This new voting system uses the evil of political parties to the benefit of the voters by making candidates compete not only against their opponents but against other members of their party on relative vote share. This system increases the quality of elected candidates, decreases the power of gerrymandering, eliminates the need for tactical voting, and is simple to implement!
Proposal:
Voters place two votes for each congressional seat. One vote is selected from the list of candidates running, & one vote is selected for the party you wish to represent you in Congress. The party vote is nationally tallied and creates party quota caps. These are the maximum number of candidates that can be seated from a political party based on their proportional vote share. Seats are then filled from a party quota beginning with the highest % vote share. Once the seat quota has been filled, finishers in competitive districts that cannot be seated are skipped and the win goes to the next highest performer. In other words candidates can end up below the cutoff for their party’s seat quota and eliminated if they run worse relative to their colleagues nationally.
This system enfranchises voters that don’t have a candidate that matches their views running in their district, and those voting in races with extremely poor candidate quality. Turnout should increase, 3rd parties become more viable, and candidates not captured by interests will be encouraged to run in their districts.
I question how this actually fits into the US election system.
Perhaps a bigger question is why on Earth would you show an example of how a UK election would work when trying to convince people to use it in the US? That just makes me like the idea even less.
In a very rough simulation the 2022 house seat allocation would go from:
First Past the Post
Republicans 222, Democrats 213
to
Proportional Past the Post:
Republicans 220, Democrats (plus DFL) 208, Libertarian 3, Independent 2, Conservative 1, Working Families 1
A full workup of which districts would be affected is not valuable as the slate of candidates running and the behavior of voters would be entirely different (and more like some European proportional systems) if this voting system was available.
For the house, why not just use a proxy system like in all corporate elections? As a citizen, an election is just the time you assign your proxy vote to the politician of your choice. The politician then casts your proxy on your behalf. The DV score is 0 by definition.
That is not exactly how a republic is designed to operate if you mean proxy votes as an ongoing measure. It is more that you are paying to outsource the work of becoming an expert on every topic that comes before congress to someone that is aligned with your interests. But I am very much in favor of expanding Congress to match the ratio of population they serve with what it was in the founder’s days. That would allow representatives to not have to serve so many competing interests.
This proposal (PPP) makes decent sense in a unicameral context, but most of the US is bicameral - literally the only exception is Nebraska.
In a bicameral legislature, there is an opportunity for the chambers to specialize. For example, the lower chamber might be comprised of seats for single winner constituencies, while the upper chamber might be proportional. The advantage of this is you don’t have to compromise the effectiveness of local representation to produce proportional representation (and visa versa).
In the US, I think the Senate is better situated for regional representation, while the House is better for ideological representation. I’d want Senate seats elected using Approval voting, in order to maximize the broadness of their support within their own state. That way ideology takes a back seat to state-level concerns.
In the case of the House, the goal should be ideological proportionality within each state delegation. However, there are some significant barriers to this goal. First, the Uniform Congressional District Act of 1967 needs to be amended to allow at-large and multi-member districts, when a proportional method is used. Second, a proportional method is not possible for many small states, due to only having one or two apportioned seats. The Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 would have to be completely repealed, and the House expanded, so states like Wyoming, Delaware, and Alaska could send reasonably proportional delegations. But I won’t advocate a specific proportional method, since I think it is reasonable to leave that up to the states themselves, for experimentation.
With that context, I am inclined to say PPP, though likely well suited to the UK, is likely not a great fit for the US. However, my mind could be changed if you can think of a secondary system that would compliment PPP well in a bicameral setting (i.e. if a state used PPP in its House, and something else in its Senate).
