[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Juho wrote:
> The idea of an appropriate size circle around candidates home (or home 
> district) sounds like a pretty safe and simple approach. That gives also 
> the voters a natural explanation to why some of the familiar candidates 
> are on the list and some not.
> 
> Dynamic districts may also be seen to fix something important. If the 
> district borders are considered artificial the circle based approach 
> moves the borders further away, and as a result also the problem of 
> artificial borders (in the sense that one can not vote for and be 
> represented by one's neighbour) may mostly fade away.
> 
> One more approach to this would be to provide "perfect" continuous 
> geographical proportionality. One would guarantee political and 
> geographical proportionality at the same time. One would try to minimize 
> the distance to the closest representative from each voter and make the 
> number of represented voters equal to all representatives. In short, 
> distribution of representatives would be close to the distribution of 
> the voters (while still maintaining also political proportionality).

There would, of course, be limits to the guarantee of having both 
political and geographical proportionality at the same time. If your 
immediate vicinity have candidates whose opinion you completely disagree 
with, one of geographical proportionality and political proportionality 
will have to sacrifice part of itself for the other. As I've said 
before, in that case I think political proportionality is more 
important. In the long run, the effect might self-stabilize, if for no 
other reason that if there are many Y-ists in an area, one of them is 
going to notice and want to become a candidate.

I'm not quite sure how to do perfectly continuous geographical 
proportionality. My "two linked ballots" idea would probably work, but I 
think we can do better by using the distance information directly. Just 
how, though, I'm not sure.