It doesn’t, it replaces it, that’s the whole point.
We could have multimember districts, say, 5 or 10 members, in some cases encompassing more than one state. “Your” representative would be any in your district-delegation who is also of the same party/politics as you. As it is now, “your” representative could as easily be the guy you voted against.
This system, single non-transferable vote, does have ways of correcting for this. You have people vote according to the month they were born or something. Also, you don’t run for all ten seats. You do polling in advance; if you figure you can win 6 seats, you run 6 candidates. If you figure you can win 5 seats, you run 5.
But of course single transferable vote (ranked preference voting) is better, and doesn’t require the same level of research and planning.
That’s bloc voting, and it would mean any sufficiently disciplined faction with a majority of votes would get all seats. That’s very swingy at best.
That’s because they’re gerrymandered. Those districts are drawn by gerrymandering.
Seriously, I’m from a red district in a red state. There are plenty of concentrations of GOP voters.
What gerrymandering does is completely concede a few districts to Democrats, depressing GOP votes in those districts to nothing, in favor of having many 60-40 or 70-30 GOP districts. Post-gerrymandering, GOP voters in inner St. Louis may as well stay home or change parties. Democrat voters in suburbia might have more of a chance if they weren’t gerrymandered out of power, but they’ll likely show up anyway, just to vote for living wages and the like.
Point about Fair Vote. And I agree, multi-member districts (or mixed-member proportional) would help a lot. Neither party should have a lock on the legislature.
If Democrats really are more homogeneously concentrated than Republicans, then you’d get that result even without gerrymandering.
That’s what I’m saying. Democrats are more concentrated regardless of gerrymandering.
Take Franklin County, OH. It’s got over 1m residents so it cannot possibly fit in one congressional district. Right now there is a small district, the Ohio 3rd where Joyce Beatty (a black Democrat) was elected with very little contest. This district basically encompasses the most downtown, urbanized parts of Columbus proper and much of the other strange politically independent enclaves inside of 270. I don’t know how you draw a district to avoid the fact that this very concentrated population is 1: more black than average in Ohio, 2: more liberal than average in Ohio. This is a district with America’s largest college campus on it, which means young liberal voters and all the “trendy” hipster type people and atmosphere that comes with it, and a district with heavy lower income black populations in other parts of the city.
I don’t actually see how you draw a district map in an area like that where normal geographic compactness standards wouldn’t result in most of Columbus proper being in one district, which means a district with very high percentage Democrat voters. The lion’s share of the rest of Franklin County is in the Ohio 15th, where Republican Steve Stivers won handily. Stivers won 60/40, Joyce Beatty won almost 70% of the vote and her Republican opponent barely cleared 25%. I don’t actually see, unless you draw districts intentionally to avoid hurting the Democrats a more neutral metric like “geographical compactness” wouldn’t result in downtown Columbus being within one district’s borders and the rest of Franklin county being split around other districts that run into the Columbus borders. Stivers’ district is white, upper middle class and leans conservative, but has a healthy dose of Democrat white liberal voters too, just not enough to outweigh the Republicans.
Now, Ohio has some gerrymandering that happened, but the point I’m making is just on a small scale without digging into all kinds of other examples I don’t see how you’d “fairly” divvy up parts of Ohio without hurting the Democrats and their more urbanized voters.
You could have drawn the districts differently, so Joyce Beatty and her 3rd District included more of the suburbs and less of the downtown area, and put more of downtown into the 15th District. That may have created two districts where instead of a Republican winning with 60% of the vote in one and losing with 26% of the vote in another you have two Democrats winning by 3-4% margins, but I don’t see how that is anything other than intentionally political gerrymandering to favor the Democrats.
Well, good! Then that stuff the Republicans were saying about sticking it to the Dems, all lies and bluster? Excellent! Should have been my first reaction, I suppose.
Well, I guess since you have not followed this thread that’s why you’re making irrelevant and meaningless posts like this.
