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Comment by erentz | Hacker News Reader

Why do these voting comparisons always only discuss electing single winner? A big part of the change needed is to introduce more proportional representation. Asides from moving strictly to an MMP style system, one way is to enlarge the districts so that each district elects (e.g.) five representatives using STV. Don't get me wrong, IRV is 10x better than what we have today, but only makes sense for the president or senate where there can be only one winner each election.

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In this context, it's interesting to note that the US Vice President was originally not a running mate to the President, but the runner-up (2nd most electoral college votes).

This theoretically allows more proportional representation by, essentially, preventing 1 group from electing their representatives of choice to (in this case) 2 positions (ignoring an overwhelming majority & certainty of it)

I'd be interested to see how effective a "runner-up-selection" methodology would be if applied in a more general case.

Look at what is happening in Brazil right now. They use this system. The minority party was able to impeach Dilma Rousseff and take over the presidency. I would expect lots of these attempts if the US used this system as well

I know what you mean. I live in a jurisdiction with optional preferential voting electing 5 candidates using STV. It's fantastic and does tend to elect a house which is broadly representative of what people actually wanted.

It's certainly not established that proportional representation is superior to good single winner systems.

http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html

> It's certainly not established that proportional representation is superior to good single winner systems.

Yes, it is. Proportionality in the legislature is a key determinant of public satisfaction with government amongodern democracies. See Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.

Being way more immune to gerrymandering should be reason enough in my opinion. And besides, most of the things on the "con" list are only problems in some kinds of proportional representation I doubt we would ever use in the US (party list system).

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