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Comment by machina_ex_deus | Hacker News Reader

District based voting isn't democratic. Proportion representation is the only real democratic choice, the district based voting simply doesn't work.

Cheating with elections is so much easier with district voting than proportional representation. The founders of the constitution hated parties but ended up with the game that leaves only a two party competition. That's hardly a choice, it's a single bit.

A real democratic system allows you to grow a political movement naturally over the years to take over and replace corrupt parties peacefully. But district voting system allows two party system to remain in power indefinitely. It completely prevents the entire point of democracy of allowing peaceful transition of power and replacement of corrupt power structures.

There's an additional problem, which is why isn't even harder to replace district voting, that those in charge of counting votes are local to each district, which is letting the car guard the cream.

In proper system with proportional representation, you need to ensure that each location doesn't abuse it's power to count votes and to fabricate population counts to gain an advantage, and you can only do so if you bring random people from different locations to count the votes in each place.

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Maybe but...

There are lots of different voting mechanisms around the world. So e are "better" in the sense that people (including me) like them more... but...

Games mature and you end up with some sort of antipattern party politics emerging.

Eg in many multiparty systems extremist small parties can strongarm governments. Acceptability to the majority isn't a thing. Party leaders become little chiefs. Not saying it's worse. It might even be better, but it's not much better.

Also, the US has relatively strong separation of powers. The house, senate and president are weak independently of eachother. Weak institutions and weak parties will probably result in complete indecisiveness.

Imo, if we're suggesting progress on democracy, we need more radical steps. Eg a randomly selected representative body.

I generally agree.

"Weak institutions and weak parties will probably result in complete indecisiveness."

The other option is that they learn to work together for decent compromises. It's also possible that slow legislation is not a design flaw but rather a feature. The way it is now is mostly stalemates, virtue signaling (passing bills they know will be vetoed), and jamming laws through as fast as possible without any true debate.

Aye, the slowness and "design by committee" aspect of a large legislative body was known to the writers of the constitution. They wanted it to move slow, to ensure due consideration.

That it would lead to deadlock or other problems became rapidly clear -- i.e. the Vice President of the USA shooting the head of the opposing party in a duel -- and we've seen things like the consolidation of power in the President as a response.

> the US has relatively strong separation of powers

But each level has the same two parties competing for it! So your only outcomes are "deadlock" or "tyranny of the 51%". It's particularly silly for things like the Supreme Court where judges are given partisan life appointments.

That's what I mean.

I'll take "deadlock" or "tyranny" as exaggerations for emphasis.

"Tyranny" isn't more or less likely with multi-party. In recent times, a lot of democracies have move to increasingly smaller large parties. But historically, a lot of parliaments have had parties with >51% or parliament... equivalent to having house+senate+presidency, with less opportunity for defection... and mostly under weaker supreme courts.

"Deadlock" works differently in parliamentary systems but... generally tend to be more deadlocked. That's why parliamentary systems often have so many early elections. Deadlock is (assumed to be) absolute. This is way more common where small parties predominate.

Im not arguing that either is better, just that patterns emerge and repeat under all the electoral systems currently used. Transferable votes, multi-stage elections, regional electorates, proportional, vote-for-party, vote-for-candidate, etc. None seem particularly "better" for producing outcomes.

Party political patterns conform to whatever habitat they exist in.

We can keep the districts—which people seem to like—and get rid of the easily-rigged elections by:

- establishing multi-member districts - electing those members via a proportional (e.g. party list) or semi-proportional (e.g. ranked choice) voting system

The first of these is actually pretty common at the municipal level (think at-large city/county council seats), but unfortunately are almost always chosen by plurality means, which means that the dominant party within the district almost always sweeps. You really need both features for this to improve on the single-member districts.

> There's an additional problem, which is why isn't even harder to replace district voting, that those in charge of counting votes are local to each district, which is letting the car guard the cream.

