I think the number of representatives per election district is a really interesting mathematical/social problem in democracy, and I’m interested in what this audience has to say.

The problem has never been a lack of solutions; we already know what to do. Ideas are cheap, easy, plentiful. Ideas for ‘better’ political systems are just bike shedding.

We don’t need more ideas, we need the political will to try one. And that is the real problem.

Interesting, I wonder how many invisible third parties exist at the state or regional level that would be represented in a better system.

That being said, this state government seems rather large for Minnesota, a state with a population of six million people. 67 senators and 134 representatives, and that's within the clunky three-branch system of government copied from the US Federal Government. Those numbers are bigger than California's which has a population that is five times larger.

Ranked Choice Voting has a much better chance of happening at a wide scale than this proposal, and even then it will be an uphill road.

This post is an interesting mathematical exercise, but RCV actually has the potential to succeed.

I would be in favor of anything that improves the current political system, including a shot at this policy. On a meta-level, I would even be in favor of new political processes that are WORSE, simply because the adoption of such a policy could prove to people that we CAN change our processes, and then we could (try) to continue to amend our process until we find one that works.

My personal favorite approach at the national level would be Ranked Choice [1], as that would preserve the (IMO important) single decision maker in the executive branch, while removing the incentive to vote for someone you hate just because they aren't as bad as the Other Guy. Interested to hear if HN knows of other/better ways to accomplish the same

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked-choice_voting_in_the_Un...

Will this result in more polarizing candidates since the party is determining who is elected instead of electing a specific person?

I'm not sure of the degree to which the two party system is a problem for state legislatures. It's an obvious problem at the federal level, but you do still stand a chance of knowing your local legislator to the state. When the constituents and representatives are just abstractions to each other, of course a party comes in to act as a middle layer.

But I do like the idea of list systems. Geographic districts are an artifact of slow communications, which don't exist any more. My neighbors and I have fewer overlapping interests than they did in the past.

Make more parties.

My pet theory is that everything is fine the way it is. For example, looking at the first table, if those 260 democrat voters voted for what they wanted instead of against what they didn't want, they might get split up into, say, 160 democrat and 100 agrarian. The outcome is still the same (republican wins) so it doesn't hurt anything, but it tells the democrat party that to win those voters back next time, they should take on some of the agrarian policies that those voters want. If they win on that, then voters get what they want just with a different brand name (democrat instead of agrarian).

My concept is that the whole idea of two-parties-bad appeals to people who are more interested in parties than policies. I don't think it matters what the name of the party is if they have the same policies.

As I see it, the problem with our political system is not the two parties but rather the money. Election campaigns are self-funded, which means that candidates have to beg for contributions from wealthy donors or be wealthy themselves and donate to their own campaign. Moreover, technology such as radio, television, and the internet have made election campaigns vastly more expensive: it's now about saturating the field with advertising rather than a door-to-door ground game. Technology has also nationalized politics, and campaign donations too, allowing instant communication and coordination around the country, around the whole world. It used to be said that all politics is local, but that ceased to be true decades ago.

The reason that third parties seem less corrupt and more representative of what the public wants is simply that they receive almost no campaign donations compared to the two major parties. The corrupting influence of money is mostly absent. As soon as a third party comes to power, all of the wealthy interests will suddenly be interested in that party, and it will inevitably become just as bad as the other parties are now.

I'm not opposed to changes in the voting system, but I think it's more important to get the money out of politics, for example by publicly funding election campaigns.