[EM] why ANY pr disempowers minority voters.

[Juho Laatu]

> On 17 Jan 2016, at 19:12, VoteFair <ElectionMethods at VoteFair.org> wrote:
> 
> On 1/17/2016 4:00 AM, Juho Laatu wrote:
> ...
> > One intermediate approach would be to elect two
> > representatives from each state, one majoritarian winner
> > and another one meeting some proportional criteria to make
> > the system proportional overall. Maybe this kind of
> > approaches that try to implement both federal type
> > requirements (of independence and local representation) and
> > national proportionality requirements at the same time
> > could be acceptable one day.
> 
> This approach is somewhat similar to what VoteFair ranking does on a district-level basis, where each district elects two representatives (somewhat proportionally), and then additional seats are filled in a way that increases the degree of overall proportional results.
> 
> Here is a link that explains this aspect of VoteFair ranking:
> 
> http://www.votefair.org/calculation_details_partial_proportional.html
> 
> Richard Fobes

Also the referred method seems to have two representatives per district (or at least in some districts). The method then proceeds to elect balancing candidates from a statewide or nationwide list. My proposal above differed slightly from this by electing the second representatives of each district so that the overall result will be proportional. No additional representatives are thus needed. The reason I did it that way was to respect the ("federation oriented") ideas that 1) every district should have exactly the same number of representatives (= no national/state representatives from randomly picked states/districts), and 2) at least one of the representatives of each district is elected purely locally (= the votes of other districts have no influence). I guess it is up to the US citizens (and politicians) to decide how much weight they want to put on this kind of arguments (proportionality, independent decisions, equal number of representatives).

Juho