Brilliant way to defeat Gerrymandering ...New Zealand's method

[Le Roi de Pot]

Was reading an article on Jacinda Ardern and her political rise from a store worker to PM and noticed a crazy thing they do.


They allocate members of parliament based on the proportion of votes the party gets nationwide ... So if we had the same system here and Say Democrats get 55% of national vote but only 48% of congressional seats ...then the Democratic losers of closest election will be declared winners till 55% of congressional seats are Democratic

Using this system here even at the state level ( will never happen) will :

1) Encourage elec participation everywhere including very red and very blue districts ..becuase your vote can help in another district within your own state

2) Political parties /Politicians will become more moderate everyone will want as many voted in the general election as possible

3) This will totally dilute the effect of gerrymandering ..they can throw the sophisticated software into the trashbin.

[Demsrule86]

1. We don't have a parliamentary system...so no. It won't work.

[Le Roi de Pot]

2. This has nothing to do with the parliamentary system ..this is an Operations Research problem

That optimizes expression of political will despite the constraints that politicians put up to subvert it.

We can always rebalance seats..

[grantcart]

3. It is very common in parliamentary systems.

In Thailand every party that gets a min percentage of votes gets a certain number of seats.

Parliamentary systems can do this because they have seats that are based both on a physical district and "at large seats".

The solution for gerrymandering in the US system is using independent commissions to draw boundaries like CA and AZ.

AZ, a red state has had 5 Dems/4 Republicans in the House because it has competitive districts and better candidates.

[Demsrule86]

8. I agree. We passed anti-gerrymandering in Ohio but the governor and legislature

ignore it.

[grantcart]

10. The difference in AZ is they passed it as a constitutional amendment

People's initiative. Governor and state legislature have no power.

Republicans tried to take it to the USSC and were laughed out of court.

[Demsrule86]

12. We need to do something like that so we can get rid of shitty Congress critters like

"Gym" Jeffords.

[unblock]

4. I don't think there's anything in the constitution preventing this

AFAIK, the idea of carving up a state into congressional districts based and having separate elections for each representative, one per district, is not in the constitution. It's just the traditional way of doing it.

It has some merit, though that gets undermined as gerrymandering increases.

But I believe a state could choose to hold elections for its representatives in many different ways.

[Demsrule86]

7. No, it simply won't happen. There is more to a parliamentary system...than carving up districts.

[unblock]

9. Well I agree it's mostly a theoretical exercise

Then again, Maine now uses ranked voting, and I never thought I'd see that in federal elections, so you never know.

Anyway, my point is that representatives could be chosen in many ways, not necessarily even involving geographical districts. It could be done by party as the o.p. suggests, all voting could be statewide and the top candidates become representatives, or it could be statewide married with ranked voting, etc.

None of these seem likely to ever happen, and no electoral system is perfect. We'd replace gerrymandering with other problems, maybe better, maybe worse.

But it's fun to contemplate....

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. While it does "defeat gerrymandering", you can't enforce it by federal law

It's up to each state how their voters elect their representatives in the House, as well as in their state assemblies. They can also defeat gerrymandering by "not gerrymandering".

For those who are interested, it's a mixed member proportional or additional member system. Also used in the Scottish Parliament, for instance. You make your districts a bit larger than before, and then you have some seats left over to distribute to even up the overall balance between parties. You can do it either with just one vote, or (as Scotland does) with one vote for the district, and a second one for the larger area. The latter can be useful for independent candidates - while they'd never win a district on their own, they might get enough support across the area to pick up one of the extra seats.

A possible disadvantage of it is that it creates two "classes" of representatives in the same house - those that represent a district, and those for a larger area. This may result in an uneven constituent workload, or feelings that one class is more 'genuine' than the other.

[Denzil_DC]

11. Yeah, our experience of AMS in Scotland is mixed.

(Or at least the modified d'Hondt system we run.)

Your description's broadly correct. We can vote for a specific candidate in the constituency vote, then for a particular party in the regional list vote. In the list vote, each party selects a ranked slate of candidates, and if they get enough of a percentage, their first one gets elected, then they continue down the list if they're successful beyond that.

This does have drawbacks. We have some (mainly Tory) MSPs who've sat at Holyrood for many years who've never won a constituency seat, and would probably be unlikely to do so if they stood in one. Indeed, there's nothing stopping someone running at constituency level and also on the regional list if their party wants it that way. There's a deficit in democracy if candidates get to become MSPs because of their standing in their party's hierarchy rather than because people actually want them in power.

Our own system was engineered by Labour specifically to make it almost impossible for one party to win an overall majority, encouraging coalition government (and coincidentally, with an eye to the future to prevent the SNP ever getting one). The SNP broke the system when they won a majority with 69 seats in 2011. They've governed in coalition in subsequent parliaments, but may be set to win another overall majority in next year's elections, though d'Hondt makes that a bit of a lottery.

The system does mean that smaller parties with reasonable vote shares that would miss out on seats under a first past the post system get some, but in a situation like the current one where the SNP is so dominant, it can risk over-representing other parties at regional level while penalizing the party which has by far the highest percentage of the overall popular vote.

There are better variations on AMS and proportional representation, all with their own benefits and drawbacks.

Given the already complicated US voting system with often very long ballots, I'm not sure what could work. It's fun and games enough in Scotland, where we have three systems: first past the post for Westminster, d'Hondt for Holyrood, and single transferrable vote in the local council elections. If Holyrood and council elections happen on the same day, it can get a bit confusing!

[eppur_se_muova]

6. I actually gave some thought to this on a state-by-state level.

Some states might decide they like it. Predictably, they'd be only blue states.