END GERRYMANDERING: have larger multi-seat districts

[yurbud]

I didn't invent this idea, some other election reform people did. I couldn't find anything in the constitution to prevent it--it just says states get reps based on population. How those seats are divided is apparently up to states.

The way it would work is instead of having many carefully gerrymandered districts, you have fewer more diverse ones, people vote for the candidate they like, and if there are five seats, the top five vote-getters get the seats. Variations could be everyone in the district voting for as many candidates as there are seats (pick five out of however many are running) or you could vote for a party then rank their slate, so the turds would eventually get spit out.


The biggest advantage would be to third parties. Right now, in nearly all districts, they are at best spoilers, and therefore ignored or despised by voters. But if you had five seat, and the Green guy (or whoever) got the fifth most votes, he would get a seat.

It would also help Democrats and Republicans who live in districts that are overwhelmingly one party or another. If you know your parties candidate will win whether you vote or not or lose whether you vote or not, you tend to get apathetic. In a multi-seat district, that is removed and the numbers and percentages actually matter again.

Changes like this could lead to true multi-party democracy, which of course means that few elected officials will support it. But it would be worth doing as an initiative.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

1. and double the number of seats in the house.

the ratio of reps to a population of 300,000,000 is anything but representative.

[yurbud]

2. is that what it is?

[ChairmanAgnostic]

4. if we have 1,000 reps, and cut their salaries in half, limit

the size of their staffs, and demand public campaign funding, (outlaw K street bandits) I think that we might just get a little bit closer to the ideals that Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Franklin envisioned.

[yurbud]

12. I'd cut the fluffers from their staff, definitely

[morgan2]

20. cutting a reps salary is just asking them to take bribes

You cant expect someone making decisions on billions of dollars to be making a pitance. Back in England raising the salary of members of parliament was seen as the way to allowing poor people to be elected, prior to that only the rich could afford it.

[Warpy]

3. Doubling it would make it unweildy

but raising the number to 600 has been suggested and rejected by a House more interested in maximizing bribery takes than representing people.

Multi member districts might be a good idea, but that, plus laws against gerrymandering by the party in power, have to be approved by state legislatures and governors.

That hasn't happened so far and it's not likely to, since those are the folks with the privilege.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

9. let it be unwieldy. Democracies are not supposed to be neat, clean,

ramrod efficient. Hell, efficiency is the hallmark of this congress. "Time for discussion? OK it's over." Efficiency is nto always a good thing. The madness of crowds, popular delusions and dangerous whims can lead to disasterous results.

Efficiency in other ways has led to problems. Recall when the telegraph first appeared. Political scientists of the day predicted that speedy efficient communications would lead to more peace. To the contrary, the lack of contemplation, the lack of TIME to think seriously about ramifications, and the sheer speed of communications led to more and bloodier wars. I believe that a book was written on that subject by a guy named Nickle.

Efficiency brought us the Patriot Act. Enough said?

[BlooInBloo]

36. Woohoo! Big change: from .00000145 to .0000029! MASSIVE change!

Sheesh. Genius.

[razors edge]

5. End the electoral college,

then work your way down. Either have a democracy or get off the pot.

[yurbud]

14. yep--heard the other day dems in congress represent more voters than

GOP even though they are minority.

How exactly is that democracy?

[Selatius]

6. Personally, I'd tell states to use proportional representation.

Personally, I wouldn't even attempt multi-seat districting. Just go for plain proportional representation.

The party in power would still be trying to gerrymander these districts to their advantage. The only difference is there would be fewer districts for them to fool with.

If a state has 25 seats in the House, for instance, then that state would award those seats based on however much each party won. This would mean the two-party system would rapidly come to an end as people would be freed to form parties that more closely match their views without fear of costing themselves power, something seen only with single-seat first-past-the-vote election systems. In such systems, only two parties become viable.

Also, institute public financing. If you can demonstrate viability (like X number of 5 dollar donations as a test amounting to 5 percent of your district), agree to abide by spending guidelines, and agree to forego all private contributions, then you should be given full public financing of your campaign and the right to advertise your campaign as a "clean campaign" or a "clean candidate." In addition, you should receive matching funds up to a certain level if you are outspent by your opponent.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

8. Then you have coalition governments,

and no one party will be able to ram through whatever they want. The odds of one getting over half the reps would be very low with the size of our country, and we'd still have the every-2-years votes to keep any dominiation pretty short.

[Selatius]

10. Yes, I don't trust political parties enough to think it is a good idea that...

one party, and one party alone, should be able to hold a majority of seats in both Houses of Congress. Nevermind the courts or the White House.

