[indubitable]

I think this indirectly hints at something much more fundamental: district based plurality does not make sense as an election system anymore.

I think an eye opening example is to consider a hypothetical single state with 10 representatives. This state has a population, perfectly well distributed, of 35% democrat, 30% republican, 20% libertarian, and 15% green. And we draw our districts up with absolutely no bias whatsoever. What 'should' the election results be? I think any logical person would say about 3.5 democrats, 3 republicans, 2 libertarians, and about 1.5 greens. What we get in reality? 10 democrats as they win a plurality in each and every district. 0 gerrymandering, 35% of the support, 100% of the seats.

To get our above example to have the logical results we want, you end up having to create really absurd districts that would completely dwarf any sort of gerrymandering of today. So then the question is quite obvious. Why don't we do at large proportional elections instead of district based plurality elections? If a state has 10 representatives then any party is guaranteed at least 1 seat if they get 10% support, 2 for 20%, and so on.

In the past when politicians and the people were much closer, I think districts made a lot more sense. You were voting for somebody who you knew or were at worst split by the most minimal degrees of separation. But today this isn't true. The average congressional district is now up to 710,767 people [1] (as of 2010). In 1790, at the time of the first US census, the average district size was 37,082. Times have changed, but our electoral system has not.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_congress...

[heisenzombie]

The way we tackle this problem in New Zealand is with the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) voting system.

Under MMP, you have two votes: 1) The delegate you want to represent your district (we call it an electorate) 2) The party you want to support.

In addition there are two changes: 1) Each of the parties publishes a ranked list of their candidates. This is imaginatively called their "list". 2) There are more seats in the house (we call it parliament) than there are districts (electorates). We have 71 districts but nominally 120 seats in parliament.

Once everyone has cast their two votes (quick brag: We had 92.4% of our population enrolled to vote, and of those enrolled, 79.8% voted -- which I think is pretty good going). The votes are counted like so:

1) The "electorate vote" determines the person who represents your district, in a simple most-votes-wins way. Anyone who wins a district is guaranteed a seat in the house (parliament).

2) The "party vote" is counted up nationwide, and each party gets that percentage of the total seats in parliament. If they won more seats with the party vote than the electorate (almost always), their seats are "topped up" from their list until they have the correct number.

(There are some subtleties: The exact way we assign seats is http://www.elections.org.nz/voting-system/mmp-voting-system/... )

This means that each electorate/district gets to choose its representative directly, so local representation is retained. At the same time, the house/parliament reflects the global percentage of votes, so smaller parties can still get proportional representation in government.

[bannus]

For an improvement on the "1 seat for every 10% of the vote you get" system you mention, take a look at the system Cambridge, MA uses for their at-large city council election [1]. Citizens cast ranked-choice ballots, and through an iterative process each of the 9 councilors are elected if they receive over 10% of the vote. (Excess votes for winners and votes for candidates below a certain threshold are transferred in each iteration.)

[1] http://www.fairvote.org/cambridge-massachusetts-elections-a-...

[sova]

Ranked choice ballots! Yes, that is a winning term.

[andrewla]

What I don't like about this analysis is that it enshrines the notion of political parties. It makes individuals into automata that simply vote for whatever candidate is thrown at them.

The ideal is that candidates can rest on their own merits, with the party mechanic existing to provide support to candidates who nominally align with the party's interests. People vote for candidates, not parties.

Even the reality is that people are not determined by their party affiliation; New York City, for example, has repeatedly elected Republican mayors despite being overwhelmingly Democratic in state and national elections. This has even been used in a derogatory sense, as "Rockefeller Republicans" or "New York Republicans"; people affiliated with the national party but who skew to the preferences of voters in their region.

In your hypothetical state, once you created the districts, then the competition inside that district is between candidates who try to align themselves with that region; people who, for example, can be a "green-republican" to draw voters from both blocks, or just a person who speaks to the needs of voters in that district, regardless of party affiliation.

Using some sort of state-wide rank-preferential or approval system means that we remove a lot of the strategizing on the part of voters, which is a positive, but the strategizing on the part of political parties and individuals seeking office become much more complex, and not in a way that serves to present candidates that appeal to issues confronted by groups of people regardless of their party affiliation. Geography is just a heuristic for this, but not the worst one you could think of.

[indubitable]

I think something you're fundamentally getting at is that in today's system people's views are not necessarily representative of their party's views. Ron Paul is not really what you'd call a republican, but he certainly ran as one. The reason is that in our current system, small parties cannot exist - or at least they can't get any representation in congress, but is there really any difference? So if you want to actually get a seat you put an R or a D by your name, or you run in a state like Maine or Vermont - both with total populations far smaller than many cities.

The reason for this is because of our electoral system. Imagine we have 4 parties each with about a quarter of the support. One of those parties is going to get 100% of the representation, and the rest are going to get 0. This incentivizes these parties to begin to merge. Two parties go 'Hey I know we have nothing in common, but if we work together we can guarantee our voices are at least heard in congress.' And the other two also see this going on and does the exact same thing. Next thing you know it you have things like libertarians and evangelical Christians both being supposedly represented by the same party, and you get a congressional approval rating in the teens.

