If we optimize districts to minimize the efficiency gap we're just gerrymandering to a different measure. This is shoddy proportionality. We could have proper Proportional Representation[1] via a big at-large election using the Single Transferable Vote process.
We should either have locality based districts, or give up on districting and have some other identity based constituency representation.
The German system, mixed-member proportional voting, satisfies the desire for a single locality based representative while still having the overall legislative body be mathematically representative of the people.
It shares the lack of individual direct accountability to the electorate (for some members) that all party-list systems have; STV avoids this but practically requires looser partisan proportionality (but still far better than single-member FPTP districts.)
And STV works well for Ireland, and I think would also work well for state-level elections in the US. The only thing is that it doesn't scale up super well, and might not work quite so well for congressional elections, though IRV might work if they wanted to keep single-member districts, even if it's less proportional than proper multi-member STV. Regardless, it'd be an improvement on FPTP and reduce the spoiler factor.
> we're just gerrymandering to a different measure.
As long as we are using some objective measure rather than "how can we draw the lines to benefit ourselves.
Personally I think there should only be approximately straight lines throughout. I'm not exactly sure how you could enforce that with mathematical rules (and still get proportional coverage).
> We could have proper Proportional Representation[1] via a big at-large election using the Single Transferable Vote process.
Small multimember districts (probably around 5 members/district) work better for STV. You really wouldn't want one at-large STV district for California's representatives in the House of Representatives (53 members), State Senate (40 members) or State Assembly (80 members).
How about the CA State Senate? It's two waves of 20 members in overlapping 4 year terms. Electing a set of 20 doesn't sound so bad. Maybe the ballot winds up with 60 or 80 people on it, but you only have to care about two or five that you like, or if you're a real politics nut maybe rank 10-20 of them. The great thing about that setup is that statewide any group that can organize itself for 5% of the vote gets a seat. The Greens get seats. The Libertarians get seats. New parties that haven't been invented yet get seats. People will run independent of any party and get elected if they have a big enough following. This would really broaden the membership of the legislature. Keep the 80-member Assembly to small local representative districts.
> How about the CA State Senate? It's two waves of 20 members in overlapping 4 year terms. Electing a set of 20 doesn't sound so bad.
It doesn't? With only two parties, and assuming each only bother running 3/4 of a full slate,that requires voters to evaluate 30 candidates. But part of the point of STV is not supporting only two viable parties; realistically, 60+ is more likely.
With STV or a similar candidate-centered proportional-ish system, I think 5 member districts are about ideal. Sure, the partisan proportionality is weaker, but it keeps it in the range where there is room for reasonable attention to individual candidates, and if you don't keep that you might as well go to a party list system.
CGP Grey has a great series of short videos explaining Single Transferrable Voting, Gerrymandering, and other voting mechanisms - the fairness or unfairness thereof
Proportional representation gives undue power to small parties, who can make demands disproportional to their share of the vote in exchange for pushing legislation past the 50% threshold (it's even worse in a parliamentary system, where small parties are often king-makers).
The American system is more about representing the preferences of communities than directly those of individuals. When you look at it like that, things like the electoral college, the senate, and plurality voting make sense.
Then you have another scaling problem. If you increase the number of representatives to the level at the founding of the US (1 per 30,000 or so if I recall) then you'll end up with the House of Representatives holding 11,000+ members.
Or maybe acknowledge that 300M people is a lot to have under one rule of government and split the country apart according to the most sensible cultural borders.
I reckon we start by letting Texas secede. Then we bundle up California + Hawaii into its own little pacific paradise. Then we offer all the northern border states to Canada. And offer New Mexico to Mexico...
>Then we offer all the northern border states to Canada.
Living in New England, there are actually a fair number of people here who dream of applying to join Canada or the EU if we could get free of the rest of the USA.
Non-proportional representation is liable to majoritarianism, which is arguably a worse outcome. Parties tend to be populist rather than principled; emotions and identity politics come to the fore and rationality is subdued.
>The American system is more about representing the preferences of communities than directly those of individuals.
And by "communities" we mean "lines drawn on the maps decades to centuries ago". For example, New York City has one municipality with five boroughs, while the Boston metro area splits its urban core into five different municipalities (even though people in each commute to all the others). And the Bay Area in California? Well, let's not talk about the idiocies imposed by municipal boundaries in the Bay Area...
