[EM] a question about apportionment

[⸘Ŭalabio‽]

	2011-05-07T08:29:34Z, “Kristofer Munsterhjelm” <Km_Elmet at Lavabit.Com>:

> 	The country I live in (Norway) has PR with multimember districts, and I haven't heard of problems like that. Large projects usually get the required analysis before they're built, even if they would only impact part of a district if they went wrong. (Actually, I'd say there are too few large projects of the kind I think is important, but that's another matter and related to the particular nature of Norwegian politics more than PR.)

	In multimember districts, no politician might care about some people getting flooded out of their homes in some corner of the multimember district.  If the United States of America would do that, it could have 1 legislative house with 548 seats.  Wyoming could use scorevoting to get its single legislator.  California could have 66 seats decided by assetvoting.

	By the way your English is great.  I am terrible at languages.  I studied Español, Esperanto, and Deutsche.  The only language I could learn was Esperanto:

	¿Ĉu vi scipovas poroli la lingvon internacian Esperanto?  Mi skribas Esperante esperante, ke vi povu kompreni min.

> 	You have algorithms that draw contiguous equipopulous districts. However, they're completely arbitrary as far as natural communities go. The districts might split a city or town in two, or might pass right through a representative's house, or any number of such effects.

	Splitting communities, interestingly enough is fairer than compact districts in the United States of America, splitting cities into shards, with each shard reaching out into the surrounding country:

	In the United States of America, because of plurality and Duverger’s Law, we have 2 parties called the Republican Party and the Democratic Party.  In the 1930s, the Democratic Party, under the leadership of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, aligned itself with the labormovement.  The Republican party aligned itself with big business.

	It would make sense for the majority of Americans to vote Democratic.  Indeed, for over a decade, the Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress and the Presidency.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the longest serving President in American History.

	The Republican Party settled on a strategy of getting people to vote against their interests by using religious issues:

Republican Politician:
	“¿Did you here about the 9-year-old girl who got an abortion just because it was the product of her father raping her and carrying the baby to term would certainly kill both her and the baby?    If you elect me to office, I shall make children molested by their fathers carry their rapebabies to term whether it will kill them or not.”

	Once in office, these Republican Politicians give taxbreaks to the rich and profitible corporations as well as open-ended no-bit contracts to the company of the Republican Vice President.

	Democratic voters slightly outnumber Republican voters, but the distribution is not even:

	Democratic voters tend to be wealthier, better educated, and more urban.  REPUBLICAN voters tend to be poorer, less educated and rural.

	Large cities can can have as much as 90% of its voters voting Democratic.  Rural areas tend to vote about 60% for the Republican Party.

	The SplitLineAlgorithm because it splits cities into shards and mixes the 90% Democratic voters of the cities with the 60% Republican Voters of the countryside Gives the Democratic Party a slight majority just as it has in voters.  Algorithms generating compact districts such as the 1 Brian Olson created, by creating compact districts, would give the Republican Party a slight majority, despite it being a slight minority party.

	As an example, let us take California.  Most Californians vote Democratic.  Under the SplitLineAlgorithm, most of its Districts are Democratic:

	http://rangevoting.org/SSHR/ca_final.png

	With an algorithm optimized for generating compact districts, most districts are dominated by Republican voters:

	http://bdistricting.com/CA/20090523_111549/CA_ba.png

> 	Now, that's probably unavoidable if you're dealing with single-winner districts, since we can't expect that the size of natural communities will fit well with the size of the district, but this problem is attenuated with multiple winners, because each district can fit more people. For instance, here in Norway, each multiwinner district corresponds to one of our natural "counties" (first level administrative regions), of which there are 19.

	Since states vary in population, a minority population would never get the 1 seat Wyoming gets, but could easily get 1 of the 66 seats California would get.

>> 	¿Why rank?  ¿Why not use assetvoting?

> 	I think it's better that the decisions are close to the people than far away. The point of representative democracy is that we can't make every single decision ourselves, so we need someone to handle the daily maintenance - to reduce the variety, so to speak - but the representatives have their own objectives that may differ from ours. Usually, that's considered part of the cost of having representative democracy in the first place, but if we don't have to pay that cost, why pay it?

	With assetvoting, one chooses those who create the legislature.  One can give them instructions.  One can even take vacation and run and be one of those choosing the legislators, and then, after one helps to create the legislature, go back to work.

> 	Asset is better than Plurality (and probably SNTV), but I'm not convinced it's better than ranked multiwinner systems. The closest thing seen to Asset itself - Fiji's voting method twist where each party provides a prespecified "negotiating order" through the ranks provided - often gave counterintuitive results.

	It is only 1 level deep.  One gives instructions to the person for whom one votes.

> 	It could *work*, but I still think it's too heavily engineered. The states also aren't just a bunch of interesting boundaries on a map, they're administrative units, and I think it makes sense to elect within the administrative units, so I wouldn't reshape the states or have the national districts cross their borders.

	Fine.  We can have the Hose of Representatives be 548 seats.  We still have to decide whether to use districts or proportional.

> 	My own heavily engineered solution would probably involve Condorcet for the president (hey, I like Condorcet :) ),

	With Condorcet, one must rate many candidates and then one must resolve cycles.  I prefer scorevoting.

> 	STV or some ideal monotone multiwinner method for the House,

	I prefer assetvoting.

> 	and then if I'm to have three houses, the third would consist of people picked randomly (because they're very hard to corrupt), refreshed say, a tenth every 1/10 of the cycle decided for that house, and that period could be coprime to the others (i.e. odd number of years). Perhaps I'd use Condorcet (or a cardinal method) for the Senate, though Gohlke's triad system would be even more interesting to use; but at that point it's getting really overengineered.

	Interesting ideas.  I shall have to think about this.