Quote: /"Democracy" is voters choosing their leaders. But when
politicians get to draw their own districts, such as (most
<http://rangevoting.org/CrossCountryG.html>egregiously) in the USA, the
result is the opposite -- the politicians choose their voters./
When you want to divide cake evenly between two people, you let one
person cut the cake, and the other person chooses which slice he gets.
In this case, let politicians cut the cake however they like (each
candidate, party, or interested group with enough signatures offers a
districting map), and then voters choose which one they like best. The
mechanics of creating a map would be left up to the ones doing the
suggesting, subject to the normal rules of contiguous districts and
equal populations. (For the record, I do like the average distance to
center method, as well as any method that generates centroidal Voronoi
tessellations).
Once the district maps were created, voters could choose between
different districting maps for the entire state,*or* (since we have
cheap computers and printers) each voting precinct might just vote
between maps of the proposed district they would vote in-- a Republican
might think it's fine to have a weirdly gerrymandered Republican
district elsewhere in the state, but may be less likely to vote to
belong to one. The nice thing about the second method is that it would
encourage groups to focus not only on a grand, statewide vision, but how
the voters of each district view their own map. Plus, it would encourage
groups to combine efforts on district maps that were clearly superior
(two districting maps of California might be identical except for a half
dozen districts), and focus their efforts on stressing the importance of
their differences. ("The Green Party endorses the map created by the
Democrats, except in districts 5-9, 17, and 22. And here is why our map
is superior in those areas.") And voters could take into account
geographic features, historical ties, driving distance, and other
factors that are really hard to program, and even harder to legislate
for without creating perverse incentives.
For added fun, voters could pick maps every two years, to be used for
the following election. How is that for responsive politics?
As a side note, I actually lean to multi-member districts, or even a
single universal at-large election -- people's political interests don't
always follow neat geographical boundaries, and a Green in Texas might
want to vote for someone who lives in San Francisco rather than a
conservative Democrat in their own state.
Mike Rouse
PS I'm playing with a proxy-range PR system myself -- yes, PR^2 -- but I
going through the EM archives to see if anyone proposed it first under
another name. :) Using range ballots, it would take the most
representative subgroup of candidates for a legislature of a certain
size, and then give each winner voting power equal to the number of
ballots that they had the highest score on among all the winning
candidates. If that sounds in any way similar to another proposal,
please send me links!
On 6/10/2011 9:35 AM, Warren Smith wrote:
A preliminary web page on this topic is now available here
http://rangevoting.org/TheorDistrict.html
Your comments would be appreciated to help me improve this page.
[There is a much longer scientific paper in the works by me& others
on this, but it unfortunately has been in the works several years
already :( I'm too lazy and/or bit off
more than could chew.]
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