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by newjersey
3662 days ago
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I've presented a pretty terrible solution before and I'll say it again to illustrate a point. Let's say we make the whole nation into a single constituent district. Now, every voter will cast one vote for one representative and the top N candidates with the most votes win. This is a terrible solution but even this is better than what we have today which i hope goes far too show how bad the system we have today is... Systems design should strive to make it resistant to corruption and try to not rely on the goodness of people making correct/impartial choices. (I am fully aware of my hypocrisy when I claim to support democracy around the world except obviously {{}} can't be in government. I hope that this just shows that I can't even trust myself to be correct/consistent/impartial.) Bottom line is that every vote within a jurisdiction should be equally equal regardless of geographical location. It might lead to people we don't like getting elected but that shouldn't dissuade us. However, I have to agree with President Obama in this -- the only way to effect any change here is to get people involved in very large numbers. Get people to move to these safe districts. I can't see how we can accomplish change here with the levels of apathy we have... |
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To try to forge a simple example to illustrate it to you (and yes, this is spoonfeeding to an HN audience who refuses to do the work themselves when downvoting is so much simpler): people interact with their neighbors and they squabble with their neighbors and there are many more factions on a myriad of issues than even a multiparty system can allow for. But neighbors unite over many issues, like "we don't want a sewage treatment plant here", or "we need more parking".
If you have a "system" that does not give local people a loud voice on local issues, your system will be overturned in favor of one that does. For instance, the American Revolution and the Brexit are the same basic issue: people far away should not be deciding our local affairs.
So now that your system's been overturned, we have a system of local districts... but local districts are filled with people who do not agree on all issues...
It's all gerrymandering, there is no such thing as not gerrymandering, including in the mathematically degenerate cases of Athenian (or New England town meeting) democracies. Factorial of 0 has to be 1, because...because... "gerrymander"