The good news, Daniel, we do not need a second constitutional convention to establish the much needed change. The first step is small, but is already required by the current US Constitution.
There are many levels of government, and the 14th Amendment demands that our governmental agencies always use the better system (and not, for instance, a system that discriminates). All levels of government, except two, must comply.
The two levels that do not need to comply are mentioned by name in the US Constitution and are given specific powers, so they have wiggle room around the demand to put the better system in place. These two levels are the federal and the state governments.
Local cities and counties are not named specifically in the US Constitution and must therefore comply. They must have proportional voting in place, since it is indeed the better non-discriminating system. To make the point quickly: our district voting discriminates against yellow. We can see from the results that we are getting red and blue only (and a purple mix sometimes). We do not have green, orange or yellow empowered parties. I need not say more, other than that proportional voting provides where district voting discriminates.
Instead of competing with each other for the single representative in district voting, we all get the ones we picked. The pie of seats is cut up according to the overall outcome; there are no losers in proportional voting.
After we learn to deal with actual political freedom, we probably end up desiring some more change. The state constitutions are far easier to change than the US Constitution (and as you rightfully point out, what a mess that would be). My proposal is that the German system is the best candidate. Not in the least because their system is based on our system. The Germans modified our system so it would deliver proportionally (and gerrymandering would indeed stop instantly).
The Germans also put a five percent threshold in place, so no small parties get any seats. That is actually smart, because we absolutely need more than two parties, but we also don’t need or want twenty little parties that are all ‘unimportant’. Five parties sounds about right to me.
We can get proportional voting in our cities and counties, today, right where we now often have just red or blue taking up all seats throughout the nation (talking about how pathetic that is from the perspective of being a democracy, all seats taken up by one party — yuck).
The subsequent step takes work but it is not impossible: changing our state constitutions.
We are done with this 18th century version of democracy, we need the 20th century (and 21st century) version.
