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I never understand why at large proportional voting systems are never even considered. Even without gerrymandering, district based plurality elections are an ex

I never understand why at large proportional voting systems are never even considered. Even without gerrymandering, district based plurality elections are an extremely flawed system. Imagine we have a perfectly well distributed state - 35% democrat, 30% republican, 20% libertarian, 15% green. And we draw up perfectly fair lines for our 10 representatives. And this state now has their election. What any person would rationally expect would be about 3.5 democratic representatives, 3 republican representatives, 2 libertarian representatives, and about 1.5 green representatives. Instead we get 100% democratic representatives as they get a plurality of votes in each district. 35% of the support, no gerrymandering whatsoever, and 100% of the seats. I don't see how anybody can find this system defensible, let alone desirable. And this is even more true now a days where geographic vicinity to a representative doesn't really mean much of anything. In the times these laws were drawn up good chunks of the population would have known their representatives personally, or at worst have a very minimal number of degrees of separation. So there would be some good argument for having geographically close representatives. In today's society we're very disconnected from our representatives, physically and metaphorically. There's no intimacy between constituent, so much as we can even be considered constituents anymore, and representative. They're simply the person we send our letters to and whom gets to respond with focus tested form letters.

brianolson 9y ago
All it takes is an amendment to a state constitution to change how one of the houses of its legislature is elected. Sounds lovely. Can even do this by direct democracy ballot initiative in a handful of states, let's do it!
- vanattab 9y ago
  This is simply not true. The us constitution demands geographical representation of the House. State constitutions can not change this only us constitutional amendment can. Edit: After rereading the parent again I think he might be talking about the state house not us house.
  - wbl 9y ago
    There is only a requirement that the voters of the state elect members of the US House. How that is done is not specified.
    - Shivetya 9y ago
      until the Justice Department gets involved and insures minority candidates have adequate chances based on the Voting Rights Act. This creates a problem where one party is effectively eliminated from a district while the opposite party may be weakened outside of it.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      That it is subject to regulation by Congress is specified in the Constitution, and Congress has acted under that power and mandated single-member, geographic districts.
  - stonesixone 9y ago
    It's not the Constitution but rather a federal law that was passed in 1967. FairVote's Fair Representation Act, which was introduced in Congress this year, seeks to change that for example.
  - durgiston 9y ago
    Actually, it is an act of Congress that mandates single-member geographical districts (1967 Single-Member District Mandate). Several states over the years have had at-large districts, and it has been a debate since at least the 1842 Apportionment Act. The debate has gone from one focused on federalism (states should decide how to elect reps) to equal protection (black people should get not get drowned out by racist southern states. flip side, gerrymandering is easy to do, hard to prevent). Nothing in the US Constitution prevents at-large House reps.
theseatoms 9y ago
Sounds like a great way for a state to make itself politically irrelevant at the national level.
- tormeh 9y ago
  Most states already are irrelevant. Your vote in US elections don't count unless you live in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Wisconsin.
  - InitialLastName 9y ago
    That's only true of the presidential election. Senators in states other than those can often go either way, and in the House it's pretty much district-by-district whether your vote matters.
  - mobilefriendly 9y ago
    Maine and Nebraska use a proportional vote so it matters there in some districts. Also Arizona, New Mexico, Missouri, and Georgia are usually battleground states.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      Maine and Nebraska assign the votes corresponding to House seats to winners in each Congressional District, they do not use a proportional system.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    No, it counts, it's just those states have recently been competitive. But being competitive or not is just the aggregate effect of individual votes; and which states are competitive or dominated by one party or the other changes over time, sometimes quite rapidly. (Some of us can remember when, in Presidential elections, California was viewed as a Republican presidential lock.)
rndmize 9y ago
Agreed. There's been some movement towards better voting systems, but proportional voting seems consistently to be bottom of the barrel of priorities. http://www.fairvote.org/ http://www.fairvote.org/ - Promotes IRV, and I think they were in favor of proportional representation, but I can't seem to find the pages now (go figure). http://www.equal.vote/ http://www.equal.vote/ - Promotes a customized score voting system, which seems more solid than IRV from my reading, but no mention of proportional representation. It's too bad, really, I'd be hugely in favor if something like this came up in a CA statewide ballot/proposition.
- stonesixone 9y ago
  Proportional representation is definitely a big part of FairVote's agenda. They have a bill in Congress right now around electing members of Congress from multi-member districts using STV -- of which IRV is the single-winner variant. It is called the Fair Representation Act: http://www.fairvote.org/the_fair_representation_act_has_been_introduced_to_congress http://www.fairvote.org/the_fair_representation_act_has_been...
sdenton4 9y ago
Geographical representation means that Congress critters have direct responsibility to a well defined set of constituents. So you can't make up for closing a factory on one side of the state by making new friends on the other side of the state. Furthermore, you have to decide which reps stay on when an election reduces the number of reps. Who makes that choice? In parliamentary systems, the party does. But in the US, elections are (mostly for the worse, imho) ultimately about the individual representative: voters have a chance to say 'THIS guy is an asshole' and vote him out, instead of giving the party discretion as to whether to drop the entrenched asshole or kick out the newcomer...
- infogulch 9y ago
  You wouldn't decide that at the next election?
scythe 9y ago
