[EM] Gerrymandering and PR

[Narins, Josh]

2 things.

Uno> Senators aren't really representing half the State. I don't see why
you'd want to divide the State.

Dos> It has occurred to me that PR districts for urban areas and single
member districts for rural districts has a certain appeal.

The Republicans might get a 2nd winner in NYC, for instance (they only win
Staten Island, currently) if the whole 8 million were voting PR slates.

Other people mentioned how in big rural areas, the sheer mechanincs of
widespread campaigning encourage single member districts. This holds
especially true for upstate New York.

On the other hand, it's impossible to focus media campaigns on single
Congressional Districts in New York City. I see ads for people running on
the other side of town, which are different districts, regularly.




-----Original Message-----
From: Forest Simmons [mailto:fsimmons at pcc.edu]
Sent: Wednesday, March 20, 2002 5:01 PM
To: Adam Tarr
Cc: election-methods-list at eskimo.com
Subject: re:[EM] Gerrymandering and PR


On Tue, 19 Mar 2002, Adam Tarr wrote:

<snip>

> Ideally, I think that there should be no single-member districts for
legislative
> appointments.  The disadvantages seem to outweigh the advantages.  But in
> certain cases (US Senate for example) there doesn't seem to be another
option.

In the case of the US Senate since there are only two senators per state
it should be easy to limit gerrymandering: it's always possible to slice
the population in half by a straight line cut, for example. [Watch out for
the knife if there is an odd number of people in your state.]

Forest



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