more like the voters and their political preferences.”

Cain grunted. “Well, you’d have to overturn a 1970s law that made single member districts mandatory for House elections. For the past thirty years, various members have introduced bills to allow multi-member voting. They’ve gone nowhere (Source).”

Abel argued, “Hey, it’s not an amendment to the Constitution. It’s doable.”

Cain asked, “And you’d need a Constitutional Amendment to change that 30,000 minimum. I mean, what if a Libertarian candidate gets a percentage of the vote that represents only 20,000 people? The Constitution says that person cannot be seated, I think. Heck, I’m not a Constitutional scholar.”

Abel shook his head. “Those votes could be apportioned according to the votes the other candidates received. The states could implement that on their own.”

Cain frowned. “Ok, like ranked choice voting does. I like that but, again, the problem is that all the states would need to implement that strategy.”

Abel sighed. “Yeah, that’s a problem. But let’s look at a purple state like Colorado, which has eight House seats split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. The cities along the Front Range vote Democratic but that vote is split among conservative Democrats, what used to be called Blue Dog Democrats, and then there’s liberals, socialists, communists, whatever. A Liberal Party or Socialist Party candidate cannot win a seat under our current system. That stifles the growth of alternative parties that voters might identify with.”

Cain laughed. “That may be a good thing. There are die-hard Communists on the left and staunch John Birchers on the right.”

Abel pushed back his seat and stood. “Yeah, but there’s the 30,000 minimum population rule in the Constitution. A John Birch candidate that represents less than that would have their votes spread around to the other candidates. The system would encourage alternative parties but not fringe parties.”

Cain nodded. “Ok, I like that. I think both of us are aiming for a multi-party system. Even if two parties dominate, other parties have a voice in governance. Australia, Canada, France and Germany have such systems. We fought a war against the British over representation. The system we have now is disempowering voters, making them less engaged.”

Abel laughed as he turned to leave. “Hey, we agree on something. A date that will go down in history.”

Cain smiled. “See you next week.”

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Image by ChatGPT