It is hard enough to find a few good men. Why do we make ourselves look for hundreds?
We should allow ourselves to give one candidate more than one Seat/Vote.
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It is hard enough to find a few good men. Why do we make ourselves look for hundreds?
We should allow ourselves to give one candidate more than one Seat/Vote.
This is also why term limits are a bad idea.
Sure, let's give Kentucky's 4th, and Michigan's 3rd all the voting power. Of course, we can't accomplish that.
This thread is about political theory. And of course would require Constitutional amendments. But this idea would be good for political minorities, just think how many votes Dr. Ron would have had if every supporter in Texas or better yet the country could have voted for him in the house and he received a proportionate number of votes.
Under the current system the Republicrats are the majority in every district and we are lucky to get a handful of Reps, and most of us are unrepresented.
Ideology is far more important and connecting than Cartography.
If we double the votes each rep gets, does that change things from them having only one?
So if I get one third of the votes I get a third of a seat and a third of a vote? Or are you thinking more like European style elections- you vote for a party and if the party gets one third of the total popular votes they get one third of the seats in Congress? Or one candidate allowed to run in multiple districts?
If you get one third of the votes, you get one third of the votes in the house/state delegation to the house. Similar but different to the Euro system which still requires one delegate for each vote, and thus hundreds of potentially corrupt office seekers. One candidate running in multiple districts would be another alternative, though not quite as good.
If I get one third of which votes do I get one third of the votes in the House delegation? One third of the votes in my district? That does not work- otherwise three candidates in three different districts could have one third each in their districts and combined get all of the voted in the delegation- even though there were winners in other districts getting votes as well. Or are we voting nationally now?
Or do we add up all of the votes cast in all of the districts and allocate based on percent of that total vote? That would give more votes to members in larger districts who could get more total votes even if they got a lower percent in their own district.
That would shift powers from rural areas with lower populations to larger cities then. If that applied to the 2016 election, the House and Senate would be blue by a small margin.
Gerrymandering is a big problem.
I think Trump should get multiple votes,
he should have at least 5 votes in the senate, and maybe 30-40 votes in the house. And 2 votes in the supreme court.
But I think there would need to be a constitutional amendment for that. Though possibly an executive order would suffice
bump.
It's not clear to me why @Swordsmyth thinks this would help libertarian-ish candidates.
His opponents (almost the entire House) would have had less votes, some of the individuals may have had more but the group would have had less.
We can hardly find a few good men like Dr. Ron while the opposition has an unlimited bench, if we are able to delegate all our votes to the few we find it helps us while doing nothing for the enemy that never has any trouble finding as many sock puppets as it needs to fill any number of seats.
As the system stands Ron only got 1 vote in the house, if his supporters in the rest of Texas gave him enough votes to earn a second seat he would have had 2 and someone else who would have gotten that seat would have 0 instead, that would be 1 more for Ron and 1 less for his enemies.
Some of the other House members might also get more than 1 seat but those extra seats would be taken from other enemies of Ron so the opposition wouldn't have gained any votes and would have lost 1 while he gained 1.
I would hope that he would have gained more than 1 but I don't know the numbers so I am being conservative in this example, if the vote was changed to be nationwide he would most certainly have gotten quite a few more seats.
Primaries don't work well with this system unless you go with the variant that keeps the districts and allows candidates to run in as many as they like.
Getting rid of primaries would be another good effect of this system since it would reduce the power of the parties.
How would they choose how many to run? In this system one candidate could potentially get every vote available.
If they only chose one or a few it would be much easier for a 3rd party or an independent to get votes, if they chose many it wouldn't change Ron's chances of being one of them much.
He would get on the ballot without doing so as a Republican and that would be a good thing, we would likely have some Reps form multiple 3rd parties in the House and the "major" parties grip on power would be much weaker.
@Swordsmyth
Suppose that, at the time of Ron's last House race, 5% of Texans statewide would have voted for him if they could have.
Under the system then existing, he beat his district opponent and got 1 vote.
Under your system, as I understand it, he'd have gotten 5% of 32 Texas seats, or 1.6 seats (assuming fractions are allowed).
Right?
If so, that may well work for a Ron in one situation, but it could also go the other way for another Ron in another situation.
It doesn't help libertarians generally.
E.G.
If Ron would have only garnered the votes of 3% of Texans, he would have only gotten 0.96 seats, less than he actually got.
If it were another state, with only 15 seats, and Ron would have gotten the support of 5% of statewide voters, he'd have only gotten 0.75.
If there's minimum threshold (pretty much has to be, unless the House is going to have thousands/millions of members), he may have gotten 0.
Fractions wouldn't be allowed except if there were spare seats that nobody won completely, then those seats would be given to those with the largest remaining fractions.
If he only got 3% of the votes he wouldn't have won the seat he did.
This is why I would prefer the system to be nationwide instead of statewide, in a House with about 400 seats it would only take about 1/4% to get a seat.