[TSiege]

Districting has time and time again proven to be a cat and mouse endeavor. Someone is always going to be able to create models to game the system one way or another. The real solution is abandoning districting for proportional representation like a true democracy. This Vox opinion piece is a great explainer, https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/11/16453512/...

[specialist]

The root cause is Duverger's Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

TL;DR: With FPTP, each belligerent tries to form the smallest winning coalition, resulting in a near even split two-party system.

Proportional Representation is the remedy for assemblies, councils, houses.

Approval voting is the remedy for executive races (eg sheriff, mayor, governor).

Additional benefits of both PR and Approval Voting:

- no more primaries

- fewer elections means reduced voter fatigue

- increased turnout, because real competition boosts participation

- greatly reduces mudslinging, because everyone wants to be your second choice

- no more spoilers, making an incubator for third parties

[squiggleblaz]

Duverger's law isn't the whole picture. Normal FPTP assemblies the size of America's have third parties (see Canada, UK, India).

Some PR countries have strong two party systems (see most obviously Malta).

There is something additional in America that causes a two party system which may or may not continue past a switch to PR because we don't know what it is.

Also, it is good to specify your goals. You might want to make it easier for unconnected people to enter the assembly, or to make it easier to throw out the choice of the primary voters, or literally just a more fragmented assembly. It is easier to come up with useful compromises if you specify your specific objectives because not every system of PR will have any of those goals. Closed list PR with primaries is probably the antithesis of what you want, but it's an extremely common kind and what a lot of people hear when you say "PR".

[specialist]

I've mostly studied USA elections and legislatures. So am ill-equipped to compare, contrast. But being very political, and having run for office and done some policy work, I can comment on our elections.

Over simplistically:

#1 - Our FPTP elections leads to two major parties.

#2 - Our gerrymandered districts (local, state, congressional) has led to increased partisanship. As noted elsewhere, because contests are won during the low-turnout primaries where the motivated base participates.

#3 - Ever increasing campaign costs has led to concentrated influence (power law distribution of attention). Who ever controls the contributions controls the agenda.

#4 - We have city, district, county, state, federal elections. The party system starts at the bottom. Memories are long and defections are never forgiven (eg Nader & Green Party).

Having now done it... Everyone should run for office, at least once. Because most commentary, complaining isn't even wrong.

My goal, always, is to empower, enfranchise people. The various reforms I support increase voter choice and participation. At every level by various (sometimes non-intuitive) means.

[ClayShentrup]

While there are a few minor examples of Plurality Voting countries escaping duoploy, they are by far the exception. America's duopoly seems clearly a result of using it.

I wrote something about this. https://asitoughttobe.com/2010/07/18/score-voting/

[jessriedel]

Proportional representation just shifts the coalition building from the electorate level to the legislative level. It's well known that such coalitions tend to be the smallest majority possible.

You may think for various reasons that it's better to form coalitions at one level of the voting process than the other, but let's not pretend PR avoids it.

[int_19h]

The difference is that legislative coalitions don't have to be permanent, the way parties are. Various factions in the legislature can come together for a particular bill, or series of bills on some issue that's relevant to them all. But on something else, they might realign differently. Also, even when coalitions are more persistent, the terms are effectively renegotiated every election - party platforms are much more stable.

[squiggleblaz]

American parties aren't exactly permanent tho are they? How many bills have fallen this year because some republican senator wouldn't support it? And I certainly wouldn't describe Trump's Republican administration as pursuing the same platform as Bush II's. Certainly there's similarity but not the stability you imply.

[int_19h]

I didn't say that they are permanent. But they change very slowly. More importantly, they mostly change by accrual; you rarely see old polices dropped hastily. Indeed, even for all the Trump rhetoric, the current administration (and legislature) is not doing anything that wouldn't be expected from a Republican government.

The reason why we have so many bills falling through is because of the razor thin margins in the Senate, so that a few dissenters can affect things. But if you look at how votes in legislature went down historically, we're pretty much at peak partisanship - it used to be a lot more common for congressmen to vote across party lines.

[jessriedel]

You're failing to draw the correct analogy in each case.

> The difference is that legislative coalitions don't have to be permanent, the way parties are.

Just like the parties that make up a legislative coalitions can change, the voters making up a political party can and do change.

> Various factions in the legislature can come together for a particular bill, or series of bills on some issue that's relevant to them all. But on something else, they might realign differently

This happens all the time on individual bills in a two-party systems as well. ("Crossing the aisle".) But the coalitions forming control of the legislative body rarely change except immediately following elections (in both PR and two-party systems).

> Also, even when coalitions are more persistent, the terms are effectively renegotiated every election - party platforms are much more stable.

The analog of a particular legislative coalitions in a two-party system is not a particular party but the party in power. And the platform of the party in power changes dramatically when power shifts from one party to another.

[specialist]

Former US Rep Henry Waxman explains in his book The Waxman Report how Congress used to work, where coalitions were often formed around issues, interests.

There are many other accounts, giving different perspectives, of course. The Politics of Attention and Unorthodox Lawmaking come to mind.

[lambertsimnel]

Among the many disadvantages of taking coalition building away from the legislative level (where it is in most democracies) is that it no longer takes more votes to win than to lose. With single-winner districts, a party getting more votes and fewer seats than another party and a majority government can rule with a minority of the votes.

[ClayShentrup]

PR mostly nullifies Gerrymandering.