American elections are administered locally to prevent top-down rigging, especially from the federal to the state level. Presumably local politicians will be more accountable to local people than an election authority across the country. And if the local people don't want to hold them accountable because they like them, then the politician is at least representing their contstituency in some way. And from the perspective of other districts, a corrupt district cannot affect their own elections, only send, at worst, a representative they don't like as if the two districts sinply disagreed. If a national election authority were corrupted, there wouldn't be anything local political organizations could do, especially if this applied to local executive or judicial positions.

And of course the original states were not going to cede the counting of their votes the federal government. The electoral college is widely operated as a winner-takes-all system because it means that no state has to trust any other.

I agree that proportional representation would be better. It's painful living in a "purple" state when that means one party handily wins state-wide elections but the other has a right grip on state legislature.

>In proper system with proportional representation, you need to ensure that each location doesn't abuse it's power to count votes and to fabricate population counts to gain an advantage, and you can only do so if you bring random people from different locations to count the votes in each place.

There are protections for the voting and counting processes. Each candidate gets to send a representative (often a lawyer) to audit. And the workers are chosen from the community. Allowing non-residents to become poll workers would quickly lead to national political groups sending partisan members across districts.

Population counts are created by the federal Bureau of the Census. Unless there's a constitutional amendment, that's a guarantee. Abd they're one of the last agencies we should fear about becoming politically corrupted.

“ Abd they're one of the last agencies we should fear about becoming politically corrupted”

The moment they have power worth corrupting…

If we're going with proportional voting, it should be based off the vote count and not just population count. A major issue I see is that most people just don't care or don't think their vote counts. These disconnected people make for a weak democracy where the people in power can basically use their indifference for the benefit of their power.

Australia has solved this problem with mandatory voting. Those who fail to vote are hit with a $20 fine. They generally have above 90% turnout in elections.

A lot of people here would still probably take the fine if it were only $20.

I don't think too many people would be upset if this meant wealthier people (who can't afford the $20) would be less likely to vote.

I suppose voter suppression or selective promotion is popular with most groups so long as it affects the "right" people.

Considering the rich have far more influence in general on how the general public lives, considering their positions in industry and economic power, it seems appropriate to balance that somehow.

This wouldn't address that issue at all. The people who want to have that influence would still choose to vote or participate in other ways. The rich, being a tiny minority group, wouldn't make much difference if they didn't vote at all in most elections.

How is it "voter suppression" for rich people to be more willing to drop $20 to avoid a trip to the polls?

> The founders of the constitution hated parties but ended up with the game that leaves only a two party competition. That's hardly a choice, it's a single bit.

I've come to believe that the only thing we need to change to have a three party system is to make all votes for bills in Congress to require 70%+. Today things can be passed with 50.00001% which is basically binary. With the required compromise and negotiation, a third party would have power to swing the vote for yea or nea and dilute the power of the duopoly. At first, it might just take form as a caucus until enough power is built to build a proper party with funding for candidates.

I know it is a pipe dream because the powers that be wouldn't want to give up their hammer. I think this is one thing that the founders got wrong. Having to build compromise could be good for everyone in the end.

Due to the filibuster, most bills require 60 votes (60%) to pass the senate. It hasn’t lead to more cooperation - it’s lead to a paralyzed government that can’t pass good laws.

A paralyzed government also can't pass bad laws. Considering how rarely laws are repealed, this is arguably a feature, not a bug.

A paralyzed government can’t pass required laws. The budget has to be passed every year. That will never happen with supermajority. No new programs, no cuts, just confusing resolutions. The debt ceiling has to be increased occasionally and if you thought recent negotiations were bad, supermajority would be worse.

A paralyzed government can’t pass good laws. All the problems in the country that would never get fixed. Current inaction is bad enough, but supermajority would never pass anything except the bland and disasters.

> The budget has to be passed every year. That will never happen with supermajority.

The budgets have been and will continued to be passed, with a sufficient amount of pork-barrel spending. Think of it as an extra cost of running a supermajority system.

Plenty of countries have some kind of supermajority system in place.

We've seen what happens when laws require a supermajority from the senate. The government moves incredibly slowly and new laws are rarely passed.

