Made my calls

[lydy]

Called Al, Amy, and Keith about the disasterous Republican "replacement" of Obamacare. As always, I flubbed the first call, did better on the second and third. I kind of think the staff are tired of hearing from me...this may be projection on my part. In all three cases, they didn't ask for my zip code, and in two cases they declined to take it. One of them said, "I have your phone number" which is totes adorbz, since one's area code is the area code that one had when one first got a cell phone, not necessarily where one lives at the moment. Which actually highlights some of the ways in which the geographic representation is an antique thing. On the other hand, most of the suggestions for replacing it with something else seem to have even greater problems. I don't know... It's complicated. If representation were by affinity group rather than geography, it removes the problems of gerrymandering, but introduces greater balkanization, just for starters.

I also called the Dept. of Homeland Security to ask for the release of Daniel Ramirez, who is a Dreamer who didn't do anything at all, other than just, be, you know, brown.

So, that's my little bit for the week.

Comments

[ckd]

Cambridge, MA's city council uses a multi-member single transferable vote system, so a group of just over 20% can elect two of the 9 seats. That group could be defined through any shared set of values: landlords, religion, racial/ethnic/cultural, etc.

Statewide, MA elects 9 Democrats to the House despite the Republicans having a total of 15.34% of the vote; a 9-seat multi-member election using the same process would guarantee them at least one seat assuming those voters picked all Rs ahead of all Ds.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

So, a multi-member election would, in fact, be more representative of the total number of Republicans in your state? Do you see that as a good thing or a bad thing? I am queasy about the Republicans, in general, but it seems like it might be a good thing for everybody if politics weren't so much of a zero-sum, winner take all sort of game.

[ckd]

Well, my no-longer-current state. WA is a bit more geographically diverse politically, which is why we have people like the state legislator who wanted to criminalize protest by calling it "economic terrorism".

I think that STV giving smaller groups (up to a certain point) the ability to elect a representative even if they're geographically dispersed is a feature overall even if I disagree with that group's choice.

I'm definitely not a fan of the current R leadership structure and believe that anyone who will caucus with them is unfit for office, but the structure of STV makes negative campaigning more fraught (you can't really say "Person A sucks, but vote for me second if you vote them first") and therefore might result in electing a third-party candidate whose views are too conservative for Ds and too liberal for Rs rather than a Republican. (Or a more conservative D instead of a real R, though MA already has Stephen Lynch with the current system.)