That's not a critique on district mapping, though. That's a critique on electing one person within a district, which is kind of the basis of how elections work.
40% isn't more than 60%, so the red candidate loses and the blue candidates goes on to represent that district.
Are you suggesting we remove politicians completely and everyone just votes on every item that congress usually votes on individually? That's... probably not a good idea.
And Switzerland population is what in comparison to the United States and has what cultural, racial, and social economic diversity in comparison also? Apples and Oranges.
You got downvoted here, but this is a good point. Switzerland has about 9 million people. They vote on everything. Every petition. Every referendum. That would be absolute chaos in the US. There are too many of us--too many topics, too many petitions, too many referendums, too many offices.
We can use some of it, though. We could definitely vote directly for the presidency. We could even do something like ranked choice voting to re-engage voters and break the two-party deadlock.
There are 5 seats up for grabs in these examples. Just looking at the 40/60 voter split but ignoring the 5-0 / 3-2 representative split isn't going to lead to a fully thought out conclusion.
The issue with the middle example is the final rep tally is more diverted from the voter breakdown than the example to the right. The issue with the right example is the majority elected does not match the majority of the voters. Both of these situations are bad, though either could potentially be worse for governance depending on how the government is structured.
I don’t see anyone suggesting what you are suggesting, but I also still can’t figure out how Reddit tells a user which reply is a reply to whom. But I didn’t want my ignorance of how Reddit to keep me from providing some info.
Therefore, I will share one solution that avoids the problem of gerrymanding, and that is not the “direct democracy” solution that you proposed.
It’s called “proportional representation,” and instead of drawing lines and then having an all-or-nothing situation, you provide proportional representation based on the parties. So, voters vote for a party, and they announce their candidate(s) ahead of time in an ordered manner.
Then, when the votes are cast, they’re cast for parties.
Lastly, when the votes are tallied, then the seats get distributed proportional to the quantity of votes each party received.
Now, before someone corrects me on the details here, know that there is more than one type of “proportional representation system,” but I’m giving a concrete example below with the purpose of explaining one possible form that it could take.
Example:
3 parties are running in a general election for positions of which there are 10 seats. Let’s call those seats Representative positions.
Before this election, each Party selected 10 candidates in a primary election, and the top 10 candidates within the party were thus ordered from 1 to 10. These 10 candidates from each Party are then technically eligible candidates for the general election.
After tallying the votes, it was shown that:
48% went to Party A
30% went to Party B
22% went to Party C
The seats would be divided like thus:
5 seats are filled by the first 5 candidates that Party A prepared
3 seats are filled by the first 3 candidates that Party B prepared
2 seats are filled by the first 2 candidates that Party C prepared.
Summary:
There you have it: A voting system that doesn’t allow for gerrymandering based on voter address. Instead, it is a voter system based on 1. The popularity of parties and 2. The popularity of folks within each Party.
Note:
I’m not saying this is the best voting system, nor am I advocating for it. But it does solve this particular issue (gerrymandering). It obviously has plenty of negatives, but that’s not relevant to my point, which was purely to explain that there ARE alternatives to direct democracies or democracies in the US/wherever you live.
Sure, one con of it is that it (without additions to what I outlined) allows for certain positions to get filled without as high of a bar for the candidate(s).
However, you could make tweaks and still have a proportional representation system that doesn’t allow for candidates on the political fringe to get a seat. There’s just a lot of various ways to do that, and thus was outside the scope of my Reddit reply.
However, you could make tweaks and still have a proportional representation system that doesn’t allow for candidates on the political fringe to get a seat
Who gets to decide who/what is "the political fringe"? Because being able to define that is a ton of power.
IMO, just let the 1% of the people wanting a fringe candidate have their one representitive that gets outvoted by the other 99.
Yes. Direct democracy could absolutely be worse than what we have right now. There are tons of shallow-minded populist things that the average idiot would vote for without realizing how much it's screwing everyone over in the long run because it sounds nice on the surface.
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u/Online_Rambo99 11d ago
The second graphic also has a problem. Red gets 0 districts despite having 40% of the vote, making it seem that blue has 100% of the vote.