> I've come to believe that the only thing we need to change to have a three party system is to make all votes for bills in Congress to require 70%+.

So tyranny of the minority?

Why do members of the same party often disagree? I think we get a bit too wrapped up on the "two parties" thing as if there are only two opinions as well.

Proportional representation is great when the population is fairly homogeneous with similar political issues and goals, and you don't need a union of different independent regions and groups. The European Union would not work with proportional representation, and countries like Iceland would struggle with their very large difference between city population and country population.

The point of disproportional representation is to reduce the political power imbalance between of high population areas with low population areas. The alternative is to split up the country or union so that each unique area and demographic govern themselves in isolation. Few people want that outcome so a compromise has to be chosen. In iceland as an example, the combined country districts has a majority if they all band together, while the Reykjavík district is by size the absolute single biggest and has well above 50% of Iceland population. Its a compromise that while political power is still very much centered in Reykjavík, they can't blindly ignore the country population.

I'm not sure I understand the "why" here though. Why should you get more of a say because you want something different than the majority?

Why should the majority be beholden to the political view of the minority because of the geographic distribution of the minority?

Ask someone from an urban area any basic question about a rural area, and they will be clueless about some simple things. I once had a friend who grew up in Chicago ask me if a cow was a Buffalo because it was brown and he thought cows were into black and white. That’s a silly example but it applies even more so to more meaningful policy decisions that happen is rural areas.

The states in the US aren’t divided on urban/rural lines though. They are divided arbitrarily.

Someone from Hoboken, New Jersey has a lot more in common with someone from Brooklyn than the latter does with someone from a farm in rural upstate NY.

Exactly.

In theory this is not a big deal because of the 10th amendment and the states having legislatures that provide some level of urban/rural balance. In practice, it's more complicated.

Maybe, but someone from a farm in rural upstate New York is also quite different from someone from a farm in Georgia. Because of mass media and news, Americans aren’t necessarily attuned to their cultural differences.

Anecdote: my parents moved to the Virginia side of the DC suburbs in 1989. In 2018, they moved 50 miles to the Maryland side, to be near my wife and our kids. I moved around a lot between high school and now so I didn’t notice it. But my dad (he travels all over the developing world for his career) immediately noticed. (And they both hate Maryland, lol.) He can tell the accents are different. The way people make small talk is different. In his view (as a Bangladeshi and then a Virginian) people are less courteous. When he pointed it out, I couldn’t unsee it. Maryland is the southernmost part of the mid-Atlantic (NJ/DE/PA). Virginia is the northernmost part of the south. Even just looking at places 25 miles on either side of DC, the Maryland side has way more Jewish people and Catholics, and way fewer Asians. (Growing up in northern Virginia in the 1990s, I don’t think I ever met a Catholic. Apparently, Virginia is only 8% Catholic compared to 20% for Maryland.)

I have no reason to disbelieve your anecdote, but I think even if true, it’s a bit of a special case. Most Americans’ culture is determined by the metro area they live in (or lack thereof), rather than by state boundaries.

Having lived in both urban and rural areas, I don't think either has a monopoly on ignorance of the other.

Having lived in both urban and rural areas, I don't think either has a monopoly on ignorance.

FTFY

Sure, but the same is true of rural peoples’ understanding of urban areas.

Given that no policy can be perfect for everyone, why do we think that votes should be proportional to land area and not number of people affected?

It's a silly example, because it doesn't really apply to the situation at all, unless your friend in Chicago happens to be Tammy Duckworth.

Isn't the converse true as well? Rural people lack basic understanding of urban issues.

Because humans aren’t atomized individuals, and instead belong to communities that themselves have a political identity. Therefore there’s a multi-dimensional optimization space, which involves not just how to make the decision (majority vote, etc.) but where to make the decision. For example, if you had a national majority vote to decide Puerto Rico’s political status (independence or statehood), Puerto Ricans probably wouldn’t be happy about that.

