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Comment by jdmichal | Hacker News Reader

That's not what representation means. They may not represent your viewpoint, but they do very much represent you and all the other constituents within their region.

I'm never quite sure what people who make these kinds of arguments as you did are attempting or hoping to achieve. It's trivially impossible to represent every single viewpoint within a constituency with anything other than direct voting. So that's fine if you want to advocate for direct voting, but just come out and say it. Otherwise, any other system involves intermediate representation, which will then have this exact problem.

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> I'm never quite sure what people who make these kinds of arguments as you did are attempting or hoping to achieve. It's trivially impossible to represent every single viewpoint within a constituency with anything other than direct voting.

You can approximate it much better than FPTP does by any system which produces more proprotional results, which is just about any system of democratic representation you don't deliberately try to make worse; FPTP for legislative seats is pretty much the bubble sort of election methods.

Well if it were just FPTP, it would be bad. But still not as bad as what we have now. We have known, admitted gerrymandering that disenfranchises and de-represents voters intentionally to split them up and make their decisions not valid.

I'm sitting with a -3 on my main post, and I still believe my points are still valid. I live in a liberal city in Indiana, and the republicans have gerrymandered us down the middle to split our votes to 2 different republican districts. Prior to 2010, we had better representation and would get more moderate republicans or democrats. No longer.

Except the president clearly doesn't represent the will of the people, as evidenced by his loss in the popular vote.

So how is this at all justifiable?

Because the US is not a strict Democracy, it's a Constitutional Republic that uses an electoral college as a layer of separation.

Further, even if Trump had won the popular vote, your floated premise would remain: the popular vote only represented a modest minority fraction of all adults in the US. So how can that possibly represent the actual full will of The People?

Regardless, history has proven on countless occasions that the will of the people is not always the ideal thing to follow. The Bill of Rights exists precisely to protect the minority from the all-too-often irrational will of the people. (you'll note that I specifically didn't justify the current state of affairs in US politics as being somehow good or positive, I'll pre-empt that conflation)

The president also doesn't write laws. So there's no impact on representation regarding laws and taxation.

I thought we were talking about Congress, not the President.

> ..they do very much represent you and all the other constituents within their region.

Perhaps a method for measuring this is needed. A way to evaluate a representative based on the merits they've shown.

It'd be amazing/nonsensical to believe that the entire system works on blind trust alone but it seems so, aside from journalists' reports.

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