I came up with a proposal that conforms much more easily to Article V (no state shall lose its equal suffrage in the Senate without its consent). It isn't an ideal democratic method, but it is a step in the right direction.
Elect half of the Senate on the basis of one per state, elected by the people. Elect the other half at-large by PR (party-list would probably be easiest, but that's a detail) with this caveat: Every state's votes are weighted to give each state equal suffrage. So, if 17 seats are up for grabs, each state would report how many seats it would assign to each party. Average over the states (weighting each state equally). I realize that the equal weighting of the states isn't perfect democracy, but I maintain 4 things: 1) By essentially doing PR on an "average state" you represent multiple interests. I don't think it can be any more distorted than the current Senate, and may often be more proportional than the current Senate. 2) The average state may actually be reasonable in practice. Consider that in the 2000 election the 2 major parties were essentially tied in the House, Senate, and President races, so three very different methods of election all reflected the same party situation. Moreover, suppose that in a hypothetical country the electorate is pretty homogenous in a geographic sense: If one area is 20% in favor of party X, so is another. If the country were divided into 2 parts, and each elected the same number of members to the legislature via PR, the same result would be obtained as in a nation-wide PR election, even if the two districts had different populations. This is not a method to be recommended when starting from scratch, but given the constraints in the Constitution it's probably the easiest improvement to implement. Moreover, as regional differences blur due to migration within the US, immigration, national media, etc. the distortions are likely to become smaller. 3) Progress is about improvement, not perfection. 4) The world has not yet ended, despite the current arrangement, so an improvement is not likely to be a precursor to Armageddon, civil war, or the second coming of the Spice Girls. Alex ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
