Alexandria Leto, Elliot Pickens, Coen Needell, David Rothschild, Maria Leonor Pacheco. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

The Fair Representation Act, first introduced in 2017 and reintroduced in 2019 and 2021, would mandate the use of multi-member districts (MMDs) to elect members to the United States House of Representatives, i.e., having fewer, larger districts each with multiple representatives. The bill is supported by good governance organizations such as FairVote; the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 released a report advocating states to use multi-member districts - however, "on the condition that they adopt a non-winner-take-all election model." Despite the popular focus on single-member district (SMD) elections, such MMDs have a long history in the United States, especially at the state and local level. In 1962, 41 state legislatures had MMDs, often with winner-take-all models; even today, 10 state legislatures elect representatives for at least one chamber in such a manner. City councils, state parties, and other organizations often adopt more sophisticated techniques, using variations on Ranked Choice Voting (RCV) to elect multiple winners from each of several districts.