[EM] IIAC. Juho: Census re-districting instead of PR for allocating seats to districts.

[Juho Laatu]

On 14.6.2012, at 23.45, Michael Ossipoff wrote:

> If the district's population is off by one person,
> that's nothing compared to the amount by which even the best PR system
> will put it off, when allocating seats to fixed districts.

Could you give me an example (or a formula or some other exact definition on what goes wrong). Do you compare adjustable districts to fixed districts or single-member districts to multi-member districts?

> And I don't criticize your preference for keeping Largest-Remainder,
> for reasons of historical tradition

It's ok to me with or without historical tradition.

> 1) Our single member districts aren't as small as you think they are.
> As of 2008, our House of Representatives Congressional districts each
> contained about 699, 000 people.

I talked about single-member and multi-member districts in general.

If we combine all single-member districts into one multi-member district, we will have ideal representation density. That must be at lest as good as the representation density of any of the single-member districts. (representation_density = number_of_representatives / population)

Isn't it so that also if we combine some of the single-member districts into one multi-member district, we tend to get at least as good representation density, if we compare e.g. the sum of deviation from the ideal representation density over all people?

Juho