Reply #23: Okay... [View All]

...the minimum House size required to give Wyoming 2 Representatives while retaining proportionality is a staggering 1,200.

Anyway, I have three concerns with your suggestion (neither of which, btw, makes it worse than the current mire of a system):

1. STV is very coarse; with 5-member districts, the Greens will not have a single representative, based on the 2000 presidential results, even though they have enough voters for 13 seats out of 435.

2. Like any system with a fixed number of representatives per area, STV punishes districts with high voter turnout. Should Maine and Hawaii have the same number of Representatives (their populations are almost identical) even though Maine's voter turnout is more than half again Hawaii's (67% in 2000 vs. 40%)?

3. STV conforms to state boundaries, even though they make little sense; Northern Virginia is closer in mindset to Baltimore and the rest of the Megalopolis but will be lumped with the rest of the state. This also means that STV has a greater chance of being passed, but this is still a dangerous double-edged sword.

BTW, my constitution link doesn't work because the last four characters of it are thml where they should be html - anyway, you can still use my sig link, which points to the same page.