That's a recipe for oligarchy.

[yurbud]

15. It's one thing that I admire about Israel--they got to patch together those

coalitions and probably have to actually do things to keep minority parties in the fold.

[nadinbrzezinski]

33. Some of the things they have to do are not pleasant

but yes, proportional represeentation is what we need

[yurbud]

17. for most states I would agree with you, though here in CA and maybe

Texas and a couple of others, there are so many seats and such a big geographic area that it might make campaigning unwieldy.

[yurbud]

18. if straight proportional rep, how do you choose who in each party gets seat?

[Selatius]

25. The process would be the same as in any other western democracy

Your party itself would draw up the list of delegates to assume the seats each one won. Party members would vote or form a consensus as to the party list of delegates to assume the seats won. The list could be ranked based on those who got the most votes down to those who got the least votes. You do this before the election.

If you are in the Green Party of California, and your party won, for instance, 12 of California's seats in the US Congress in the election, then the top 12 candidates would naturally assume those seats, and those 12 would be held accountable according to the Green Party voters of California.

If I had may way, I would set up the system so that you can remove any or several of those delegates at the will of the Party if they do something Greens disagree.

For instance, you have those 12 seats and 7 of them voted for torture for some reason. The Green Party of CA can make an internal decision to remove those 7 and replace them if it wants. You still keep all 12 of your seats you won in the election. All you'd be doing is switching out names on those seats and replacing them with delegates who will "fly straight."

This way, politicians would have even less discretion on major issues than they currently have. The people, ideally, should make the big decisions. Politicians should be reduced to little more than hand servants of the people to carry out the decisions. That's how I wish our system would work, anyway.

[yurbud]

31. so you would rank the slate in the primary?

[Selatius]

37. Yeah, all the parties would be going through the process before the election

This way, everybody has a list of delegates ready to go when the results come in.

[Rufus T. Firefly]

7. More of a parliamentary system.

Works for me. Or apportion the reps like the Electoral College does by state, and if a Green got 19%, she gets 19% of the state's reps.

I'd LOVE them to do that with the Electoral Vote as well. I know the Electoral one could be done without an amendment, and I think the House too.

[ms liberty]

11. I like this idea... n/t

[yurbud]

13. now I'll just have to remember where I read it...

[ms liberty]

24. Have you read...

"Give Me Liberty!" by Gerry Spence? It's got some interesting ideas in it on solutions to some of these issues. If you haven't read it, you might want to check it out.

[HereSince1628]

16. Thanks but no thanks to at-large candidates.

I think that's a poor way to get representation for all the different life circumstances in most states.

It might be fine for Rhode Island which is less than the size of most midwestern counties, but it'd turn rural voters into a vastly under-represented class which would ultimately lead to their being treated unfairly. I'm afraid it'd lead to an Appalachianization of America.

Urban and suburban voters already endorse NIMBY with respect to dumps and power plants. I sort of doubt you're gonna get urban and suburban voters to agree to modern (clean) industrial development or major medical facilities for rural areas rather than their own.

Third parties aren't knocked out by congressional districts. Third parties are knocked out by winner take all rules for controlling legislatures.

[yurbud]

19. why would it result in less rep for rurals? their votes would be combined

with those of republicans living in predominantly democratic districts and their vote is already more or less determined by their numbers (relatively few).

[HereSince1628]

23. You said it, because their votes would be combined and thus

diluted. Yes, they want good lives, education, health care etc, but those things wouldn't come to low population areas. Rural folks feeling of the need to be able to use resources and opportunites in their area is very different from urban and suburban folks.

I own a farm in an area where suburban voters miles away want to control the landscape I live on. They want my farm and the farms around me to be prevented from development (unless as in the recent past it's an oil pipeline, or a dump). City people want my land and my neighbors' land to be maintained as a pastoral backdrop to vistas out their side windows as they make 65 mph transitions from one metro area to another. Through a regional planning agency, they foreclose township decision making on development opportunities for these areas _without paying_ anyone for depriving them of the same opportunities already taken in other areas.

Impose this system and people in rural areas will end up feeling more and more like a distant government that doesn't understand them, that doesn't care for them, drives their lives.

[yurbud]

30. so you want to make your rural area more urban?

[HereSince1628]

34. I'm talking about not cheating people out of opportunities.

That is to say the taking away a landowner's right to use their investment to make money. I want rural landowners to have similar opportunites as urban landowners or that rural landowners at least be compensated for the taking away of the potential income afforded to others.

Here is just one example that I know is not universally true but one that I hope will help you understand my point.

