[EL] Rick Pildes Guest Post

[Mark]

To the extent that PR w MMDs would remove the need for primaries, such a
system could significantly lower the cost of elections.

Bigger districts would make it easier to create minority representation
oops w/o having to engage in the shuffling of voters around the margins of
districts that we now engage in w SMDs

In Virginia, the number of uncontested or virtually uncontested leg
elections is appalling.   Voters have no choice.  W MMDs this would be
resolved

On Fri, Jul 5, 2019 at 00:10 Steven John Mulroy (smulroy) <
smulroy at memphis.edu> wrote:

> 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> 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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-- 
Mark Rush
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