As a European I ask myself why there’s no proportional voting system at all in the US. The states should be independent enough to introduce one for themselves, and there are also referendums.
Because change in voting systems has well-studied partisan and ideological impacts, and many of the people who know enough to understand the way that our current voting system contributes to widely-recognized problems in governance also have studied the issue well enough to understand those impacts, and many of them, even while accepting the problems as problems, think that the likely shift in ideological outcomes would be more adverse to their preferenced than the current set of problems.
> The states should be independent enough to introduce one for themselves
They are, but they don't want to. The only major voting system reform that has anywhere close to critical mass is IRV, which should have minimal impact (which is actually why it is within the space of possibility, though obviously not something advocates publicly trumpet.)
https://news.gallup.com/poll/320744/americans-support-abolis...
What "flipped" is that it went from overall < 50% to > 50%.
> the most extreme case was in South Carolina, where an impossible 101 percent of all eligible voters in the state had their votes counted
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidentia...
It would require a constitutional amendment. In modern times, that would seem to require the sort of prolonged alignment that follows a deep and lasting shock to the country.
I don't want be around the sort of calamity that could produce a constitutional amendment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
- IRV is commonly used for local positions - Other positions seem to use a system where all the political parties have the same primary, and then only the top two candidates are on the ballot for the general election. Wikipedia describes it well:
> Under California's non-partisan blanket primary law, all candidates appear on the same ballot, regardless of party. In the primary, voters may vote for any candidate, regardless of their party affiliation. In the California system, the top two finishers—regardless of party—advance to the general election in November, even if a candidate receives a majority of the votes cast in the primary election. Washington and Louisiana have similar "jungle primary" style processes for U.S. Senate elections, as does Mississippi for U.S. Senate special elections.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_United_States_Senate_elec...
Every senate election I can recall in California has been Democrat v Democrat by the general election.
Which is the point of the system. Republicans only have a shot if they don't compete with each other, and no third party candidate ever has a chance.
> The Overton window is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.[1] It is also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences.[2][3] According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office given the climate of public opinion at that time.
> Which is the point of the system.
Yes, but not the way you paint it.
> Republicans only have a shot if they don't compete with each other, and no third party candidate ever has a chance.
No, the point (at least, insofar as created by same-party general elections was the point) of the system was that Republican-leaning voters would have an impact on which Democrat was elected in safe Democratic seats.
No, the result is not “Republicans only have a shot if they don't compete with each other” (except to the extent it it is equally “Democrats only have a shot if they don't compete with each other”; it does disadvantage a party having support spread among many candidates vs concentrated on a smaller number, but there's nothing that makes that more true for one party that the other.) And no third party candidate ever had a chance before the blanket primary. (The blanket primary probably slightly improves this for the Green Party in certain Democratic-dominant districts, but only if Democratic support is highly concentated on a single candidate such as an in-party popular incumbent, but its still not much of a chance.) But, again, that's not new with the blanket primary; classic partisan primaries and FPTP voting were more than sufficient to make that generally the case just as it pretty much is everywhere in the country that uses those systems.
So the two things that make up “everything you said” are not the result of the system.
So, you have a very short memory? The nonpartisan blanket primary was adopted in 2010, so no elections prior to that were Democrat-Democrat; 2012 also wasn't. 2016 and 2018 were.
It seems like the best way to get proportional voting is to create your democratic system with it that way from the beginning.
What we really need is a switch from "first past the post" to approval/score/range voting, which would dissolve the two party system by eliminating spoilers and thereby making third parties viable.
Score/range voting is "that thing the Olympics uses"; approval voting is "that thing the Olympics uses if the only possible scores a judge can give are 0 or 1".
As far as I can tell the biggest impediment to this is a lot of people proposing alternative systems that aren't as good (e.g. IRV) and then no change is made because proponents of change are divided on which change to make.
Less places than you might think. It especially wouldn't for Congress (so long as it was proportional by a method similar to STV within state delegations, or within some subset of state delegations), as the only barrier there is a statutory prohibition on at-large districts for delegations greater than 1, adopted to head off the use of FPTP at-large districts to systematically deny representation not minorities.
> Also, proportional voting introduces all kinds of unnecessary problems like not having districts
Party list proportional would do that, but most other proportional systems would not.
> and thereby constituents having their votes diluted
Proportionality doesn't dilute votes; the more proportional a system is the more efficiently it allocated votes to give them maximum effect.
> and not having a specific representative
Proportional systems don't need to have that effect, either, no matter how you measure it (and FPTP—and any other simple singlr-member district system—definitely has that effect for supporters of the nonwinning party in a district, who are effectively unrepresented entirely.)
