Let’s dissolve obsolete anachronisms 

Dispose of electoral districts and their ever-changing boundaries. They are unnecessary for voting citizens to vote for their representatives in local, state, and national elections. These unnecessary electoral districts are in turn abused by the very political parties George Washington and the Founders warned us about. Beware of these factions. Be alert to their desperate scrambles for power. Gerrymandering is the result. Gerrymandering is corruption. We see this unnecessary conflict playing out across America time and time again, as it has in recent years and months from coast to coast. 

It is undemocratic and anti-republican to have political representation based upon population alone. For example, the tiny District of Columbia, a territory, has no real representation in Congress, and it has far larger population than the whole state of Wyoming. Many territories took decades to become states based upon population and their need for infrastructure. Some territories still remain, unnecessarily, territories. Each jurisdiction must be represented regardless of its population. Population can certainly play a significant role in choosing how and what gets represented, but not the only way.

We Americans already have the foundation for federal-level congressional representation, but we fail to use it. Instead of legislative districts where most citizens don’t even know which ones they live in, we can use the local political jurisdictions already in place. Counties, parishes, independent cities, and city-county hybrids are each their own separate legislative districts. We can dispense of the term “legislative district” altogether as an abomination as it arbitrarily puts citizens unknowingly into ridiculous blobs of red, blue, and purple marked by zigzagging lines that make zero sense except to political party factioneers manipulating emotions and archaic institutions for raw political force and financial gain.

The same can be said for smaller local governments where, for example, neighborhoods of a city already exist to form true legislative bases for city council members instead of drawing wiggly borders with sharp angles. 

This will require deliberation to craft the precise language of constitutional amendments at all levels of government from the federal to state and territorial levels to city and county levels. Common sense restrictions must be put in place to regulate political parties at state and local levels from any abuse of even this new amendment process to prevent them from subdividing counties and cities, etc., into a multitude of smaller entities to manipulate voters and voting representation.

It also leads to the need for another amendment: to make it clear there is no population requirement for a territory to become a state of the union and there must not ever be any such population requirement. Also, every single territory must become a state and has 5 years to do so. If states have a need to redraw their state boundaries to allow for some to divide into new states or for some to merge into others, such a process must be streamlined and agreed to by Congress. This process is currently so cumbersome and anti-democratic as to be archaic and obsolete in its present form. We must reform this process. Secession from the national union, however, is not an option.

Ahhh, are we wasting our time here? The political parties will fiercely oppose any efforts to reduce their ability to distract government from governing. The liberals will whine, fuss, and cry that making existing county and city jurisdictions serve as legislative districts and by abolishing population requirements means more conservatives will be elected as there are more conservative counties than liberal cities. Conservatives will cry about liberals leveraging the greater population numbers in the big urban areas that dwarf rural towns and counties. Both must consider nothing remains the same forever, cities change, and the countryside changes, too. Life goes on. It must.

William Dudley Bass
Thursday 30 April 2026
Shoreline/Seattle, WA
USA
Earth

Copyright © 2026 by William Dudley Bass. All Rights Reserved by the Author & his Descendants until we Humans establish Wise Stewardship over and for our Earth and Solarian Commons. Thank you.