Hacker News Reader

We are suppose to vote for people, sadly far too many people vote along party lines regardless of the qualities of the actual people involved.

View on HN

That is still different than voting for a party. In proportional representation you would cast your ballot for e.g. The Democratic Party. If they got 54% of the vote, they would get to then appoint 54% of the representation for that district. In this way, a very heavily Tea Party district would still have representation for the democratic minority, just less.

> In proportional representation you would cast your ballot for e.g. The Democratic Party.

You are confusing "proportional representation" (which is a continuous-valued property of many election systems) with "party list proportional" which is a particular election system for achieving a high value of proportional representation.

Notably, Single Transferrable Vote is a system in which people vote for candidates as they do in FPTP elections (except using preference ballots), but which is designed to acheive proportional representation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com