[EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racialminorities

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Aug 17, 2008, at 11:34 AM, James Gilmour wrote:

> The evidence from countries which presently have single-member  
> districts but are considering reform of the voting system, is that
> electors want a balance between proportional representation of the  
> main political groups AND guaranteed local representation.  It is
> difficult enough to convince them that with STV-PR they really can  
> get both with modestly sized multi-member districts.  It would be
> impossible to persuade them of the benefits of PR reform if all the  
> members were to be elected at large (UK House of Commons = 646
> MPs, Scottish Parliament = 129 MSPs).  STV-PR was once viewed in  
> this utopian way in the UK (in the 1880s), but now it is promoted
> by practical reformers who are more attuned to the concerns of real  
> electors.

A related problem here in California is the small size of our state  
legislature, relative to the state's population. The California state  
assembly (our lower house) has only 80 seats. Compare that to the UK's  
646; California has a population 60% of the UK's. California has 5-6X  
the population of Scotland, but less than 2/3 the seats.

As a consequence, California's single-member Assembly districts are  
already quite large, so that it's prohibitively expensive for most  
candidates to mount a viable campaign. Five-member districts would be  
to my way of thinking an absolute minimum (more would be better), but  
without increasing the assembly size, such a scheme would lead to  
enormous districts.

(For non-US readers, state-house district sizes vary widely (wildly)  
from state to state. California has nearly 500K residents per seat;  
Maine has ~8500.)

Some PR reforms have proposed a modest increase in the size of the  
Assembly (eg from 80 to 120), but, while desirable in itself, this  
would to the difficulty of implementing PR at all, given that any  
change gets resisted.