[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]

Right, my bad. I read that as congress. I'm nit sure why I missed the specificity, considering I read it twice and then looked up the information on Wikipedia.

My bad, indeed.

[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.