But illegal as of the 1968 election unless ALL previos elections were at-large and then just for the 1968 election.
No.
It is a bigger problem in the US.
Newly elected Australian senators begin their six-year term on 1st July.
Their election may have taken place up to a year prior. Hence why the AEC has plenty of time to formalise the count in the non-executive house.
Remember that in both Australia and Ireland there is an independent commission to oversee elections. In the US it’s done by each state independently and is intensely partisan.
So after the US completes it’s interminable election cycle it then takes a couple of weeks to determine who won? Can’t see how that would be acceptable. The place nearly went into meltdown in 2000 as it was.
The move to require all voting to be electronic (just so votes could be tallied quickly) would be inevitable and that opens another can of worms.
I’ve never understood this argument. In the world I live in, if there were three positions to choose from Democrats would rank them one, two, and three. If there are more Democrats than Republicans, no Republicans would get elected. And certainly not third-parties.
I say this because I live in a Democratic city with at-large council seats. If there are five council seats then the five Democrats get the most votes followed by the five Republicans followed by the third-party candidates.
Unless you’re planning on doing away with parties entirely this scheme merely adds cost and complexity without changing outcomes. It’s a fantasy that somehow proportional voting will result. If you want proportional voting then say so.
It’s not correct to say that “all races are close”. Typically, in a five-seat electorate, you may be able to predict with confidence, based on levels of party support, that party A will win two seats, party B will win one seat, and there are really only two seats in play between party A, party B and other parties.
Plus, an argument which rests on the notion that safe seats reduces campaigning costs is essentially suggesting that elections are conducted for the benefit of candidates, and that the interests of voters are a secondary consideration. If nobody is bothered competing to attract your vote, what that tells you is that your vote doesn’t matter. How is an electoral system whcih seeks to maximise the number of votes whose value is minimised a good system?
Again, this is not how it works. Under the present system, New York senators almost invariably come from New York City. This is what you expect if people vote locally, and it takes >50% of the vote to win a seat. If you had two senators elected by transferrable vote then you could win a seat with >33.3% of the vote. Thus it becomes easier, not harder, to secure a greater diversity of representation.
STV doesn’t dilute the voting power of minorities; it increases it.
The place “nearly went into meltdown” because the matter was handed to the courts, not because anyone was prejudiced by the delay in certifying the result. Note that, in presidential elections, because of the electoral college system the result is normally not certified until many weeks after the election anyway. What a more complex counting system does is to increase slightly the time-delay before the result is fully known, but I don’t see why that should be a problem.
In a single-seat contest, like a presidential election, there is no reason to expect any delay, normally. Australia uses ranked voting in single-seat elections for the lower house; the results are known the same night in nearly all cases, and within a day or two in every case. There is no reason to expect “a couple of weeks” delay if the system is used in presidential elections in the US.
Voting is already electronic, or mechanical, for most US voters.
That’s not how ranked preference voting works.
Suppose there are three seats. The electorate reliably breaks 60/40 to the Democrats. The Democrats and the Republicans both run three candidates. The first preference votes break down as follows:
Dem A: 22%
Rep X: 21%
Dem B: 20%
Dem C: 18%
Rep Y: 10%
Rep Z: 9%
Right. To be elected in a three-seat district you need more than 25% of the vote - the “quota”. (Why? Because only 3 candidates can get more than 25% of the vote). None of the candidates have this. So we eliminate the lowest candidate, Rep Z, and redistribute his 9% according to the second preference. Since the voters are party loyalists, they go 5% to Rep X and 4% to Rep Y, so now the tally looks like:
Rep X: 26%
Dem A: 22%
Dem B: 20%
Dem C: 18%
Rep Y: 14%
Rep X has exceeded the quota, so he is elected. There are now two seats in play and, without going through the gritty details, it’s obvious that the Dems will win them . What will happen next is that Rep Y will be eliminated, and his votes will be distributed to the next effective preference. Preferences to Rep X will be ignored, since he is no longer in the race (having already been elected). If a sufficiently large proportion of Rep Y voters prefer Dem C to Dems A or B, he may overtake his colleagues and take one of the remaining seats; otherwise they’ll go to Dems A and B.
