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Comment by metaphorm | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's problematic. The duopoly system forces a large number of voters into "lesser evil" stances, or at least forces them to narrowly focus on their one pet issue and vote for candidates based only on that issue.

a system with more choices has more opportunities to find candidates that you agree with on multiple dimensions of policy, as well as hopefully finding more candidates that you can respect as human beings.

the post you're responding to is proposing a kind of non-geographically constrained proportionally allocated representational democracy. so, instead of voting for just one of the 2 candidates in your congressional district (which is likely gerrymandered anyway) you can vote for anyone in the country and that person's voting power in congress is proportional to their popular vote count. that's not dissimilar to a lot of corporate governance systems (voting shares of common stock widely distributed).

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I'm not sure how this addresses my objection. Sure, more choices means more opportunities to find candidates who match me perfectly. And if you allow literally anyone then that candidate is me. So you might as well not elect candidates at all, just give every citizen a vote in the legislature instead.

the way it addresses your objection is that the congressional voting power is proportional to popular vote received.

unstated in the OP, but my supposition (reasonable, I hope), is that there will still be a limited number of congressional seats so that candidates below a certain popular vote threshold will have 0 representational power. in that case it is still in the best interests of voters to vote for someone who is likely to clear the threshold and not throw their vote away by voting for a perfect ideological match (i.e. themselves).

this seems fairly elegant to me except that it might lead to a neglect of the provincial concerns of low population density areas (which was a major concern of the founders), but on the plus side, those rural voters can at least find an ideological match even if they don't find someone to represent their geographic interests.

If there was some minimum threshold, then yes, my objection goes away. But that wasn't stated.

I think there are plenty of possible variations. I've been thinking that representatives above a certain threshold actually get seats in the legislature and committee positions, etc. But any one person would have the freedom to vote on every piece of legislation (if technically possible) if they wanted.

In all likelihood, a few people would get most of the votes, because they're competing for attention from a national audience. Therefore, it is possible that local issues get marginalized, so I think it would be necessary to give people multiple votes. That way they can split their vote and choose both national candidates and local candidates.

We can debate all these details when we get to the constitutional convention.

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