Districts are popular when they work because local concerns may be divergent from state concerns, particularly in localities where the politics are at odds with the state as a whole, such as (conservative) eastern Oregon or (liberal) Atlanta, Georgia. While Oregon or Georgia might elect a contrarian representative in a PR election, such representative might not be as satisfying of a choice to residents of those districts. I think the easiest "trial run" for proportional voting in the US is using two-winner elections (preferably Schulze but maybe traditional STV) to elect Senators, because this doesn't require any changes in representation. Unfortunately this is subject to game-theoretic problems because it tends to make the Senatorial output of a state less polarized (California might have one Republican and one Democrat instead of two Democrats), which could result in a political swing towards those states without proportional Senators (Wyoming might still elect two Republicans with FPTP).
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > I think the easiest "trial run" for proportional voting in the US is using two-winner elections (preferably Schulze but maybe traditional STV) to elect Senators The easiest trial run would be at the state level. Making each states Senators part of the same class instead of being from two of the three separate classes would require a Constitutional Amendment, since it would change the terms of some sitting Senators to something longer or shorter than the Constitutional 6-year terms. It also (presuming Senate terms aren't changed besides what is necessary for transition) would mean each state would have six years between elections for the Senate rather than alternating 2- and 4-year intervals. > Unfortunately this is subject to game-theoretic problems because it tends to make the Senatorial output of a state less polarized (California might have one Republican and one Democrat instead of two Democrats), which could result in a political swing towards those states without proportional Senators (Wyoming might still elect two Republicans with FPTP). This can be mitigated by increasing the number of Senators per state; even 3/state would probably make it a non-issue, it would make 2/1 splits common initially, so you wouldn't have most states even with the others 2/0.
bmm6o 9y ago
On the flip side, having each representative tied to a particular locality makes sense from a service delivery standpoint. If there are potholes in your street, you contact the city council member from your district. And if they aren't responsive to your needs, you vote for a replacement. I think it's a mistake to think that locality doesn't matter just because of improvements in transportation and communication.
durgiston 9y ago
Several US states have in fact had a various times at-large representatives (most notably Hawaii and New Mexico since the time they were admitted into the Union). In 1967, the Single-Member Districting Mandate (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c) was passed to mandate geographically based single-member districts. One reason it was passed was because of fears that southern states would use at-large districts to dilute the black vote. The other is that at the time, Indiana was under court-order to elect all 11 of its representatives at-large unless it could come up with a satisifactory districting plan. This was an attempt by Congress to claw back some power from the judiciary after the 1962 Baker case declaring the one-person/one-vote principle that districts must be of roughly equal population. I think that it is an interesting debate and definitely doesn't get talked about enough (or at all!) in school.
- ykler 9y ago
  This is very interesting. Why was it thought that at-large districts would dilute the black vote? Blacks were a minority in every southern state, I believe, so naively one would think that they would stand to benefit from at-large districts and suffer from gerrymandering. The only way I can think this might not happen is if the plan were to only have a very small number of the representatives (like one) be at-large, but presumably the relevant proposal should be to have all representatives be elected on an at-large basis (?)
  - bonyt 9y ago
    This is because an at-large system isn't the same as a proportional representation system. In an at-large system, 51 percent of voters can still control 100 percent of the seats. This is because each voter gets one vote per seat. For example, if a hypothetical state had 5 Representatives elected on at at-large basis, and 51% of the state favored one party, they could win 51% of the vote for each seat, and win every seat.
  - zachrose 9y ago
    It may be true that no state had a Black majority in the 1960s, but several states did have a Black majority until the 20th century. From Wikipedia: Three Southern states had populations that were majority black: Louisiana (until about 1890), South Carolina (until the 1920s) and Mississippi (from the 1830s to the 1930s). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_minority https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_minority
nathancahill 9y ago
At the risk of devolving the thread into political flamebait, the issue isn't geographic vicinity or physical and metaphorical disconnect. It's a financial disconnect: the money funding representatives comes outside the constituency. All of the other issues you described stem from that. See: The refusal of representatives to hold town halls. They literally don't represent their constituents anymore.
- durgiston 9y ago
  This is a different issue. No reason we can't also fix gerrymandering. Also, while outside money certainly is an issue, there is still research showing the limited effectiveness of money in politics. It only goes so far, whereas siloing opposing voters can be at least as effective, and more permanent.
mtgx 9y ago
Indeed. This is what FairVote has been fighting for in the past 5+ years, and it's already making some progress: http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation
glaugh 9y ago
Germany has a very clever system of electing representatives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Germany#Voting_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Germany#Vo... 1. You vote both for an individual in your district and for a party. 2. Individuals win via a plurality of their district, like in the US 3. The rest of the Bundestag is filled up from party lists so that as much as possible the final proportion of parties matches proportion of party votes. Applying it to your example and doubling the representative count, there would be 10 directly elected Democratic representatives. The rest would be distributed proportionately among Republican, Libertarian, and Green. In practice you don't actually get the directly elected seats all coming from one party, so in reality you end up with a roughly 35%/30%/20%/15% breakdown in the end. That way you can have some direct representation of your region, which I'd assert has some utility, without sacrificing proportional "accuracy". (I'm skipping a couple subtleties here, but that's the gist as I understand it.)
- chongli 9y ago
  Doesn't this create a two tier system where the directly elected representatives hold a proper mandate and those on the party list are relegated to the back seats of power?
dragonwriter 9y ago
> I never understand why at large proportional voting systems are never even considered. Party-list proportional systems reduce the accountability of individual representatives to the general electorate, transferring that accountability to those setting the party list. You can get much better proportionality than single member districts provide without abandoning direct accountability (e.g., by using STV or a similar system in districts of, say, 5 representatives.)

