At 03:54 PM 8/30/2005, Adam Tarr wrote:
>Just a random thought I had the other day for a PR system that would
>work using only single-winner districts.
The scheme, as described, achieves proportionality by awarding
victory to some candidates who had only weak support in the districts
from which they were supposedly elected. This cannot reasonably be
called "single-winner."
I didn't describe it as "single winner" I described it as working in single winner districts. The point was, no change to the voting method would have to be made for this to work.
It was more of an intellectual exercise in squeezing PR out of the current system, rather than a serious proposal that I think is wonderful.
Rather, it is multiple-winner over the
collection of districts, and the assignment of winners to districts
is not a significant detail (except that I suppose that district
constituents might have someone to petition if they want governmental
action on something).
Exactly; every voter gets a local representative. Also, "the assignment of winners to districts" does require that the candidate ran in that district and that district alone, so it's not a complete abstraction. While the winner may not have had a plurality of votes, he or she is as much the representative of a voter in that district as any current representative is. After all, there are plenty of people who don't vote for the winner in regular single-winner districts.
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