[EM] STV+AV (Raph Frank)

[Raph Frank]

On Mon, Feb 6, 2012 at 2:55 PM, David L Wetzell <wetzelld at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nope.   I'm advocating the use of the Hare Quota, not the Droop Quota.

Ahh ok.

So to be guaranteed 2/3 of the seats, you need 2/3 of the vote.  But
if some voters vote for non-concentrated parties, then you can get
your 2nd seat for 1/3 more than you "need".

> I think one can then get a "major party" in power by a plurality vote and
> give their a priori selected leadership enough procedural controls to get
> things done without a majority.  What this does is give 3rd parties the
> right to decide which major party is in power so that neither can corner
> this branch and leverage their control of it to get an unfair edge in other
> elections, which in turn has a further multiplier effect of making more
> elections more competitive.

The thing about PR is that the "King maker" role for 3rd parties is
over-stressed.  It assumes that 2 and a half parties is the way things
go forever.

However, if smaller parties have excess power, then the major parties
will fragment.  A balance occurs where both types of parties have
roughly power corresponding to their numbers.

> It's even harder with a Hare quota to gerrymander.

True.

> Yeah, so I'm saying it might be advantageous to push for going back to the
> Constitutiona mandated 2-stage approach if we were to dramatically improve
> the 1st stage via the use of 3-seat LR Hare.

Changing the constitution is very hard, you need people to be
reasonably sure that they want to change things.

That seems pretty hard, when many/most people would view losing their
right to elect the Senate as a decrease in democracy.

> You could set it up so that the State House of Reps chooses the Senator and
> then the  state senate approves of the chosen senator by at least a 40%
> rate.

Maybe, it depends on the Supreme Court's viewpoint.