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>> if Party A wins 51% of the popular vote in every single district, then will claim 100% governance of the entire country What about 51% of the votes in 51% o

• potatolicious 15y ago
  Ahah, in most places that's 51% of governance - which will appease the macro-scale proportional-representation folk, but is not without issues. Let's say you are in a rural district with a great deal of natural lumber resources. There's a party that's for clearcutting, and two parties adamantly against it. The party for clearcutting gets 35% of the vote and wins the election - is it democratic that governance power in the local district is handed to the minority vote? Of course, the "easy" solution to this is to do things California-style - i.e. put every major controversial issue up to a popular vote, to remove the association of specific issues to party lines. That has its dangers also - here in Seattle it's resulted in deadlock on major issues and just a complete clogging of government. Even if we ignore local governance, the drawing of district boundaries can also be used to disenfranchise certain demographics. In one city I used to live in, they redrew the districts to carve up the urban-center population and mixed them in with the suburban voter base. In this way, pro-urban issues didn't have a chance, and urban residents couldn't win representation effectively. Is that democracy? etc etc. These issues never end - "democracy" is hard to define.