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> So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis. > That policy is in turn heavily weighed

> So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis. > That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas Forgive me if I'm missing something, but these sound like contradictory claims to me? As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. The number of members of each party that make it to Congress is the main determinant of what policy gets passed. But I can only influence that indirectly, by choosing which party represents my local district. If I'm in a solid minority in the district I live in, I basically have 0 influence on the result of the election. Overall, those invisible lines let politicians crack and pack constituencies so a party with a minority of the votes still gets a majority of the seats. In this system, the number of representatives of each party would be determined by the national popular vote, meaning I can more directly vote for which party gets the majority. Your vote does two things: it casts a vote for your party against the other parties in gaining them seats, and it casts a vote for your favorite party candidate over other candidates in the party (including those in other districts) to determine which candidates of the party earn the seats the party is given. It reduces the effect of the invisible line in weakening my vote. I'm okay with this meaning that sometimes my vote helps elect someone in a different district, since this would mean my district doesn't have enough members of my party to justify a representative of our own and because a lot of times the lines are arbitrary anyway. It would require bigger districts with multiple winners, and sometimes that the person with the 6th or 7th most votes in the district gets the 4th or 5th seat instead. This, in my mind, is the "gerrymandering correction:" it ensures those parties who were disadvantaged by the line drawing get their fair share of party members. As for one vote counting twice as much as another, my understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that the main cause of that is differences in turnout between the different districts and rounding representatives to the nearest whole number. Nothing can be done about the later (big problem in the US too -- people per district varies by hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the disparity in the Senate). For the former, you could proportion representatives between districts based on turnout instead, but this is a bad idea since it makes it much harder to campaign in a district if you don't know how many seats are up for grabs.

avar 1y ago
As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives? A representative with absolutely zero self-interest in representing you, as it's highly unlikely you'll be able to "vote for" them the next time around? Your representation being an odd mathematical quirk? Because that's essentially what the Icelandic system is like. The US has the same lopsided population-to-representative ratio to some degree [1]. [...]and please correct me if I am wrong) No, it has nothing to do with turnout in Iceland. You can think of it as an odd way to enact something like the US Senate without a bicameral legislature. 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/05/31/u-s-population-keeps-growing-but-house-of-representatives-is-same-size-as-in-taft-era/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/05/31/u-s-popul...
- Epa095 1y ago
  . You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives? I don't see how it makes sense to say that the candidate in Florida is 'the one' you voted it. You casted your vote in Alaska for the party. Your vote mattered there, and either the party got candidates in or not. Then after that mini-election your vote gets to play a second role on the national level, where IF the party got a bad ratio between the number of representatives they got in, and their total vote-%, they can get another candidate. But that candidate is not 'the one you voted in'. You (possibly) voted in candidates in Alaska already, this is your votes' second chance, to get someone in from the party somewhere else (where the party had a particularly bad ratio between representatives and vote-%).
  - avar 1y ago
    This should be easier to understand if you suppose that none of your 50 states shares any of its political parties in the House of Representatives. The Minnesota FLP[1] got members into the house of representatives in numerous elections. If you'd voted for it in Minnesota, who do you suppose your vote should transfer to in Alaska or Florida? Of course that's a borderline nonsensical example in the case of both the modern day US and Iceland, as in both cases The Party (whichever one it is) is something you can vote for in any state or district. But it's important to understand that the cart came before the horse. That purely local parties are unelectable is partly because the incumbents have shaped the system like this, to their own benefit. In any case. The Icelandic voting system asks you to intern two seemingly mutually incompatible ideas: - That local politics are so unimportant, that you may as well not care who your local representative is, because you may be getting some party critter from the other side of the country, and the difference shouldn't matter to you. - That you shouldn't worry too much about some people having up to 2x the voting power you have, based on which district they vote in. That outsized influence being something that transfers indirectly to what constitutes their national party policy. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Farmer%E2%80%93Labor_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Farmer%E2%80%93Labor...

avar 1y ago

As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives? A representative with absolutely zero self-interest in representing you, as it's highly unlikely you'll be able to "vote for" them the next time around? Your representation being an odd mathematical quirk? Because that's essentially what the Icelandic system is like. The US has the same lopsided population-to-representative ratio to some degree [1]. [...]and please correct me if I am wrong) No, it has nothing to do with turnout in Iceland. You can think of it as an odd way to enact something like the US Senate without a bicameral legislature. 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/05/31/u-s-population-keeps-growing-but-house-of-representatives-is-same-size-as-in-taft-era/ https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/05/31/u-s-popul...

Epa095 1y ago
. You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives? I don't see how it makes sense to say that the candidate in Florida is 'the one' you voted it. You casted your vote in Alaska for the party. Your vote mattered there, and either the party got candidates in or not. Then after that mini-election your vote gets to play a second role on the national level, where IF the party got a bad ratio between the number of representatives they got in, and their total vote-%, they can get another candidate. But that candidate is not 'the one you voted in'. You (possibly) voted in candidates in Alaska already, this is your votes' second chance, to get someone in from the party somewhere else (where the party had a particularly bad ratio between representatives and vote-%).
- avar 1y ago
  This should be easier to understand if you suppose that none of your 50 states shares any of its political parties in the House of Representatives. The Minnesota FLP[1] got members into the house of representatives in numerous elections. If you'd voted for it in Minnesota, who do you suppose your vote should transfer to in Alaska or Florida? Of course that's a borderline nonsensical example in the case of both the modern day US and Iceland, as in both cases The Party (whichever one it is) is something you can vote for in any state or district. But it's important to understand that the cart came before the horse. That purely local parties are unelectable is partly because the incumbents have shaped the system like this, to their own benefit. In any case. The Icelandic voting system asks you to intern two seemingly mutually incompatible ideas: - That local politics are so unimportant, that you may as well not care who your local representative is, because you may be getting some party critter from the other side of the country, and the difference shouldn't matter to you. - That you shouldn't worry too much about some people having up to 2x the voting power you have, based on which district they vote in. That outsized influence being something that transfers indirectly to what constitutes their national party policy. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Farmer%E2%80%93Labor_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Farmer%E2%80%93Labor...