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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jttmab who wrote (17184)	5/23/2005 5:31:27 PM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

Start portioning that out by percentages and the implementation of proportional representation become problematic. One solution is to quit restricting the boundaries for house of representatives to state lines. The district could be drawn using a public mathmatical formula and a computer thereby eliminating the gerrymandering. TP

To: jttmab who wrote (17184)	5/23/2005 7:54:37 PM
From: Raymond Duray	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 20773

Re: What % of the public do you think is informed and actually cares? Of course the number is small and I see the drift of your argument. However, I'd counter by saying that We the People must start to do something to remedy the damage to the body politic that has been done by the corporate media and a cuckolded educational establishment for the last 3 decades on behalf of a tiny cabal of craven criminals. I'm convinced that plenty more Americans would care about how they are governed if they weren't treated like mushrooms (kept in the dark and fed BS) and told by authority figures that their only role in life is to consume.

To: jttmab who wrote (17184)	5/24/2005 11:18:17 AM
From: 49thMIMOMander	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 20773

"voting a party vs. a person" and Germany. Note, Germany has a 'mixed system', and furthermore one with 'two votes'. That is: - X% of the candidates are elected as in USA, one elected per district (or FPTP, winner-takes-all, single-seat-district, etc) - the rest are elected from much larger districts making it possible to achieve proportional representation (PR) as many candidates are elected. (if for example, 20 elected according to their votes, the result will be proportionate within 5%) - the PR system they use is based on party lists, the voter votes for a party (which have their candidates ordered on a party list), the party gets a proportionate number of seats according to the total votes that party gets. (x% votes, x% seats) - the maybe specific mechanism in germany is that the voters vote within both systems, "one for person and one for party". I think the X% is 50%, that is, half of parliement is "exactly as in USA", one "local" representative. The other half represent the "third parties", kind of. Note, Denmark is similar but there one has "only one vote", one must decide to vote "person or party". (the german system is smarter?? less "tactical voting stuff") Additionally there are (always) "limits" on (a) the proportional system, a party has to get something like more than 4-6%(?) of the votes, or at least one single-seat-district, etc.. The idea is, for example, that a small "danish" minority close the danish border should get representation although they are less than the overall PR-threshhold, and do not have a majority in any single-seat-district. Smart, practical system, one reason B.C. Canada now seems to look into it. PS germany (as well as sweden) additionally uses a "correction mechanism" to correct for that slightly un-proportional result one gets (that 20 -> 5%). A small number of "extra" (secondary) seats are added to achieve overall proportionality

To: jttmab who wrote (17184)	5/24/2005 11:33:55 AM
From: 49thMIMOMander	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

"German-like system easily transfers to the US" There are basically two different possibilities: - add N seats to the house, these will be those which are elected through larger districts, large enough to elect maybe 6-10 seats (candidates). - combine some single-seat-districts to "free up" the same N. Both solutions are clearly difficult to implement: - 300 seats in parliament is clearly close to the maximum size of a "functional" system (compare parliements with something like 1-2,000 "locally elected" - combining existing districts would demand a total "re-drawing" of all districts. PS one solution "suggested" for USA has been to just improve the present single-seat-districts by - combining, for example, three districts into one, and electing three candidates from this muli-member-district. This would result in a proportionality-threshold of 30% compared to the present one of 50%. Or by defining the dis-proportionality differently: - Assuming 3 parties and single-seat-districts: worst case voting 33-33-34% and the 34% candidate "takes all", 66% disproportionality - 4 parties and 3-member-districts. 26-25-25-24% the 24% candidate is not elected, 24% dis-proportionality.. funny stuff, when other systems are specifically designed to achive a higher than 99.9% proportionality.. (among those getting more than the 1-4-whatever threshold)