300 million people, 50 states, 100 senators, and 435 representatives – governed by where they happen to live in any given election year on a undemocratically-drawn map.
Is this still the most sensible way to represent an electorate in the 21st century, with geography being just one factor among many in determining longevity, quality of life, socioeconomic mobility, etc.? Is someone from San Francisco more similar to someone from Orange County or Portland? Is a rancher in Texas more ideologically aligned with a socialite from Austin or a rancher in Washington? Etc.
If the underlying doctrine of a democracy is “one person one vote”, averaging out voices by geography serves to silence different voices – the whole point of gerrymandering.
What if 100 senators were instead divided among 100 income percentiles, for the billionaires to the penniless? Or, through some sort of hypothetical contact tracing, each of the 435 representatives would be distributed to a cluster of 680,000 Americans clumped by X degrees of closeness to each other – not geographic proximity, but how many degrees away they are from each other on communication networks. Or by self-reported political leanings. Or whatever we can imagine.
It’s just a hypothetical, but has anything like this – a representative democracy with elections based on something other than geography – been tried in either other nations or other democratic organizations?
In theory, I’d like to see a system of self-selected virtual districts. Legislative districts would have no real world existence. Let’s say we have around 250,000,000 voters. We would have around five hundred districts that exist on paper and each would have a population of around 500,000 voters. And each voter could decide which district they wanted to belong to. Each district would then elect its own representative to go to Congress.
This would mean everyone would belong to the group they feel best represents their interests. And any group which has half a million members would have a representative.
The notion of universal sufferage is quite new. Age, sex, wealth, ethnicity, religion et al have all been used to select electors and the elected.
The aim of the game is good governance, whether that is achieved by selecting from a gene pool limited to a single family or casting the net nation-wide. It’s the candidates who are more important than the electors.
Didn’t the US quite recently try an experiment with electing somebody without any experience or propensity in governance. How’d that work out?
On the other hand Old Sarcum provided Great Britain with two prime ministers and an extended period of better than average governance.
Regimes tend to look out for the interests of those that control them. An aristocracy might claim to have the intentions of the entire nation in its hearts but as a practical matter they’ve going to be looking out for what’s best for the aristocrats. The same is true if the governing elite is a religious organization or a worker’s soviet or an imperial dynasty or an entrenched bureaucracy. If we ever develop powerful AI’s and put them in charge, I’m sure we’ll end up with a government whose highest priority is ensuring a steady supply of cheap electricity.
This is why democracies tend to be the least fucked-up governments. If you have a system where the regime can be voted out of office, you have a political system that has to look out for the best interests of at least 51% of its people.
Yeah but that won’t work.
You’d have the half mill self-identified sages, illuminaries and thinking persons guild whose candidate is the Archangel Gabriel elected on winner takes all. Further if you were an up & coming SITP you couldn’t join because that electorate is full. And when one of the current SITP carked it creating a vacancy, who gets the gig?
On the other hand you have the Evil Bastards Union whose 500,000 members who put in the Anti-Pope.
Not to mention the Jedis, the Trekies et al seeking extraterrestrial representation.
Then the apathetic non-political couldn’t be buggered who get equal representation by somebody they have never heard of only to find they have been the victims of an EBU branch stack.
If you thought there was intractable divisions between political camps now, what you are proposing is simply political carnage.
I don’t think it’s as unworkable as you’re saying.
You and I shouldn’t be able to decide who’s fit for office and who isn’t. The same is true for deciding who is fit to vote and who isn’t. If Evil Bastards, Jedis, or Trekkies manage to pull together, they’re as entitled to elect a representative as sages, illuminaries and thinking persons.
Me, I’m an optimist. I feel that if you let all of the ideas compete, the good ideas end up driving out the bad ideas. And I feel good ideas have an advantage because it’s a lot harder to rally a half million people around a bad idea.
In the short term, the Evil Bastards are only going to be able to elect one Anti-Pope. He’ll be one representative in an assembly of five hundred.
OK, well think of the basic function of government.
If the community in which you live has spread it’s vote across 500 virtual electorates nationally but need some critical piece of infrastructure or project, a bridge, a hospital, support and resources after some calamity, who do they lobby, who is their representative?
How would each group limit members to just 500k? Wouldn’t there be some groups with millions and others with like 20 people? Would there be “overflow” groups that are just basically copies of the original one?
I’m not actually convinced our system of federal, state, county, local is actually all that good at actually providing resources. Other, more centralized democracies manage to provide education, healthcare, high-speed rail, functional bridges, unemployment support, etc. without leaving it all up to petty bureaucrats bribing each other and creating good ol’ boys networks. Maybe some money should just stay local and be used for citizen-participatory budget instead of trickling up to the feds and then trickling back down via pork barrels, with billions lost to corrupt middlemen. The whole existence of states is part of the problem here, when Texas and California can dictate education standards for the whole country, California determines all the cars, Florida makes and breaks presidents, etc. Why should we purposefully keep a system that carves up democratic power so unequally?
Well, being from one of those federal but “more centralized democracies” I’d be sympathetic. But the OP is about electorates not opening the can of worms on the future of federalism. Start an OP and I’ll be one of the TM giving their 2c.
I did start this OP, and electoral districts go hand in hand with federalism, because both made more sense when resources, communications, ideologies, etc. all had stronger ties to geography. They still do, of course, just less so with interstates and internets and isms. But, if you don’t want to talk about it, I’ll shut up too.
Love the idealism but you can propose a billion dollar program for [insert worthy cause here] which your chapter of the SILP support enthusiastically.
My EBU will propose a billion dollar tax cut. Always put your money on self interest … it’s the only horse trying.
There would be a practical reason to keep a group from getting too large; it only gets one representative in the legislative assembly. So if your group is really popular and is getting too large, you’ll reach a point where you’re better off splitting into two groups and getting two representatives. Or as you put it, overflow groups.
Yes, and where does the split off group that extra representative from?
All the other representatives are pledged to other self-identified groups.
Perform some variant of an aggressive corporate take-over?
I don’t see why. It’s essentially a zero-sum game (leaving aside population growth). If one group is increasing its membership, it means other groups are loosing their membership.