I believe you’ve drawn the wrong conclusion with each of your objections.
First, the “list” shouldn’t be a problem if parties want to run electable candidates. In addition, primaries can still be held (I suggest approval voting for those) if those are more attractive to voters. Heck, I’m in favor of some parties holding primaries while others don’t. Choice is best for voters.
Second, in a five member district, I will have FIVE representatives who want my vote. Current proposals do not call for huge numbers of at-large representatives so this is a bit of a red herring. A state like Pennsylvania, for example, would probably be divided into 3-5 super districts.
Third, again in a five member district (which will probably be the norm if the FRA or something similar is passed), the threshold for being elected is one sixth plus one vote of the total. If a batshit crazy candidate reaches that threshold, they’ve earned a spot in Congress, imo. Coalition governments can and do work elsewhere around the world.
I happen to live near Tufts, and the border between the towns of Somerville and Medford goes through the Tufts campus. In fact, it runs right through some buildings on the campus, including the Math building.
A word about the complexity of counting the votes in STV: we have these things called “computers” these days. You might even be working on one as your reading my screeches.
This is not complex code to write. Excel 2019 has over one million rows per sheet, for example, and many of us here could probably construct a worksheet for the data and get an accurate answer in an hour or two.
Side note, I like the Danish system for selecting the winners in their multi-member districts, too, which is not exactly an STV system. It’s proportional and even simpler.
The Australian Electoral Commission produces a number of explanatory guides about how the system works here, which might be useful for people who only have experience of the bizarre construct you have in the US.
Here’s a very clear outline of how a redistribution works - a change in an established electorate to reflect population shifts, which is the nearest thing to what we’ve been discussing above.
Anti-gerrymandering works when its part of a larger depoliticised process, starting with the census, principles of 1 person-1 vote, etc down the chain. Changing electorates without fixing your other problems will be ineffective.
Because it’s better for both of you. I live in a county which for years basically had one Congressman. (Not always the same one, but just one.) When a member of the other party won that seat, it was eliminated in the next round of redistricting. The county was split up among several other districts, to the detriment of the interests of the county as a whole. Even the County Executive, a member of the party that did the redistricting, said as much. He may have been drunk at the time but in vino veritas and all that.
While I acknowledge that this has been your experience, I don’t necessarily buy that it is the experience of most districts that are re-apportioned. More importantly, I would like folks to consider that a system of governance where each representative is the only protector and champion of their district’s special interests is not a good system to perpetuate. It discourages them from having and acting on principles, and encourages graft and corruption. This is too big a topic for this thread, though, so I’m going to stop here.
If not across the hall it’d be the person in the next dorm across the street. In any urban area the boundaries between districts for city councilmen, county councilmen, state reps, and federal reps is just some ordinary street.
The idea we can draw always lines through substantially uninhabited areas so neighbors are always in the same district might work for areas with widely separated small towns. But fails utterly for how most the US population lives. Going forward, an ever-increasing share of the population will be living in dense areas.
We need to design a system that would work when the country is one giant homogenous suburb from sea to shining sea.
I will say that one advantage of representatives selected by single-member districts is that most Congressmen put a priority on assisting constituents who are having difficulty in some sort of interaction with the federal government – e.g. a social security check being delayed, getting embassy assistance overseas, resolving a dispute with the IRS. Every Representative has “casework” staff in their district offices whose sole jobs are to help constituents resolve issues with the federal bureaucracy. In my experience, these staff are rigorously nonpartisan in their approach to the job – they likely neither know nor care about the constituent’s political affiliation. Because they have to sell themselves to their voters every two years, the value of having a reputation for effectively assisting constituents is high.
That is part of the argument here in the UK too. Constituency casework is taken for granted as a core part of an MP’s duties*, and what sank proposals for some sort of “additional member” system for Westminster was concern over who the list-elected members would be considered to be representing, or whether they’d be left with enough time on their hands to busy themselves trying to unseat one of the casework-burdened constituency MPs.
On the other hand, we have additional member systems for the Scottish and Welsh parliaments, and the Greater London Assembly (not exactly the German model, but rather used to balance out the preponderance of the major parties in the constituency elections, and make the overall result a bit more, but not wholly proportional) - and I don’t hear great cries of complaint about an imbalanced workload between two classes of members. And not every MP is that wedded to their constituency casework, at least in safe seats.
*Possibly to an excessive extent, in some people’s expectations: I remember one survey which hrew up a fair number of people who thought their local MP could just dictate to local government and every other public service in the area.
