At 03:04 PM 9/1/2006, Steve Barney wrote: >It seems to me that a requirement that districts have to be convex >may make gerrymandering significantly more difficult.
Actually, the central problem is the very concept of the district. District elections for representatives are, quite simply, *elections* for representatives, and such elections inherently disenfranchise voters, who end up with, quite often, an uncongenial "representative." How can this person be said to represent them. He does not represent them, he represents a district. If districts paid taxes, no problem. But they don't, taxpayers do. "No taxation without representation?" Bosh. From my point of view, we don't have representation, most of us. Only those who voted for a winner do. Asset Voting used for proportional representation totally solves this problem, generating a peer assembly where nearly everyone voted for a winner, if not directly, then indirectly. (If any votes are wasted, it is because the one who received the vote wasted it by refusing to find an appropriate compromise; to be sure, some small level of waste would probably remain, though schemes can be imagined that would prevent this.) Delegable Proxy even more directly works in this way, it creates representation without elections. But Asset Voting fits much more easily into how people imagine legislatures, it creates a peer legislature where every representative has properly the same voting power. Asset Voting, a brilliant idea, actually, wish I'd invented it. But Warren did, to my knowledge. You know, when I heard of STV, I first assumed that the votes were transferable by those who received them. Silly me.... Gerrymandering uses the systemic disenfranchisement of voters through district elections to skew representation. That's all. Eliminate district representation and gerrymandering becomes impossible. Asset Voting can (and would) be used by voters to create *mostly* local representatives. If creating a state legislature, however, some small factions might have a state-wide representative. So with Asset, there *would* be local representatives you could go and meet and discuss issues with. They won't know, generally, whether you voted for them or not, under secret ballot conditions.... We got major help with our adoption from Senator Ted Kennedy's office. When CIS told us that it would be three months to get our Orphan Petition approved so we could bring our daughter -- whom we had already adopted by proxy in Ethiopia, she was waiting -- into the U.S., my wife called up his office. We had never had any contact with him, and we were not asked if we were Democrats. They simply listened to the story and said they would try to help. And the very next day we got a call from Kennedy's office that CIS was approving our petition that day, and the approval came in the mail the next day... Good politicians -- and Kennedy has to be one of the best, entirely aside from partisan considerations -- serve their constituents. You don't have to have district elections to have representatives well placed to serve a district.... and such service is the only reasonable argument for district elections, aside from the opportunity to gerrymander that they present. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
