I think the mechanics of "holding elections" is categorically different than the set of things you will be voting on, and what constitutes those things.
All of which is covered in "manner."
I mean, the House could be abolished altogether and replaced by, say, a nationwide party-slate proportional body - while the time, place and manner that the states choose to hold their elections looks exactly the same.
No, that is not the same time/place/manner. Most specifically, the manner is obviously very different in a proportional representation. For starters, in proportional representation, people don't vote for their preferred candidate, with the person with the most votes winning. Rather, people vote for the leader of a particular political party, and then that person, based on the percentage of votes they receive, gets to choose various people to go to congress (some proportional representation have you vote directly for a party rather than the leader, but as a practical matter it amounts to the same thing). This is very far from the same manner as single-district first-past-the-post voting.
Your prior post has suggested that "manner" is limited to things like "hand counted paper ballots, or various machines, etc" when it's obviously far more expansive to include things like the drawing of districts or even--as was done in the past--the ability to have the entire slate of Representatives chosen by an at-large vote (this was later prohibited by congress).
I am also not so sure if one could actually, without a constitutional amendment, change the House race into a
nationwide proportional vote. Certainly (if congress were to amend the law requiring single member districts to allow proportional representation) one could have proportional representation on a state by state basis--that is, people in a state vote for the preferred party, and then the representatives for that state are divided up based on the results--but having one's election results chosen by elections in another state seem far more questionable. I would have to look more into whether phrases such as saying Representatives are chosen "by the People of the several States" could be construed from the language at the time to interpret "several states" as to refer to multiple states taken as a whole, or if the phrase "several states" in the plural would only mean individual states separately choosing their representative. Are there any precedents on this?
So, Im suggesting that states (or congress) have constitutional discretion over how to manage the voting process. But they should not be able to change the sense of what congress persons are to the point that they are no longer really "representatives". The most fundamental aspect of all this is that we the people have actual representatives.
Well, this seems more of an abstract philosophical idea than something actually found in the Constitution. Furthermore, they clearly are representatives in a gerrymandered district. The fact remains that the candidate who gets the most votes wins, so the choice of the majority, or at least plurality, wins.
The effect of gerrymandering is to set it up so that districts are composed of people who are far more likely to elect a particular kind of candidate (more specifically, one of a particular party), but at the end of the day the person still ends up as the representative of the people of the district in question because they're the ones who vote for them. The actual problem of gerrymandering is not on the individual district level, where again the people have representatives who legitimately are representatives of their districts, but on the macro level where it sets it up so one particular political party is able to ensure that their party will get more representatives. But while this offends a sense of fairness overall, every individual district still chooses their representative. No matter how hard a party engages in gerrymandering, the people of a district
still have the ability to choose their actual representative in the election.
In fact, even if we were to accept that this abstract philosophical idea of whether the representatives are really representatives--again, not actually found in the Constitution, and certainly not in the Elections Clause--what would do far more to harm this abstract philosophical idea would be if one were to, say, disallow by law people of a particular race or gender from voting. In that case, one could far more plausibly say that the representatives aren't truly representative because so many people in their district don't actually get any kind of vote.
The thing is, that obviously is not stopped by the Elections Clause, or anything in the original Constitution, on account of the fact... this was widely done and kind of expected. If that was constitutional despite being a far more blatant violation of this abstract philosophical question, surely partisan gerrymandering, which actually allows people to vote, would not be. Of course, prohibiting people of a particular race of gender is
now unconstitutional, but that was due to subsequent amendments passed,
not the Elections Clause or anything in the Constitution prior to the 15th/19th Amendments.
Which is proper. A straightforward reading of the Elections Clause gives essentially plenary power to states or congress on the rules of elections, so long as those rules do not violate some other part of the Constitution. So although the Elections Clause by itself authorizes a state to forbid all females from voting by virtue of the fact it doesn't prohibit it, the later Nineteenth Amendment forbids that. If someone is going to argue that partisan gerrymandering (or at least extreme partisan gerrymandering, given some have expressed an opinion that some is allowed but at a certain point it is too much) is prohibited by the Constitution, they simply must look outside of the Elections Clause, because it's not there.
This is precisely why when the question of whether partisan gerrymandering is constitutional or not, courts who said no weren't (to my knowledge) appealing to the Elections Clause, because that doesn't help in that area. The primary part of the Constitution that was appealed to was the Equal Protection Clause, which is far more sensible. It is, after all, where is the cited justification for the prohibition on racial gerrymandering and the requirement of equal population among districts comes from.
However, as I indicated in a prior post, I don't think the Equal Protection Clause does prohibit partisan gerrymandering (it is the most plausible thing to point to against partisan gerrymandering, but something being the
most plausible does not mean it actually
is plausible, just that it is
less implausible than the alternatives). Political parties were hardly in view with that; its purpose was to stop disparate
racial treatment by the law (later interpreted by courts to include gender which, while hardly the intent of it, isn't without textual support given the braodness of its phrasing). However, it does not appear to me that the text or intent of the Equal Protection Clause supports any idea of a prohibition on partisan gerrymandering. I actually have some skepticism on it banning racial gerrymandering or unequally sized districts, but there the connection is at least discernable... this is not the case for partisan gerrymandering.
My contention is that partisan gerrymandering degrades the possibility of representation. Representation is the primary consideration here. I do realize that we're all conditioned by custom to view my idea as radical.
It's not radical in the sense that suggesting partisan gerrymandering is a bad thing is radical. That isn't radical, and I'm in agreement with it being a bad thing I'd like to see done away with. It
is radical in the sense that gerrymandering somehow violates the Elections Clause, which doesn't make sense; indeed, to my knowledge, even the courts who thought who thought partisan gerrymandering
was unconstitutional did not, to my knowledge, accept that argument, and attempted to find the violation in a different portion of the Constitution.