It causes your vote to be mixed with a larger number of other votes, which is the definition of dilution. By giving the candidates more alternative constituents to win over in order to stay in office, your vote is less important to them and there are more ways they can screw you over and still stay in office.
> the more proportional a system is the more efficiently it allocated votes to give them maximum effect.
That isn't inherently true. Suppose you have a state with two districts. 60% of the state are religious conservatives, 30% are libertarians, 10% are socialists. With proportional representation the socialists get disenfranchised because they don't get their own candidate. Even the libertarians might get disenfranchised if the religious conservatives manage to get two representatives. But with range voting, you end up with a candidate who has to make all the interests in their district as happy as possible because anyone who comes along and can make them happier would defeat them in an election -- so nobody gets disenfranchised because every victor needs to make everybody happier than anybody else.
Proportional systems also fail in the same way but worse when forming governing coalitions. Suppose you have a White party and a Black party and the White party voters are 70% of the population. Then proportional representation gives them 70% of the representatives, they form the majority coalition and the Black party representatives lose every vote.
Compare this to range voting where if you so much as have a White party, they lose even in many majority-White districts against a moderate candidate who can earn the support of both White and Black constituents. It promotes the election of moderates with broad appeal over the election of extremists who fight to gain a majority coalition that can steamroll over anyone in the outgroup.
Wut? Literally every vote would be worth the same under proportional voting, that’s kind of the point isn’t it?
Of course that means that people whose vote is currently outrageously relevant will have their vote dilluted.
(dragonwriter disagrees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549671, but I'm not sure what he/she is referring to)
Edit: that party got 50 seats total.
Systems like approval voting or STV when used with single member districts do not reduce the two party duopoly. To achieve this you must use multi member districts, which has the effect of reducing the threshold to gain a seat. The best case study for this is maybe Australia, which has been running systems like this for a century. In their Senate they elect using very large multi member districts and have a representation from a number of parties, whereas in their House they use single member districts. And the result there is a two party duopoly.
For example at the moment in their Senate (multi member districts) currently there are seven parties and one independent:
Liberal (31)
Labor (26)
Greens (9)
National (5)
One Nation (2)
Centre Alliance (1)
Lambie Network (1)
Independent (1)
Labor (68)
Liberal (61)
National (15)
Liberal National (1)
Greens (1)
KAP (1)
Centre Alliance (1)
Independent (3)
WRT your concern about who is your representative in the multi member case. It can be argued now ~40% of people who vote for the loser in our current system don’t have a representative, and a more proportional system would clearly improve this. So I think, if say we had RCV with five member districts, you could either just contact whichever member you prefer, contact them all, or they could introduce joint offices to work together, or a system could be set up to assign them to “sub district” that would be akin to our current districts. For example assign them based on who gets the most first preference votes in a district. Or rotate them every six months between sub districts. This might even reduce partisanship.
What do you mean?
Suppose you have a single member district with four parties running: Democrats, Republicans, Greens and Libertarians. First past the post polling shows 48% Democrat, 48% Republican, 2% Green and 2% Libertarian. Your preferred candidate is polling at 2%.
You're then going to vote for one of the major parties because you know perfectly well that your preferred candidate is not going to win and you also know that you prefer one of the major party candidates over the other one.
By contrast, with approval voting, all four candidates get around 50% approval because there are no spoilers and no reason not to approve of the candidate you actually want, so one of the third parties can plausibly edge out both of the major parties for the highest approval and win the district. They also have a much better case that they could win which means they can get into the debates etc.
Also, approval voting makes it plausible for independents to win when they tailor their platform to the district, which just might destroy the political parties whatsoever -- and that would be most excellent.
> It can be argued now ~40% of people who vote for the loser in our current system don’t have a representative, and a more proportional system would clearly improve this.
No one disputes that the existing system is terrible. But approval voting still fixes that, because a candidate with 60% approval loses to one with 70% approval, so someone who can make more of the district happy wins. And there is no way to give full consideration to 100.0% of the voters short of direct democracy, which has its own set of problems.
I'd rather phrase it, the proportional systems have quite large districts (or alternatively, much more of representatives per district) to achieve the proportional allocation. But I get what you mean.
However, it is very well possible to design variations to any traditional party list proportional system where (at least nominally) one representative is identified with each current-sized and located district.
For example, take a classic proportional system, and use it to select the number of representatives per party list. In proportional methods, usually the list is either preordered by the party or order within the list depends on the individual total popularity of candidates in all districts. So, to achieve nominal geographic representation, one can assign a district to each selected representative. E.G. each district is nominally represented by the one of those elected who had the largest share of votes in that district and is not yet assigned to some other district by the same rule (if one complains that one may have their representative elected by people out of one's district, this implicitly happens in such proportional systems anyway).
