⸘Ŭalabio‽ wrote:
2011-05-07T08:29:34Z, “Kristofer Munsterhjelm”
<[email protected]>:
The country I live in (Norway) has PR with multimember districts,
and I haven't heard of problems like that. Large projects usually
get the required analysis before they're built, even if they would
only impact part of a district if they went wrong. (Actually, I'd
say there are too few large projects of the kind I think is
important, but that's another matter and related to the particular
nature of Norwegian politics more than PR.)
In multimember districts, no politician might care about some people
getting flooded out of their homes in some corner of the multimember
district. If the United States of America would do that, it could
have 1 legislative house with 548 seats. Wyoming could use
scorevoting to get its single legislator. California could have 66
seats decided by assetvoting.
Well, I don't know what to say except that that particular failure
doesn't seem to happen over here, where we do have multimember
districts. Nor have I heard of anything like that even in the places
where you'd expect the local link to be most weak - countries like
Israel where the entire nation is a single district.
Perhaps this weakening tie is instead an advantage - that PR weakens
local ties to the point that pork barrel politics become limited, but
not to the point that the reps don't care if there's a flood somewhere
on the outskirts of their district. I have no evidence for that, though.
By the way your English is great. I am terrible at languages. I
studied Español, Esperanto, and Deutsche. The only language I could
learn was Esperanto:
¿Ĉu vi scipovas poroli la lingvon internacian Esperanto? Mi skribas
Esperante esperante, ke vi povu kompreni min.
Only slightly, by visiting translation sites on the web :)
And thank you. I hope it's accurate, as I have to learn the second
Norwegian variant quite soon. (Yeah, we're so strange we have two
versions of our language.)
You have algorithms that draw contiguous equipopulous districts.
However, they're completely arbitrary as far as natural communities
go. The districts might split a city or town in two, or might pass
right through a representative's house, or any number of such
effects.
Splitting communities, interestingly enough is fairer than compact
districts in the United States of America, splitting cities into
shards, with each shard reaching out into the surrounding country (...)
Democratic voters slightly outnumber Republican voters, but the
distribution is not even:
Democratic voters tend to be wealthier, better educated, and more
urban. REPUBLICAN voters tend to be poorer, less educated and rural.
Large cities can can have as much as 90% of its voters voting
Democratic. Rural areas tend to vote about 60% for the Republican
Party.
That's a problem, yes, but it seems some distortion is unavoidable with
single-member districts. It's kind of like rounding off and then adding
up versus adding up first and then rounding off. You know what my
solution would be, which would let you have more natural borders *and*
representation.
On an aside, though: wouldn't this benefit to the Republican party
disappear if you could get true multiparty rule? Or would you need both
Range/Asset *and* split communities to counter the duopoly?
Now, that's probably unavoidable if you're dealing with
single-winner districts, since we can't expect that the size of
natural communities will fit well with the size of the district,
but this problem is attenuated with multiple winners, because each
district can fit more people. For instance, here in Norway, each
multiwinner district corresponds to one of our natural "counties"
(first level administrative regions), of which there are 19.
Since states vary in population, a minority population would never
get the 1 seat Wyoming gets, but could easily get 1 of the 66 seats
California would get.
That's unavoidably true, yes. Over here, our parliament is large enough
that every region gets more than one representative, but doing that in
the US would result in a very large congress - at least 821
representatives would be needed if you were to use Webster's method of
apportionment.
¿Why rank? ¿Why not use assetvoting?
I think it's better that the decisions are close to the people than
far away. The point of representative democracy is that we can't
make every single decision ourselves, so we need someone to handle
the daily maintenance - to reduce the variety, so to speak - but
the representatives have their own objectives that may differ from
ours. Usually, that's considered part of the cost of having
representative democracy in the first place, but if we don't have
to pay that cost, why pay it?
With assetvoting, one chooses those who create the legislature. One
can give them instructions. One can even take vacation and run and
be one of those choosing the legislators, and then, after one helps
to create the legislature, go back to work.
Couldn't party discipline reduce Asset to the sort of prespecified
ranking that was used in Fiji? If so, the results (as we know) could
become quite unintuitive.
My own heavily engineered solution would probably involve Condorcet
for the president (hey, I like Condorcet :) ),
With Condorcet, one must rate many candidates and then one must
resolve cycles. I prefer scorevoting.
The voter doesn't need to care about cycle-resolution, and he doesn't
have to rank every candidate. For that matter, a cardinal ballot could
easily be translated into a ranked one or be used in a system like
Cardinal Weighted Pairwise.
STV or some ideal monotone multiwinner method for the House,
I prefer assetvoting.
and then if I'm to have three houses, the third would consist of
people picked randomly (because they're very hard to corrupt),
refreshed say, a tenth every 1/10 of the cycle decided for that
house, and that period could be coprime to the others (i.e. odd
number of years). Perhaps I'd use Condorcet (or a cardinal method)
for the Senate, though Gohlke's triad system would be even more
interesting to use; but at that point it's getting really
overengineered.
Interesting ideas. I shall have to think about this.
Even the best election method will only pick from candidates that run
and that can make themselves well known. If what matters is the will of
the people, then the people themselves are more fit to determine what it
is. Of course, they don't necessarily know much about actually
implementing the changes they want, hence Socrates's argument against
sortition back in Greece. This might be mitigated either by having the
true popular house be only one house (instead of the entire
legislature), like with my idea above, or by making use of technology to
separate the task of specifying (what do we want) from implementing (how
do we do it). Where such a separation is done by a bureaucracy, the
bureaucrats' own ideas of "what do we want" tend to color the solutions
they come up with, but hopefully, technology could let such
implementation groups be more agile.
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