There’s your problem. That’s most certainly NOT what the underlying doctrine of the US’s republic is, nor is it the underlying doctrine of most of the planet’s modern democracies. Direct democracy is a bad idea for a lot of very good reasons. One can debate if those reasons are more or less compelling than the reasons why representation is a bad idea.
I think underlying the OPs question is this: what’s the fairest way to select our representatives?
This leads to the inevitable question…what does it mean to be “fair”? That too is subjective. It’s turtles all the way down my friend. It’s not a math problem.
Little_Nemo, it sounds like you’re basically re-inventing party-list proportional representation but with complications. With that system, the Thinking Persons Guild, the Evil Bastards Union, the Jedis, the Trekkies all appear on the ballot paper; and - assuming we’re electing a house of 435 members - for every 1/435 of the votes they get, they get one seat.
The difference is the functions would be in effect self-inventing with their membership self-selecting.
I can see how such a system might be created, but I don’t see how it could evolve over time. At least not with a fixed headcount of legislators. But at the same time you can’t allow any arbitrary splitting of a faction to just create new seats willy nilly.
I think there could be some interesting dynamics, but it’s hard to say how it would play out.
Consider a fixed district system. What happens when a district gets too many people? Well, it can’t split, but we can expect it to not get too big–at a certain point people won’t like that their vote is being diluted too much, and find some other district which maybe isn’t quite as good a match but where their voting power is higher.
The districts too will change their behavior. They aren’t really interested in attracting members in the first place, because there’s no benefit to it (they just get the one seat no matter what). If they have a broad focus that’s attracting too many people, they might narrow that focus.
But on the other hand, if a district is too small, then even if it has some really unpopular focus, the high voting power will still have a great deal of attraction, and people will come, vote out the existing legislator, and replace them with someone more reasonable.
I’m really not sure what would happen overall–I can’t even decide if the overall force is toward splintering or averaging–but I don’t think it would be static. There’s lots of good game theory at play.
I don’t see it. I feel party list proportional representation is still controlled by organizations - ie the parties. They decide on what the platforms are and which candidates are eligible for elections. The virtual district system I described would be more a bottom-up approach. People would associate with other people on the basis of shared political priorities and then they would choose an individual from within the group as a representative.
And I feel there would be minimal vote ranking. You’re not going to be in a situation where you’re rejecting a bunch of candidates before reaching the ones you like. If you are, it’s a clear sign you should move to a different district. If you’re in a district with like-minded people, you’re probably going to be generally happy with all of the candidates in your group and would be voting on the minor differences between them. You’re not going to see a situation where you’re making a choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump because there won’t be any district which would nominate both of them. They might both be running but they’d be running in two different districts.
I’ll admit I have more of a general idea than specific policies.
But as a suggestion, maybe fix the number of representatives at five hundred and let people form districts as they want. Only the five hundred largest districts get to elect a representative.
Smaller districts would be formed but the goal of these proto-districts would be to express a platform and attract more members. If they succeed in selling their message, they’ll grow large enough to make the cut and get representation. If their message doesn’t catch on, they’ll either have to modify the platform to attract wider support or be stuck out of power. Most likely, districts like this would break up within a couple of years if they can’t demonstrate growth and their members will give up and more to established districts.
I feel the best aspect of this policy is that it would eliminate gerrymandering (in fact, I originally thought of it during a discussion of that topic). You can’t “hide” voters in a district beneath a majority of other voters. The minority will just walk away to another district. Everyone gets to “move” to the district they’re happiest with.
The degree to which I can agree with and dissent from your position depends on what your position is.
As @ctnguy (welcome back btw) has pointed out you are now proposing proportional party lists which is conceptually opposed to your opening position which was 500 single member districts with 500k self identified voters
The fact that you recognize that my position is “conceptually opposed” to proportional party lists shows that it’s not what I am proposing, now or then.
If you substitute the word “party” for “district” you’ve just invented PR with a minimum vote to get seats.
A “district” would have to have organizers and organization. 165 million voters vs 500 seats says ~350K voters per seat on average. Groups that size don’t run themselves. The citizen organization that springs up to create the platform that attracts the interest is commonly called a “political party”.
As I understand your underlying concern / complaint that led to your proposal, it has two separate almost orthogonal components. Both of which are legitimate beefs about politics as practiced in the USA.