[openasocket]

"proportional representation" is a generic term for a wide variety of possible representational systems. And each system has their own advantages and disadvantages. Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very large states. Other solutions use districts, but have multiple representatives per district, and have a method for apportioning those representatives. These are still vulnerable to gerrymandering, though its effectiveness is less pronounced as the number of representatives per district increases. But apportionment can be complicated. Some of these methods change the way voting works so that you vote for a political party rather than a specific candidate, which comes with a bunch of advantages and disadvantages.

All to say that, while different methods for representation should absolutely be considered and discussed, it's important to remember that none of these are a panacea, and we should be upfront about the nuances and disadvantages of every option.

[masklinn]

> Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs.

It's doubtful whether that still exists as anything more than a foil/justification though, given Congress's expansion was stopped a century back, and each Representatives now stands in for at least half a million people (RH has the lowest number of citizens per rep' at 530k) and up to a million (Montana, population 1042520, currently has a single rep'), with the average closing in on 740k (up from ~710 during the last census).

Can a rep' really vouch for the specific needs of 700000 people any more than a proportional delegation would?

It's unclear to me that the House of Commons manages to do that, and they've got 650 MPs for 65 million people (or ~100000 people per MP on average, though the average electorate is lower, and it has very extreme low ends, Na h-Eileanan an Iar has an electorate of under 22k).

[eli]

The people in CA-8 (Mojave Desert) have very different needs and concerns from the people in CA-12 (San Francisco) even though they represent the same number of people.

[squiggleblaz]

Actually, under Open List PR, you could still have de facto local representatives. Someone could focus their attention on the needs of the Mojave Desert dwellers and get elected or not based on their popularity in the desert. PR doesn't prevent people from focusing their attention on geographic regions; it merely creates other alternatives.

[dragonwriter]

> All to say that, while different methods for representation should absolutely be considered and discussed, it's important to remember that none of these are a panacea

Well, other than that more proportional results, by whatever means, seem consistently across modern democracies to provide government with which the people are more satisfied, and also provide a higher dimensionality to the range of political ideas and debate. (See Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy.)

Every options has positive and negative traits, but single-member FPTP districts are about the worst, on balance.

Well, worst would be that plus having districts that don't even try to have similar population, so that the results are even less proportional than you'd expect with FPTP in single-member districts.

[kbaker]

The Thirty Thousand project aims to fix the problem gradually by scaling the number of representatives to the population:

> As shown above, in 1804 each Representative represented approximately 40 thousand people. Today, the average population of congressional districts is nearly 700 thousand and growing.

> In order to restore the House to the citizenry, our total number of federal Representatives will have to be increased substantially. Achieving this goal is essential to extending the ground of public confidence in our government and ensuring the beneficent ends of its institution.

http://www.thirty-thousand.org/

[patrickmay]

> Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs. This matters less in small states and countries, but can mean quite a lot in very large states.

The solution to that, however politically difficult, is to break the larger states into smaller ones. New York City, for example, shares very little politically or economically with the rest of New York. Similarly with the various regions of California -- Silicon Valley and Los Angeles are as different from each other as both are from the areas north of San Francisco.

[Jesus_Jones]

Breaking up the big liberal states has been proposed by conservatives, because they want to get more conservative leg members. We'd need to break up conservative states too. There has been discussion of breaking Seattle off into it's own state or country. That would add a Republican Senate and House Rep, since the test of the state is more conservative, so you have to do a 3 way breakup of WA state. Anyway, these things are all hard to achieve and infeasible in practice. IMHO.

[rocqua]

There is a similar issue with switching states away from 'winner takes all' in the electoral college.

If a liberal state does it, it costs liberals votes. If a conservative state does it, it costs conservatives votes. It seems pretty clear that such a system is fairer, and yet no-one wants to actually do it.

[lambertsimnel]

Twenty-three states have already passed the National Popular Vote bill, which will in effect switch all states from winner-takes-all when it covers a majority of the electoral college: http://www.nationalpopularvote.com/state-status

[openasocket]

The issue with that is demographics change over time, so any attempt to break states up into more politically/economically uniform pieces will become outdated over time (like if a large city expands beyond its current boundaries). So you'll have to change the state lines periodically, and then you've still got the issues of redistricting, only now on a national level instead of a state level.

[rojoca]

The other solution is to have mixed representation where a portion of the seats represent districts and the rest are allocated to match the proportions voted for by the state. In this case each voter gets 2 votes: 1 for their district and 1 for a party.

[int_19h]

Mixed-member proportional representation provides for geographic districts, while still ensuring that every party gets no more seats than its popular vote percentage.

[squiggleblaz]

You can hardly do MMP in America. Several states have only one or two seats, where MMP would be equivalent to FPTP or block vote - a significant step back.

[int_19h]

You'd need to do it on the national level, not state. Our parties transcend state boundaries anyway, and House was always supposed to be representing people as a whole; the states have the Senate for their representation as entities.

[squiggleblaz]

I dunno, I'm just trying to play with the rules that exist. There's a dubious federal law designed to ensure minority representation which seems to prohibit proportional representation, but seeing as it so abjectly fails to achieve its goals it may have no grounds to stand on. A state which thought democracy was a good idea and might be useful trying in the US[] could unilaterally introduce a bill and it may succeed in the courts. But it's unthinkable that you could get enough states to pass an amendment to the constitution to abolish state-based districts without an experiment in proportional voting in the US first.

[]: I don't mean to say FPTP is undemocratic - Canada is plainly democratic - just that America isn't democratic in much the same way one says Russia isn't democratic. If the government is intent on not hearing the will of the people, it will find a way.

[Taniwha]

those low-population states should use STV systems (as should states for senators)

[lambertsimnel]

> Those that get rid of districts entirely lose the ability for specific sub-regions of a state to have their own dedicated representative to vouch for their specific needs.

Not if they establish their own parties.