Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dsr_ | Hacker News Reader

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There are several problems here.

The federal Senate is 2 Senators per state, no voting representation for territories (places not in admitted states) or Washington DC. So Vermont and Wyoming, with populations around 600,000 each, have the same vote strength as California (39M) and Texas (31M) -- 1.2 million people equated to 70 million.

Gerrymandering ("from Gerry's salamander-shaped district") is the practice of the ruling party in any state drawing their districts for the federal House of Representatives so that their party wins multiple districts (by, say, 52-48%) and making the other party win a smaller number of districts (by 90-10%). Each district is required to have roughly the same number of people in it. The shaping is bad, but the per-population equality of representation is nearly optimal.

Academics generally conclude that of the 435 districts, no more than 40 or 50 are actually representative of the political demographics of the state as a whole.

Is the concept of electoral reform realistic within the US? I believe the gold standard at the moment is a multi party system with ranked choice voting.

I feel like the concept of having more choices to vote for would be appealing to most US voters - but I can't imagine such an initiative would be successful

Each state has an astounding degree of control over their own voting systems for federal elections. Maine and Alaska have chosen RCV in the last decade, and it seems to be working out well for them.

Some states, including New York, allow a candidate to be run simultaneously by several parties, and for voters to then vote for the candidate with a particular party endorsement. This nominally allows a small party to gain status -- say, if the Green Party (tiny) were to nominate Biden (unlikely, but bear with me) and he wins the presidency, then for the purposes of New York State, the Green Party would move closer to being a recognized major party.

The overriding problem is that the Constitution was written with a deliberate ignorance of the concept of parties -- so much so that in the original 1789 document, the runner-up of the Presidential race becomes Vice-President. That didn't work out well; fixed by the 12th amendment.

The other gigantic issue, that has only become clear in the last two decades, is that an astounding amount of the government runs on convention rather than regulation.

Fixing these things would require a significant restructuring of the Constitution, and that opens up doors to... everyone.

It also might be worth pointing out that while the Senate structurally favors low-population states (which in the US are more likely to be conservative), the Republicans currently have a higher proportion of seats in the House than the Senate.

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