[EM] a question about apportionment

[⸘Ŭalabio‽]

Note:
	I got swamp with work a few weeks ago, but since Kristofer Munsterhjelm went through the trouble of writing me, I should respond.


	2011-04-18T18:46:16Z, “Kristofer Munsterhjelm” <km_elmet at lavabit.com>:

>> 	The ideas of districts is that the politicians are accountable to the people in their districts.  If a proposed dam would flood a district, the Representative would try to stop it.  With proportional representation, none in the legislature may try to save the district.

>> 	With district-based systems, groups which are not at least a plurality somewhere receive no representation.  It is good to have an house of proportional representation and a separate house of district-absed representation.

> 	If politicians are only looking out for their own hides (which seems to be a prerequisite for what you're saying), then you have two situations:

> 	- In a district-based system, you would have one representative that is very concerned about the dam, and (n-1) representatives that aren't at all (because the district's votes don't go to them).

> 	- In a PR system, you would have n representatives that are all somewhat concerned about the dam, because the people who would be in the district all affect the composition of the council.

> 	Thus, on the average, you would have the same result; only that in one case, all the concern for the dam is concentrated on a single candidate whereas in the other, it is spread throughout.

	People are lazy.  Being somewhat interested probably would not make the politicians act.  A politician whose district is about to go underwater if a proposed dam comes to be will be very motivated.  That politician might talk the other politicians into not building the dam.

> 	So I don't see any advantage to single-member representation here, and quite a lot of disadvantages: A Single-member district method requires either an independent redistricting commission or equivalent, a program that will draw sometimes-unusual regions, or that the people endure gerrymandering, whereas multimember proportionality gets rid of this problem.

	We have algorithms which draw nice districts.

> 	There are of course reasons for not having too large multimember districts, such as that it's hard to rank 10 candidates (or to know their positions),

	¿Why rank?  ¿Why not use assetvoting?

> 	and that feedback becomes too weak, but the good news is that gerrymandering runs into diminishing returns pretty quickly, so small multimember constituencies would be good enough. AFAIK, gerrymandering an n-member district using a Droop proportional method would only let you swing 1/(n+1) of the vote in the very worst case. Even that disproportionality can be handled - at least on a party level - by something like Schulze's STV-MMP suggestion, if exact proportionality is very important.

	Assetvoting does not require ranking and is proportional.

	I would prefer an house for the states (each state would get get a score (20) senators chosen proportionally via assetvoting), an house for the districts (chosen via scorevoting), and an house of proportional representation (chosen via assetvoting).  I would prefer the districts to be drawn without regard to stateboundaries (the senate represents the states), but if you are married to districts fitting in states, we can split the states into districts totally 548 (Wyoming has 1 548th the population of the country) for the nation.  The president would be elected via scorevoting.