Making the US Senate More Representative

[lpetrich]

Here is where I found advocacy of MMPR for the US Senate, in the platform pages of Jeff Phillips, someone running in CA-12, a district that includes most of San Francisco.

Long Term Constitutional Changes — Jeffrey Phillips for Congress

Ranked Choice Voting & Proportional Representation

Moreover, we need to do away with the winner take all system, and establish Ranked Choice voting to allow the best candidates to rise in all Federal elections. Rather than telling everyone that they must settle for the “lesser of two evils”, the People will be free to vote for whom they believe is the best candidate, and select alternates down the line. We say we want to count every vote, so let’s make Every vote Count.

And because there are only two Senators for every state, each Senator wields immense personal power, some even contradicting the wishes of their party to demand special concessions. We can counter this by adopting a system of mixed-member Proportional Representation in the Senate, where in addition to the state senators, we allocate a number (say 20) Senators at Large, allocated proportionally to the total national representation of first-choice votes. This elevates those first choice votes, and these Senators, chosen by the Parties themselves, would be able to cut through the current stalemates that characterize Senate proceedings, and push for change and consensus beyond the two-party status quo. This system more accurately represents the will of the voters, and allows more political parties to have a voice in the way our nation governs itself.

 

[lpetrich]

The tables did not get fixed after the move from vBulletin to XenForo. I will fix them.
 List of electoral systems by country

Polity	Dist	List	L/D
Germany	299	299	1
New Zealand	72	120	1.67
Thailand	350	150	0.43
Lesotho	80	40	0.5
Bolivia	70	60	0.86
Scotland (UK)	73	56	0.77
Wales (UK)	40	20	0.5

 Demography of the United Kingdom

What	Population	Fraction	Has parl
England	56.6 M	84.3%
Scotland	5.5 M	8.2%	X
Wales	3.2 M	4.7%	X
N Ireland	1.9 M	2.8%	X
Total	67.1 M	100%	X

England doesn't have its own Parliament, a deficiency that ought to be fixed in some way.

 

[lpetrich]

Making the Senate proportional by population, like the House, is an interesting exercise. For that, I decided to use the Huntington-Hill highest-averages algorithm as my baseline one. The overall number of Senators is twice the number of states, but each state may have more or fewer Senators than the average, 2. Each state has at least 1 Senator, also parallel to the House. I used the 2020 US Census data for all the present states, omitting possible future ones DC and Puerto Rico.

My code is in lkpetrich/Proportional-Allocation: For doing proportional allocation and representation

The result; each number of Senators and the states with that number:

• 10 CA
• 8 TX
• 6 FL
• 5 NY
• 3 GA IL MI NC NJ OH PA
• 2 AZ CO IN MA MD MN MO TN VA WA WI
• 1 AK AL AR CT DE HI IA ID KS KY LA ME MS MT ND NE NH NM NV OK OR RI SC SD UT VT WV WY

To get a semi-proportional result, I decided to take the square roots of the state populations. I also took the square of the Huntington-Hill divisor, and both methods agreed:

• 5 CA
• 4 FL NY TX
• 3 GA IL MI NC NJ OH PA
• 2 AL AR AZ CO CT IA IN KY LA MA MD MN MO MS NV OK OR SC TN UT VA WA WI
• 1 AK DE HI ID KS ME MT ND NE NH NM RI SD VT WV WY

I also tried setting an upper limit on the number of Senators for each state.

Max: 8

• 8 CA TX
• 6 FL
• 5 NY
• 4 IL PA
• 3 GA MI NC NJ OH
• 2 AZ CO IN MA MD MN MO TN VA WA WI
• 1 AK AL AR CT DE HI IA ID KS KY LA ME MS MT ND NE NH NM NV OK OR RI SC SD UT VT WV WY

Max: 6

• 6 CA FL NY TX
• 4 IL PA
• 3 GA MI NC NJ OH VA
• 2 AL AZ CO IN MA MD MN MO SC TN WA WI
• 1 AK AR CT DE HI IA ID KS KY LA ME MS MT ND NE NH NM NV OK OR RI SD UT VT WV WY

Max: 4

• 4 CA FL GA IL NC NY OH PA TX
• 3 AZ MI NJ VA WA
• 2 AL CO IN KY LA MA MD MN MO OR SC TN WI
• 1 AK AR CT DE HI IA ID KS ME MS MT ND NE NH NM NV OK RI SD UT VT WV WY

I could further adjust my algorithm to avoid that pileup of states at the maximum number of Senators. Since the highest-average algorithm adds seats one at a time, one could adjust it so that it will only add a seat if there are fewer states with one more seat.

 

[ZiprHead]

Make the Senate more representative by eliminating the filibuster. Fuck minority rule.

 

[bilby]

England doesn't have its own Parliament, a deficiency that ought to be fixed in some way.

That's not a deficiency, it's a symptom of English dominance over the rest of the UK, and over the UK parliament.

The Welsh, Scottish, and Northern Irish parliaments exist solely as an attempt to reduce English dominance over those regions. Similar efforts to devolve power to outlying regions who feel that Westminster cares too much about the Home Counties, and not enough about the rest of the UK, have been mooted for Cornwall, Yorkshire, and various divisions between the county and country scales, such as the North East, North West, Midlands, and South West - with varying degrees of public support.

 

[ZiprHead]

There is an ad playing on TV a lot. It complains that the Dem candidate voted to allow a Chinese company to set up a battery manufacturing plant here in Michigan. I don't get it. Apparently to MAGAts this is a bad thing. I would think good paying manufacturing jobs would be welcomed.