Dear Ernie, My personal opinion is that bicameralism is unnecessarily bulky for a state legislature. So rather than re-conceptualizing the relationship between the two chambers, I'd rather just condense it into a single chamber. I think that people have enough trouble keeping track of what is happening in state government as it is, and I think that having two separate chambers makes this problem twice as bad. I would like to elect the single chamber via STV-PR. For district magnitude, 7 or 9 on average sounds fine to me. I don't think that it is too attractive to elect a legislative chamber via Condorcet's method, even if they are only deciding on legislation rather than writing it, because single-winner districts can lead to disproportionality, and encourage gerrymandering. For example... Say there are 100 seats in the chamber. The Democrats have a 100%-0% majority in 49 of the districts, and the Republicans have a 51%-49% majority in the remaining 51 districts. The Democrats have 73.99% of the vote, the Republicans have 26.01% of the vote, but the Republicans have majority control over the chamber. It's an extreme example, but you get the general idea. Single-winner-district legislatures are usually bad news, I think. I know that you are very concerned with centrism, but I do think that a good STV-PR assembly would still hinge on the center. Some of the representatives would probably be rather distant from the center, but in order to pass legislation one would need to build a majority coalition which includes the center. If you still feel the need to inject more centrism into the system, I would probably just suggest a "parallel" system within one chamber (as in Russia, Japan, etc.) rather than creating separate chambers. That is, elect most of the seats (80%?) via STV-PR, and the remainder by Condorcet. Thus, you have a mostly-proportional assembly that is somewhat weighted towards the center. I'm not personally convinced that this would be preferable to just a straight STV-PR legislature, but I would prefer it to a bicameral system. I think that Rob Loring is an advocate of STV-PR / Condorcet parallel assemblies. http://accuratedemocracy.com/ > >Despite Arnold's best efforts (which, frankly, are better than anyone >else has done here for decades)
Feel free to elaborate on these (onlist or offlist, as you prefer). >The optimal district magnitude >for PR is usually considered around seven (7), Considered by whom? >giving a 90% confidence >that a voter would get a candidate they agree with. 90% chance that they will get their first choice, or what? Wouldn't that just depend on the ratio between candidates and seats? >In case of a >cycle, the whole Smith set would go to the governor and he/she could >pick one. Why not use the iterative pairwise procedure which I proposed for small group voting, at http://fc.antioch.edu/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/voting_methods/iterative.htm Also, in a small group, the Smith set (or minimal dominant set) may differ from the Schwartz set (union of minimal undominated sets). For an explanation of the difference between these sets, see http://fc.antioch.edu/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/voting_methods/survey.htm#smith http://fc.antioch.edu/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/voting_methods/survey.htm#schwartz my best, James ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info