Proportional Representation, a mini-essay

You want to abolish “the two party system”?
What you shouldn’t care that much about is IRV for President, instead, what you should want is proportional representation for the house.

• What is proportional representation, you say?
  It’s a system where you work to make sure that the representation of parties in the legislature is proportional to their representation in the population.
• How do you do this?
  The two most common ways are the Single Transferrable Vote and Party Lists.
• So, tell me about Party Lists, then?
  In a party list system, you break up the population into large districts that do not redistrict. Many representatives (or MPs, as they are referred to in Parliamentary systems) are elected per district. The census just changes the number of representatives in each district. At election time, each party publishes an ordered list of candidates. If a district has 10 seats, then a party that gets 40% of the vote gets four seats, and the first four people on their list are elected. Some versions of this system will have rules that create some minimum amount of the vote required to hold one seat.
• OK, what is this Single Transferrable vote thing?
  Same idea with the multimember districts, but now, voters publish a ranked ordered list for the candidates, like in the IRV proposals. But now, the idea is that you are electing more than one candidate for that district, with the goal of guaranteeing that everyone’s vote goes toward electing *someone* (as in, to balance the “My vote never counts because I’m a democrat in a 90% republican district” error with the “My vote never counts because I’m a republican in a 90% republican district” error) so:
  1. First, any candidate getting more than (100%/number of reps in districts +1) of the vote is elected.
  2. Now, eliminate the last place candidate, and reassign their second place votes to non-winning candidates. Also, take the second place choices of winning candidates beyond the winning threshhold (if it took candidate X 25 votes to win, but they got 39 votes, take 14 votes for the first place candidates and assign them to second choices)
  3. repeat until all seats are filled
• What is the advantage of these?
  The big one is that they give geographically dispersed minority groups a chance to get representation without weird gerrymanders. If you made California into a single district and elected its house members with a list system, there would probably be Greens and Libertarians seated in Congress right now. The other thing is that they get much closer to “every vote matters”. If there are no longer any 85% districts, and it actually matters whether one party gets 5% more of the vote, then all parties have to stop neglecting any winnable votes. If you need only 1/10 of the vote to elect one out of ten represenatives (in either STV or List), that can be a lot more attainable than having 50% of the vote in a given district. Also, of course, you deal with the “Nader effect” stuff, which is actually more pronounced in countries like Canada and the UK, which have 4-5 major parties, but still use single member districting (ex: anti-Brexit parties actually won a larger vote share than pro-Brexit parties in the 2019 UK general election, despite the overwhelming Conservative win in terms of number of seats). But to me, the main thing is that you really fix both problems with gerrymandering and with having to draw minority-majority districts in robust ways that are difficult to re-break. And with that latter issue, you simultaneously solve the “if you draw a minority-majority district, you further dilute the minority vote elsewhere” issue.
• Ok, disadvantages, then?
  It can often lead to the spread of a large number of fringey parties. If you need a small dedicated population ONLY to get elected, then you can open the floodgates to some small groups. Examples of this are the Netherlands (there is literally a “people over 65 party”) and Israel (a bunch of parties representing extreme-Orthodox groups have wedged into parliament and had a lot to do with the harsh tenor of post-Barak Israeli politics). I would say that these examples are actually blunted in their downsides in a US context, relative to Parliamentary systems, because the President is independently elected from Congress, unlike the Prime Minister, who is elected by Parliament, so “fractured parties having to work together with shifting coalitions” may be a feature rather than a bug.
• Disadvantages to the specific forms listed above?
  Well, the Single Transferrable Vote gets pretty unwieldy once you get more than 5 candidates per district — 5 seats x 5 parties = 25 major candidates, so you’re asking voters to rank-choice to 25th place or more, that said, it does give a lot more control to voters about who they want in office, with the fine detail that is given at the ballot. Also, tabulation of results is obviously super complicated mathematically, so there can be a bit of a disconnect between “my vote” and “what my vote means”. A lot of Americans would probably find the central role that List systems give to parties disconcerting, no matter how much Americans view politics in VERY party-centered ways, anyway.

Anyway, that’s my argument. You get many more benefits out of proportional representation for congress than the simple “I want to vote for Nader, but I want to elect gore” arguments for IRV at the presidential level. Thank you for reading through my rant.