I said this long before my most recent post:
Threads are conversations, if you don’t know how to go back to the beginning then you’ll have no context by commenting at the end.
Oh, OK, so they are doing it but its the Democrats fault for clustering together like they do. Or at least that’s a big huge part of it, but nobody talks about that, and besides, the Dems do the same thing. Got it, thanks.
Really, they should have talked to you first before they shot their mouth off about rigging the elections.
Now, I’m just a country boy from Waco, not real sophisticated, but seems to me the way things oughta be is that the party that gets the most votes should have the greater share of power. Have I got that about right? And that if a party achieves more power than they actually have coming, they gain that power illegitimately, they gain power they have no actual right to. With me so far, Martin?
Like when Bush “won” in 2000. Remember that speech he gave, about how he recognized that the people weren’t really behind him, and so he was gonna be sure to govern in a way that acknowledged that, honoring the will of the people and not pretending he had some sort of mandate to press the Republican agenda?
You know, come to think on it, I don’t actually remember that speech. Do you?
But hey! Thanks for your critique on my posting style, rest assured, I will give it all the consideration it is due.
Is that possible in a two-party system?
It will be useful knowing in all other threads that you don’t believe in democracy, since you are okay with your party breaking the law to hold onto power. That’s the textbook definition of tyranny. And you’re all for it. You’re all for letting the people in power set it up where they can’t be taken out of power. You’re okay with subverting the will of the people as long as your party remains in power.
A government where one party has successfully prevented the other party from coming back into power has undergone a coup. It is no longer a democracy. Can’t you get out of your desire to provoke the liberals on this board and pay attention to what you are supporting?
Your statement is in direct contradiction to what you’ve posted before on the subject, so it is only because of the rules of this message board that I am assuming you just were blinded by partisanship.
To be honest I considered responding to you with my opinions on the matter until you said this:
You are making specious arguments for me there that I have never made, this shows me you are completely faithless in any sort of serious discussion and are only interested in rambling on in a manner to amuse yourself. I won’t play that game with you, have fun playing with yourself.
What law is being broken? Drawing of congressional districts is the provenance of State law, and where States allow elected legislators to draw them there are few national restrictions on what those legislators can do. There are certain conditions in which the Supreme Court can rule a district drawn improperly but it’s a small subset of the many different ways that you can gerrymander a district for political gain.
You guys are talking revolution and illegal seizures of power in response to elected officials doing things that they are empowered to do by both the U.S. and State constitutions.
And what does that have to do with America? The Republicans control 1/2 of the Federal legislature. The Democrats control the other half and the executive branch, so how exactly have the Republicans “prevented the other party from coming back into power?” Further, even if they had, your claim that it is a coup is basically retarded. The way you phrased it anytime one party wins an election and prevents the other party from taking power, a coup has occurred.
Sure, simple math imagine a country with five “districts.”
Let’s assume the constitution mandates that districts be as close as possible in population size and “maximum geographic compactness.” [While not the only concept of a fairly drawn district, it does have some traction in States that have attempted to make district non-partisan and among algorithm makers and geographers somewhat relevant Slate article]
Let’s also say that there are two parties, the “People’s Party” and the “Citizen’s Party.” Let’s say in American political parlance the People’s Party is “liberal” and the Citizen’s “conservative.”
In two of the districts, District 1 and District 2, there are large (for this small country) cities. They have large minority populations, young unmarried people, college students and professors and basically many of the traditional groups that would vote Democrat in the United States.
Districts 3, 4, and 5 are more suburban or rural, more from the majority race, more older married couples, more religious people etc. Basically groups that vote more Republican in the United States.
Alright, so each District has 100,000 residents. District 1 and 2 are very small, because they center on the country’s only two large cities, and under the concept of geographic compactness there is no way to avoid this.
