[EM] Fwd: The Global Fight For Electoral Justice: A Primer

[Someone]

> It
> doesn't make sense to me to aim for pure centrism in assemblies,
> Congress, etc. -- you lose the ability to _directly_ represent
> specific concerns, and instead aim for some kind of prototype
> politician-bot who can serve all constituencies.
>

Congressional districts are currently single-winner, so they should still
elect a "centrist" candidate (where "centrist" = "candidate closest to the
centroid of popular opinion within that district"; "representative" is a
better description than "centrist".)  All single-winner elections in a
representative democracy should elect the person who best represents the
entire population that votes for them (not half of the population).

This argument is valid for multi-winner districts/elections, though. For
instance, it could be argued that having all the winners be centrist clones
is "representative", but in this case I agree that a better system would
divide up the population into N groups and elect N candidates who are good
representatives of each group.  I haven't found a resource that explains
which systems do this, and am trying to simulate different systems to find
out.

But it's unlikely the general populace will be very satisfied with it
> in the long run, since many concerns and ideas will never be directly
> represented in such a system. And I doubt that it produces the best
> politics, because it lacks the tension/disruption that makes
> innovation possible.
>

Multi-member districts and MMP would both help with this problem, without
trying to elect local representatives who aren't actually representative of
their entire district.

Note that none of the above includes reference to IRV or STV.


I know IRV is bad, but is STV bad, since it's only for multi-winner
elections?  I can see that IRV is bad because it elects polarizing
candidates rather than centrists, but maybe that same mechanism makes STV
good at splitting up the population into N groups, as I said above?
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