There is a reason that virtually every country has some form of multi-level government. And in a multi-level government, non-majoritarian voting at higher levels can help protect the integrity of the multi-level system.

> For example, if you had a national majority vote to decide Puerto Rico’s political status (independence or statehood), Puerto Ricans probably wouldn’t be happy about that.

"Two in three Americans (66%) in a June Gallup survey said they favor admitting Puerto Rico, now a U.S. territory, as a U.S. state. This is consistent with the 59% to 65% range of public support Gallup has recorded for Puerto Rico statehood since 1962." https://news.gallup.com/poll/260744/americans-continue-suppo...

The point is of course not whether the national vote would happen to agree with what the puerto Ricans would want, but the fact the whatever they want (which may or may not be statehood, don't forget a lot of people there are against statehood) would be drowned out by the rest of the country, and despite being ostensibly democratic, that doesn't mean it (nation vote) is the best solution.

The majority of Puerto Ricans and the majority of Americans both support Puerto Rican statehood. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Puerto_Rican_status_refer...

The only thing stopping Puerto Rican statehood is the lack of majority rule in the US, and the fact that Republicans are heavily against Puerto Rican statehood. It's a partisan issue: "The majority of Democrats showed support for statehood for both D.C. (61.8%) and Puerto Rico (69.7%)" while among Republicans, only 26.7% supported D.C. statehood and 34.8% supported Puerto Rican statehood.

The majority of supporting Puerto Ricans is quite slim (especially compared to the national support). A couple percentage points lower and the majority wouldn't be in favor. So my point was that if you _determined_ the question in a national vote versus a local vote, locals might be quite upset about it (particularly those who lost - if it was a local loss, then they fit to participate and lost, if it was national, then they never got a say).

Although, if you're now switching to argue that the national opinion is _against_ (or at least the republicans would block it), then this actually excellently illustrates the original point that there are decisions which shouldn't be made nationally instead of locally!

> The majority of supporting Puerto Ricans is quite slim (especially compared to the national support). A couple percentage points lower and the majority wouldn't be in favor.

So? Majorities are often slim. Just look at US elections. The difference is whether you have majority rule or minority rule.

> Although, if you're now switching to argue that the national opinion is _against_ (or at least the republicans would block it)

I'm not switching, I'm just saying it's a partisan issue, and Republicans happen to be over-represented in the national government due to territorial representation, which is how they're able to block Puerto Rican statehood, against the wishes of the majority. And it's pretty obvious why Republican leaders want to block Puerto Rican and D.C. statehood, because that would likely lead to additional Senate and House seats for Democrats.

> So? Majorities are often slim. Just look at US elections. The difference is whether you have majority rule or minority rule.

Slim majorities mean the outcome of the election is not obvious - it's possible that the vote would have a different outcome.

> I'm not switching, I'm just saying it's a partisan issue

It illustrates the point well regardless.

conflating Puerto Rico and DC statehood is frustrating to me.

Puerto Rico should choose independence or statehood, and the Congress should approve either way. Continuance of the colonialist/protectionist status is shocking.

But D.C. was originally not supposed to have any citizens. Only federal government offices, foreign embassies, and monuments/parks/museums. Perhaps Maryland can reclaim part of the district, as Virginia did.

> But D.C. was originally not supposed to have any citizens.

Times change. That ship has sailed. It's the 21st century now, not the 18th.

Fair enough, but maybe we should allow Maryland to take back most of the rest of DC.

The "no permanent residents" rule isn't necessarily bad

This all makes sense as long as questions like “state hood” are a thing.

Us primates need not foist past spoken traditions and hallucinations on the future.

58% of Americans live in the state where they were born, and the median American lives 18 miles from their mom. Statehood absolutely is a thing.

It’s absolutely hilarious that we’re watching Supra-national unions disintegrate (how much longer will Scotland be part of the UK?) but some Americans think a unitary majority-rules government in a country of 330 million people is a good idea. Madness.

Why should the minority be beholden to the political view of the majority because of the geographic distribution of the majority?