So in an election the break down comes down to:
District 1: 100,000 votes - 90% People’s Party, 10% Citizens
District 2: 100,000 votes - 90% People’s Party, 10% Citizens
District 3: 100,000 votes - 30% People’s Party, 70% Citizens
District 4: 100,000 votes - 40% People’s Party, 60% Citizens
District 5: 100,000 votes - 45% People’s Party, 55% Citizens
So in total, the People’s Party wins two districts and 295,000 voters preferred a candidate from the People’s Party. The Citizen’s Party wins three districts, and 205,000 voters preferred a candidate from the Citizen’s Party.
In a fictional country with two cities that are almost the size of a district, and with the district guidelines above it would be very, very hard to “fix” the “disadvantage” that the People’s Party has because of their extreme concentration of voters. Basically, people who identify with that party have chosen to collect in a manner that isn’t an even distribution around the country and that has electoral negatives for them. I’m not 100% sure how you fix that with a single member district system that has first past the post voting without basically saying “well, this is the majority party in overall votes so we will just draw the districts to make sure they win all 5.”
That may “feel” right to someone that thinks whichever party has the most votes should be in power, but it would seem to violate the concept of non-partisan and “fair” district drawing. (A very hard to define thing, the concept of geographic compactness is suggested as a fair drawing technique, but there is no true objective fairness and most people define fair to equate to what benefits their party the most.) The truth is if you choose a single member district system with first past the post voting unless parties have voters perfectly evenly distributed throughout the country I am not 100% sure how you can avoid situations like I’ve outlined in this ‘extreme worst case’ scenario above. Even in the UK which almost everyone agrees is not intentionally gerrymandered, there have been arguments made that differing geographic concentrations of voters have created “undesirable” differences between national popular vote and the party that ends up winning overall.
A note, by the way: It isn’t just the fact that Democrats are concentrated in cities that makes the difference; it’s that they’re homogeneously concentrated there. That is to say, the urban tendency towards Democratic voting is stronger than the rural tendency for Republican voting. If, instead, we had a polity where the cities went 70-30 for the Democrat while the rural areas went 95-5 for the Republican, it’d be the Republicans who’d be hurt by the districting, despite them being less concentrated.
Gosh, you could hurt a guy’s feelings talking like that! Now, I’m no shrieking violet, but quite a delicate and vulnerable person, nonetheless. You gotta be more careful, you could really hurt somebody with that sharp and acrid wit.
Here, let’s do this. If you post something I think is wrong, I’ll say so. If you want to say something in response, you are free to do so. If you would rather go off and frolic in the daffodils, that’s your prerogative. And if you decide to sternly refuse to respond to me, I’ll just have to get over it. As best I can.
There! Works for me.
Yeah, but a person is a person, a vote is one each. Real estate is not entitled to representation.
Unfortunately USC forbids at-large voting. I would say rescind that law and let states decide how to elect representatives as long as it stays one person one vote. I personally say if your state has 8 Reps then each party can run op to 8 candidates. Top 8 vote getters are elected.
Right, that’s what has taken a lot of steam out of FairVote. Constitution-building is something I think about a lot, and I really have a ton of respect for the reasons our Framers had for creating our constitution and the end result and how it’s worked out. But I think over time, the combination of the strong social and political aversion to seriously pursuing passage of any sort of structural reform through amendments and the actual technical difficult of passing an amendment (3/4ths of the States) have left us in a place where a lot of the best reforms we need for modernization are simply political fiction and totally out of the realm of possible action.
“Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”
“A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Benjamin Franklin
Your enemy won’t do you no harm
Cause you’ll know where he’s coming from
Don’t let the handshake and the smile fool ya
Take my advice I’m only try’ to school ya
The Temptations - Smiling Faces Sometimes
Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered
I’ve seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.
Woody Guthrie - Pretty Boy Floyd
CMC
Short of adopting proportional representation, we should take a lesson from the process of “redistribution” of ridings (districts) in Canada. They are redrawn every 10 years by politically independent boundary commissions, civil servants, who apply established formulas, with public input. Not by the federal or provincial parliaments.