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Comment by cherryteastain | Hacker News Reader

There's a far better solution to gerrymandering than these creative ways to draw lines on a map. It's called proportional representation, and it's used in many countries in Europe (usually combined with the d'Hondt formula). FPTP leads to far more silliness than PR and therefore countries using PR have healthier political discourse and systems. Sad that the UK rejected the proposal to abolish FPTP in the early 10s.

Edit: changed this tautological sounding sentence - "None of the countries using PR suffer from the sillinesses arising from FPTP."

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Yes, but we have to consider what is politically feasible or plausible.

The US is not going to switch to proportional representation at any point in the near to medium future. It's just not going to happen. There's zero public awareness or desire -- right now we're having a hard enough time just making the much smaller incremental improvement of ranked voting.

On the other hand, there's no strong tradition of any kind behind drawing districts. If someone really can come up with a fair, objective way of doing it, it's far easier to see it getting adopted. Gradually at first (state by state), and then possibly nationally. Still difficult, but within the realm of possibility (unlike PR).

They're not switching to a new apportionment formula that doesn't politically benefit the party in power either

That's why I said gradually and state-by-state.

Honestly I think a main way it could be adopted is imposition by the courts -- we've seen increasing cases of "stalemates" where states can't seem to produce maps acceptable to the courts at all. So courts do have the ability to say, "if you can't produce a satisfactory map, we will, and this is it."

I'm not saying it's easy or quick, I'm just saying it's in the realm of the possible, unlike PR.

Some states used to have at-large seats in addition to districts. But the court basically killed that in the 60s. There might be a clever legislative solution that would still be in the bounds of the 'one person, one vote' requirements the court set.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At-large#U.S._House_of_Represe...

> None of the countries using PR suffer from the sillinesses arising from FPTP

Frankly, I'd be surprised if they did. It seems much more likely that they'd suffer from the problems of PR instead.

I get what you mean, looking back that sentence reads like a tautology. I guess what I should've said is "FPTP leads to far more silliness than PR and therefore countries using PR have healthier political discourse and systems"

I wanted to add some additional thoughts on what the problems of PR might be...

  - Clusters of minority populations tend to not get as much representation, because they are but a small voice in a bigger ocean of voices. 
 
  - Representatives can't focus on representing a smaller geographic area, including field offices, outreach, constituent services, etc as easily, because they have to represent a much broader geographic area.

  - A lack of community ties, as representatives are representing a broader geography, the representative is less likely to know the names, places, and small cultural quirks associated with the communities they represent.

Please feel free to add comments of your own with additional downsides. I am generally a fan of proportional voting systems, but I think it is important to have an honest discussion of the pros and cons, as there are ways to build representative systems that balance these concerns- but we have to be aware of and acknowledge them.

I think these are all minor quirks that can be addressed in some ways. The biggest "quirk" of PR is that you tend to get coalition governments, which isn't always so easy to strategize on as a voter.

Yes, I acknowledge that their are ways to address them, but I wouldn't call them minor.

I meant compared to getting coalition governments that most voters didn't want.

Coalitions aren't a PR quirk. UK uses FPTP and has had several coalition governments, most recently in 2010-2015.

The US House of Representatives currently has an uneasy coalition masquerading as a FPTP majority.

> Clusters of minority populations tend to not get as much representation, because they are but a small voice in a bigger ocean of voices.

This would be true if not for gerrymandering. Look at minority populations in states like Texas and Alabama and then look at the distribution of state and federal representatives. These voters are packed and cracked and would have a greater voice in a proportional system.

> A lack of community ties, as representatives are representing a broader geography, the representative is less likely to know the names, places, and small cultural quirks associated with the communities they represent.

My house rep lives 100 miles away from me in a town with very different demographics than mine. I am very confident that he does not know the cultural quirks associated with my community, except that he thinks that we are all cultural marxists indoctrinating children to be communist heathens.

