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Comment by brianolson | Hacker News Reader

The abstract describes a system for achieving shoddy Proportional Representation through bipartisan (or multi-partisan) gerrymandering. If you want Proportional Representation, then just do that and don't try to gerrymander districts to achieve it. I think this country is too stuck on the notion of districts and needs to think outside the box and paint outside the lines (nyuks intended). I think we keep describing what we want as some sort of identity/ideology based representation and those things are now much more important to us than geography and _where_ a person lives. So we should have at-large PR or large multi-member districts (8 or more reps per district).

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I wonder if gerrymandering even makes sense with the current Swiss way of counting?

The way they count is unorthodox: It needs a computer to compute the result because it's very iterative, but the result is easily verified without a computer. In Condorcet's days this would have been unthinkable.

Each party receives the right number of seats based on number of votes, and the iterations progressively move seats around to favour candidates who are popular in their party and in their region/district. Eventually it says "can't be made more fair now" and at that point it's easy to verify that.

At first blush it seems that gerrymandering could then only have an effect within a party... is that right?

I agree we should switch to Proportional Representation. Unfortunately this would weak our duopoly parties, allowing third parties to win seats. So they (D&R) will never change the laws.

In a FPTP election, 10-20% of the votes are wasted on a 3rd party. In a PR election, 10-20% of the votes get 10-20% of the seats.

> Unfortunately this would weak our duopoly parties, allowing third parties to win seats. So they (D&R) will never change the laws.

(1) They will change the law if the choice is being displaced as major parties (i.e., if people care enough), and

(2) for state government, in many cases the elected members of political parties would not need to act, the citizenry could change the laws directly,

> In a FPTP election, 10-20% of the votes are wasted on a 3rd party. In a PR election, 10-20% of the votes get 10-20% of the seats.

Assuming you mean party list PR, that's true, but then also individual candidates aren't accountable to the general electorate and no one has anyone they can point to as “their” representative. That's a significant trade-off; there are systems which achieve rough proportionality (far better than FPTP) that don't have these problems (i.e., STV with small, e.g. 5-member, districts), but if you look simply at a naive “wastee vote” metric as you've constructed here they may not be better than FPTP.

> In a FPTP election, 10-20% of the votes are wasted on a 3rd party

In the US, the number is much lower; of course, the problem is as big or bigger if you add in abstentions and tactical votes.

I advocate STV with larger sets, 8 or more. The wasted vote is smaller, any constituency that can show up and get out the vote for 1/N of the total gets one of the N seats. 5 seats or fewer biases towards the major parties. Lots of 5 seat sets will go 3-to-2 or 2-to-3. I'd like to get in other voices and split it 5/3/1 or 4/4/1. And I bet over time that 1 would grow to 2, but we have a bootstrapping problem in the current system that always throws away that smaller voice.

> I advocate STV with larger sets, 8 or more.

The trade-off with more seats with STV is better theoretical proportionality vs. larger candidate pool that voters must evaluate; because the number of viable parties as well as the number of candidates each can sensibly run scales roughly with the number of seats per district, the attention burden varies roughky with the square of the number of seats.

> The wasted vote is smaller, any constituency that can show up and get out the vote for 1/N of the total gets one of the N seats.

With the usual formula, pedantically, the smallest integer number of votes greater than a 1/(1+N) share of the electorate, rather than a 1/N share.

> 5 seats or fewer biases towards the major parties.

I think you overestimate the degree to which support for the major parties in the US is fundamental rather than a artifact of tactical voting based on the realities of FPTP; the US is, by affiliation rather than typical vote, 39% independent, 31% Democrat, 28% Republican by the most recent Gallup poll numbers, and at least the Democrats consist of two apply conflicting, roughly balanced factions in loose tactical alliance. (The Republicans have factional divisions, too.)

> ... individual candidates aren't accountable to the general electorate and no one has anyone they can point to as “their” representative.

Alternatively, individual candidates would be accountable to the voters who placed them there. Similarly, the voters who placed them there would think of them primarily as their representative. Those voters who are represented by more than one person in their ideological camp would find they have more than one representative they can reach out to on issues. Those who are more independent but find themselves more closely aligned to a set of reps in one of the camps will also find they have multiple representatives to reach out to, ask to cooperate on something, etc. I live in a state that has GOP dominance at all levels. I’d love to feel like there was anyone representing me the last 20 years at the state and federal levels.

EDIT: I’m not advocating for such a system per se, I’m just suggesting its efficacy is somewhat a matter of perception/perspective. Both voters and candidates can find accountability and notions/feelings of representation in a district-free proportional system. It is surprising to me there’s no way for voters to challenge gerrymandering directly when, in many states, voters aren’t represented by someone who shares their views for decades (on either side of the ideological aisle).

A switch to PR would require a change to federal law. Meanwhile, in the absence of PR, any state is free to adopt its own redistricting policy. The latter approach seems much more feasible.

A State changing how it runs its State Legislature is a change to the State Constitution either way, whether taking away the map drawing authority from the Legislature itself or changing the structure of the Legislature to be non-districted or multi-member districted.

What is more likely, a change to federal law, or the existence of one of 50 states that changes state law?

It’s a single statute that requires single member districts. It wouldn’t be difficult to change. Hell, it may even be unconstitutional.

> It’s a single statute that requires single member districts. It wouldn’t be difficult to change.

Yes, it would, politically. The reason it exists will produce vet strong resistance to a straight repeal, and any replacement with an alternate approach to preventing the original problem while allowing multimember districts will, in addition to resistance from those in Congress whose opposition is driven by opposing undermining the existing dominant parties, resistance around the details of any alternative scheme (which will have predictable winners and losers.)

Coming from a place with proportional distribution, I can see there's value in a winnner-takes-all policy. For example, alternance is more likely (in Andalusia it took 37 years for a non-socialist government to have a chance at power). Also, representatives respond to their district's specific needs, which is good because you have one specific person to go talk to, and to boot off their seats if necessary (unlike a system where the politicians at the top of their parties ranked lists are pretty much guaranteed a position). There's no perfect system, and the grass is always greener, etc.

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