# If the supreme court abolishes gerrymandering nationally, how many seats do the dems pick up **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [March 7, 2018, 5:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-the-supreme-court-abolishes-gerrymandering-nationally-how-many-seats-do-the-dems-pick-up/810168 "2018-03-07T05:49:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2018, 2:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-the-supreme-court-abolishes-gerrymandering-nationally-how-many-seats-do-the-dems-pick-up/810168/41 "2018-03-22T14:29:33Z")
> [@Lord\_Feldon](#): > > Okay, I’ve never ever heard of that kind of system. I assumed you were just proposing a regular old blanket ballot (i.e. majority-takes-all). > > And that could lead to some pretty weird outcomes. Say both parties put up two candidates, but one of the four candidates is much more well known and popular than the other three. You could end up with a situation where the minority party wins both seats because the majority party was penalized for having the most popular candidate. I do not disagree that that kind of ballot can fail. If the Democrats had a very popular candidate, some voters might simply assume that they can vote for the Whig because surely the popular Democrat that they might have voted for is safe. Kind of like what happened recently in Alberta, where Labor won because the Right split between two competing parties. I would be inclined to offset my kind of system with four public tally days over a couple months, where voters could observe how it is breaking and submit a revision to their vote. The idea that voting must happen blindly may not be the ideal. > [@](#): > > It’s the other way around. The majority of “unaffiliated” voters are lying. We only see the result of two-party dominance. If the system pulled its rigid support for the parties by eliminating the binary result, we would very likely see voters gravitating to other camps or becoming even more unpredictable. And if Congress was fit with more than one big aisle, we would probably see more compromise and coöperation and less fuck-you-we-do-what-we-want. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 22, 2018, 3:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-the-supreme-court-abolishes-gerrymandering-nationally-how-many-seats-do-the-dems-pick-up/810168/42 "2018-03-22T15:01:28Z")
It should be noted that every voting system has some situation where it gives a different result than it “should”. This was mathematically proven, and is called “Arrow’s impossibility theorem”. That said, some voting systems have failures more or less frequently than others, or of greater or lesser severity. > [@](#): > > Quoth **UDS** : > > You’re problem with the presidency is that any kind of proportional representation is impossible. There can only be one president, so the voters who back one candidate will secure 100% of the representation, and the voters who back all other candiates, nil. Well, that, and a presidency-by-sortition would be too noisy. You wouldn’t have the Law of Large Numbers evening out the wrinkles, and there’d be no check when the occasional crazy got elected. > [@](#): > > I think you need to decide whether you want the people to be represented by Parliamentarians who are like them as regards age, gender, ethnicity, etc, or by parliamentarians that they actually want to be represented by! I think that, for the most part, people want to be represented by politicians who consider the same issues important, and what issues people consider important will often track demographic traits (and for that matter, what issues people consider important can themselves be considered demographic traits). Granted, there are many demographic traits that I would consider wholly irrelevant in picking representation, and the fact that sortition would also balance those out is a useless (but harmless) feature. As for “who they want to be represented by”, that’s why I allow for a randomly-selected citizen to choose someone else to act as their representative. ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [March 23, 2018, 12:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-the-supreme-court-abolishes-gerrymandering-nationally-how-many-seats-do-the-dems-pick-up/810168/43 "2018-03-23T00:54:47Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > We don’t have PR in the UK. That’s my point. You don’t have PR in the UK, and you have a system that rewards loyalty to party, which is the very defect that you attribute to PR. > [@Quartz](#): > > For Westminster, Tory candidates are chosen by the local constituency parties; AIUI Labour candidates can be imposed by the central party BICBW. Loyalty to the Party is, of course, often a significant consideration, but local constituency parties - especially Tory ones - have their own minds. Just look at the likes of Mogg and Hannan. All you’re saying there is that the UK system can be made to incentivize loyalty to _local_ party, rather than loyalty to _national_ party. It’s still loyalty to party. > [@Quartz](#): > > You might also look at the Aberdeen Labour councillors who were expelled for forming a coalition with the Tories as another example of local independence. Aberdeen Council is elected by proportional representation in multi-member constituencies using the single transferrable vote. Isn’t this rather an example that tells _against_ your argument, rather than for it? > [@Quartz](#): > > I prefer Approval Voting myself. It’s certainly an improvement over the system mainly used in the UK, but it still suffers from the defect that 100% of the representation goes to one party, and 0% to all others. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/if-the-supreme-court-abolishes-gerrymandering-nationally-how-many-seats-do-the-dems-pick-up/810168.md?page=2)