I agree that gerrymandering destroys the community advantage of geographic representation.

I generally follow a political philosophy that the larger the geography of the political body, the fewer laws they should make, and the less those laws should impact daily life of most individuals. For example, (in the USA) the Federal government shouldn't make as many laws as the State, and the laws they make should focus on Federal issues, like national defense and interstate commerce. States shouldn't make as many laws that impact daily life as the counties and cities do, etc. Likewise, more taxes should be levied and paid (as a proportion, not necessarily in aggregate) locally than nationally.

Sounds like subsidiarity? "Subsidiarity is a principle of social organization that holds that social and political issues should be dealt with at the most immediate or local level that is consistent with their resolution."[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity

I am also in favour of proportional voting systems.

But with a party list system, there can be a perception that the party machine has more control over who gets elected. If a party can realistically expect a vote share of 20-30%, and ten candidates are being elected proportionally, then the top two candidates on the list are pretty much guaranteed a seat, whether or not they work or campaign very hard. This puts a lot of power in the hands of the people who decide the party list.

But to be honest, FPTP has a very similar problem with safe seats.

These are all valid issues.

Germany addresses them by doing a FPTP pass and then filling the remainder of the parliament such that the overall parliament has PR according to a second, independent vote given at the same time. This creates some other issues again, but works surprisingly well for the most part.

Worth mentioning that the Germans didn’t come up with this system - it was the allied forces: US, UK and France, drawing on their experience on the deficiencies of their own systems.

It was successful enough that it also served as a blueprint for the Eastern European countries once the Soviet Union fell.

Always puzzles me why these three countries never took the opportunity to learn from their very own experiment.

> Always puzzles me why these three countries never took the opportunity to learn from their very own experiment.

It's very difficult to change the existing system because the people currently in power are there because of the way the system is built, so any change will almost by definition be disadvantageous for the people who have the power to change it.

Because they had a unique opportunity to design a government off a clean slate, whereas to change their own governments would mean working through the requirements of each individual government.

Which in the US is actually 51 separate governments consisting of the Federal government which only has enumerated powers, and also the 50 sovereign states.

I heard it was a bit of a compromise since the Germans were used to PR, but felt it had shown weaknesses in the Weimar period, but the US and UK preferred the familiar to them single winner district system.

New Zealand has a similar system - the MMP (mixed member proportional) system we use is better than FPTP but I suspect vote-ranking systems are better than MMP.

In NZ, citizens vote for a candidate in each of the 60 electoral districts and so they get the representative that they vote for. Similar to Germany? Also our citizens vote for a party, and the other 60 seats of parliament are filled from lists of candidates (one list created by each party). The 60 seats are allocated to candidates from the lists, selected so that that we have the same percentage of members in parliament to match up the percentages of party votes by citizens.

New Zealand gets members of parliament that were chosen by the party. That is a problem because those members have no constituency: citizens can't really vote out someone (because a party selects some of its members).

I personally think that a critical feature of democracy is being able to vote out someone we dislike. I'm sure we can think of undemocratic countries where they would love to vote out a disliked politician. MMP fails here: citizens can't vote out some of our members of parliament.

the party list gives disproportionate (force multiplied) political power to a few key players in each party.

The second problem is also a feature: we often get small parties that get outsized influence. To get 50% control of parliament multiple parties join together in a coalition. Coalitions are an emergent property of MMP: and coalitions create some terrible incentives for parties to do misrepresentative things.

Outsized power is misused particularly by one celebrity politician with 5% of the population voting for him. The guy is a tool.

In theory a small party should be able to focus on a single cause. In practice, The Green Party gets 10% of the seats but it then refuses to form a coalition with our "conservative" party. The Green Party gives up its minority power, because the thei politicians are too strongly greenie and they won't compromise. The idiots fail to make green tradeoffs against economic policies. They are idiots because the planet is strictly worse because of their political failings.

