Joe Weinstein wrote: >Short of forcing everyone into a single district, with resulting >guaranteed huge campaign costs for small parties or obscure candidacies, >it's NOT necessarily easier to maximize overall geographic fitness >or 'utility' of an apportionment scheme by using PR. > >By the way, usual PR presumes that voters want to be proportionally >represented ONLY according to political party, not other criteria, >including geographic proximity.
Good point about geographical concerns. In a bicameral state legislature it would be reasonable to elect one house by PR and the other with single- member districts. We can debate which house of the legislature should be elected by PR, but I think the basic idea is reasonable. Also, I think PR should stick to districts of 5 or 6 members, rather than operating state- wide, to keep the district sizes half-way reasonable. >Also by the way, we would get much better 'PR' using PAV applied to >individual candidates, not parties. I agree that PAV would provide excellent proportionality while keeping the scrutiny on individual candidates. However, as I understand it, PAV requires keeping 2^n tallies when there are n candidates. In CA there are normally 7 parties on the ballot. If we had 5-member districts that could lead to 35 candidates, or 2^35 = 34 billion tallies. The Florida fiasco shows that ballot counting matters, and should be a criterion when evaluating election methods of an sort. (IF I MISUNDERSTAND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PAV KINDLY CORRECT ME AND I WILL WITHDRAW MY CRITICISM.) To keep the counting simple while keeping the scrutiny on individuals, I am intrigued by Cumulative Voting. STV, with n! tallies, is clearly out of the question. Some party list systems may also have potential. Alex
