NPR:
Amid growing frustration with both major political parties, voters are open to some big changes.
A new poll, commissioned by supporters of election reforms and shared with NPR, shows there is significant support for upending winner-take-all U.S. House… Continue reading
The post “Voters are sick of the 2-party system. A new poll shows they’re open to big changes” appeared first on Election Law Blog.
I’m not a big fan of proportional representation, because it can be gamed just like the current system, but in proportional representation you don’t actually cast a ballot for a person. While a third party candidate might sneak in there with some proportion of the vote, for the most part it will still be D’s and R’s with most of the vote, so whoever is the first D or R on the list will basically have the job for life, with no practical way to challenge them at all.
I do like ranked choice voting, in conjunction with a massive increase in the size of Congress. 435 is way too small. 1435 might be the right number, if my math is right that could be about 250k people per Rep. Let’s see people try to gerrymander 175 Congressional Districts in California…
You can have proportional voting where votes go to specific people. Basically just do away with House districts and then have X slots. Top X vote getters get elected. You can also have a form of ranked choice where excess votes (beyond what’s needed to secure a position) get proportionally spread among the other candidates according to their second choices.
But that is functionally identical to what we have now: in a district with 5 slots, D’s run 5 candidates, R’s run 5 candidates, most people pick D or R down the line. A district can still be drawn to favor one over the other, except instead of 1 safe seat, you have 5 safe seats.
The only change would be that an impactful third party can only change one of those five safe seats. By moving to this sort of proportional representation, you actually dilute third parties’ power further.
Proportional voting doesn’t give X votes to each voter. You can just look up how these different options work instead of imagining that they’re dumb and you were the one to figure out an obvious flaw.
I have read up on it, and people who advocate for it take as a given that it would make things better, but I just dont see it. I go by three axioms:
as long as drawing districts is a political process, districts will be drawn to the partisan advantage of the major party in charge
Once you have multi-member districts, major parties will run a candidate for as many slots as they are allowed to. And party-line voters will expect to have a way to express a party-line preference. I expect that any system which does not allow a party to run a candidate for every slot will be challenged.
Once you disassociate votes with individual candidates, major party bosses can dole out “safe” seats as patronage. But if you don’t disassociate votes with individual candidates, a party can still sweep a multi-member district with 50.1% percent of the vote for each spot
The only case where proportional voting helps is where the multi-member district becomes so large that it is the only district, and now it can’t be gerrymandered at all. But you still have other problems then.
I would sooner keep districts the way they are, but make many more of them, and introduce either RCV or a true runoff when no candidate gets 50%.
I really don’t think you have since you don’t know basic things about what proportional representation means.
Enlighten me, please, then. I’d love to find a way for it to work here.