Since congressional districts were intended to be a form of proportional representation, what do you propose in their stead?
There are different ways to assign representatives in proportional representation systems, but at such small scale you could have district-wide primaries where the top N finishers for that multi-member district are slotted into seats in the order in which they finished in the primaries.
Unfortunately this system is still imperfect, as strategic voting can still occur l, but significantly less so than in our first past the post single-member system. Also it excludes extremely small parties (>10% of the national electorate) from influence. It’s a tough problem.
With a STV system like Hare-Clarke you will likely see independents standing with very centrist platforms, with the major parties quickly scrabbling to get those centrist votes.
Overall the system works quite well, and the proportion of representatives a party has in parliament roughly aligns with first preference votes.
Naming things isn’t easy.
No, unequal apportionment and the electoral college are the biggest problems, FPTP and single-member districts in state and federal legislatures are, in combination, just the biggest problem which isn't federally Constitutionally mandated and which can therefore be fixed with legislation at the appropriate level(s) without federal Constitutional Amendment.
> With a STV system like Hare-Clarke you will likely see independents standing with very centrist platforms
Perhaps, but every candidate elected being a compromise candidate that relatively few people feel they would have preferentially votred for first is horrible for representation, and that's what you get with any STV-like system with single member districts in an electorate where political views aren't unimodally distributed (and if views were unimodally distributed, FPTP would get you exactly the battle for the center you propose and you wouldn't need STV to get it.) You want compromise in the legislature on policy where the voices in the legislature reflect those in the populace to the degree feasible; you don't want the compromise to happen mechanically in selecting members of the legislature.
What do you mean?
I think the biggest problem is giving electoral votes based on total state population instead of based on citizenship.
California and Texas both end up with more than they should have.
Edit: I'd like electoral votes to be distributed proportionally instead of winner takes all - it sucks that if you are not in a swing state you have less influence.
Mostly the Senate and it's resulting effect on the Electoral College, though granularity effects from the very small number of house seats are also an issue.
> I think the biggest problem is giving electoral votes based on total state population instead of based on citizenship.
The existence of a legal class of permanent resident non-citizens is itself a fundamental problem for the entire idea of popular government.
But even if you accept what you pose as a distortion at all, it's less significant than the disproportionality in federal legislative and executive voting power produced by the Senate and the corresponding Electoral College seats.
Why would we want a popular government?
> disproportionality in federal legislative and executive voting power produced by the Senate and the corresponding Electoral College seats.
I'm still not sure what you mean. Do you have an article you can link me to?
It's a pretty big chunk of EC votes - more than Wyoming gets in total!
The senate is meant to represent the states - not the people - so it's not really a fair comparison.
No, it's about the same. If you pull non-citizens out of the calculation nationally, California loses between 3 and 4 seats in the House.
> The senate is meant to represent the states - not the people
That's no more true than saying the House is supposed to be scaled to people and not citizens. Both are features of the design of the system. “Is supposed to be X” doesn't stop something from being a problem in terms of a goal other than X.
Sure - I guess it's the difference between a tweak and an overhaul. I'd expect the overhaul to have 100x the supporting evidence.
The current system gives "illegal immigrants" a 10 vote advantage in the Electoral College for the Democrats...because they tend to live in safe Democratic states.
An election for President based on the nationwide popular vote would eliminate the Democrat’s advantage in Electoral College members arising from the uneven distribution of non-citizens.
Electors are people. They each have one vote. The result would be a very inexact whole number proportional system.
Every voter in every state would not be politically relevant or equal in presidential elections.
It would sharply increases the odds of no candidate getting the majority of electoral votes needed, leading to the selection of the president by the U.S. House of Representatives, regardless of the popular vote anywhere.
It would not accurately reflect the nationwide popular vote;
It would reduce the influence of any state, if not all states adopted.
It would not improve upon the current situation in which four out of five states and four out of five voters in the United States are ignored by presidential campaigns, but instead, would create a very small set of states in which only one electoral vote is in play (while making most states politically irrelevant),
It would not make every vote equal.
It would not guarantee the Presidency to the candidate with the most popular votes in the country.
The National Popular Vote bill is the way to make every person's vote equal and matter to their candidate because it guarantees the majority of Electoral College votes to the candidate who gets the most votes among all 50 states and DC.
Quota-preferential.