Here’s my interpretation FWIW …
One is the problem of binary choices. You believe we each should not have just 2 presidential candidates to pick from, nor just 2 candidates for each of the many other offices ruling over us. We should have not just more variety, but massive variety.
The other problem is that you believe that you have no practical voice in the selection process that picks those 2 candidates. You probably also (rightly IMO) believe you have no voice in selecting the primary candidates for your favorite party at any level.
The answer to the second problem is you, and the rest of the electorate need to get individually and passionately involved in the entire party process from “grassroots” to primary candidates. That way you will have a voice in all that. Absent that level of involvement you won’t.
From the other end of the telescope, unless the electorate at large within your favorite “district” of like-minded souls wants to make political involvement in district operations their main hobby, they’ll end up in the same place: no voice in the multi-layer selection process that eventually leads to the actual named candidate to office. Why no voice? Because they aren’t participating and so the tiny minority who do participate are the voices actually controlling the selection. Absent personal ambition & corruption, that minority will be trying to select candidates and platforms to best appeal to their rank & file supporters. But they won’t get it as right as actually having mass involvement would.
Once we re-enter the real world with personal ambition (large) & corruption (at least non-zero, but ideally small), the problem of good candidate selection gets massively worse.
Switching back to the first problem, any legislative system needs an executive branch too. The US method elects the executive separately from the legislature. A more typical parliamentary method has a prime minister generally coming from the biggest party.
How would you propose to select the chief executive if your legislature consisted of 500 reps, each from a different “party”?
Beyond just the chief executive selection problem, how would a legislature behave as a legislature if it had 500 reps each pursuing their disctrict’s individual different platform?
IMO what would quickly happen is reps who were not iconoclasts would band together into informal groups based on the overlaps in their platforms. Which pretty quickly would become formal groups. Game theory shows us that the end state is two factions.
In all it’s an interesting idea. But I think the end result would very quickly come to resemble Italian or Israeli politics. Neither of which are known for responsiveness to constituents, but are known for deadlock & instability. And left to stew for a hundred years it’d become a two-party system.
The problem with non-regional districting is that it would require a constitutional amendment to enact. Interesting to discuss, but very difficult to acheive.
Easier, would be to increase the size of Congress. The constitutional limit on the size of a House district is 30,000. We wouldn’t need to go that small, but I’d love to see each district represent about 100,000 people. Making that change requires only an act of Congress. At the same time, they should create a gerrymandering statute (something simple like the square of the perimeter of each district divided by its area cannot be greater than 30 (a circle is under 13, square is 16, regular triangle is under 21)).
The advantage of small districts (especially when there’s little gerrymandering) is that, for better or worse, people tend to live near those who share their values. That’s partially due to sharing the same infrastructure, but also because people tend to move to where others similar to them already live. And people get influenced by the experiences of those around them.
Hyperlocal districts would mean representatives would have to know their district. Mass media would be extremely inefficient in advertising, so candidates would need very focused events in their community. Likewise, local organization would be much more useful than a large pocketbook.
One complaint about first past the post election systems is that it encourages a two-party system. But that’s not exactly correct. It encourages two parties in each district. There’s no reason to expect it’ll be the same two parties in every district. Smaller districts makes it easier for smaller parties to gain federal offices, which I consider a good thing.
There’s no reason in this modern era with secure telecommunications and a pandemic to expect all of Congress to sit together in a single room. That is truly a relic of the past.
I’d also like to see the Senate increased to 3 senators per state. Each state would have a Senatorial election every two years. That also would only require an act of Congress (on preview: actually, I might be wrong about that).
My eyes keep rolling around in my head, but did I miss the part where anyone points to the fact that only about 60% of eligible voters today bother to make a simple A/B choice between two candidates with decades of delineation and obvious giant differences who will be the most powerful person in the world, but expect the population to research 500[!] brand new slates to determine which they prefer in order to get a single representative who has no power whatsoever?
They are all equally arbitrary. They are choices we make, each choice comes with it’s own set of biases and compromises.
You seem to be under the false assumption that the goal is to have a direct mapping of representatives to cohorts. This would not result in good governance and it’s not an implied goal of the current system.
SITP = “sages, illuminaries and thinking persons guild” and EBU = “evil bastards union”, both examplse of interest groups/electorates in penultima_thule’s argument.