[EM] a question about apportionment

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

⸘Ŭalabio‽ wrote:
> 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.

Well, I don't know what to say except that that particular failure 
doesn't seem to happen over here, where we do have multimember 
districts. Nor have I heard of anything like that even in the places 
where you'd expect the local link to be most weak - countries like 
Israel where the entire nation is a single district.

Perhaps this weakening tie is instead an advantage - that PR weakens 
local ties to the point that pork barrel politics become limited, but 
not to the point that the reps don't care if there's a flood somewhere 
on the outskirts of their district. I have no evidence for that, though.

> 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.

Only slightly, by visiting translation sites on the web :)

And thank you. I hope it's accurate, as I have to learn the second 
Norwegian variant quite soon. (Yeah, we're so strange we have two 
versions of our language.)

>> 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 (...)

> 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.

That's a problem, yes, but it seems some distortion is unavoidable with 
single-member districts. It's kind of like rounding off and then adding 
up versus adding up first and then rounding off. You know what my 
solution would be, which would let you have more natural borders *and* 
representation.

On an aside, though: wouldn't this benefit to the Republican party 
disappear if you could get true multiparty rule? Or would you need both 
Range/Asset *and* split communities to counter the duopoly?

>> 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.

That's unavoidably true, yes. Over here, our parliament is large enough 
that every region gets more than one representative, but doing that in 
the US would result in a very large congress - at least 821 
representatives would be needed if you were to use Webster's method of 
apportionment.

>>> ¿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.

Couldn't party discipline reduce Asset to the sort of prespecified 
ranking that was used in Fiji? If so, the results (as we know) could 
become quite unintuitive.

>> 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.

The voter doesn't need to care about cycle-resolution, and he doesn't 
have to rank every candidate. For that matter, a cardinal ballot could 
easily be translated into a ranked one or be used in a system like 
Cardinal Weighted Pairwise.

>> 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.

Even the best election method will only pick from candidates that run 
and that can make themselves well known. If what matters is the will of 
the people, then the people themselves are more fit to determine what it 
is. Of course, they don't necessarily know much about actually 
implementing the changes they want, hence Socrates's argument against 
sortition back in Greece. This might be mitigated either by having the 
true popular house be only one house (instead of the entire 
legislature), like with my idea above, or by making use of technology to 
separate the task of specifying (what do we want) from implementing (how 
do we do it). Where such a separation is done by a bureaucracy, the 
bureaucrats' own ideas of "what do we want" tend to color the solutions 
they come up with, but hopefully, technology could let such 
implementation groups be more agile.