A More Perfectly Representative Union

The other day I was listening to some people on the radio discussing, probably for the billionth time, how to improve the process of assigning House districts. As usual I was considering various mechanical methods and their known problems (such as bisecting communities). And then it hit me: why should House districts be geographic at all? If the Representatives are elected by the people, why do they represent plots of land instead?

So here's my proposal. Every ten years, record numbers abstracted from the voter registration rolls of the several states shall be combined into one list, permuted randomly, and distributed as evenly as possible across the current number of House districts. Voters newly registered in between distributions will be randomly assigned to a district until the next census. You get a fresh voter registration card showing your current House district, or you can look it up online, however your state does things.

Why do this?

• Nowadays it's simple. It should be a lot simpler and quicker than the current system.
• It's a wholly mechanical system which can be proven incorrupt (or not) by simple examination of the procedures used to implement it.
• All districts will be exactly the same size, plus or minus one voter. You can't get more fair than that.
• This method destroys the incentives (and the means) to manipulate demographics for personal political gain. Time, energy, and money will be freed for candidates to work on plans for serving the people, rather than packaging and using the people to serve the candidates.
• This also makes earmarks and pork-barrel projects worthless as tools for currying favor among the electorate. Any Representative would be guaranteed that very few of his constituents would receive disproportionate benefits from such expenditures, and that his colleagues' constituents would be similarly affected. This should tend to focus Members' thinking on the national interest rather than their own interests.
• A Member's "base" would disappear. His constituency would exactly resemble the overall makeup of the electorate, and would be shuffled frequently. No more reliably insert-party-here districts.

The point of all this is to change the Representative's priorities in two ways. One: to get him to do less strategic thinking about getting elected and more about doing the job for which he is elected. Two: to dilute the influence of the parties and return that influence to the people.

I thought there might be Constitutional objections to this plan, but I see only one rather vague one regarding "that State in which he shall be chosen." It can be argued that, since every Representative will be chosen in every State, this is satisfied, but of course it can (and will) be argued that this language somehow means that representation in the House is somehow required to be bounded by state lines.