[Election-Methods] Partisan Politics

[Jonathan Lundell]

On May 18, 2008, at 9:05 AM, Fred Gohlke wrote:

> re: "Political proportionality is the one that people most often  
> discuss since the election methods/systems typically provide  
> regional proportional automatically (e.g. in the form of single seat  
> districts and forcing all voters to vote at their home region,  
> without asking about the opinion of the voter)."
>
> Should I infer that there is a basis for opposing regional  
> proportionality?  I ask because it never occurred to me to question  
> the wisdom of "forcing all voters to vote at their home region".   
> Indeed, even the idea of "force" never occurred to me.  I am of the  
> opinion that voting is a right and that one's home region is the  
> most logical place to exercise that right.

The objection is to "spending" all of our opportunity for  
proportionality on regional proportionality; we're looking at the  
fundamental argument for PR.

J S Mill makes the case better than I can: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645r/chapter7.html 
  [John Stuart Mill: "Of True and False Democracy; Representation of  
All, and Representation of the Majority only", Chapter 7 of  
Considerations on Representative Democracy (1861)]

But of course I'll take my own shot at it, through example.

California has an 80-seat state assembly, with 80 somewhat  
gerrymandered single-seat districts. Ignoring the subtleties of quotas  
and the mathematics of PR, let's say for convenience that each seat  
represents 1/80 of the voters of the state. As a voter, I'd like to be  
able to form a voting coalition with enough like-minded voters to  
elect a representative. Depending on how strongly I feel about which  
issues, how likely is it that I'll find enough like-minded voters  
within my district to send a representative to Sacramento? Not very  
likely, unless my some stroke of luck my interests happen to be  
aligned with the major party with a (probably gerrymandered) majority  
in my district.

A Republican voter in San Francisco has no chance of direct  
representation in Sacramento, nor does a Democrat in Redding. Nor does  
a Green or Libertarian anywhere in the state, even though both parties  
have in aggregate enough members to justify 1/80 seats.

A typical STV proposal for the California assembly has multimember  
districts of 5-10 seats, preserving a degree of geographic locality at  
the expense of raising the threshold for minority coalitions. Notice,  
though, that if the state were treated as a single 80-seat district,  
there'd be nothing under an STV system to prevent voters from forming  
geographically (vs party or issue) based coalitions. The difference  
with that these geographic coalitions become voluntary, based on  
common geographically based interests; they're not imposed (forced) on  
the voters by the district system.

So, "forced" in that respect.