Proportional representation changes this. Fractional support being more than sufficient to get seats in congress means people can break into parties that actually fundamentally represent their views - instead of being forced to clump up into super-parties. I think this effect would be particularly emphasized in our country. We have a phenomenally good system of checks and balances ensuring that even 'the little guy' in congress can have a meaningful effect. The problem is our electoral system all but precludes there being any little guys in congress.

[andrewla]

Proportional representation sort-of fixes this. I think rank-preferential (instant run-off) or approval voting also solves this, even on single candidate elections, because they remove the spoiler effect. I think switching to these methods but keeping districting is a good intermediate step that doesn't "completely change the game" but opens some new doors.

Proportional representation, as I mention above, does remove most incentives to vote other than your actual preferences, but it does introduce very complex strategies on the part of candidates and parties. Every election becomes a state-wide election, so smaller candidates representing regional interests will find it harder to target their campaign. I'm not sure whether this is a net positive or negative.

[indubitable]

Smaller candidates today already stand stand practically 0 chance of getting elected. Literally every single member in the house of representatives is either a democrat or a republican. That is a consequence of a simple question: 'If a person receives 10% of the vote in a state with 10 representatives, how many seats should they receive?' The current answer is 0.

In our current system the one and only power of smaller candidates is a spoiler effect. This enables them to have some influence on the super-party that's closest to their own ideology, even if implicitly. Rank preferential / Australian voting / etc not only fail to change the 10% support = 0% representation issue, but they even remove the spoiler effect which means that smaller parties can safely be completely ignored unless they look to gain a plurality themselves - which is rather contrary to the notion of smaller.

On this note, I'm not seeing why you think that proportional would make campaigning more difficult for 'smaller candidates.' It would mean they might actually stand a chance of finally getting a seat in congress. A basic example from Europe would be something like 'The Pirate Party.' They're never likely to gain substantial support, but they have been able to receive representation at the national level in a variety of nations, proportional to their support, exclusively due to proportional systems.

[KGIII]

Sanders and King are both Independents but caucused with the Democrats.

This doesn't really negate your point, I just figured you may be interested. They may not literally all be a D or an R, but it's trivial and I'm mostly being pedantic.

[Armisael16]

If we're being pedantic, both Sanders and King are senators.

[KGIII]

In Maine, at least, third parties actually have a good chance at being elected. In the past few decades, we have elected Independents for governor quite frequently. The Green Party has a respectable turnout, as well. Once in a while, we get Libertarians and Socialists, but those are less frequent and usually at a local level.

(Mainah, ayuh.)

[tashi]

I was just looking at a list of Maine's governors, and something stands out: your state really is ideologically diverse! You only care about picking the right man for the job.

[indubitable]

One thing about places like Maine and Vermont (Sanders' state) is that they're tiny.

The total population of Maine is 1.3 million. The population of Vermont is 0.62 million. These states are smaller than many cities now a days. And you'll see a similar pragmatic politics in many of the other very small states. I think that's because you minimize the degrees of separation between representative and voter. When people know and meet other people it humanizes them and makes it easy to see that a letter beside somebody's name doesn't define them.

Our system was built for a different time, and we can see it's still a pretty reasonable system in the areas where that time is kind of emulated. But for many other parts of the country the system's age is showing. Even if we tried to keep up with how the founding fathers saw it we'd have literally thousands of individuals in the house of representatives which is probably similarly unworkable - and rather comical compared to the unchanging 100 of the senate.

[KGIII]

Kinda neat, isn't it?

We actually approved a change in our constitution because of the current situation. Our current govenor, he's an idiot, was elected with 34% of the votes. The previous election saw him win with something like 38% of the votes.

So, we had a referendum on the ballot and we will now have run-off voting.

I can, within reason, live anywhere on the planet. I've enough resources to get resident status and citizenship with pretty much every country. I retired and looked all over. I didn't 'settle' on Maine. I think that confers a negative view. So, I picked Maine because it best suits my needs.

[T-hawk]

> Why don't we do at large proportional elections instead of district based plurality elections?

Because the seats going to the smaller parties would come at the expense of the parties currently in power, who are thus strongly disincentivized against changing the rules towards proportionality.

[crazygringo]

Correct. This was recognized a long time ago, starting in the late 1700's and gaining popularity in the 1800's, but it's never had much mindshare in the US, unfortunately. The solution is proportional representation [1], something much more common in Europe. Taken to its most extreme, it treats the entire country as a single district -- Israel is an example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation#Hi...

[KGIII]

Heh...I thought I'd seen that comment before.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15418907

[dsfyu404ed]

Or just add more districts...

[sova]

More districts means more people hanging out in the House of Representatives. Connecticut Compromise made sure there were also 2 people per state in the Senate.