General Politics Discussion

[danbrotherston]

Proportional representation does break down if there is an anomaly or a geographic voting block. In certain circumstances a small block voting heavily for one party can garner far more influence over the rest of the house. Ideally there would be a balance of proportional representation and geographic representation.

I don't understand this.

A small block voting heavily for one party would get votes EXACTLY proportional to their percentage of the population? Why is that wrong?

In my experience, local representation seems mostly used for grift/corruption (where pols try to get stuff for their riding) and to paper over broken systems (when constituents talk to their representatives because the systems they should use are broken).

Neither of which are good things.

But if we MUST have geographic representation, there are plenty of options for that MMP works, as does STV, both which lead to a (more) proportional result.