Hacker News Reader

Comment by gmiller123456 | Hacker News Reader

Certainly a small step in the right direction. But what's really needed to give voters their voice is Proportional Representation. That's were the legislative houses are made up of parties given the percentage of seats based on the percentage of votes they received.

Ranked choice voting still results in a "first past the post" system, where significant portions of the voters (up to 49.999...%) get no voice at all.

View on HN

Germany has a system where part is determined by the votes percentage but then there are also some seats that can be won by winning a district. I think this works pretty well.

In general the US needs a system where if you a certain number of votes you get some level of representation. For example it’s real bad that Perot won 20% in the 90s but these votes got zero representation. .

This is for the Mayor and other citywide offices where there can only be one winner in the election.

Proportional Representation doesn't work for a single office election

The House should have more seats anyway. We only have 435 because of the Apportionment Act; the Constitution allows for no more than one Rep per 30,000 people.

Which would mean we should have up to something like 11,000 representatives given our current population. Clearly something is wrong when the average representative:constituent ratio is 1:700,000! It was originally 1:34,000.

11K is perhaps far too many to be manageable, but 435 is clearly far too few.

Edit: the 14th amendment may have changed this math before the 1911 Apportionment bill fixed it at 435, but 1:700K is still far too high.

However it will change the political landscape.

If each state sends representatives according to proportional voting, we would quickly see other parties gaining some seats.

Those other parties will probably grow and even gain seats in the senate. At some point you won't need the support of all parties to break a fillibuster.

I agree, and re-reading my post, I don't see where I implied otherwise. In fact, I actually specifically said it would apply to the legislative houses. Just posting this as confirmation in case anyone else got the impression you did.

My comment was because of what the article is about: "mayor, public advocate, comptroller, borough president and members of the City Council, starting in 2021"

Maybe you could do PR for City Council, but the other positions are single person positions. I thought your comment was related to the article, which is why I replied like I did.

Also, however... PR has its flaws... it makes the party the unit you are voting for, not the person. Maybe you like one party member but not another; with PR, you can't make that choice, the party does.

While we’re on the subject one of the best ways to implement prop-rep is called mixed-member voting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional

M–M voting preserves individual districts, but it eliminates the effects of gerrymandering by using extra seats to make up for any discrepancy between the proportion of districts a party won vs the number of votes. Gerrymandering is, of course, a huge problem in the US, and M–M voting offers a way to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.

Ranked Choice Voting is sometimes called Instant Runoff Voting when used in a single-winner election. But it can be used in multi-winner elections.

If it's used for a multi-winner election, it gives results that are proportional in representation. For instance, this is how it's used in the city council elections in Cambridge, MA. Sometimes it's referred to as "Single Transferable Vote" when used for multi-winner elections.

"Ranked Choice Voting" is an umbrella term that refers to the ranked ballots, round-by-round elimination of candidates, etc.

For any polisci folks out there, does ranked choice voting still encourage a bipartisan system, or does it theoretically encourage more parties to specialize to single-issue parties where voters essentially rank their issues on the ballot, as opposed to voting all-or-nothing for a party that supports their #1 issue but none others?

Yes it encourages bipartisan voting. It encourages 3rd party voting only when you know the 3rd party will be eliminated before the two major parties, otherwise you risk your lesser-of-two-evils choice being eliminated instead. IRV for single winner elections is nearly as awful as first past the post.

Last time I brought up condorcet someone pointed out it has problems too, but they're not as bad. Switching all rep voting to multi winner, rather than one winner per district, solves some of the election problems (and makes gerrymandering a lot less significant), and for single winner like president or governor the ultimate solution is range voting which ends up strategically collapsing to approval voting. So basically people who want to can range vote, but practically everyone will vote Yes/max for all candidates they can stomach and no/0 for candidates they can't.

That seems simple but the obvious effect is that good 3rd parties can be voted for without "wasting" your vote. Therefore a few good third parties would flourish and start winning city and state elections, not just in crazy districts or once in a blue moon, but regularly whenever Reps/Dems have lost touch.

Thanks for the explanation! Do you have any info on how electing multiple winners works out in practice? Seems like it essentially shifts the complexity of disagreement from the ballot box to the halls of legislature... does it end up with more positive compromise to get things done, or more gridlock and stalemates? Do initiatives take more or less time to enact? Any effects on approval ratings?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com