That’s not really how it works in countries that use PR. People vote by party affiliation, not by the individual candidates appearing on the lists (why the disparaging quotation marks in your post, incidentally? The thing is called a list). The names on the list are publicly known, of course, but they don’t matter much in campaigning, save maybe for the top candidates nationwide. Voters don’t peruse the list and say “I’m not going to vote for party X because I don’t like candidate #98 on their list”. So it’s, effectively, the party nominating members of parliament by placing them on the list.
I’m talking about PR with statewide or even nationwide lists here, not about multi-member districts, which seems to be what you’re having in mind.
Clearly that concern doesn’t apply at this particular spot on the map.
Or maybe it does. As argued upthread by a bunch of folks, having the right number of people in each district is one measure of merit, but maybe not the only one. Who knows what the districting commission had in mind? And per your cite, we do know. They were trying hard to dilute the student vote and succeeded. bastards.
When I was at Villanova, the campus was split among something like seven different districts, precisely to prevent the student body from being a voting bloc. There were plenty of things we disagreed on, but there were also some things that we did agree on. For instance, were we a bloc, we’d probably have voted to change the zoning rules, so it would be possible to legally house the entire student body (it wasn’t).
I honestly didn’t know that the nominated candidates were called a “list” so ignorance fought, thanks. And I didn’t really mean to sound disparaging about it, my apologies.
Still, that knowledge doesn’t really affect my argument. Parties have a vested interest in running the best candidates and perhaps it’s better for voters if personality, and, more importantly, financial standing don’t enter very much into the equation. And there still shouldn’t be anything preventing a party from holding a traditional primary to select its candidates if it wants to go that route.
Yeah, I focus on the American proposals of smaller multi-member districts. The FRA – one of two districting proposals now circulating in the House, I believe – calls generally for districts composed of from three to six members each. We could have even better representation, imo, if we substantially increased the number of representatives to something more approximating other modern democracies and had more multi-member districts with smaller constituencies. Doubling the size of the House would result in an average five-member district representing about 1.9 million people and that’s not too bad.
A fair comparator might be the European Parliament - 705 members representing something like 500 million people. Each of the 27 member states decides how to run its elections, though they must be by proportional representation, and AFAIK, they are all done by the party list system: most countries have a single national list, but some have regional or other sub-divisions.
(And there’s a sort of division of powers, as between the Parliament, the Council of Ministers (representing member state governments) and the Commission (executive) ).
One issue for the US is that it doesn’t really have political parties in the sense most European countries do. To use Norway as an example we have proportional representation where you, for election to the national parliament, vote for a party list for your region/county. That list was decided by the party congress for that region and voted upon by the representatives elected by the municipal party groups where any paying party member has (the right to) a vote. (Norway has three levels of elected government.)
Any party will have a leader (The Greens did a weird thing for a while, but lets ignore that), elected by the national party congress by representatives of the lower levels, but the agenda will be set by the party congress, not by the “bigwigs” (although of course being on the comities that make agenda suggestions increase the chance of getting your wishes successfully adopted). The party’s candidate for prime minister doesn’t have to be the party leader, although they often are, but they have to adhere to the party agenda, or risk losing their leadership, which means more focus on political agendas, and less focus on persons (although not none).
You can also do adjustments to party lists when you vote, but what you can and cannot do differs between the three levels, and has been adjusted many times. Examples:
Cross someone out. Reduces their share of the party list votes by a certain fraction and can, if a sufficient number of people do it, push someone down the list and potentially mean someone lower is elected in their place.
Give someone a boost. Similar effect. This was used in the past to counter a tendency for people to cross out all the women.
Add someone from a different list. I think this is only allowed at the municipal level. It moves a fraction of your vote from that party list to the individual in question, which means they might move up and be elected for their party in the place of another, or at all.
But of course the national level in Norway is only about 5 million people, so nothing is directly transferable to the US, but my point was mainly to highlight that:
party lists are a more democratic thing in countries with parties with functional internal democracies
voting for party lists doesn’t have to completely take away choice for voters
My personal objection to the list is that it immunises the top members of a party from being personally defeated at the polls. In my view, every candidate should face that possibility, regardless of their rank in the party.
In Canada, we’ve had four Prime Ministers defeated in their own ridings: Macdonald, Meighen, King (twice!) and Campbell. Every election, there are always the occasional Cabinet ministers defeated, even if their party is returned to office. I find that very salutary: the party can’t give any member a guaranteed seat. The voters in the PM’s own riding decide if the PM will be returned to the Commons.
