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Even "compact, fair" districts can lead to outcomes that one party, at least, would find unfair. For instance, in the US, Democratic voters tend to be clustere
by my_first_acct 10y ago
Even "compact, fair" districts can lead to outcomes that one party, at least, would find unfair.
For instance, in the US, Democratic voters tend to be clustered in cities, so urban congressional districts (even "compact, fair" ones) vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. This means that there a lot of "wasted" Democratic votes contributing to landslide victories in urban districts, instead of bringing about Democratic victories elsewhere.
Even if the Republicans have only a narrow majority in the suburban and rural districts, and are an overall minority of voters in the state, they are able to win the majority of congressional districts.
See this 2014 article (sorry, behind NYTimes paywall) for more details: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/its-the-geography-stupid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/26/opinion/sunday/its-the-ge...
- dragonwriter 10y agoRight. Any method of drawing single-member FPTP districts will, unless voters of different persuasions are perfectly uniformly distributed, will: (1) Produce disproportionate advantage for some party, and/or (2) Produce some number of safe seats where the general election is a forgone conclusion and the mechanism that selects candidates decides the winner in practice. You can select methods to choose which of these effects predominate, and which party benefits from either disproportionate representation or safe seats (there's a certain tension -- you get disproportionate representation for your party by giving the other party super safe seats), but you can't avoid them unless you throw out FPTP, and really single-member independent districts entirely.