New Zealand avoids the worst excesses of a two party system. However MMP is no panacea: politicians do the same political things.

In theory a left wing and a right wing party should form a coalition together to run the country. In practice such a coalition can't form.

Humans are shit at making good compromises.

I'll just note that the above has a lot of opinion with respects to NZ politics that a lot of other NZers would disagree with.

Also with respect to "can't vote out a list MP" I think this is exaggerated. "Bad" MPs are very common in constituencies in many countries. They are often hard to get rid of since they have local support and control their local party organisation. Whereas a list MP can be pushed down or off the list placing even if they cannot be made to resign their seat.

You can't vote out a constituency MP if 2/3s your neighbors like him. Or will always vote for his party no matter who they put up as a candidate.

The first point indicates a lack of familiarity with the actual history of PR systems.

The resulting problems are actually the opposite: very small clusters of voters typically end up wielding a disproportionate amount of power. That's because PR invites people that are ideologically affine, to run separately, effectively campaigning against their "friends". It's obviously better, for any given politician, to be the head of a 5% party than being a "rank&file" in a 30% one. The resulting fragmentation has to be later recomposed with alliances to form a government, which will go on bickering constantly; and it often results in executives that can count on very thin majorities, increasing overall uncertainty to bad overall effects (instability, higher borrowing costs, etc). Such executives then have to spend inordinate amounts of political (and often monetary) capital, appeasing very narrow interests. One of the most infamous expression of such dynamics is the Italian experience from 1948 to 1994, but also France before Napoleon III, Weimar, etc.

This is why modern PR systems end up with forceful thresholds, where a party with less than 2 to 6% is kept out of parliament - but that's literal, direct disenfranchisement, not particularly better than the indirect one resulting from FPTP.

IMHO the better approach is FPPT but with ranked voting to reach 50%. This reduces the worst distortions of FPPT (i.e. "winners" literally hated by 60-70% of the electorate), while promoting a balanced approach to minority interests.

> The resulting fragmentation has to be later recomposed with alliances to form a government, which will go on bickering constantly;

I mean what are political parties under FPTP other than alliances to form a government? Bickering is rather common within them.

Democratic politics always requires a broad coalition of different interests and groups to assemble a majority. I'm not convinced voting system changes that much, but tensions may erupt in different ways under different systems.

> Bickering is rather common within them.

"Within" being the key word. It's a completely different level, believe me.

The last 6 years of UK political life have been exceptional, and the overall sentiment is that they were pretty bad. They were also absolutely run of the mill from a PR perspective: a new executive every few months, elections every 3 years or so, a constant fight to reconcile fundamentally un-reconcileable positions, extreme public brinkmanship, etc etc. PR will fix nothing of that, it will only make it worse.

I would point out that some of the issues you've called out are particular to a parliamentary system. The USA forms executive governments differenty. The closest analogy would be the speaker of the house, where the USA has already seen significant infighting recently.

Where I think a broader range of parties would benefit the US system is reducing the degree by which measures and bills are passed and opposed along consistent party lines. With more parties, there would be coalition building that would encourage more negotiation and cooperation.

The US House Speaker was voted out primarily by Democrats, not Republicans. There were only a handful of Republicans that voted to remove McCarthy. It took the Republicans a while to get enough voted to replace him. Certainly plenty of infighting in both Democrat and Republican parties, but the Speakership contest was the entirety of the House Democrats allying with a very few extremest House Republicans.

Yes, that's useful information to those who aren't familiar with the situation but I would say that the way the Democrats voted in lockstep is a great example of the partisan lack of compromise that a two party system encourages.

Indeed and it’s also good to not look at the grandparent comment and draw any sort of false equivalence here. The sort of problems grandparent describes certainly do exist in PR systems, but GP is describing a system that gets it something like 90% right vs FPTP which is completely and utterly broken beyond repair

> - Representatives can't focus on representing a smaller geographic area, including field offices, outreach, constituent services, etc as easily, because they have to represent a much broader geographic area.