brianolson 9y ago

All it takes is an amendment to a state constitution to change how one of the houses of its legislature is elected. Sounds lovely. Can even do this by direct democracy ballot initiative in a handful of states, let's do it!

vanattab 9y ago
This is simply not true. The us constitution demands geographical representation of the House. State constitutions can not change this only us constitutional amendment can. Edit: After rereading the parent again I think he might be talking about the state house not us house.
- wbl 9y ago
  There is only a requirement that the voters of the state elect members of the US House. How that is done is not specified.
  - Shivetya 9y ago
    until the Justice Department gets involved and insures minority candidates have adequate chances based on the Voting Rights Act. This creates a problem where one party is effectively eliminated from a district while the opposite party may be weakened outside of it.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    That it is subject to regulation by Congress is specified in the Constitution, and Congress has acted under that power and mandated single-member, geographic districts.
- stonesixone 9y ago
  It's not the Constitution but rather a federal law that was passed in 1967. FairVote's Fair Representation Act, which was introduced in Congress this year, seeks to change that for example.
- durgiston 9y ago
  Actually, it is an act of Congress that mandates single-member geographical districts (1967 Single-Member District Mandate). Several states over the years have had at-large districts, and it has been a debate since at least the 1842 Apportionment Act. The debate has gone from one focused on federalism (states should decide how to elect reps) to equal protection (black people should get not get drowned out by racist southern states. flip side, gerrymandering is easy to do, hard to prevent). Nothing in the US Constitution prevents at-large House reps.

