Quote (Black XistenZ @ Sep 7 2018 10:09am)
both proportional representation and first-past-the-post voting systems have their advantages and disadvantages.
I admit, however, that the american system of FPTP on the state level, with states of vastly differing size and demographics, is suboptimal.
Imho, the best system in a FPTP system on a district level, like in the UK or Australia, with the head of government then decided by the representatives elected to parliament from their districts.
Imagine if the house majority decided the presidency and gerrymandering didnt exist - this would imho be a much better system.
On a sidenote, representation in the US has been dwindling. The US has the largest representation size in OECD countries:
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he 12th, the Apportionment Amendment, has languished unratified by the states, apparently by accident. In just the past decade, archival research has suggested that Connecticut ratified the amendment in 1790 without Congress noticing, meaning it should have taken effect upon Vermont’s ratification in 1791. But the Supreme Court in 2012 rejected an appeal to get the amendment recognized, and so, despite apparently going through all the steps to become part of the Constitution in 1791, it remains unratified.
The amendment read:
After the first enumeration required by the first article of the Constitution, there shall be one Representative for every thirty thousand, until the number shall amount to one hundred, after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall be not less than one hundred Representatives, nor less than one Representative for every forty thousand persons, until the number of Representatives shall amount to two hundred; after which the proportion shall be so regulated by Congress, that there shall not be less than two hundred Representatives, nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons.
That last clause contains what most scholars of the Apportionment Amendment consider a scrivener’s error: “nor more than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons” should read “nor less than one Representative for every fifty thousand persons”; the screw-up is technical, but this piece has a good explanation of what happened (it involves the secretary of the Senate misunderstanding a direction).
If the amendment were to be ratified today by another 27 states and become part of the Constitution, with the scrivener’s error corrected, then the House of Representatives would have to ensure at least one representative for every 50,000 people, or about 6,489 representatives total.
Wasn't proper representation in government one of the reasons the US rebelled against the English?
Or do people here think that state-level representation is enough to compensate for this lack of federal representation?