Result: with 40% of the vote, Rep voters get one-third of the representation, plus some influence over which Democratic candidate will take one of the Dem seats. With 60% of the vote, Dem voters get two-thirds of the representation. The price they pay for not having two-thirds of the vote to justify that level of representation is that they have to concede some influence to the Rep voters in deciding which Dem candidate is to succeed.
Ranked preference in multi-seeat districts is a form of proportional representation. It’s not, obviously, when employed in single-seat districts; you can’t have proportional representation in single-seat districts.
I am in favor of getting rid of Congressional districts. But I suspect I do not understand the issue. Consider,
Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco council because of at-large voting. All the Gay people across the city voted for their guy. This is to say that at-large elections helped a minority candidate.
I was reading the New Jersey papers the other day. Spanish-speaking folks were upset with at-large voting in their township saying it denied them representation. Apparently, in this case, at-large elections are bad for minorities.
Which is it? All in all, at-large voting seems better to me in that a congresscritter cannot appeal to the small number of extremists who might be a majority in a smaller district.
But I am willing to be corrected.
At-large voting (five seats to be filled, every voter has five votes) dilutes the power of minorities if they are concentrated in a neighbourhood in which, if it were a stand-along single-seat district, they would be more than 50% of the voters in that district.
But ranked-preference voting (each voter has one vote, and he ranks candidates in order of his preference) increases the power of minorities if they are spread across the district, and wouldn’t be a majority anywhere if it were split into smaller single-seat districts.
I see what my problem has been. I’m familiar with the Australian ballot under that name and somehow when I read “ranked-choice” I associated it with a different scheme entirely. Yes, it would lead to more representation for minorities of voters in multi-seat districts. That doesn’t change my objection about larger districts being more costly to campaign in and the increased height of the entry bar for candidates.
To work without making the system worse, therefore, the system requires three simultaneous giant changes: multi-seat districting, ranked-choice voting, and diminishing the role deep outside pockets play in modern politics. I find that extremely unlikely.
The entry bar is not higher, as is evidenced by the fact that minor parties and independents (who are, presumably, on average less well-resourced) tend to do better under ranked choice than FPTP.
I think the key here is remember that a switch from FPTP to ranked choice does not, in itself, increase the number of votes you need to get elected, and therefore the cost of reaching and influencing that number of voters does not necessarily go up.
Arguably, the first two changes might themselves help with the latter. Under FPTP, and with a two-party system, to win the election you need to be the preferred candidate of more than 50% of the voters. Under ranked choice in, say, a five-seat electorate, you can be elected with the preferences - not necessarily the first preferences - of 16.67% of the voters. There’s no advantage to topping the poll as opposed to being elected to the last seat to be filled, so a more low-impact (and therefore less expensive) campaign may serve you just as well. So why spend the extra money?
A representative must represent all the people in a district. I cannot imagine a situation in which it would be acceptable for someone to campaign in a fraction of a district. You must not live in New York or states with similar situations if you don’t understand the frustrations of Senators who don’t care about half the voters. (Or governors: it’s also been decades years since an Upstater won.) Ed Koch, once mayor of New York, ran for the Senate and made a slighting comment about Upstaters. The furor was enough to sink his candidacy. Why do you think there are secession movements in so many places? Conversely, why are state legislatures deliberately so backward and beholding to rural constituencies? Any proposal that increases the power of the dominant power structure works against the interests of the people it claims to aid.
The power and the money will center on the big cities. The candidates will gravitate to the power and money. Campaign finance reform is, IMO, a far huger and more critical issue than proportional representation. Solve that first.
And that is assuming that proportional representation is implicitly a good idea. I have grave doubts about that, as well. However, I’m curious to see the results from places that are trying it in the U.S. I don’t think that its use in any other system says anything about our outlier politics, though.
You must have been reading different news report to me.
