Minority control

[mindstalk]

It's old news that you can control a single-member district legislature with a quarter of the voting population[1], ideally distributed: half the voters[1] in half the districts, to give you half the legislature. I just realized you can amend the US constitution with 1/3 of the voters.

You need 2/3 of the House and Senate, and 3/4 of the states. House: 1/2 of 2/3 of the districts, for 1/3 of the voters. That's the most stringent consideration. States differ wildly in population, so you need a lot less for 2/3 of the Senate, though I don't feel like doing the math. (IIRC you need 8% of the voters to control a 41% filibuster bloc, given how low population many states are, and our treating Wyoming as importantly as Texas.) 3/4 of the states would means 3/8 of the voters if populations were even, but they're not, and as 3/8 is .375 vs. the .333 of 1/3, I feel confident in risking an assertion that 3/4 of the states won't need as many voters as the 2/3 House requirement.

Note I've been precise in saying "of the voters"; given typical turnouts, the fraction of the population can be slashed in half.

Yes, this is unlikely to happen precisely, but I think a system would be stronger if it couldn't happen at all, e.g. by requiring a direct vote of the people. And given a political bias to most low-pop states, it's certainly possible that an amendment could pass without as much popular support as the Founders intended.

[1] With plurality voting in theory you could need arbitrarily small amounts, what with multiple candidates splitting the vote and only needing a bit more than anyone else.

Comments

[mishalak]

The current system is far from perfect, however the minority of a majority of states problem will not occur due to the fact that reliable partisans are far from efficiently distributed and cannot be since the boarders of states are inviolate. Therefore states are, if anything, the fairest districts in the United States since they are not drawn by partisan officers.

The Republican party has currently a significant advantage in the House of Representatives but it is far from being a 1/4 of voters to carry a majority problem that you propose. Democrats managed to take 51% of the vote and fell 17 seats short of a majority. This means they lost about 4.9% of their nationwide vote to shenanigans or just the fact that Democrats and Republicans tend to move into strongholds rather than swing districts. This is far from what I would want, but it also is no as if the Democrats got 55, 60, or 75% of the vote and ended up in the minority. They got a pretty narrow majority and ended up in the minority.

A direct vote of the people has problems as well as long as there are differing standards for voting in different places. It will mean that partisan locations rather than swing locations control who wins. Because turnout will be everything and if they can turn out more of their base in deep red Idaho by being radical then it counts just as much as appealing to the middle and is much easier. Plus vote fraud anywhere can change the vote rather than in just swing states.

More devastating than any theory is what direct voting means in practice. It also means the same sort of wonderful ideas and mass movements as in states like California and Colorado get pushed to the fore. Direct democracy is crap in practice.

[mindstalk]

The unlikelihood isn't too relevant to me.

Uniform voting standards would make sense, obviously.

"More devastating than any theory is what direct voting means in practice. It also means the same sort of wonderful ideas and mass movements as in states like California and Colorado get pushed to the fore. Direct democracy is crap in practice."

The most direct democratic place today is Switzerland; one can hardly call that crap in practice. Yes, voters can pass laws we don't like. So can legislatures, will you be consistent and use that to argue that representative democracy is crap in practice?

21 US states have legislative initiatives, 18 have amendment initiatives. http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/Forms_of_direct_democracy_in_the_American_states

And one could argue that occasional referenda or initiatives every few years is crap pratice compared to an engaged population voting multiple times a year.

[mishalak]

Ah yes, the wonderful Swiss referendum system. It prevents dangerous 'foreigners' from acquiring Swiss citizenship with such weak qualifications such as having been born in Switzerland to parents born in Switzerland of grandparents born in Switzerland.

And in the United States of America it would be combined with our absolutist stand on the first Amendment and money as speech to give us the same sort of nationalist laws and maybe finally eliminate the welfare state as well.

I am not a fan of direct democracy precisely because I live in a state with a referendum system, namely Colorado. Of the dozens of referendums that have passed in my lifetime I cannot name more than five that was a good idea.

[mindstalk]

Like the friendly German law, which IIRC had generations of stateless Turks in Germany?

What fraction of the non-referendum laws passed in CO have you thought were a good idea? (And did you mean referendum or initiative?)

The virtue of direct democracy isn't that it magically gives you good results, it's that it gives you what the majority wants. No better, but also no worse. The Swiss, despite their association with banking and capital, passed an initiative requiring corporate CEO pay to be voted on by the shareholders. A lot of the economic shit going down in the eurozone -- dismantling the welfare state and all -- probably wouldn't pass a mandatory referendum. Endless copyright extension? NSA? The UK joining the Iraq War?

[mishalak]

If the results are no different why is it better?

[mindstalk]

I said no better than what the majority want. I posit that it's better than what we find in representative democracies today.

[mishalak]

I posit that you are, like a libertarian or communist, working from theory rather than from actual evidence. You are pointing to problems that do not exist to prove that a system that actually fails would be better. Name a US Constitutional Amendment passed by minority support. One. Even one.

[mindstalk]

That form of minority support is more of an amusing observation. I don't claim any amendments passed that way.

I'd say lots of laws pass with probable minority support, though more from the intrinsic nature of representative government, where elections hinge on only a couple of issues, than from the mechanism described. Also from things like Harper's government having a majority of seats with a minority of votes.

Also of interest are the laws that don't pass despite majority support. That Chomsky thing I posted described some of those.