Alternatively, one could achieve remarkable amount of geographic identification by relaxing the "one representative <-> one district" requirement. For example, require that each party list can put forward only one candidate per (equally populous) district; a candidate gets personal votes only in that district, but the number of seats given to list is allocated proportionally over all districts, as usual in proportional systems. Then the order within list is assigned by the personal votes of each candidate. (This has the added complication -- or benefit -- that districts with low overall turnout may be left without a specifically named representative and the district with high turnout for all candidates standing there may get them all elected; nevertheless, all votes count towards the party list total sum, no matter the district.)
> ...we really need ... approval/score/range voting
Agreed. That's been my long time position.
That said, per The Democracy Nerd podcast, I'm newly curious about multi-member seats. Which might be a smaller lift in a lot of places.
https://xraypod.com/show/democracy-nerd/saving-democracy-in-...
"... Kristin Eberhard from Sightline Institute discusses her proposal to eliminate the state Senate, along with other ideas to save democracy in Oregon."
(Sorry, no timestamp.)
Eberhard claims that prior to eliminating multimember seats, Illinois' legislature was far more productive, constructive.
FWIW, I'm strongly in favor or unicameral legislatures at the state level, and I'm chewing on the notion for the federal level.
The US Senate was originally appointed by the state legislatures and intended to represent the interests of the state governments at the federal level -- representation that they no longer have, leading to a massive federal takeover of government. Compare the ratio of tax revenues collected by the state vs. federal governments before and after the 17th amendment. There was a drastic, immediate, permanent shift.
In your future perfect PR world: Still bicameral? PR just for House? Replace House & Senate with a parliament?
Or do you still want to preserve the vetocracy with a Senate (House of Lords)?
What do state, county, city governments look like?
As a European, the elections in my country are:
-- Presidential: uninominal majority (of course).
-- Assembly: uninominal majority.
-- Senate: no universal vote, voters emanate (mostly) from municipal councils majorities.
-- Regional: allegedly proportional lists, but in fact a majority vote, since the leading list gets a majority bonus of 25% of the seats, and then only proportional applies (and still, it is a two-round vote in which lists under 12.5% are evicted from the first round, and then can be evicted again at the second round, even from proportional). So in practice the leading list is always granted more than 50% of the seats.
-- Departmental: uninominal majority
-- Municipal: in large towns, allegedly proportional lists, but in fact a majority vote, since the leading list gets a majority bonus of 50%!!! so there is not even a slight theoretical possibility of having a balance; in villages: plurinominal majority (so a list where every member gets 50%+1 votes gets 100% of seats).
So, not a single actual proportional election, even in those which purport to be such.
(That's France, if you wonder.)
As a practical note, I would like to add that concerning the Assembly, the uninominal voting system used to produce a sort of balanced result, because of differences in history, culture, sociology, traditions and so on in different voting districts; but at present the populations are mixed, the medias are national, everything is more standardised, and so votes are more uniform, and as a consequence a party who has a small lead now has it almost everywhere and can get an overwhelming majority of seats despite only having that small lead.
That system mostly worked, but it still required a civil war to prove the Union was really was sovereign and states could not leave.
When you’re baffled by things happening over here, remember that the United States is less analogous to France or Germany and more analogous to the European Union. The individual states are more analogous to EU nations. It’s not a perfect comparison, but it’s helpful.
[1] https://www.fairvote.org/new_york_s_proportional_representat...
"[R]epeal advocates blamed proportional representation for the election of communists to the city council. While the communist issue might have doomed proportional representation, the true deathblow came when the Republicans joined the Democrats to oppose it. Republicans had been early champions of proportional representation, but defected due to their dwindling role within a diverse and mostly progressive minority coalition."
For instance, in my state, official (legally recognized, meaning access to the ballot) parties are organized by legislative, county, and state wide. Depending on the whatifs, who's got the real power changes over time and context.
And the intraparty Democratic fighting is far worse than the interparty stuff. IMHO.
(Though I've attended Republican events, having never participated in their orgs, I can't compare. Though from popular press accounts, insurgents like the Tea Party, taking on their establishments, sounds comparable.)
Then we have all sorts of non partisan politics. Like interest groups, lobbyists, agencies, media, etc.
So while doupoly sucks, and PR would be so much better, our current system is not monolithic.
Sunnyvale just switched to single-member districts because of this.
See the radical shift when New Zeeland shifted to MMP, which although not perfect is better. [0] For party-list based systems some modification of the Webster/Sainte-Laguë method [1] is often used to have about perfect representation compared to the votes with the caveats you desire, e.g. lower thresholds and so on, while still allowing some choice in the actual person and not party representing you.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_New_Zealand#Gener...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webster/Sainte-Lagu%C3%AB_meth...