chunes@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
In my opinion there shouldn’t be districts at all. Too much potential for fuckery.
The secret is that you need proportional elections within each district. What also implies that they should be bigger…
Or, in other words, just copy Switzerland and you’ll be fine.
(Personally, I’m divided. The largest scale your election is, the most voice you give to fringe distributed groups. I can’t decide if this is good or bad.)
In my country Germany the system is that every party above 5% can send representatives according to their percentage of votes. Then there are districts, who have to have size of approximately 250.000 inhabitants with German citizenship, who send a representative of the party with the most votes.
It’s a bit simplified of course.
The point of representatives is that they each represent a small portion of the population. If you remove districts, then who are house members representing?
Indeed that’s the intention, but in practice gerrymandering often leads to the opposite outcome where urban cores are divided up with large rural areas to suppress one side’s votes.
See Utah’s districts for the most obvious example of this. It would be logical to group Salt Lake City in one district, Provo + some suburbs in another, then the rural areas in the remaining districts. But instead the city is divided evenly such that each part of the city is in a different district, with every district dominated by large rural areas.
You can have a electoral division of your country without gerrymandering. Cf most european countries.
Most European countries do not use first past the post, but proportional representation with multiple elected representatives per voting district. There is far less incentive for politicians to gerrymander with proportional representation.
One of the main complications in the US is the racial mix. Looking at party lines and geographic boundaries is an over simplification
Say 20% of the population is black, and the state has five reps. Two neighboring cities each have 30% black population, and enough population to have two of the five reps. The rest are dispersed in rural areas. Do you draw that each city gets one rep? Or do you draw such that a district has a majority of black residents, with funny boundaries to accommodate the geography?
The former means that you will more likely end up with a white representative for both cities and the voice of the black community are not heard in the legislative body. The latter means that you have now gerrymandered to ensure a group gets a voice they deserve.
This is the real pain in the ass about the whole thing. Some level of drawing stupid districts is needed to create good. Pure geographically created boundaries will only cause segregation if we want minority groups to have an equal voice in the legislature.
But, people in power tend to fuck everything up.
When everyone votes along party lines, why does it matter if you have local representation ? Barely any of them actually vote how they think their constituents would want them to vote, they vote however the sorry tells them to vote.
This is a very cynical point of view that would make it even less possible for independants to be represented inthe House, remove town halls from the system, and therefore make the entire system even less democratic and remove the entire point of a representative democracy.
There is zero benefit to this.
Proportional voting would actually make smaller parties be able to have representatives, breaking up the 2 party system and promoting more diverse point of views. You can also have mixed systems, with locally elected reps for a part of the house, and the rest of the house being filled in a manner that the end result is proportional to the global voting share
I’m not saying getting rid of local representation is the solution, necessarily. In fact, I personally think the opposite is true and we need more local representation.
It’s just with the current system, local representation is kind of useless and supports gerrymandering and corruption.
If I were in charge I would demand political parties to disperse completely and local representatives be the only people on the ballot to go ahead and make decisions for the people who voted for them. Vote for the person not the party.
Proportional representatives. Of a party gets a 30%of the votes, it gets a 30%ish of the seats.
The arguably huge downside of this, is that it cuts the direct line from you to a representative. That undermines democracy, because it undermines your capacity to be heard.
If the “direct line” is theoretical anyway it just doesn’t matter anyway.
I don’t have any citations sorry, but I did look into this about 15 years ago for reasons I no longer remember, and what I learned is that in most places with large overall populations that uses a system like this, where leadership is not voted for independently of local representation, the representatives overwhelmingly vote along party leadership not on the community they represent.
Not sure I’m explaining it well sorry
Does your representative ever done something you asked for?
qevlarr@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
Proportional representation is the way. X% of the vote means X% of seats, no shenanigans
nemo@piefed.social 4 weeks ago
No shenanigans except the party picks the rep instead of the voters. Maybe you have a party you trust to do that, but I don't.
qevlarr@lemmy.world 4 weeks ago
You will have more parties. Internal party democracy is not that important then