Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like an interesting idea. In the end the US needs a system where if a party gets a certain percentage of votes it gets some level of representation in Congress. For example in the 90s Ross Perot got 18% of votes but these voters got 0 percent representation anywhere. This is just extremely unhealthy. The extreme partisanship would get reduced quickly if there were some people in Congress who would vote with one of the big parties one and then with the other another time.

We have a federal, not national, government. National percentages of votes earned are meaningless.

I'm not saying that's good or bad, but that's what it is.

Agreed. But I hope my point makes sense. If 18 percent of people vote for someone and get no representation out of it they quickly will get disillusioned about voting and the country's politics will not be representative of the people.

Is it worse that Clinton got 48 percent of the popular vote or McCain got 46 percent and lost - that is a much bigger disenfranchised proportion.

Yes. Because by definition in a presidential election there can be only one winner. In the House or Senate there is no reason to not have proportional element.

Presidential elections can't be proportional, true, but they could be made less polarizing. The goal should be consensus, the election of a candidate acceptable to the vast majority of the population, not someone loved by 51% but loathed by the other 49%.

In the good old days the winner became president and the loser vice president. Maybe we should back to that. I would love a Trump/Clinton presidency.

Those Clinton voters still have their representatives in the House (and probably in Senate, too), so they are represented in the political system, just not in the White House.

The lack of proportional representation is a feature of single winner districts, as opposed to multi-winner districts, not national vs federal.

I am not even saying we need full proportional representation but just some element so a party that gets voted for by a certain percentage of people can get some foothold. Right now you can't maintain a third party because the threshold to have an impact is way too high.

The Scandinavian countries have something like this, called leveling seats:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_seat

The Scandinavian countries have voting systems that are approximately proportional in the core. Then they use those leveling seats to fix the sub-5% differences in the vote proportions and the seats. But that's just a small correction if we are comparing voting systems that are not proportional in their design at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster/Sainte-Lagu%C3%AB_meth...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method

The argument might better applied to state-level elections for legislative bodies. They are usually FPTP by district, so in a 51/49 split district, a significant portion of the electorate is left out in the cold.

We could adopt some flavor of split system... FPTP for district reps, with some number of positions set aside state-wide for proportional representation.

I believe Germany does something like this, though I'll have to dig up the details.

Yes. That's what Germany does. If your party gets 5 percent you are in parliament even without winning a single district.

The german Bundestag (federal level) election rules can be roughly summarized like this:

Each voter gets two votes, one for a candidate and a second for a party list.

Half of the members of the Bundestag are elected by direct vote. The candidate in the election district that gets the most votes is elected.

The other half are distributed so that the total distribution matches the distribution for the party list. A party that fails to accumulate at least 5% doesn't get any seats from the second vote, but gets to keep any direct seats they gained, unless they win a minimum number of direct candidates.

If a party wins more direct candidates in a state than their share of votes per party list would allow for, the Bundestag grows and more seats are distributed to balance the proportion.

The system is designed to allow for direct candidates, but still keeps smaller parties relevant since any party that gets beyond 5% or manages to win direct candidates is part of the Bundestag.

(grossly simplified, but probably good enough for here)

Thanks for the summary!

I disagree. I think it is a feature that Congress does not reflect electorates. Even under first-past-the-post Congress is much saner than electorates.

For years Unification Church tried to get representation in South Korean congress. They failed, but votes show that they would have succeeded under proportional representation. Proportional representation enables extremist parties.

If an extreme party gets maybe 5 percent they deserve representation if you like them or not.

I disagree. The idea of approval voting is that if majority is against for you to be a representative, you shouldn't be a representative. This is "the will of the people", per representative basis.

You know the term "tyranny of the majority"?

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