Cube Root Rule Legislative Districts

[Antonio the Sixth]

This method gives France 402 Deputies and Canada 323 MPs. Not bad.

Not bad ? 402 deputies would be awful...

Though for USA, it would give 672 reps, which would still be a progress.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Just for the fun, I used Dave's application to make a map of RI's legislative districts (it would have 102). Obviosuly I chose RI because it's the smallest State available, the others would have been horrible to do...
Except in particular cases, districts don't exceeed +/-500 inh. of difference with the average.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Multi-seats districts are great if you use PR to elect reps, and horrible if you use FPP.
Fractional representatives seem quite scary to me, don't know what it would result in.

[Antonio the Sixth]

This method gives France 402 Deputies and Canada 323 MPs. Not bad.

Not bad ? 402 deputies would be awful...

Though for USA, it would give 672 reps, which would still be a progress.

Why would it be awful?

Because the less representatives we have, the less an Assembly is representative.

[Antonio the Sixth]

This method gives France 402 Deputies and Canada 323 MPs. Not bad.

Not bad ? 402 deputies would be awful...

Though for USA, it would give 672 reps, which would still be a progress.

Why would it be awful?

Because the less representatives we have, the less an Assembly is representative.

If you mean representative of social classes, it isn't already and an assembly which pays attention to representation of social classes is corporatist.

I'm speaking in general : of political views, socio-demographic factors (I don't believe in social classes), etc. The more representative we have, the smaller is the number of voters it represents, so the closer we are to direct democracy (which, though being now senseless with the current political structure, doesn't deserve to be entirely forgotten).

[Antonio the Sixth]

Sound quite complicated... Why not just drawing districts so that they can have an integer number of representatives ?

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yes, it makes sense, though I don't think having an 4 or 3 representatives depending to the year of the election is really the equivalent of having 3.6. It can give uncorrect representations for some elections, which could result in a party winning a majority though getting less vote.
Anyways, the best system remains a statewide election without any district.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Yes, it makes sense, though I don't think having an 4 or 3 representatives depending to the year of the election is really the equivalent of having 3.6. It can give uncorrect representations for some elections, which could result in a party winning a majority though getting less vote.
Anyways, the best system remains a statewide election without any district.

Having an STV election for a single 102-member election is unworkable.  Using a list system simply results in the election of vapid placemen and not true representatives that a district system does.  STV combines mild proportionality, while maintaining local representation and local representativeness.

What about a State-wide (or nation-wide, or any other else division-wide) repartition of the seats between parties, but based on lists coming from smaller districts ?


Here's an example.
Let's say that that we have 3 districts. Here are the results with the traditional system :

District 1 : 4 seats
Democrats : 24 votes => 2 seats
Republicans : 16 votes => 2 seats

District 2 : 3 seats
Republicans : 16 votes => 2 seats
Democrats : 14 votes => 1 seat

District 3 : 6 seats
Democrats : 34 votes => 3 seats
Republicans : 26 votes => 3 seats

Republicans eventually get 7 seats and democrats only 6, even though they have more votes.

Instead, with the system I propose, votes are counted State-wide :
Democrats : 72 votes => 7 seats
Republicans : 58 votes => 6 seats

And only after, seats got by parties are dealt between districts :

For democrats :
District 1 : 24 votes => 2 seats
District 2 : 14 votes => 1 seat
District 3 : 34 votes => 4 seats

For Republicans :
District 1 : 16 votes => 2 seats
District 2 : 16 votes => 2 seats
District 3 : 26 votes => 2 seats


Basically, this system ensures that the representation is the best possible in the final Assembly, but also that list will be made in a small constituency. This system is used for French regional elections, and also for Italian legislative elections. It makes fractional representatives rather useless because uncorrect representation doesn't harm the partisan divide in the Assembly.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The Italian electoral system is terrible.

It's far better than most of other countries'.

I am the first one to admit that Italy really sucks on most domains, but electoral system isn't among those.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The Italian electoral system is terrible.

Yes. Majority bonuses are a perversion of proportional representation. Either you use real PR or you use FPTP or whatever.

No, because proportional representation with majority prizes are aimed to provide clear majorities to a coalition whil not perverting the whole citizens' representation as FPTP does. FTPT is the dumbest electoral system, provides Assembly who aren't even closely representative of the share of the votes. Majority prizes allow to conciliate the need of governability with the exigence of democratic representation.

[Antonio the Sixth]

The Italian electoral system is terrible.

Yes. Majority bonuses are a perversion of proportional representation. Either you use real PR or you use FPTP or whatever.

No, because proportional representation with majority prizes are aimed to provide clear majorities to a coalition whil not perverting the whole citizens' representation as FPTP does. FTPT is the dumbest electoral system, provides Assembly who aren't even closely representative of the share of the votes. Majority prizes allow to conciliate the need of governability with the exigence of democratic representation.

How is it fair and real proportionality that a party with a plurality, say 30% of the votes, gets 50 flipping percent? That's as bad as FPTP.

How is it fair and real proportionality that a party which has won an election with 30% of vote (and the other party wins 29.5%) gets a majority? FPTP is calling, they want their crap back.

Either you do PR or you don't do it (or at least you don't have the balls to blatantly lie and call it PR).

Here is an unexhaustive list of the drawbacks of FPP which you don't mind with Majority prize-PR :
- The order of parties can be totally changed due to random factors. To put it clearly, luck matters as much as numbers of votes for the final representation. With majority prizes, only the election results influentiate the repartition.
- FPP renders gerrymandering possible.
- Regions with high abstention, or with a lot of people too young to vote, are favored since the drawing of constituencies depends to the population and not the number of votes.
- A party can gte a majority of votes and a minority of seats. There are numerous examples in the history.
- With an equal number of votes, egional parties are favored, because their votes are concentrated in a small number of constituencies. That's why BQ always get more votes than NPD.
- There is no guarantee that FPP will generate solid majorities in the final representation. Se for example the Assemblies of third republics.

To sum up : FPP sucks, is totally stupid and has absolutely no advantage. Then, if you want to choose the voting system, it all depends to you priorities : If you think that having strong majorities is important, choose majority prize, if you think the electorate should be perfectly represented, use traditional PR. FPP isn't a good option in either case.

[Antonio the Sixth]

- A party can gte a majority of votes and a minority of seats. There are numerous examples in the history.

This always happens under the Italian system. It happens every single time.

By "minority" I meant the party isn't ahead in terms of number of votes.