On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 2:55 PM, David L Wetzell <[email protected]> wrote: > Nope. I'm advocating the use of the Hare Quota, not the Droop Quota.
Ahh ok. So to be guaranteed 2/3 of the seats, you need 2/3 of the vote. But if some voters vote for non-concentrated parties, then you can get your 2nd seat for 1/3 more than you "need". > I think one can then get a "major party" in power by a plurality vote and > give their a priori selected leadership enough procedural controls to get > things done without a majority. What this does is give 3rd parties the > right to decide which major party is in power so that neither can corner > this branch and leverage their control of it to get an unfair edge in other > elections, which in turn has a further multiplier effect of making more > elections more competitive. The thing about PR is that the "King maker" role for 3rd parties is over-stressed. It assumes that 2 and a half parties is the way things go forever. However, if smaller parties have excess power, then the major parties will fragment. A balance occurs where both types of parties have roughly power corresponding to their numbers. > It's even harder with a Hare quota to gerrymander. True. > Yeah, so I'm saying it might be advantageous to push for going back to the > Constitutiona mandated 2-stage approach if we were to dramatically improve > the 1st stage via the use of 3-seat LR Hare. Changing the constitution is very hard, you need people to be reasonably sure that they want to change things. That seems pretty hard, when many/most people would view losing their right to elect the Senate as a decrease in democracy. > You could set it up so that the State House of Reps chooses the Senator and > then the state senate approves of the chosen senator by at least a 40% > rate. Maybe, it depends on the Supreme Court's viewpoint. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
