[EM] Gerrymandering

[Forest Simmons]

On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, Blake Cretney wrote:

> Joe Weinstein wrote:
>
> > By the way, usual PR presumes that voters want to be proportionally
> > represented ONLY according to political party, not other criteria,
> > including geographic proximity.  That's as mistaken as the present
> > one-rep one-locality fiasco.  Also by the way, we would get much
> > better 'PR' using PAV applied to individual candidates, not parties.
>
> In a closed list system, people have to be represented by a political
> party, but the political party can represent anything.  It can represent
> ideology, geographic region, race, height, or IQ.  Parties generally
> represent ideology because that is what people generally care about in
> terms of deciding who represents them.  But if we all were primarily
> concerned about geography, then parties would represent geography.


Joe meant that the beauty of PAV is that it can take into consideration
all of these kinds of effects simultaneously.  STV can too, but not as
efficiently.

Forest