Because it’s the majority, which is true regardless of geographic distribution?

If 10 people want A, and 3 people want B, how does geographic distribution even enter into the equation?

Are you suggesting that the minority should rule because of the majority’s “geographic distribution”.

And what do you supposed we do if the A that the 10 people want is for the 3 people who want B to pick their cotton for free?

The same thing you do if 3 people want 10 people to pick their cotton for free.

I can’t even tell what you’re advocating for. Minority rule? Anarchy? Democracy were you always win?

No system is perfect. Much control should be local. In zero sum situations, there isn’t a better answer than majority rule. That can be imperfect or even evil, but so can every other approach.

> I can’t even tell what you’re advocating for. Minority rule? Anarchy? Democracy were you always win?

Slavery, AFAICS.

You're not understanding. The "correct" people have the majority numbers now, so we should embrace the tyranny of the majority.

I'm suggesting that the baseline assumption that majority rule is some selection of "good" or "ideal" or "preferred" is at minimum misguided and at worst downright evil. Sprinkle in some geographic distinction and you edge much closer to the "evil" end of the scale.

Curious (not trying to be snarky), where and when did you grow up? Because I am grateful I was taught the answers to these questions in elementary school civics lessons

The simple answer is that there is no natural law that dictate that people work together. Getting people to cooperate involve compromises.

Taken to an extreme, would you want a global government that had proportional representation? Most of the worlds population is not located in the geographic location of north America. With large international agreements, should EU, US and China get one vote each, or should it be based on populations?

To take a other perspective, is populate based voting the best system? In the past we had systems based on wealth or families, with the concept being that fairness is about stakes in the political outcome. Why should anyone get a vote if they don't have a stake in the outcome, and if they do have a stake, shouldn't votes be proportional to that stake? Populate based voting makes more sense in time with military drafts where every individual has an identical stake in the political outcome.

Looking at the EU the answer is both more simplistic and more complex. The reason the majority is beholden by the minority is that otherwise it would just be the German empire under a different name. German votes get slightly less power than citizens of other nations, and in return we have a union. It doesn't make Germany powerless, as they have more representatives than any other country, which also make other people upset. Why should Germany get more votes than Luxembourg? Is a system of one country one vote more fair?

> In the past we had systems based on wealth or families, with the concept being that fairness is about stakes in the political outcome. Why should anyone get a vote if they don't have a stake in the outcome

I would think those with no/ little wealth have a large stake in the outcome of politics.

Exactly what are you advocating for here?

I am not advocating, and if I were to extract some form of advocacy from it it would be that cooperation generally require compromises in order for people to feel that it is worth it. Fairness is based on when everyone involved feel that things are fair enough to participate.

What "between the lines" stuff are you trying to find?

Both the EU and Iceland have proportional electoral systems, with districts having several seats. But the way seats are allocated to the districts in both systems isn't strictly proportional, with less populous districts having fewer electors per seat than the more populous regions.

I think you and OP are talking past each other. A purely proportional voting system is not a good idea for the reasons you mentioned. That's why a lot of countries including the US have a bicameral system: One where regions/states are represented proportionally and one where seats are distributed equally.

I believe OPs critic is wrt the district based voting system of the House of Representatives. Having a winner takes it all system per district seat is a really bad idea and just a result of a limited understanding of election dynamics at that time and some restrictions how election results could be communicated before the advent of telegraphy:

A proportional system forces states to first collect all votes from all districts (a huge task for a state like Texas when only horses and a few rail roads are available for transportation) then collecting and counting the votes at the capital of the state and then sending messengers back to each district to announce results. When each district calculates their winner independently this problem is alleviated.

Nowadays it's clear that such a system will inevitably create a two party system. The fact that the president is also elected by an electoral college (which in most states is also a winner takes it all system) further enforces an effective two party system.

Just a nit, strictly speaking, the electoral college is just a system where states must delegate the power to vote for president to a group of people (the expectation being that they should make an informed decision to further their interests based on facts on the ground in the capital). It's also a form of indirection: you don't vote for president, the best you can do is appoint people you can trust to make a good decision (similarly, there was originally a layer of indirection for senators, who were appointed by state legislatures, not by state vote). Of course, this is essentially abolished because people wanted more direct control over the government.