There are lots of practical reasons why geographical constituencies make sense. But nobody ever questions them as the natural way to group voters in elections. I've always wondered what politics would look like if constituencies were based on other criteria. For example, age group, profession, gender, marital status & number of children, or income-bracket.

One way to combat the issues you bring up is to add more members to the House of Representatives. Keep the same districts, but have each district elect five members.

A cluster of a minority population might be able to elect 1 of 5 members, instead of being shut out.

Representatives would still represent the same geographic area and have the same community ties.

The main argument against is the difficulty of running the House with ~3000 members. There isn't a room big enough, and there isn't time for all to get their 5 minutes to speak on each bill. That said, there is no constitution requirements for either. Changes would have to be made to accommodate.

> - Clusters of minority populations tend to not get as much representation, because they are but a small voice in a bigger ocean of voices.

This is largely solved by the districtized version:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-member_proportional_repre...

In fact I had been writing up a little paper about another system like this, but I've been busy with other things.

Interesting! Sort of like MMP, except that each representative still has a "home district."

I think any system which has complications is going to seed distrust today.

For instance because you have the electoral college in the US you have the possibility of the electoral college going in the opposite direction of the popular vote. An event like that reduces the mandate of the winner.

If a PR system or single transferable vote or something like created events that were hard to explain on the news that's trouble.

U.S. house districts are like 700k persons. The local community knowledge is already not happening

What are those though?

I strongly disagree. Its not just the ratio that matters, but whether your representative is geographically close to you.

The American ideal is NOT just that you have a Representative, but that Representative knows YOUR community.

Proportional representation could result in all my States Representatives coming from LA or SF, but not the rural areas.

Ideally, I'd like Representatives that I'd have realistically met before in normal day to day living in the community. We need it representative for every 25,000 people, in my opinion. and that representative coming from my local community of 25,000 or so people.

I don't disagree, but the actual situation in America does not match this ideal at all.

It absolutely does not meet this ideal...ever since the capped the number of Representatives to 435 in 1918...a travesty against the Constitution, in my opinion. I don't care if it looks silly to have a stadium of reps. Look a this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_congressional_ap...

Our House should go back to something like 1 per 75,000.

“Looks silly” is putting it lightly. That would only increase the already ridiculous level of dysfunction that your government suffers from, and would require vast procedural changes to even get back to those levels.

You provide no evidence for your claims.

More representative, more locally bound, less tied to corporate interests because you don't need to raise that much money to run a campaign for 20,000 citizens you represent. That means instead of spending half their day, every day, fundraising, they can attend to business.

I see this the opposite way. In a proportional system, I can usually vote for someone from my community, and they have a reasonable chance of getting elected. In a system with single-representative districts, this is often not possible. I would have to choose between candidates with no chance of getting elected and candidates outside my community.

For many people, the most important communities are not based on geography. And even if your geographical community is important to you but you live in a city that elects multiple representatives, single-representative districts may prevent you from voting for your local candidates.

Also, proportional systems are often not fully proportional. You can guarantee some geographic representation by combining local administrative units into districts that elect a reasonable number of representatives each.

It's also an incredibly effective way of getting fascists elected - who can then use their platform to gain legitimacy and support. I look at Europe and see fascist parties gaining seats in every country - except the UK, because in the UK FPTP will ensure they never get one. Even UKIP, never won a seat, despite being hugely influential populists.

UKIP won a seat in the 2015 general election, and previously won one in a by-election. They were also extremely successful in achieving their goal of getting the UK to leave the EU - the conservative manifesto promise to hold a referendum was directly due to the threat from UKIP.

Disenfranchisement is a double-edged sword. Those parties prosper on self-victimization, and the best cure for that is to see them co-opted in actual government. Once voters realize they're just as bad as everyone else, the spell is broken. If you never let them in, they'll continue to fester outside, in the real world.

