[EL] Rick Pildes Guest Post

[Steven John Mulroy (smulroy)]

I think Rob Richie has it right.  As to Rick Pildes' concerns, let me respond.
"My concerns are that this would raise the cost of elections; demand more of voters regarding information than is reasonable to expect; would leave voters without feeling they had a representative who was "their" person."

1. Election costs would not go up as much as you might think. A candidate in such a multimember district would only need 17% to 25% of the vote, depending on the size of the multimember district. She would not need to do advertising and outreach to the entire district, but instead could target the geographic or demographic subsets that would work best for her.  In an age of micro targeting, targeted direct mail, and social media, this would be eminently doable.

2.  Voters in such districts would only have to gather enough info to weed out obvious disliked candidates (usually pretty easy to do) and then decide on their 1sr, 2nd, and 3rd choice. Most voters do not rank more than 3 even in the single winner RCV elections which Rick (I'm glad to hear) likes. They can use endorsers, party labels, media endorsements, and other heuristics to do the weeding and the ranking just as they do nowadays. And you can choose to rank as few or as many as you're comfortable with.

3. Actually, there would be MORE voters who felt like they had a rep who was "their person." Under single member district winner take all, usually 40% or so in each district end up feeling like "I didn't vote for THAT guy- he doesnt represent ME." Usually that same  40% feels that way time and again, leading to alienation. Under Proportional Representation, almost all voters can point to at least one representative and say "I voted for that person- she represents ME."

Note that none of these concerns seemed fatal in Cambridge Mass or Minneapolis, where multimember district proportional representation has been used for decades. Ditto Australia, which has multimember PR Senate districts just as big as those in Rick's NC hypothetical.

" But none of these changes are going to happen, certainly not for the 2020 round. "  True only as long as we all tell ourselves that. And  they said the same in Cambridge Mass and Minneapolis too.

"So for that, I still will focus on IRCs."
IRCs are certainly part of the solution. We should focus on them. Just not exclusively.

On Thu, Jul 4, 2019 at 4:28 PM Pildes, Rick <rick.pildes at nyu.edu<mailto:rick.pildes at nyu.edu>> wrote:
I support ranked-choice voting in certain kinds of elections, particularly for a single officeholder (Ned Foley's idea that States should use it in presidential elections is a good one).

I have been more skeptical about using MMDs and RCV when electing members of Congress.  Take a State like NC, which might be carved up into three regions for MMDs; the regions would elect 4, 4, and 5 candidates.  So we would have 8-10 candidates running in a general election, across a third of the State, with voters having to rank them.  My concerns are that this would raise the cost of elections; demand more of voters regarding information than is reasonable to expect; would leave voters without feeling they had a representative who was "their" person.  I think a better approach, if we are going to think outside the box this far, is the hybrid German system, in which voter elect individual representatives from districts but there is also a party-based vote, and the overall representation reflects the correct PR outcome.

But none of these changes are going to happen, certainly not for the 2020 round.  So for that, I still will focus on IRCs.

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