Regarding district level representation being obviously a bad idea - not necessarily. Since senators represent the state (and wasn't even voted upon directly by the people), representatives are the way local (populist) interests get represented. This only breaks down once when people start having general party allegiance (both at the ballot and in mind share), which I'd argue is itself caused by the fact that we vote directly on appointments which are far beyond our locality (senators but mainly the president), which then spills over to our choices of representatives.

Why should the house of representatives reflect interests of different districts? It's supposed to represent interests of the states. For matters that are only relevant to one district they should most likely be dealt with at the state level and not federally.

No, the senate represents the interests of the states. The house represents people (which is why they are for voted by citizens - even when the senate was appointed by state legislatures, and why different states have different numbers of representatives).

I'm not sure really what the question is. In practice, they are voted for by district, so they represent the people of the district...

> Its a compromise that while political power is still very much centered in Reykjavík, they can't blindly ignore the country population.

I don't understand arguments like this. This logic is symmetric! Can't Reykjavík residents equally claim that their interests are being "blindly ignored" by the rural population who rule them? Isn't there a "power imbalance" at work already? Why does cutting the population based on location make sense to "reduce the political power imbalance" but not by other demographic metrics like gender or age or religion which also correlate with political preference?

This argument[1] seems to take as a prior that not just any minority group, but specific minority groups[2] need to be given power disproportionate to its population? If someone tried to deploy this logic in favor of another minority group (Catholics? Men? Trade workers?) you'd agree that would be wrong, right?

[1] Which we all know isn't about Iceland at all.

[2] Suspiciously, always groups aligned with the person making the argument.

Iceland has multiple levels of government (national and municipal). A wide range of things are handled at the municipal level. Folks in Reykjavík can govern themselves by simple majority vote. What they need more than a majority for us to govern folks outside Reykjavík.

Location is special—because it’s special. It’s incorrect to think of it as just another characteristic of individuals. Humans live in their geographical surroundings, and location creates natural boundaries and limits on people. I’m from Bangladesh, which in my parent’s lifetime declared war on Pakistan—a country where people share the same race and religion—so it could govern itself instead of being a far-flung province. In that case Bangladesh actually had a slight majority of the combined population, but it wouldn’t have been any different if it had 1/4 of the population. The point was to make to make the voting more closely associated with the land.

> Iceland has multiple levels of government (national and municipal). A wide range of things are handled at the municipal level. Folks in Reykjavík can govern themselves by simple majority vote. What they need more than a majority for us to govern folks outside Reykjavík.

Again: Rural Iceland can govern itself at the municipal level. Folks outside Reykjavík can govern themselves. What they need more than a majority for is to govern folks in Reykjavík.

Get the point? It's symmetric! Why is one direction right and one wrong? Why do rural Icelanders[1] matter more in your calculus? If the population inversion flipped and there were fewer Reykjavíkers than outsiders, would you really be making the same argument to reduce the voting power of the rural population?

So we get arguments like this:

> Location is special—because it’s special.

Yeah, pretty much.

This is just a losing argument, logically, and you know it. This is like when left wingers try to go to bat for affirmative action as a permanent policy instead of a temporary workaround: it just doesn't work. We all agree that everyone should be equal, right? Right? So one person, one vote is the clear goal here. Trying to construct policy arguments around bad logic is poor governance.

[1] And, again, we all know we're not talking about Iceland.

> If the population inversion flipped and there were fewer Reykjavíkers than outsiders, would you really be making the same argument to reduce the voting power of the rural population?

Yes. I don’t know about the history of this in Iceland. But in the US, voter distribution helped Democrats for much of the 20th century, because rural voters were a key part of the FDR coalition. JFK won by just 200,000 popular votes, but over 80 electoral votes. Biden had a popular vote margin of 4.5 points compared to JFK’s 0.2 points. But JFK had a bigger electoral vote margin than Biden. Obama, who did well with rural voters, could have lost the 2012 popular vote to Romney and still won the electoral vote. Republicans weren’t complaining about the electoral college back then.

