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PAL representation: Difference between revisions
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:*Neighbors can organize to lobby their shared representatives.
:*Fair attention for local issues.
=== Compared to other PR systems ===
*A closed list system would be (rightly) attacked as a power grab by party bureaucrats. Voters have been souring on parties for decades now, and they wouldn't stand for that.
*A global open-list system such as STV would have unacceptably-complex ballots. Who can keep track of dozens of candidates, let alone fully rank them?
*A districtless system would be too radical a change. People are used to having "their" representative.
*A multimember-district system helps with the above problems, but doesn't actually solve them. Who wants a system where ballots are only a little bit too complex, where you only sort of know who your representative is, and which is only mostly proportional?
*A mixed member system is an ugly hybrid. To me, US democratic ideals are too egalitarian to accept that there could be two different kinds of representative.
*More seriously, a mixed member system would be totally unacceptable to existing incumbents, as it would draw too many of them out of their existing districts. And I actually think this is in part a valid concern. The public interest is to have representatives who are accountable, not complacent; but I see no value in change for change's sake.
*Balinski's "Fair Majority Voting", as used in Belgian municipal elections, resolves all of the concerns above, but it would be very hard to justify the fact that some representatives would lose with a majority vote. It's very hard to respond to a simple question like "Why should my opponent win with 45%, when I lose with 52%?" with a complex answer about party balance and compensating for gerrymandering.
**Note that PAL representation would actually give the same result as FMV, but would provide an easy justification for that result. Responding to the question above, you could say: "Each representative needs exactly the same number of votes to win. Your opponent got the vote transfers they needed to reach that threshold and you didn't. Those votes were transferred in accordance with the explicit will of the voters, and to ignore them would be to disenfranchise those voters."
== Justification ==
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