[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Raph Frank]

On Mon, Aug 25, 2008 at 10:46 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<km-elmet at broadpark.no> wrote:
> Another trick related to one that I've referred to before is this: give each
> voter an additional fractional vote where the candidates are ranked in order
> of distance from the voter. "Continuous" districting, if you want. The
> fraction depends on how much you want locality to matter. You'd also have to
> link the two votes' weight somehow, otherwise it just becomes minisum
> distance, which isn't what we want.

You could pick a party and it counts as ranking all party candidates
ordered by distance from the centre of the current constituency to the
centre of the constituency that they are standing in (or perhaps their
home).  This could then be appended to any local override rankings.

This allows opinion (party based at least) to matter combined with distance.

Ignoring logistics of the count, you could have 'free constituencies'.

Each candidate can register in any number of polling stations covering
at most N seat's worth of population.  (N=5 might be reasonable).

The candidate then appears on the ballot in all those constituencies.

The voters could then vote for any candidates who are on the ballot in
their local polling station.  There would also be a method for ranking
all the rest of the candidates.

This could include candidate lists, spaces for write-in candidates,
distance based orderings and whatever else seems reasonable without
making the ballot overly complex.

This completely eliminates the problem of gerrymandering, while still
having local candidates.