The courts needed to intervene because there was no other way to resolve the impasse in Florida before the time limit set by Title 3 of the United States Code (12th Dec)
And hell, isn’t that working well compared to the implausibly naff & low tech options like a pencil and paper used in functioning democracies like say Australia or India with 814 million eligible voters.
And that’s the outcome of the present system, Exapno. What you are describing is exactly the deficiency of the winner-takes-all FPTP system. Ranked choice voting in multi-seat districts addresses this by making it possible to win a seat with an appeal to a region within the district.
As long as the US operates a system of electing senators one at a time, and as long as it has a two-party system, ranked-choice voting would actually make little difference in an NY senatorial election. It wouldn’t make matters worse, but it wouldn’t do much to make them better except, perhaps, by giving minor parties (and their voters) slightly more power. But it would only be a power to influence which of the two major party candidates would fill the one seat available.
But if ranked choice is used along with multi-member districts, it unquestionably makes it easier for minority or marginalised groups to secure representation. And this is true whether they are identified by ethnicity, by geography, by gender or otherwise. Legislatures elected in this way tend to be more diverse by gender, ethnicity, party, etc, parties tend to secure representation more nearly proportional to their share of the vote, and individual votes tend to have more nearly equal value in determining the outcome of the election. What’s not to like?
Perhaps you shouldn’t so readily accept that you must make a choice? Perhaps addressing the voting system can do something to reduce the power of money to buy elections.
This may be so; it’s always foolish to assume that the experience of other countries will map onto the US. On the other hand, does this assume that your “outlier politics” is not to some extent the product of your crapulous electoral system? Because maybe that assumption is worth examining.
Because the courts threw out the election laws that would allow the executive branch to certify the results before the safe harbor deadline.
That’s currently about a quarter of US congressional districts. That’s likely to be viewed as a lot of disruption.
Well, you don’t know beforehand how many votes you’re going to get. It’s not necessarily clear ex ante what the cost-benefit tradeoff would be in paying for, say, a trip to Michigan and Wisconsin.
{Note to the SDMB mods. Yes, I’ve butchered the original quote but I hope I’ve not changed the intent or meaning.}
It’s both. 
Say in San Francisco the Harvey Milk supporters are spread evenly so they don’t achieve a majority in any district, but get a quota in an at-large election.
The Hispanics form a majority bloc in their town which dominates one district, but lacked the number for a quota at-large.
Both systems are valid, pick one and that’s the way the democratic cookie crumbles.
But from a considerable and safe distance my assessment would be that the Hispanics were getting over representation through a gerrymander.
Whatever changes to the system happen, they will be made on a population who has never known another system in their lifetimes. How are the English doing with assimilating the metric system?
However, I will bow out of this discussion. I won’t live long enough to see this happen and it gets harder and harder to work up enthusiasm for such long-term hypotheticals.
God knows. But the Irish managed it without any difficulty.
So the question becomes, is your typical American voter as dumb as the English, or as smart as the Irish?
There’s only a narrow window within which this condition prevails.
Suppose there are five equal-sized districts, and Hispanic voters form a majority in one of them. That means they represent >10% of the population of all five districts.
Now we amalgamate the districts. If Hispanic voters across all the amalgamated district represent 16.6% of all voters, they still get a seat. The extra 6.6% can be made up of “surplus” Hispanic voters in the original district - they might have represented significantly more than 50% of the votes in that district - or from previously “wasted” Hispanic voters in the other four districts, who hitherto could not help to elect a Hispanic candidate but now can.
So, depending on the precise demographics, a move to multi-seat districts with ranked-preference voting could either reduce or increase minority representation in different areas of the country.
Overall, though, the current system does poorly. Hispanics represent 17% of the population of the US, but only 7.8% of members of the House of Representatives. If we assume that Hispanic voters would tend to prefer Hispanic candidates (a big assumption, but let’s run with it) then that suggests that an awful lot of Hispanic votes are “wasted” because they are too thinly spread. The suggested new system should tend to improve this, since it greatly lowers the threshold for what counts as “too thinly spread”.