[jerlam]

Interesting, I wonder how many invisible third parties exist at the state or regional level that would be represented in a better system.

That being said, this state government seems rather large for Minnesota, a state with a population of six million people. 67 senators and 134 representatives, and that's within the clunky three-branch system of government copied from the US Federal Government. Those numbers are bigger than California's which has a population that is five times larger.

[tedkimble]

We're at about one legislature for every 30k people. It was one per 20k in 1973, one per 12k in 1919, one per 6k in 1889, and less than one in 2k when Minnesota was a territory in 1858.

I'm not sure what the right ratio is, but the level of disenfranchisement is palpable.

[gus_massa]

Here in Argentina, we have a proportional system inside each province. At the national level we have an indefinite number of parties, but as a simplification, we have

* the 2 extremes: far-right, far-left

* the 2 biggest one: Milei and Cristina

* Like 3 small/medium in the middle

So you can select something in between. They work as informal alliances, so the parties in the middle most of the time align with one of the big ones, but they may switch in particular cases.

It makes it harder for the big parties to do very stupid things, but they can manage to do stupid things anyway ¯\_(ツ)_/¯