Yes. And to paraphrase Lee Drutman's take in Breaking the Two-Party Doom Loop: far-right parties in the EU tend to get about 10% of the vote. And in a way that's bad (they get seats in parliament!). But in another way, it's good: they can't claim to be "the voice of the masses" when only 1 in 10 people votes for them.

Winning seats proportional to a party's vote share grants them legitimacy and support exactly in proportion to the support they already have and that got them elected.

For actual decision-making power, they need a parliamentary majority, which by design requires the support of a majority of voters.

I hope the UK system isn't quite so rigged as to deny any seats even to a party that gets >50% of votes.

The existing parties in the United States have already shown to be vulnerable to entryism, so I'm not convinced this makes a difference.

Many of those "fascist" parties (or right-wing populists / conservative nationalists / whatever you want to call them) are similar to US Republicans. The difference is that their support is 20% and not 50%, because proportional representation leaves room for other right-wing parties.

Lol no. The front national makes Republicans look like bleeding heart liberals in comparison. Talking about deporting actual citizens if they are brown or Muslim in Europe is common for those semi mainstream parties (in the FNs case, they came second in the past 2 elections). Even Republicans never talk about stripping citizenships of immigrants and focus on illegal immigrants (not because they love immigrants, but because they know that talking about stripping the citizenship of millions is lunacy in the US). Same for tons and tons of other policy points, like calling for closing mosques in France, the AfD in Germany, etc.

Again, Republicans are (and it's weird to say) literal model examples of diversity and minority inclusion if you compare them to the front national more or less 100% white christian party.

No, fringe fascist parties that scrape by with preferences are just rookies, and the GOP are the professionals. The GOP has way more subtle, systematic, and effective ways of making people’s lives worse. They’ll bang on about hot-button issues to get constituent support, but they mostly still know how to say the quiet part quiet. Rookie conservatives don’t.

Fringe? You realize the FN got 40% of the votes in presidential elections multiple times in France, and is more or less the main "opposition" party? And also controls tons of local governments? Talk about Americans exceptionalism lol, how is a party that is the main opposition and and that was founded by a literal neo Nazi (marine's dad) on a clear "make France white again" agenda better than "subtle GOP tactics"??!?

I'd love to know by what distinction Suella Braverman or Mark François does not count as a fascist.

Regarding the "alternative vote" referendum in the UK: the voting system (also called "ranked-choice voting" or "instant-runoff voting") is an improvement to first past the post, but it's worth noting that it is not proportional representation and would do little to dissuade gerrymandering.

I don't think PR would work for the US, at least in its most common(?) form where people vote for parties and each party has a list of candidates.

A big problem with Gerrymandering is that it favors extremists. When a district is competitive, a candidate must appeal broadly to people of various political positions. When a district is artificially created to cater to party X, a candidate only has to be selected by party X, because then they're practically guaranteed to win. Thus candidates who are more loyal to party X is more likely to be elected, regardless of how they're viewed by the general population.

PR has the same problem - someone who's at #1 position of Party X's list is as good as elected, and the position is determined by internal party politics. Thus, the top positions will be filled by those who always toe the party line and never compromise.

I don't hear all that much about gerrymandering from Britain. And the referendum to abolish FPTP was IIRC not to abolish single-winner districts.

Although I agree PR is better. The German version also even keeps the districts if you really like them.

While PR seems good in principle if we look at the actual outcomes they don’t end up so great.

Whereas FPTP systems are a roaring success?

I live in a PR jurisdiction. Please do correct me if I’m wrong but you sound like an American whose idea of being open-minded is to consider alternative voting systems as an engineering interest yet still can’t bring yourself to actually consider the experience of other jurisdictions. If my country, that I’m fairly fond of, moved to FPTP, it would at the very least cause me great anguish, and I’d strongly consider leaving. It’s quite clearly a far worse system, but please do keep your head in the sand.

