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PR mitigates Gerrymandering because it reduces the amount of "discardable" surplus votes. Imagine you have 100 single-winner districts that are each roughly 50

PR mitigates Gerrymandering because it reduces the amount of "discardable" surplus votes. Imagine you have 100 single-winner districts that are each roughly 50/50 Dem/GOP, with the slight edge breaking 50/50, so that your legislature has 50 reps from each party. Now we redistrict to pack a bunch of Dems from the GOP-majority districts into one super-Dem district, shaving down their margins in numerous districts. We could conceivable get 99 GOP reps even though the population is 50/50 Dem/GOP. That super-Dem district "discards" or "wastes" 50% of the votes of the Dems inside it, because they're surplus votes in excess of what they need to win the district. Now imagine you switch to 20 5-winner districts elected with PR. The Dems could win all five seats with conceivably 83.3% of the vote (5 candidates getting 16.6% each means they get all the votes). So the most you can possibly wast is 16.7% of the votes instead of 50%. > It only replaces districts with parties No. Most PR systems still have districts. Exceptions like Israel, where the whole country is one big district, tend to be the poster children of PR gone wrong. Plus there are PR systems where you vote for candidates, not parties. Single Transferable Vote in Australia's Senate is an example. You just rank the candidates (although many voters blindly follow the guidance of their preferred party). Another cure to Gerrymandering is algorithmic redistricting, which I'm supportive of. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUS9uvYyn3A As for Score Voting (aka Range Voting) there is a proportional form of it. http://ScoreVoting.net/RRV.html http://ScoreVoting.net/RRV.html However I agree that even the single-winner form would reduce the negative impact of Gerrymandering (also, getting Score Voting is a much more consequential/impactful change than eliminating Gerrymandering). The reason it mitigates Gerrymandering is that it tends to reduce polarization and two-party dynamics, electing broadly appealing centrist winners. If you try the "packing" strategy with Score Voting, you tend to "move the ideological center", so a district that's already going Democrat doesn't become a /dev/null for surplus Dem votes that you want to effectively burn. If you pile on more Democrats, you can just keep pushing the center more Democratic. This is a theoretical argument mind you, but I think a reasonable one. Clay Shentrup Co-founder, The Center for Election Science

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> Imagine you have 100 single-winner districts that are each roughly 50/50 Dem/GOP, with the slight edge breaking 50/50, so that your legislature has 50 reps from each party. Imagine you have 100 single-winner districts with range voting so that there aren't two parties, or any strong parties at all. Then the platform needed to win a district is district-specific, because a candidate with a district-specific platform beats any party's general platform in that district. Even if the winning candidate is a member of a party, the candidate still has to do what the district wants over what the party wants or they'll lose the seat. The winning candidate in single-district range voting is literally the one that gets the highest average rating within the district, so it optimizes for no surplus at all. If there was any then an independent candidate could show up with a platform that captures it by aligning more closely with the district and thereby win the seat. The only way to do better than that is to do the same thing but with smaller districts, at the cost of having more members of the legislature (and in the limit it becomes direct democracy). > No. Most PR systems still have districts. I don't mean there are no districts, I mean that in PR instead of being stuck with a district that might not represent you in some ways, you're stuck with a party that might not represent you in some ways. And PR STV doesn't fix that. Anything that increases the number of constituents per representative inherently can't, because that is what causes the problem to begin with. Diluting each vote by 20 times but giving each constituent 20 times as many representatives doesn't cancel out. If a state upstream from your district is dumping poison in the river, no candidate could win that district without addressing it. But with any kind of PR, it's possible for every representative to ignore it because the affected voters split between twenty representatives, none of which need 1/20th of their votes enough to address the problem. And RRV looks like it would create a lot of strange incentives, like giving a lower score to candidates you strongly like if you think they're likely to win regardless, except that if everyone thinks that way then that candidate loses.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

> Imagine you have 100 single-winner districts that are each roughly 50/50 Dem/GOP, with the slight edge breaking 50/50, so that your legislature has 50 reps from each party. Imagine you have 100 single-winner districts with range voting so that there aren't two parties, or any strong parties at all. Then the platform needed to win a district is district-specific, because a candidate with a district-specific platform beats any party's general platform in that district. Even if the winning candidate is a member of a party, the candidate still has to do what the district wants over what the party wants or they'll lose the seat. The winning candidate in single-district range voting is literally the one that gets the highest average rating within the district, so it optimizes for no surplus at all. If there was any then an independent candidate could show up with a platform that captures it by aligning more closely with the district and thereby win the seat. The only way to do better than that is to do the same thing but with smaller districts, at the cost of having more members of the legislature (and in the limit it becomes direct democracy). > No. Most PR systems still have districts. I don't mean there are no districts, I mean that in PR instead of being stuck with a district that might not represent you in some ways, you're stuck with a party that might not represent you in some ways. And PR STV doesn't fix that. Anything that increases the number of constituents per representative inherently can't, because that is what causes the problem to begin with. Diluting each vote by 20 times but giving each constituent 20 times as many representatives doesn't cancel out. If a state upstream from your district is dumping poison in the river, no candidate could win that district without addressing it. But with any kind of PR, it's possible for every representative to ignore it because the affected voters split between twenty representatives, none of which need 1/20th of their votes enough to address the problem. And RRV looks like it would create a lot of strange incentives, like giving a lower score to candidates you strongly like if you think they're likely to win regardless, except that if everyone thinks that way then that candidate loses.