theseatoms 9y ago

Sounds like a great way for a state to make itself politically irrelevant at the national level.

tormeh 9y ago
Most states already are irrelevant. Your vote in US elections don't count unless you live in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Virginia, or Wisconsin.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  That's only true of the presidential election. Senators in states other than those can often go either way, and in the House it's pretty much district-by-district whether your vote matters.
- mobilefriendly 9y ago
  Maine and Nebraska use a proportional vote so it matters there in some districts. Also Arizona, New Mexico, Missouri, and Georgia are usually battleground states.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    Maine and Nebraska assign the votes corresponding to House seats to winners in each Congressional District, they do not use a proportional system.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  No, it counts, it's just those states have recently been competitive. But being competitive or not is just the aggregate effect of individual votes; and which states are competitive or dominated by one party or the other changes over time, sometimes quite rapidly. (Some of us can remember when, in Presidential elections, California was viewed as a Republican presidential lock.)

rndmize 9y ago

Agreed. There's been some movement towards better voting systems, but proportional voting seems consistently to be bottom of the barrel of priorities. http://www.fairvote.org/ http://www.fairvote.org/ - Promotes IRV, and I think they were in favor of proportional representation, but I can't seem to find the pages now (go figure). http://www.equal.vote/ http://www.equal.vote/ - Promotes a customized score voting system, which seems more solid than IRV from my reading, but no mention of proportional representation. It's too bad, really, I'd be hugely in favor if something like this came up in a CA statewide ballot/proposition.

stonesixone 9y ago
Proportional representation is definitely a big part of FairVote's agenda. They have a bill in Congress right now around electing members of Congress from multi-member districts using STV -- of which IRV is the single-winner variant. It is called the Fair Representation Act: http://www.fairvote.org/the_fair_representation_act_has_been_introduced_to_congress http://www.fairvote.org/the_fair_representation_act_has_been...

sdenton4 9y ago

Geographical representation means that Congress critters have direct responsibility to a well defined set of constituents. So you can't make up for closing a factory on one side of the state by making new friends on the other side of the state. Furthermore, you have to decide which reps stay on when an election reduces the number of reps. Who makes that choice? In parliamentary systems, the party does. But in the US, elections are (mostly for the worse, imho) ultimately about the individual representative: voters have a chance to say 'THIS guy is an asshole' and vote him out, instead of giving the party discretion as to whether to drop the entrenched asshole or kick out the newcomer...

infogulch 9y ago
You wouldn't decide that at the next election?

scythe 9y ago

Districts are popular when they work because local concerns may be divergent from state concerns, particularly in localities where the politics are at odds with the state as a whole, such as (conservative) eastern Oregon or (liberal) Atlanta, Georgia. While Oregon or Georgia might elect a contrarian representative in a PR election, such representative might not be as satisfying of a choice to residents of those districts. I think the easiest "trial run" for proportional voting in the US is using two-winner elections (preferably Schulze but maybe traditional STV) to elect Senators, because this doesn't require any changes in representation. Unfortunately this is subject to game-theoretic problems because it tends to make the Senatorial output of a state less polarized (California might have one Republican and one Democrat instead of two Democrats), which could result in a political swing towards those states without proportional Senators (Wyoming might still elect two Republicans with FPTP).

dragonwriter 9y ago
> I think the easiest "trial run" for proportional voting in the US is using two-winner elections (preferably Schulze but maybe traditional STV) to elect Senators The easiest trial run would be at the state level. Making each states Senators part of the same class instead of being from two of the three separate classes would require a Constitutional Amendment, since it would change the terms of some sitting Senators to something longer or shorter than the Constitutional 6-year terms. It also (presuming Senate terms aren't changed besides what is necessary for transition) would mean each state would have six years between elections for the Senate rather than alternating 2- and 4-year intervals. > Unfortunately this is subject to game-theoretic problems because it tends to make the Senatorial output of a state less polarized (California might have one Republican and one Democrat instead of two Democrats), which could result in a political swing towards those states without proportional Senators (Wyoming might still elect two Republicans with FPTP). This can be mitigated by increasing the number of Senators per state; even 3/state would probably make it a non-issue, it would make 2/1 splits common initially, so you wouldn't have most states even with the others 2/0.