Unless you have an electorate wide multi-member electorate (not as common as proportional systems rare) you will require geographic electoral boundaries to be drawn.

The UK’s AV referendum was not for proportional representation but instant runoff voting for single member electorates. Which is a better system but in the UK in 2011 clearly would benefit the Lib Dems much more than actual multi member electorates would.

Sometimes people slide into Windows discussions telling people they should just switch to Linux instead.

That might on some level be right, but it's completely unhelpful.

USA operates under the political delusion that geographicallynlcoalnareas are politically unified.

You say delusion but I can tell your politics with far far better than random accuracy just by the city you live in. State legislators do actually deal with issues local to the district despite them being drawn increasingly weird.

I don't think we should base our political system on the assumption but I don't think it's unfounded. It's tough to want to have the makeup of my state legislature reflect the will of the population at large while making sure when the pool is distributed my district gets a democrat because anything else would be insane given the political makeup of the area.

Yeah I consistently hear people say "well if we have proportional representation then you won't have access to your representative who is beholden to your needs specifically." My federal district has 600k voters. My house representative lives 100 miles away from me and is a complete asshole who regularly publicly attacks my demographic. I'm sure not able to take him to a baseball game to share my political concerns, let alone get him to care if I send a letter.

No, but, say, areas in general have different concerns. E.g. setting a national minimum wage based on what people in cities want is a big problem for employers who are in lower-cost areas.

The area covered by my federal representative is quite large. It contains significant areas of abject rural poverty, some small cities, as well as multiple large universities and their associated college towns. This area does not have meaningful uniform concerns.

but that is a failure of the current system after Congress passd a law to fix a number of representatives in the house. There used to be a much smaller proportion of citizens to representatives than there is today. The excuse they used to fix the number was that it was ridiculous the number of individuals that would be in the House, but personally, I don't care if they have to hold it in a football stadium---- I want a representative that I might have met at my local coffee shop. That's the ideal and we need to get back to it.

Sure, and that's a problem. It is true that uncapping the house and ending up with like 15,000 representatives would achieve a bunch of goals and IMO be a significant improvement, but I personally find this less likely to happen than to change from a geographic model of representation.

Probably, but all this does is lead to more of what we have now: No trust in government because government is far away. No trust in your representative because they are some mega-rich millionaire (or hangs with them) and not only have you not met them, they don't even care about your hometown.

And think of this. Today House members spend all their time mooching for donations, because to get elected requires a BUNCH of money. That money is increasingly dominated by money outside your district. If we have a Representative for every 20,000 citizens for you 15,000 number, that means you can run a small campaign for very little money. Heck you could just knock on doors for no money.

THAT takes a lot of power away from moneyed interests.

Also, 331,000,000 citizens / 50,000 citizens/rep = 6,600 reps

To me, the distance to government doesn't really affect my trust in government.

I agree that uncapping the house would improve things, but I do not think that it is fundamental to improving things.

You can still have those at state level, or even lower, by grouping counties.

The hill people from Appalachia deserve to be represented by someone local. The low lying coastal communities in the outer banks also deserve to have someone that understands them, rather than someone from NYC. The border towns in Texas are better represented by someone from there, rather than someone from Ohio. There is some value to local representation, it doesn't need to be all in.

Romania for example has a hybrid system: it's "first past the post" first and foremost, so people get local representatives, but all the unused votes that would otherwise get wasted (both winning and losing ones) are then put together in a big national pool and then you have the second round of MPs appointed because of that pool. That way popular vote matches the percentages in the parliament, but you also have local representation.

As someone who lives in the Outer Banks I'd much prefer a random person (our state is 50/50) than the gerrymandered bullshit we deal with now. It doesn't help that the local pool business guy (true story) is our representative when he runs unopposed because of extreme gerrymandering.

Id just use sortition. Someone who didn't want to run for office, is perfect.

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