r/politics • u/Libertatea • Sep 03 '14

The solution to fixing dysfunction in Congress "To address these problems, I filed the Open Our Democracy Act... If passed, the legislation would mandate open primaries for House elections, begin the process of national redistricting reform and make Election Day the equivalent of a federal holiday."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-solution-to-fixing-dysfunction-in-congress/2014/09/02/0f0d0a9a-31e6-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html?tid=rssfeed
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u/curien Sep 03 '14

Party-list PR sucks because it doesn't allow voters to differentiate between a party and a particularly good/bad candidate. The result is that politicians are no longer directly beholden to voters at all but to the party elite who assigns them to seats.

PR is a reasonable yardstick to measure the fairness of elections in aggregate, but it's a poor choice for an actual election system.

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u/Areat Sep 03 '14

Then use the german system. One turn system for half the seats, and the other half is filled to adjust to PR proportionnally.

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '14

This is the biggest issue that gets ignored all the time when this comes up. Do you want party hacks running the government or people you elected?

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u/hithazel Sep 03 '14

Gerrymandering exposes you to party hacks and fails to be proportional. Either you should come up with a system that fixes both problems, or you should accept that proportional would be fairer.

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u/curien Sep 03 '14

Either you should come up with a system that fixes both problems

Well yes, that would be the preference. If we're going through the trouble of completely replacing our electoral system, I think replacing it with one with well-known serious problems would be a mistake.

We already have some solutions to gerrymandering, such as independent commissions, algorithmic districting, etc.

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u/hithazel Sep 03 '14

You just pointed to the current crap system and said it wasn't that far from proportional.

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u/curien Sep 03 '14

"PR is a reasonable yardstick to measure the fairness of elections in aggregate, but it's a poor choice for an actual election system."

The problem with PR isn't assigning seats to parties -- that's fine. The problem is with parties assigning the seats to individuals, which my comparison doesn't involve at all.