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"if you still value the notion that local communities should be able to have their collective power represented"

Your town assembly can take care of the concerns of your town.

Your regional assembly can take care of the concerns of your region.

Your National Assembly can take care of the concerns of your nation.

We can get rid of gerrymandering and still have different levels of government, each devoted to a particular level of localism.

Indeed, having one level of localism interfere in the affairs of another level of localism seems like a violation of encapsulation, in the sense that a software developer would understand the concept.

Here in NZ (but also in Germany and I'm sure other places) we use MMP - it's pretty simple - take your existing setup and halve the number of representative seats - we all get 2 votes the first vote chooses a local representative for your local seat. The 2nd vote is for a party, each party provides a list of candidates before the election, you count up the parties who have won the local representative seats, then hand out the same number of list seats so that the proportion of seats in total (list and representative district) match the proportions of the party vote - some places have a minimum threshold (3-5%) for a party to be included in that count.

Germany is a little bit more complicated as we also take into account proportionality on the level of each state. And you (at least in general) more than double the size of parliament. But the gist is correct.

I haven’t ever heard of this. Seems really interesting. Thanks.

Another thought I’ve had for a long time: why not just lift the limit on Congress? My understanding is that Congress set a law to cap it (as opposed to the constitution specifying it) Which made sense 100 or even 50 years ago when members of Congress needed to be physically present to vote in DC.

But today in a world of the internet, video conferencing, etc. it seems like that limitation is arbitrary. Much smaller districts would exists. Making gerrymandering harder. Making a the house look a lot different than the senate. It would make the House more like … a mayor who writes and votes on laws in DC instead of locally.

The Constitution sets a minimum district size, but not a maximum. The minimum is 30,000 ppl, the average now is over 700,000 ppl.

Congress could easily double the size of the House, and should. That and a law requiring that districts have maximum compactness/population density would I think solve many of our problems with running a democracy.

> But even neutrally drawn districts give more power to the party that is less concentrated geographically.

There's a certain appeal to that too however. As long as the advantage/disadvantage isn't overwhelming anyway. Perhaps it would help to encourage more diverse communities or give a disadvantage to political groups that isolate themselves while giving an advantage to groups who demonstrate they're both willing and capable of living and working in diverse environments. It might even help to reduce the amount of political and cultural divide.

> The gist is, split states into a smaller number of larger districts, each of which gets multiple representatives. The representatives are allocated proportionally to the vote in each large district. So if the district has 5 representatives, party X gets 63% of the vote, and party Y gets 37% of the vote, then party X gets 3 members and party Y gets 2 members.

Note that in order for this approach to be coherent at all, you need to abandon the idea that it's possible for a voter to vote for a candidate for office. The only kind of vote this system acknowledges is a vote for a political party.

This isn't actually the case. See either STV or MMP which allow the combination of proportionality and voting for individual candidates.

The above example is not STV nor MMP so the person you are responding to is strictly correct.

The concept of proportionality is not even well-defined for STV (a problem shared by several other aspects of STV). In the example of my parent comment, where two parties are fielding candidates for 5 seats, party X receives 63% of the vote, and party Y receives 37% of the vote, STV will happily assign all 5 seats to party Y. The assignment is completely dependent on factors that weren't specified in the example.

(As a side note, Wikipedia's toy example of "STV in a party system" considers a case where three parties field candidates for 5 seats and receive 48%, 45%, and 7% of the vote, resulting in those parties respectively winning 2, 2, and 1 seats. This is about as bad in terms of proportionality as any other system [Party A has 686% of Party C's votes and 200% of the representation; Party B has merely 643% and 200% of the representation], which isn't a surprise; 5 seats don't allow for proportionality unless you're lucky enough to see a 63-37 split in the electorate. But if party-based proportionality is a concern, the correct answer is fairly obvious - the three parties should receive 2, 2, and 0 seats, with one seat going unfilled. It is interesting to me that no one ever seems to contemplate this as a possibility.)

I agree and I don't understand why some people are drawn to to STV. Among its problems is the simple fact that it is complicated. By contrast, simple approval voting (given 50 candidates, vote as much as you want and the top 5 candidates will win) will produce results just as accurate, and the math is much simpler -- every voter can easily understand what is going on.

STV is pretty awesome to follow though, speaking as an elections nerd. Figuring out where the transfers will go entertains me enormously every election here in Ireland.

This is the only reason to study STV, to look at the interesting patterns. Likewise, I'm fascinated by a knowledge-graph pattern (I'm not sure if it has a name) where we use something like k-means clustering to discover less popular candidates who belong to the same cluster of voters who voted for the top candidate. I think the results would deliver good government, in that it would surface the maximum number of non-extremist ideas. But I think the math is too complicated for most people to follow, and so I think it would lack legitimacy. So I don't bother recommending it, except as a thought experiment regarding alternate systems.

I was drawn to STV in the past because I liked the level of control it gave voters, having them expresses preferences over parties and candidates. But now I'm more inclined to agree that its too complicated.

I don't think that the approval voting scenario you suggest is good though. If I want to elect five candidates, I want 5 candidates that represent the diversity of the population. But it seems to me that your suggested method will elect 5 candidates of the largest voting bloc, not at all what we want.

As I read the above example, it leaves it undefined which proportional system is in place. As such, the statement is strictly incorrect, because it makes a general statement which isn't true of proportional systems generally.

If you read the example, you must have noticed that there is no way to interpret it as describing a system of single-transferable-vote.

The example is very explicit that votes are cast for parties and all of the benefit of receiving a vote goes to the party for which it is cast. As such, the model is only coherent if there is no such thing as voting for a candidate.

The example given mentions voting for parties, but doesn't give explicit indication how this works. Are the votes directly for parties or for candidates from those parties? It doesn't say. I suspect that you see it as explicitly talking about votes directly for parties, but I see it leaving it undefined.

But really, what exactly the original example intended to convey is a pointless pedantic argument I'm not getting into.

The crucial point is that you absolutely can have multi-member proportional districts where you vote for specific candidates. So to someone who advocated for a such multi-member districts, the contention that you have to give up voting for individual candidates simply isn't true.

Your 'rounding error' solution just moves the circus to ballot access. Here in Michigan the parties decided that since they are well organized and have gotten people on previous ballots, they should have lesser requirements for getting on future ballots, so it isn't really hypothetical that it would happen.

Just increasing the number of representatives would have some impact on gerrymandering.