In round numbers/oversimplifying, I’m suggesting that Connecticut is 40% Republican, 50% Democrat, and 10% “Liberal third party” (Green or WFP).
You could subdivide that 40% Republican to differentiate MAGA-types, old-school-Republicans, Libertarians, etc…but that’s more complicated than necessary to make my point.
The D+“Liberal third party” contingent makes CT a reliable blue state in the Presidential elections, and while CT hasn’t been as outrageous as some states in gerrymandering, the Congressional districts are drawn in such a way that there are 4 safe D seats and one “leans D”. However, once you get away from the urban corridors, CT does turn pretty red, although I think MAGAheads make up a smaller proportion of CT’s Republicans (or R-leaning voters) than other states.
In a prior edit of my post, I attempted to theorize a ranked-choice algorithm that would work in an n-representative superdistrict…and I failed.
I think there probably is a way to adapt the ranked-choice algorithm to work…but it’s not coming to me.
To use my example (as corrected) – what if those vote tallies represented first-choice votes. Presumably one of D2/D3 get eliminated, and the extra votes would go to the other.., and then either “Other” or the survivor of D2/D3 would be eliminated. You’re left with 3R’s when the political makeup would suggest there should only be 2.
The algorithm would need somehow handle “surplus” votes…and I think that starts to get a little too complicated.
In this stragegy you redistribute from those who have more than they need, then if nobody has enough, you eliminate the lowest. Keep going as long as you need to.
So if 250,000 D1 voters had D2 as their second choice and 150,000 had D3 as their second choice then you say D1 has 200,000 extraneous votes. Those are distributed as:
200,000 / 400,000 * 250,000 = 125,000 to D2
200,000 / 400,000 * 150,000 = 75,000 to D3
The description at the fairvote link provides the handling of the surplus I was missing.
Thanks…although if it were to ever come to pass, I don’t know that I’d want to be around when folks tried to explain the math to the alternative reality crowd.
As for “ties” - when we get to the point of doing things like deciding whether “hanging chads” should count, we really just need to flip a coin and be done with it. It is just a series of attempts to nudge the vote one way or the other. There’s no real “correct” answer at that point, and we need to not pretend that there is.
That would have made my example unnecessarily complex.
The number of candidates running would likely depend on how parties selected folks for the ballot. While it’s entirely possible that parties would initially try to run n candidates for an n-representative superdistrict, in a two-party system I would expect that parties with a known/expected disadvantage would run fewer candidates in order to maximize the expected votes per candidate vice the expected votes per candidate of the other major party.
However, I’d hope that such a system would weaken the duopoly. It wouldn’t do away with it altogether – the single-winner-take-all nature of the Senate and Presidential elector contests structurally fosters the existence of a two-party system (absent other considerations, like regionalism).
But moving to superdistricts might allow third parties to become viable in the races, or for different factions in the two major parties to differentiate themselves. As parties/factions develop expectations of significantly less than 50% of the vote, they would have an increasing incentive to reduce the number of candidates to run.
In my CT example, where I (for discussion purposes at least) theorize that 15% of voters are “Liberal third party” for the 5-representative superdistrict, that “Liberal third party” has an incentive to run only one candidate, to optimize their chances of getting a seat.
Similarly, the Republicans have a strong incentive to run not more than 3 candidates (as opposed to 5), lest they dilute their strength to receive fewer-than-expected seats.
Sadly, this is all just mental wankery, as a change like this is probably never going to happen.
Here’s a tremendously fascinating link. I know it’s Fox News and some of you have a distinct habit of never new clicking on a Fox News link. Do yourself a favor and click on this one. It’s not political at all.
Just a fascinating link about Elon Musk, Mars and an idea of theoretical democracy similar to the ideas being kicked around in this thread.
I don’t know about cheating, but the undercounting in Texas was intentional and expected. The Texas GOP helped push for the citizenship question, which created distrust in the large migrant communities even after the question was removed. And they wouldn’t even discuss state funding for outreach programs, which is a fairly common approach.
There definitely seems to be a trend with the over-counters (mostly blue states) and under-counters (red-states). As far as dollars being sent to each state, that would certainly seem to hurt the under-counters.
And as far as congressional representation, the Minnesota overcount (estimated at 219,000) seems to have re-allocated the seat from blue state NY to blue state MN. I’m not sure where the RI seat should/would have gone. But I’m guessing Twig can supply the answer.
