Excuse me, this is far too sensible to be used in politics.
Especially American politics. Especially on the right, presently. They’re unofficial motto is “if cheating isn’t working then you’re not cheating hard enough.”
At this point, we could move to a direct democracy system, and maybe move away from a representative democracy .
Agreed. It’s a fabulous idea, but I’m pretty sure only one state awards electoral votes proportionally.
With 2/3 of the states controlled by fascists and their enablers, it is sadly never going to happen.
We are not in a democracy, no matter how much people love to use the D word.
two states, nebraska and maine, distribute some electoral college votes by congressional district.
but even if the so-called ‘wyoming rule’ was in play, where the smallest state dictated the size of a congressional district and the increased size of the house of representatives as a result—no presidential election outcome would have changed, with the possible exception of 2000 (which was decided by scrotus, not votes).
It seems the first time PR was used was in 1855. Canada and the USA are late (it seems that most of the places I’d be okay with living use proportional representation), but catching up sooner would be better than catching up later!
I’ll draw a parallel to another revolution: supposedly only two wars were fought to end slavery, in the USA and Haiti (everywhere else seems to have banned slavery with just legislation and compensation, for example in Britain), and I’d rather keep the number of wars over proportional representation at 0 rather than risking having a higher number, so advocating emphatically is important regardless of circumstances.
Ah! I believe I’ve found the flaw in your analysis… you assume that our party want any of that. You see we’re in power and don’t want to share, so. No.
See there you go, now with a pat on the head go back to playing with your Model Legislature.
/s
Question: How do you implement proportional representation without sacrificing the ability of the voters to choose specific candidates?
Primaries and/or ranked choice voting allow for people to know who exactly it is they are choosing to have represent them. Proportional representation generally means that the people are only choosing what party they want, and the party gets to decide who will be their representative. There’s any number of reasons why you might support a party in general but oppose a specific politician. I’d much rather have a system where people can potentially weed out terrible candidates, rather than leaving it to the party to decide.
The closest you can likely get without getting overly complex is Single Transferable Vote/Ranked Choice Voting. No system will be precisely proportional and some voting systems work better depending on the governance system in place (I.e., size of electoral districts, number of seats/seats per district. legislative makeup, etc.).
Copying a previous comment of mine:
I like a variation of the German system (not sure if it’s used everywhere in Germany though).
Keep the map and election as is, add seats to the chamber, once the results are in add MPs until the chamber is proportional, they’re selected by adding the party’s leader first then the candidates from their party that had the highest % of vote in their district then the next one and so on.
That means districts where first and second place were close would get two MPs which might swing the next election in the second place’s favour if they do a good job representing their district. It also means the party only gets to choose one of the MPs that are added this way (the leader), the other ones are chosen by the electors.
Someone added that the party leaders could even be added to the list of MPs separately, the moment there’s one MP elected for a party the leader is present in the chamber, otherwise the second a party has enough votes to have a seat it first goes to the leader. They would be there for the country, not a specific district.
There’s more than one way to do it. You can simply have open party list proportional representation, where people vote for who gets on each party list and in what order. Then in the general election everyone picks parties and the seats are awarded proportionally according to the lists that were chosen by the voters.
Or, you can have a open election with any number of candidates running for office from any number of parties. Voters pick candidates using a method that lets them choose as many as they like, like Sequential Proportional Approval Voting. Then the seats are awarded to the winners, with the awarding method being the thing that creates proportional representation.
With the first way it’s extra important that candidates appeal to the party’s base. With the second way there’s potentially multiple strategies for winning a seat.
