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Comment by lyschoening | Hacker News Reader

The US would do a lot better with mixed-member proportional representation: It would solve gerrymandering outright; money in politics would be less than an issue, because money would have to be spent everywhere and not just on swing states/districts; and soon there would be more than two parties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...

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I still think the cap on the number of representatives is the problem. The current number of 535 should be more like 10,000+ considering the current population size. This would also solve gerrymandering and help with the money problem.

Yeahbut, the building won't hold 10,000 members.

Sounds like a good opportunity to create some jobs and score points with the electorate. :)

It could/should be a bit more, yes, but you also have thousands of representatives in the state governments and that isn't working out much better with respect to gerrymandering.

The advantage with the mixed-member system is that you get to elect both a representative and a party, so even if you don't end up getting the representative you've hoped for your vote still matters.

I think that, once the suggestion of replacing single member elections with anything approximating proportional representation is made, the focus on managing the electoral system we DO have is lost.

Tons of measures made by political scientists about gerrymandering implicitly value PR or nearly-PR as the standard of justice and fall into this trap. But I think there's opportunity in the SMD systems for fairness, like the Gelman-King stuff that looks at equalizing the winners bonus provided to parties. That is, taken alone, it doesn't matter if seats are awarded disproportionately to votes won, as long as the system responds in the same way when the tables are turned.

Extreme Gerrymandering can skew even mmp via overhang candidates.

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