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Yes, exactly. It seems to me that any first past the post system is an accidental democracy (at best). Technically, if every voting district has voted exactly 5
by Yizahi 4y ago
Yes, exactly. It seems to me that any first past the post system is an accidental democracy (at best). Technically, if every voting district has voted exactly 51:49%, then every single vote of the 49% group will be void, ignored. Winner takes all. Last elections in the USA shoved discrepancy of up to 3 million votes if I remember correctly, meaning majority vote number vs. actual number. And that number can go up to almost half of the population in the most absurd scenario. But even 10-20 million discrepancy, which is much more likely, can possibly cause some huge problems and protests.
- ant6n 4y ago> And that number can go up to almost half of the population in the most absurd scenario. It can get worse. If there are N parrties, the winner could take all seats with a vote percentage of 1/N+epsilon. Or could take the majority with 1/(2N)+epsilon. For example a party could win the majority of seats with 10%+epsilon of the votes in a five party system. While another party could have a minority with 60%-epsilon.
- pavlov 4y agoI wonder if there could be a federal law that requires all districts in all national or state-wide elections to be large enough to send at least ten representatives, leaving it up to the states to choose their preferred mechanism for how voters will select those ten from a longer list.
- charlieyu1 4y agoWon’t change a thing as long as it is winner take all.
- pavlov 4y agoHow would that work in this case? The state assigns one seat to the person who got the most votes and the other nine seats to whoever regardless of their vote counts? That’s not much of a democracy. If it’s simply “top 10 candidates with most votes get the seats”, that would be a great improvement over gerrymandered districts already. Other states could opt for ranked voting, d’Hondt’s method for party-proportional representation, etc.
- Spivak 4y agoBecause the whole point of messing with the districts is to make each district 50.01% party A 49.99% party B. A winner take all system with multiple candidates would work like the presidential election, you vote for them as a group. If you switch to top 10 then it's not winner take all anymore.
- alistairSH 4y agoMore than half the states don't have 10 House members, so this is impossible without a massive Constitutional change.
- pavlov 4y agoWell, ten or the maximum available, in which case the whole state must be a single district. (States with 11-19 seats would also have to be a single district since they wouldn’t be allowed to create districts smaller than ten. The specific number 10 is of course arbitrary, I didn’t think about it at any length.)
- smegger001 4y agothat is entirely a self inflicted hurdle, the law used to be there was to be one representative for every 30,000 persons, but then in 1929 congress passed the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929, fixing the number of representatives at 435. if we had stuck with the original we would have 11,080 representatives. technically speaking the only barrier to this is repealing that act, that and building a much larger capital building
- alistairSH 4y agoTrue enough, it's not strictly a Constitutional problem (we don't need an amendment). But going from 435 to >10,000 House members is a massive change. I've long though that pegging House districts at the population of the smallest state was a reasonable middle ground. That would put us at 571 members instead of 435.
- nilstycho 4y agoThe advocates of multi-member districts in the United States usually prioritize three- or five-member districts, or a mixture. Ten-member districts are unwieldy for voters, and the marginal increase in proportionality drops off quickly.