Juho wrote:
The idea of an appropriate size circle around candidates home (or home
district) sounds like a pretty safe and simple approach. That gives also
the voters a natural explanation to why some of the familiar candidates
are on the list and some not.
Dynamic districts may also be seen to fix something important. If the
district borders are considered artificial the circle based approach
moves the borders further away, and as a result also the problem of
artificial borders (in the sense that one can not vote for and be
represented by one's neighbour) may mostly fade away.
One more approach to this would be to provide "perfect" continuous
geographical proportionality. One would guarantee political and
geographical proportionality at the same time. One would try to minimize
the distance to the closest representative from each voter and make the
number of represented voters equal to all representatives. In short,
distribution of representatives would be close to the distribution of
the voters (while still maintaining also political proportionality).
There would, of course, be limits to the guarantee of having both
political and geographical proportionality at the same time. If your
immediate vicinity have candidates whose opinion you completely disagree
with, one of geographical proportionality and political proportionality
will have to sacrifice part of itself for the other. As I've said
before, in that case I think political proportionality is more
important. In the long run, the effect might self-stabilize, if for no
other reason that if there are many Y-ists in an area, one of them is
going to notice and want to become a candidate.
I'm not quite sure how to do perfectly continuous geographical
proportionality. My "two linked ballots" idea would probably work, but I
think we can do better by using the distance information directly. Just
how, though, I'm not sure.
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