> Yeah, pretty much. This is just a losing argument, logically, and you know it.

It’s the winning argument. We have an entire world based on location. People fight wars so they can align voting with location. The minority view on this issue are the individualists, why everyone else attaches so much importance to soil.

> People fight wars so they can align voting with location.

This is a needless digression, and it's clear you won't change your mind. But FWIW, this is 100% backwards. Wars are over "location" because by definition it's not possible to fight a war to win voting share or opinions[1]. War can win territory, period. That's all it does. So we've traditionally aligned our political boundaries with whatever lines were drawn up by the last conqueror to come through the region.

That's a bug! Democracy is the fix for this disaster. You're claiming the disaster is a feature!

[1] It is possible, however, to use the tools of war to affect demographic distributions. We call that "genocide", and I really don't think you want to be aligning your logic in this direction.

> This is a needless digression, and it's clear you won't change your mind.

It’s not a digression. “Democracy” isn’t just about voting mechanisms. People all over the world care about self determination—governing whatever they consider to be their own society.

> Wars are over "location" because by definition it's not possible to fight a war to win voting share or opinions

“Opinions” aren’t what glue people together. And the things that do glue people together are locational, for the same reason wars are. As long as humans exist primarily in meat space, geographic boundaries will also naturally reflect people’s families, neighbors, workplaces, recreational places, etc. Particular boundaries might be redrawn, etc., but the relevant boundaries will be geographic. The average American lives only 18 miles from their mother. 58% of Americans live in the state where they were born. 1 in 6 have never left their home stage.

> Democracy is the fix for this disaster. You're claiming the disaster is a feature!

Democracy doesn’t fix the problem, because democracy presupposes that a particular group of people have consented to being part of a body politic on certain terms. “I trust you enough to participate in joint decision making with you” is a threshold issue, before you get to “what is the mathematical technique for making a decision jointly.”

The European Union does already have proportional representation. In addition, reducing the size of multi-member districts (see Spanish electoral system) and increasing the threshold (Germany) are ways to reduce the number of very small parties in Parliament.

This is completely backwards. The most charitable interpretation is you're thinking the entire country would have proportional representation?

You can still have proportional representation on a state level. This allows minorities who might be 10% or less of the population to have some representation. Instead we have situations like North Carolina where the GOP won by 1-2% but has a supermajority or in 2018 in Wisconsin where the GOP got 38% of the vote yet got a supermajority.

The other issue here, particular to the US, is that small states have disproportionate power. No one really predicted 200+ years ago that one state would have 40 million people and another 500,000 yet both have equivalent power in the Senate.

So for the European Union, proportional representation would most sensibly be done on a country-level, not over the entire EU.

> Cheating with elections is so much easier with district voting than proportional representation.

It's the opposite. A single compromised location can tip a in a national popular election. It almost becomes an arms race of cheating.

With district based they can only affect their district.

That is not true. National popular elections still rely on the same voting booths with known numbers of local voters. A location with a thousand voters turning out a million votes would be instantly detected and investigated.

Someone wanting to swing a national popular vote fraudulently would need to compromise tens of thousands of ballot boxes to steal on the order of ten million votes -- a much harder ask than compromising a hundred ballot boxes to swing three states in the Senate/Electoral College or gerrymandering twenty districts in Congress.

> A location with a thousand voters turning out a million votes

Easy to detect for a small town, not for a big city, where there are literally millions but who knows how many actually vote. In fact I could cite the exact kinds of statistical reasoning for certain counties in the recent election, but you wouldn't accept that.

I don’t think not “democratic” is the right phrasing. Democracy is a multi-dimensional design space. I think it’s more accurate to say that district based voting prioritizes a value (connection between a constituency and single, independent legislator) that’s become less salient in the age of mass media and powerful political parties.

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