This method would confirm that undesirable (but as-yet incomplete) trend.
My previous Rep made a point of regularly touring the district, visiting tiny towns including mine, and listening to and acting upon very local concerns. He was also a national player for some years with important committee seats.
That would seem to be a rather significant impediment to stopping them, though, wouldn’t you think?
“I don’t care if it’s legal; I’m going to force them to stop anyway!”
Uh huh.
How?
I’m great with it. I think it’s a fantastic plan, and I’m excited to be alive at such a watershed moment in history.
I think the flaw in this system is that one party may have a superstar candidate who is everybody’s first choice of that party. Here’s a totally ridiculous hypothetical:
A state has 10 Congressmen, 1,000,000 Democratic voters and 10 Republican voters. Each party puts up a slate of 10 candidates. One of them is a true Democratic superstar and gets all 1,000,000 Democratic votes. The 10 Republican voters split their votes among their 10 candidates. The result: 1 Democratic seat, 9 Republican seats. So with 0.001% of the vote, the Republicans get 90% of the seats. Sure it’s farfetched, but a superstar candidate could win by far too much and cripple his party. My solution- you get as many House votes as there are House seats.
I was referring to of allocating of electoral votes in a Presidential election, not US congressional seats. Please refer to the article I linked to above. I have no problem with a broad movement for proportional election of electoral college members, if ALL states do this, i.e. uniformly. If only mostly red or mostly blue states do this, it tilts the Presidential election dramatically toward the other side.
Michigan and Ohio seem to allow for ballot initiatives which could undo this sort of plan. Not so sure about Pennsylvania; I guess the only thing to do there would be changing the state legislature/executives to folks who want the current way.
The Federal government has the power to ban automobiles. Certain Democratic Party leaders announce that banning cars will be part of their next climate change legislation.
I would imagine that people who like cars would have some means other than the courts to stop that stupid plan. I imagine opponents of this electoral plan would use very similar tactics to stop the car-grabbers.
Thanks for the snark. Do you actually have an opinion on this? Do you care to share it?
A whole range of options are legal with respect to how states assign their electoral votes. Some are better than others, some are worse. Some might be fine if done in all states, but result in very antidemocratic outcomes if applied inconsistently.
Would you care to engage in that discussion? Because your tactic of pointing out that one of the many legal options is in fact legal, and saying “how are you going to stop it?” on that basis, is really pretty absurd.
Guys, on issues like this, it’s better to just ignore Bricker. His responses to threads like these is always:
Something not often mentioned about FPTP and gerrymandering, is by design a first past the post system will not award legislative seats in proportion to the popular vote. Note that in the United Kingdom, which has no gerrymandering, FPTP has had elections where a party with less than 40% of the popular vote wins over 50% of the seats in Parliament.
This talk of national popular vote or state popular vote and “mandates” is irrelevant if we have a FPTP system, which we do.
Now, let me also say this, gerrymandering isn’t the only reason Republicans win more seats with less votes. It’s also because the Democrat constituency, due to sociopolitical reasons, tends to be much more highly concentrated. Some urban Democratic districts have the most lopsided margins of victory for any candidates in Federal elected office.
If we had a non-partisan committee of randomly selected geographers and citizens or something that just tried to create the most geographically compact and uniform districts (one measure of “unbiased” districting, though alternatives exist) you would still have some Democratic “strongholds” with 80%+ Democratic voters and a disproportionate number of Republican districts where the Republicans are pretty much always going to win but the margin might typically be 55/45 or 60/40.
Now I’ll add the caveat, gerrymandering is a true, undeniable, bad problem. Republicans did a lot of gerrymandering after the 2010 elections (but Democrats have done the same when so positioned), district drawing should be done by apolitical bodies (I’m open to suggestions on how to select them, the British seem to do a good job with this.) I’m not saying gerrymandering isn’t a bad thing or doesn’t happen, what I’m saying is the other big reason is Democratic demographics and I’ve not heard very many people acknowledging that.
I’ll note my point about demographics is a big reason the Fair Vote people don’t just advocate for independent commissions to draw borders. They recognize this demographic problem is possible in any system that has single member districts and where some constituents predominantly group up densely in geographic regions.
That’s why the Fair Vote proposal would divide States into a small number of large, multi-member districts. This would get the ultimate result of House seats much closer to the proportion of State voters who vote for a given party. Just unbiased redistricting will not result in a State that votes say, 60% Democratic always getting a proportionate number of Democrats. The Fair Vote people show they could get as close to that as possible with balanced population multi-member districts (as close as you can get within the limits of whole numbers and a voting system not strictly proportional.)
I don’t think we’ll see much done to counter this. It’s too “hard” to explain the consequences to those who would care to oppose it, at least on the ground. The best chance for that lies in opposition legislators. Or, as someone earlier pointed out, in a groundswell happening in enough other states to balance the scales, as it were.
I plan on hiding mine on a secluded former agricultural plot, only being able to break them out once in awhile when my nephews visit.
That place far outside the wire by the turbine freight track?
Well, you’re right. Electors are chosen by states in the way the state wants. So you can’t stop state legislatures from changing the way electors get chosen except through making people aware of it, and care enough to throw out state legislators who vote for the change.
But.
As Tom Delay can tell you, gerrymandering is in and of itself illegal. Nate Silvers of the world may be motivated to prove it’s going on, and I doubt you want to argue that Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania haven’t been gerrymandered with respect to federal representatives.
The law that many state legislatures have passed that says that, as soon as 270 electors’ worth of states have passed the same law, allocates all electors to the national popular winner can also stop this.
Well, you could allow discontinuous districts, but that opens up a whole 'nother nest of snakes.
Err…no it isn’t. Delay was convicted of money laundering related to a redistricting scheme, but the redistricting scheme itself was found to be (mostly) legal. As they generally are unless they go overboard in disenfranchising minorities.
Gerrymandering is legal in the US.
That’s a fair point. I’m not sure its terribly likely, but it does give the Dems a conceivable counter play.
Representation schemes are designed to represent people. They should be judged on that basis and not on whether or not they further your agenda.
Despite the ridiculousness of the hypothetical, this does raise the concern that an overly-charismatic candidate would end up hurting the party’s representation, and I’m not entirely against having voters choose X candidates from the slate rather than just one.
But I doubt this would be a serious problem because–once you decide to vote red or blue–voting within a party is multi-dimensional, and not everyone agrees on the importance of each dimension. I suspect, for example, candidates wouldn’t just be running to be “The best democrat/republican”, but would stake out pet issues–candidate A is strong on guns, B is concerned about urban issues, C touts his/her business experience, etc. Voter’s choices would then be weighted by the importance they place on each issue, and there’s no incentive for candidates to, say, split their party’s “pro-business” vote (just like there’s currently little incentive for a D or R to run as an independent in a general election because it gives the opposite party a better chance of winning if the party vote is split). In this case charisma would come from the championing of a particular issue (rahter than the personal qualities of the candidate), and if an issue is charismatic enough you can bet there will be attempts by candidates to dilute that charisma by poaching that issue.