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Comment by user3939382 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately fighting with bad cops is like fighting with a rude low-level customer service rep. It may be true that they suck, but the ultimate source of the bad situation is the result of intentional decisions by people wearing nice suits somewhere, who through many layers of beauracracy, hired these low-level people to do their dirty work.

The whole State at this point is oriented against the People. Fighting the police is at best very inefficient, even when you're in the right. This whole neocon/neolib uniparty and corporatocracy running our country has to be ousted first. Local level policy will follow naturally from that.

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> This whole neocon/neolib uniparty and corporatocracy running our country has to be ousted first.

IMO the most direct and safest route to that outcome is relentless and brave advocacy for election reform. Duverger's Law holds that first-past-the-goalpost-winner-take-all virtually guarantees a party duopoly. It may take a constitutional amendment, but proportional representation is the only way that could happen. All other fixes are useless band-aids or dangerous.

Multi-party system is no guarantee either. Usually a newcomer party cannot rise quickly enough and by its second or third term will be completely assimilated by the system.

I'm originally from a country that has proportional representation. Let me tell you - it's a total disaster.

One serious problem is actually the law you mention - in proportional rep there's a plethora of parties, most of whom have no chance of ever governing or influencing policy. Two-party states are better in that the population can punish party A by voting for party B and vice versa. In a many-party-state, some people stop voting for party A but they split their votes between B, C, D, and E, none of which are effective in opposing A.

The other serious issue is that each party has a completely unaccountable and opaque system for deciding on a list of representatives. Getting on that list presents wonderful opportunities for corruption for bad politicians.

I now live in first-past-the-post Canada and it's so much better. I have an actual politician who is motivated to help me when I ask and read my letters because a couple of thousand votes can swing the local election; whereas before I was a faceless, undifferentiated citizen and went completely ignored.

> The other serious issue is that each party has a completely unaccountable and opaque system for deciding on a list of representatives.

I'm in a FPTP, two-party country, and strongly favour PR. But definitely not a PR system based on party list. That looks like the worst of all possible worlds, including FPTP.

But how else would you do it though? If the party list is chosen by the people, every voter has to elect hundreds of politicians; or else you need to stratify the country along location or some other dimension and have every stratum vote for one politician. AKA FPTP.

Multi-party constituencies; which entails either many more representatives, or much larger constituencies, both of which are a problem.

STV (ranked preference); STV usually means multi-member constituencies.

AV/Instant Runoff; that's what I favour. It doesn't require huge constituencies or lots of representatives. It's not really PR though.

What I find objectionable about party-list is that the parties choose the candidates, so you can't have independents. The parties also rank the candidates, so you vote for the party, not the candidate. And the party machine can bury a disfavoured candidate at the bottom of their list. I want voters to be able to remove a useless representative that the party wants to keep, without actually assassinating him; you can't do that with party list.

> I'm originally from a country that has proportional representation. Let me tell you - it's a total disaster.

Your former country may be seem a disaster to you, but it has been studied fairly extensively, and, among modern democracies, proportionality is very much associated with both positiive measures of function and with positive perceptions of function from those who are subject to them.

> Two-party states are better in that the population can punish party A by voting for party B and vice versa

In a mulitparty system you can pubnish any party by voting for any other party, whereas in a two party system you can only punish part A bv voting for party B, which means a strategy that makes both parties look worse but the other one by slightly more is a winning PR strategy. The results are predictable.

> The other serious issue is that each party has a completely unaccountable and opaque system for deciding on a list of representatives.

That's not a product of proportional representation, its a product of one particular system of achieving it, “party list proportional”.

Most PR advocates in the US (or Canada) are advocating systems with by-district elections, which mean you still have locally-elected by-name specific representatives, either Single Transferrable Vote (almost always this in the US) or Mixed Member Proportional.

Voting for party B only punishes party A if it increases the chance that A loses an election to B.

Which seems like a no-brainer, but I found most of my erstwhile fellow citizens voting not for B but for B, C, D, ad infinitum.

Because parties B - Z are now tiny parties, they get no momentum, and nobody votes for them... because nobody else votes for them.

Leaving a huge voting block for A, who happily keeps ruling regardless of being unpopular with all but 30% of the population.

Better to have two parties that are balanced on a knife edge, and they have to perform or they lose.

I'm reading though your responses trying to figure out what mysterious force is present in this hypothetical proportional representation country that prevents a majority subset of parties B - Z from forming a coalition.

Can't figure it out.

On the assumption that Party A just simply has the majority still? This objection lakes cogency, so maybe you could make this general objection more concrete by citing a country that finds itself in your abstract scenario?

That only works when parties A and B have meaningfully different policies in the area when you'd want to punish them. Otherwise, it's two boxes for the same gift.

> It may take a constitutional amendment

National proportionality, abolishing state representation, would take an amendment. Using STV or party list proportional within the bounds of each states house seats would not.

The US, though, has a strongly Presidential system, which would favor duopoly without radical Cobstitutional reform, and the Senate is problematic as well.

Ranked choice voting is another solution

They stole cash and deserve the ridicule.

Unfortunately it's not just the federal government that's captured by these monied interests - it's the states, too. Just look at the private prison industry and their lobbying. I agree overall, though, decentralization and re-fragmentation is the only way this status quo is going to change.

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