Simple solution to end gerrymandering

[yurbud]

Make all seats at large. Voters would choose a party, and then rank candidates within the party, so if the GOP wins 25 seats, their top 25 vote getters go to congress.

This would make it more likely that third parties would get in if they got enough votes to equal at least one seat.

Candidates could still campaign in their traditional districts because they would know what issues are important to voters there.

There is probably a problem with this proposal I'm not seeing, but it would make it easier to get rid of the deadwood without risking giving up the seat to the GOP; simply rank the lackluster candidate lower (or not at all) and he'll get bumped by the other party or a newcomer could get more votes and move up.

If it looks like Arnold is anywhere near getting traction on his Texafication of our districts, this could be a way to neutralize him.

This would also end feeling like your vote is wasted if you have an entrenched encumbant (of either party) in your district.

[whistle]

1. Yes, make it more like a democracy

[skids]

2. It kinda goes against the grain of the whole idea...

...of having representatives represent the interests of their local communities.

Also, just as an aside, why should you have to choose a party and only rank candidates from one party?

[yurbud]

4. your concerns

It kinda goes against the grain of the whole idea of having representatives represent the interests of their local communities.

Candidates would still be free to campaign with the voters they have an affinity with by region or on any other basis as well.

Also, just as an aside, why should you have to choose a party and only rank candidates from one p

I'm not entire opposed to this, but a lot of other people would for similar reasons to their opposition to open primaries--the other side could vote for the nuts of their opponents party.

[skids]

5. I think you just answered your own question.

"I'm not entire opposed to this, but a lot of other people would for similar reasons to their opposition to open primaries--the other side could vote for the nuts of their opponents party."

See "tyrrany of the majority"

If we did it this way, all, rather than most, of the reps would campaign to, and be elected by, the large metropolitan centers.

[yurbud]

6. not necessarily metro only

If too many candidates campaigned in the same area there would be diminishing returns since voters would still have to rank candidates even if they were more familiar with them. It would be better to be #1 with a lot of voters in Modesto rather than #13 with the same number of voters here.

The same could be true of minority candidates. They could just focus on their ethnic community and still get enough votes to get in.

As you saw from the European poster here, I think I've overcome the one problem they have with this scheme over there. You vote for a party and candidates within the party.

[skids]

7. This is actually a pretty well researched field.

Your description is a bit too vague to comment on precisely which groups
would lose how much representation using it.

I encourage you to keep thinking on it. There's a whole field of study in more democratic systems. A few search terms: "concordat voting" and of course "instant runoff".

[yurbud]

8. how would you study who loses?

[skids]

9. It's a complicated problem.

A competant discrete mathemetician might be able to solve it outright, however, the shortcut for those of us without that acuity is to just use a computer to iterate through a large variety of test cases.

You basically take a population of people and give them a few secondary attributes. Then you decide on a correlation factor between those attributes and vote preference. Then you run through the election and count up how many people with certain values for their attributes were disempowered by the results.

The attributes need to be divided into groups of different sizes. For example, one of the attributes might have values of urban/suburban/exurban/rural and out of every 100 voters, for example, you'd assign 50 urban 30 suburban 15 exurban and 5 rural. Then for another run you'd assign 50 urban 15 suburban 15 exurban and 20 rural.

The preference strength (e.g. 60% of "urban" voters strongly/weakly prefer candidate X over candidate Y) would also have to be varied to see what happens in close races versus those where a candidate highly popular with one attribute.

I'm sure there are reams of academic papers on this.

[tjwmason]

3. We have this system for the European Elections

The country is divided into several large regions each of which elects a given number of M.E.P.s. Each party produces a list of its candidates, and one votes for the favoured party. There is a formula for granting each seat to one of the parties which give it to the first, second &c. person on their list.

It works smoothly over here, but this is partially because the European Parliament is generally ignored.

The biggest qualm which people had with it was the closed list - this is that the candidate selection is entirely in the hands of the parties. This means that one cannot favour particular candidates (there was one person in my region for whom I would not vote at all, under this system if I wished to vote for his party I would also vote for him).