bmm6o 9y ago

On the flip side, having each representative tied to a particular locality makes sense from a service delivery standpoint. If there are potholes in your street, you contact the city council member from your district. And if they aren't responsive to your needs, you vote for a replacement. I think it's a mistake to think that locality doesn't matter just because of improvements in transportation and communication.

durgiston 9y ago

Several US states have in fact had a various times at-large representatives (most notably Hawaii and New Mexico since the time they were admitted into the Union). In 1967, the Single-Member Districting Mandate (https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c) was passed to mandate geographically based single-member districts. One reason it was passed was because of fears that southern states would use at-large districts to dilute the black vote. The other is that at the time, Indiana was under court-order to elect all 11 of its representatives at-large unless it could come up with a satisifactory districting plan. This was an attempt by Congress to claw back some power from the judiciary after the 1962 Baker case declaring the one-person/one-vote principle that districts must be of roughly equal population. I think that it is an interesting debate and definitely doesn't get talked about enough (or at all!) in school.

ykler 9y ago
This is very interesting. Why was it thought that at-large districts would dilute the black vote? Blacks were a minority in every southern state, I believe, so naively one would think that they would stand to benefit from at-large districts and suffer from gerrymandering. The only way I can think this might not happen is if the plan were to only have a very small number of the representatives (like one) be at-large, but presumably the relevant proposal should be to have all representatives be elected on an at-large basis (?)
- bonyt 9y ago
  This is because an at-large system isn't the same as a proportional representation system. In an at-large system, 51 percent of voters can still control 100 percent of the seats. This is because each voter gets one vote per seat. For example, if a hypothetical state had 5 Representatives elected on at at-large basis, and 51% of the state favored one party, they could win 51% of the vote for each seat, and win every seat.
- zachrose 9y ago
  It may be true that no state had a Black majority in the 1960s, but several states did have a Black majority until the 20th century. From Wikipedia: Three Southern states had populations that were majority black: Louisiana (until about 1890), South Carolina (until the 1920s) and Mississippi (from the 1830s to the 1930s). https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_minority https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_minority

nathancahill 9y ago

At the risk of devolving the thread into political flamebait, the issue isn't geographic vicinity or physical and metaphorical disconnect. It's a financial disconnect: the money funding representatives comes outside the constituency. All of the other issues you described stem from that. See: The refusal of representatives to hold town halls. They literally don't represent their constituents anymore.

durgiston 9y ago
This is a different issue. No reason we can't also fix gerrymandering. Also, while outside money certainly is an issue, there is still research showing the limited effectiveness of money in politics. It only goes so far, whereas siloing opposing voters can be at least as effective, and more permanent.

mtgx 9y ago

Indeed. This is what FairVote has been fighting for in the past 5+ years, and it's already making some progress: http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation http://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation

glaugh 9y ago

Germany has a very clever system of electing representatives. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Germany#Voting_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_system_of_Germany#Vo... 1. You vote both for an individual in your district and for a party. 2. Individuals win via a plurality of their district, like in the US 3. The rest of the Bundestag is filled up from party lists so that as much as possible the final proportion of parties matches proportion of party votes. Applying it to your example and doubling the representative count, there would be 10 directly elected Democratic representatives. The rest would be distributed proportionately among Republican, Libertarian, and Green. In practice you don't actually get the directly elected seats all coming from one party, so in reality you end up with a roughly 35%/30%/20%/15% breakdown in the end. That way you can have some direct representation of your region, which I'd assert has some utility, without sacrificing proportional "accuracy". (I'm skipping a couple subtleties here, but that's the gist as I understand it.)

chongli 9y ago
Doesn't this create a two tier system where the directly elected representatives hold a proper mandate and those on the party list are relegated to the back seats of power?

dragonwriter 9y ago

> I never understand why at large proportional voting systems are never even considered. Party-list proportional systems reduce the accountability of individual representatives to the general electorate, transferring that accountability to those setting the party list. You can get much better proportionality than single member districts provide without abandoning direct accountability (e.g., by using STV or a similar system in districts of, say, 5 representatives.)