Thomas Jefferson was the first person in world's history to devise proportional voting.
It is the only voting system in which the voter is not just equal in the voting process but also in the voting results.
I'll show you an example for a city with eight council seats.
In this image you see the winner-take-all outcomes to the left. All eight seats are won in a single district and a single person gets the seat. It means that the voters are represented at minimum by that person based on 50% of their votes, plus one.
To the right, you see the clean voting system because all voters vote one single time for their favorite (not eight times, just one time), and as a result, almost 90% of the voters are guaranteed that their vote translates into a seat. Thomas Jefferson created the first intrinsic voting system. He was a genius (with a good number of flaws as we all know).
These are the minimum numbers, and when there are 9 seats, the minimum is actually 90%. When there are 19 seats, the minimum is 95%. When there are 4 seats, the minimum is 80%.
In green, the minimum number what voters wanted. In white, the maximum number of voters getting nothing they wanted.
What is special about the two different systems is that winner-take-all concentrates power in the hands of fewer groups. So, when the Framers did not use the clean voting system for the Federal level, they were actually smart. They wanted a strong Federal government that could withstand foreign enemies, plus they wanted to prevent a serious breakdown because of extreme internal conflicts and made the nation strong by concentrating the Federal powers. They were extremely smart.
Yet they did not say a word about concentrating powers for anything else. Rather, they declared often and many a time their love for freedom, the pursuit of happiness, and the privileges instilled with the people.
The Framers were smart. The States' folks were devious. At first opportunity they used their middle fingers for State elections by not using Thomas Jefferson's clean voting system, perhaps even demonizing him in the process.
Worst of the worst is that they wrote State rules that made it illegal for cities and counties to use Thomas Jefferson's clean voting system. They did not want to follow the US Constitution because they wanted to be as mighty and as powerful as they could be themselves, and they used that mighty power to battle the Federal government instead. It was as if they never signed; it was as if they never accepted the US Constitution as the highest document of the nation. They steered local governments away from the US Constitution, and that is where they really overstepped their powers.
For certain, winner-take-all elections for cities and counties are US Constitutionally illegal. They undermine the power of the voters.
The States are the reason we have a two-party system. The Framers concentrated power x1, but the States concentrated powers x3.
Here an article I wrote with the worst possible outcome:
