Virginia U.S. House member Don Beyer’s bill for proportional representation for most states, in U.S. House elections, now has a bill number: HR 3057.
Virginia U.S. House member Don Beyer’s bill for proportional representation for most states, in U.S. House elections, now has a bill number: HR 3057.
There is an article about this bill posted on “The Intercept” website written by Zaid Jilani.
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/05/new-house-bill-would-kill-gerrymandering-and-could-move-america-away-from-two-party-dominance/
Without having read the bill, I predict that the language will set a threshold of around 20% so no Greens, Libertarians or Independents will ever (or rarely) win seats in Congress if it ever we’re approved.
A single Democrat working with Rob Richie is a sure sign that it’s a bad thing.
Pure proportional representation must steer clear of such power-grabbing pluralists who have shown disdain and hostility for teamwork and low thresholds.
Would you be interested in pure proportional representation (PR) with a threshold of less than 1%?
The United Coalition has been doing it right for more than 22 consecutive years and PR works fine:
http://international-parliament.org/ucc.html
The bill’s threshold in districts with 5 winners would be 16%.
16% = only the rich and powerful need apply.
What would anyone else here think about cumulative voting . . . either in these 3-, 4-, or 5-seat districts or on a statewide basis?
Representatives should be apportioned to the nearest 1/5 of a representative, so Montana might have 1.4 representatives. The number elected for any term would vary, so Montana would elect two representatives for two terms in a decade, and one representative for the remaining two.
The same would be done for districts, so a district with 3.6 representatives, would elect four for three terms, and two for the other two. If there were four incumbents, they could all run in a 3-representative election, and the voters would decide which three might return (of course there could be challengers).
This reduces the opportunity for gerrymandering, since you could require districts to be composed of whole counties, instead of devious slicing of counties to get equal numbers of persons. This would also permit voters to form districts by aggregation until the districts are “large enough”.
The total number of representatives should be increased, perhaps using the cube root rule, which would result in around 700 representatives. This would reduce the qualms about representatives losing their seats in the first election, and also reduce the size of districts. Representatives from a district should be required to share offices, for handling routine matters such as missing social security checks, etc. They could have political staffers assigned to one district office.
@JALP, There are ways to count approval votes, that produce proportional results, and don’t require gaming by the voters.
The first candidate elected is the most approved. The ballots that approve him would be reduced in value to 1/2. So if there were a second candidate whose support largely overlapped with first, his approval would be roughly halved, while a third candidate whose supporters were mostly opposed to the first, would retain the weight of their ballots.
If all voters were hyper-partisan and voted only for all of the candidates of their party, it would work like proportional representation using D’Hondt.