Drive into any metropolitan area and you see billboards. Those billboards make money from advertising, collectively rather big money. And no one would question the presence of billboards in Time Square, or painted on the sides of buildings along I-94 into downtown Chicago. Or mounted on the roofs of buildings along the freeways thru Milwaukee. It's simply accepted by urban and suburban dwellers that it's ok for land/building owners to try to maximize the return on their business investment.

Now, lease on the small space to put up a billboard isn't much individually but it's a dividend on a small farm's very large investment in the land, and over time it does adds up. But in many places in the US rural landowners are denied that opportunity and in more and more places people are trying to impose this sort of ban.

Why? To preserve the views of pastoral landscapes. Which is to say for the benefit of what amounts to recreational viewing.

But for who? Well, the suburban and urban dwellers that race along the highway.

For purely aesthetic reasons it's important to people driving through an agricultural area that they be free of seeing billboards that they accept with little question when they are driving down the suburban and urban expressways of their own metro areas. Those people want to have that recreational viewing opportunity preserved but that really is a taking away of an opportunity of some faceless outnumbered landowner to get something of value rather than just the noise and pollution from living next to an interstate.

Now, that's fine if, when for greater society a government agency forecloses the right to make profits from advertising on your own land, the landowner gets paid or otherwise compensated for the viewing use just as he or she would get paid for the viewing use of a billboard. But, you know what, rural landowners usually don't. And the same sort of people, who pay $40 for a ticket to a ballgame, $10 dollars to enter an art museum or $7 to see a movie, want preservation and admission to that pastoral landscape for free.

Now standing that idea more or less on it's head, those same people racing down the highway have no problem with their view being regularly punctuated with the rather ugly, soaring, and blinking skeletons of cell phone towers because as we know, urban and suburban types support development of cellphone coverage areas because they wouldn't want to give up the opportunity to get a phone call when driving through one of those pastoral landscapes that let them "get away from it all."

Ain't that curious? For good or bad, for the local folks it all seems to be done for the interests of folks just passing through from other places.

How'd we get there? Thats just the will of the majority, of course.

[yurbud]

35. I see your complaint but that happens with the current system

and also touches on a broader issue of what right any state has to regulate or zone the use the private property.

If I bought a house in the suburbs, I couldn't necessarily tear it down and build a thirty story high rise, and neither of us could put up our own nuclear power plant or brothel.

Don't you get paid something if they put that cell tower on your farm? Or do they put it on the freeway right of way?


for dual use of land, we should be giving farmers incentives to put up windmills and solar panels, so we can diversify our energy sources and not be held hostage by foreign oil or by the energy pirates as happened here in CA. Solar panels wouldn't work for dense crop areas, but here in CA, there's a lot of land that is currently only used for raising scorpions and tumbleweeds.


Additionally, if we ever started doing biofuels in a big way, the crops you do raise should be worth more even without subsidies (no offense intended if you are raising a non-subsidized crop).

[yurbud]

21. rural states with only one rep already effectively all "at large"

Alaska, Wyoming, Montana, North & South Dakota, Vermont, Deleware... (okay, I don't know if those last two are rural or not, but they are pretty damn small).

[HereSince1628]

27. Small population states, yes, I understand.

But rural residents in large population states like New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Illinois, Texas, etc simply would get REDUCED representation of their communities.

That at large plan isn't going to advance the cause of liberty, justice and equality.

It's like letting a union elect its board all at large. That results in contracts getting skewed to protect the long-time employees at the expense of newer employees. And I've been in a union like that. Made up by very highly educated, mostly liberal people. If steps aren't taken to protect the representation of everyone voting minorities get screwed. Everytime democracy or not.

[yurbud]

28. with an at large system, those rural people could be represented

and urbans with similar sympathies could actually increase their clout.

It would depend on how it was set up. Candidates could still have districts in the sense of parts of the state they are more familiar with and therefore better equipped to pitch to. and the opposing party would have some incentive to campaign in areas where they normally don't because any votes they pick up would help their total.

[HereSince1628]

32. IMHO life doesn't work that way except in Utopian fictions. n/t

[morgan2]

22. I kind of like the idea of gerry mandering districts

to make lots of 70/30 splits, then make the primary the more important election.

[Warren DeMontague]

26. If we really wanted to make government fair, we'd change the ground rules for the U.S. Senate.

The idea that 400,000 Wyoming residents have the same 1/50th slice of power as 33 Million Californians is fundamentally un-Democratic and skews our government towards the podunk social conservative side, HARD. That's why you still have, for instance, $40 Billion a year being spent to drag pot smoking cancer patients off to jail, even when most of the people on the heavily populated coasts think it's a terrible idea.

[yurbud]

29. amen to that