In the American system, the small parties making disproportionate demands are simply embedded within the larger parties and use the discipline of the two-party system to take it over.
All you need is a majority within a party that gets half the vote: 50% of 50% is 25%. This is why the Republican party has been taken over by an extremist who's unpopular with large chunks of his own party.
>All you need is a majority within a party that gets half the vote: 50% of 50% is 25%. This is why the Republican party has been taken over by an extremist who's unpopular with large chunks of his own party.
The plurality primary system actually makes it much worse than that. The total percentage of the registered voter population who nominated Trump, IIRC, was about 4.5%. It was 4.6% for Clinton, too.
Lots of other people voted in the primaries, but voted for losing candidates. So it actually turns out you need 4.5% of the total voting population to support you to get a major-party ballot line, at which point you'll basically receive 25% in the general election on "ham sandwich" grounds in your party's regional bases. Then you can concentrate on competing your way up to a majority vote in the general (or for Presidential races, the Electoral College).
What you're forgetting is that while the small parties are king-makers, they're not kings. They don't get to dictate the bulk of policy - they generally just get to get one favoured bit of legislation looked at.
Proportional representation is far, far, far, far, far better at representing a large modern democracy than the US electoral college system (which includes the ability for some electors to completely ignore the will of the people - not sure how that makes sense). FPTP only results in a two-party system over time. Prop rep and friends allow for multipolar politics.
Besides, if you're worried about the undue influence of small parties, the electoral college still sucks, because small states wield undue influence - votes beyond their population count.
> Proportional representation gives undue power to small parties, who can make demands disproportional to their share of the vote in exchange for pushing legislation past the 50% threshold (it's even worse in a parliamentary system, where small parties are often king-makers).
This is only true when larger parties can't cooperate.
The great advantage of coalition government is that it the partners act as a moderating influence on one another.
Also, you tend not to get 'grand coalitions'. Instead, you get a senior member with enough junior members to create a stable voting bloc. Grand coalitions only happen at times of perceived existential threat or national crisis. The closest thing to to a counterexample I can think of is Austria, but even then, those were to put a cordon sanitaire around far right and far left parties. The very fact that grand coalitions are seen as antidemocratic tends to keep their formation to a minimum.
In reality, countries that have lots of coalitions by virtue of their voting system (such as STV[1]) tend to have perfectly stable governments. It's only in countries whose voting systems tend to give a single party power that have issues with coalitions, because they have no idea how to handle situations like that. Witness the panic in the UK after the 2010 elections - here in Ireland, we were quite entertained by the panic as coalition governments are the norm here.
[1] Ireland, where I'm from, for instance, hasn't had a non-coalition government since the '50s. In that time, we went from being one of the poorest countries in Europe of one of the wealthiest in the world, so obviously our government was able to take some kind of meaningful action in all that time.
>Also, you tend not to get 'grand coalitions'. Instead, you get a senior member with enough junior members to create a stable voting bloc. Grand coalitions only happen at times of perceived existential threat or national crisis. The closest thing to to a counterexample I can think of is Austria, but even then, those were to put a cordon sanitaire around far right and far left parties. The very fact that grand coalitions are seen as antidemocratic tends to keep their formation to a minimum.
This kind of thing is why my ideal system right now is Mixed Member Proportional representation with an approval-vote. Represent small opinions, but strengthen the moderate blocs at the expense of extremist blocs.
I've mixed feelings about MMPR, mainly because it's subject to collusion via decoy lists, party splitting and the like, so it ends up devolving into parallel voting, which is susceptible to gerrymandering of constituencies. It works well in a lot of places (Germany, Scotland, NZ, &c.), but not so well in others (Venezuela, Hungary, &c.).
How would adding approval voting into the mix improve MMPR as you see it? It's an interesting idea for sure, especially as approval voting eliminates the spoiler factor in single seat elections you get in FPTP, and it's simpler than IRV.
Only in a parliamentary system, where a stable majority in the legislature is encessary to form a government. Otherwise, you end up with ad hoc per-issue coalitions.
I think such a low–latency boost to the fringes, as opposed to gerrymandering's high-latency boost to the fringes, is good for keeping people engaged in politics, especially in a place with so much pessimism and initeria like the US.
We should either have locality based districts, or give up on districting and have some other identity based constituency representation.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote