Pros And Cons Of The Proportional Representation System

Rob Richie of the FairVote group, suggests getting rid of winner-take-all elections. When you get 51% of the vote, you represent 100% of the people. If a candidate is obviously going to win a majority of the vote not only do they represent all the people but people don’t engage in the voting process. This change would result in larger areas having more representatives. The system would change from needing a little over half to win the seat to only needing a third of the vote to win. This will ensure more voters’ voices are heard. Richie suggested we change the winner take all votes to having more people elected to balance the representatives. I believe this splitting of vote would help more minorities be heard in a district. I also feel this system may become more cumbersome to getting the

The advantages to the proportional representation system are numerous. More women would be represented, racial and ethnic minorities would not be overlooked, and issue-oriented campaigns would arise. Elections would become more exciting to the public because their voice and vote will make a difference. "Winner take all" will no longer exist. Americans

A two party system is strong and influential although it allows lesser parties to exist and have an influence. As a result a majority party will form the government and the minority party will form the opposition, and coalitions of the lesser parties are possible. These systems can also be multi-party systems. The Two-party sytem has advantages and disadvantages they consist of: Advantages,: It can lead to political stability which leads, in turn, to economic growth, two-party systems have been seen as preferable to multi-party systems because they are simple to govern, while multi-party systems can sometimes lead to parliament. The disadvantages: Two-party systems have been criticized extreme views, and putting a second opinion on debate within a nation, two-party systems for fail to provide enough options since only two choices are permitted on the ballot, the problem with having only two parties is that the nation loses "the ability for things to bubble up from the body politic and give voice to things that aren’t being voiced by the major parties." Multi-party governments permit wider and more diverse viewpoints in government, and encourage dominant parties to make deals with weaker parties to form winning coalitions. I think having a two-party system is ideal because neither major party is strong enough to win without bringing up specific topics that they believe in or their ideology of their party. The way the Republicans and Democrats present

The term “gerrymandering” can be traced back to Elbridge Gerry, who was one of the first governors to sign a redistricting plan that would give his party an advantage. Gerrymandering is the act of redrawing congressional districts in a way that favors one group or another. This is done by the state legislature, and is designed to favor their own party. Gerrymandering is harmful to elections. Gerrymandering is harmful towards elections because it can dilute a candidate's voter base, free up the majority of other districts for an opposing party, and alter the weight of a voter's vote.

Gerrymandering is the process of altering electoral districts to favor a political party over the other by receiving more votes in that districts based on the population demographics and party affiliation. Gerrymandering was founded when Governor Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts had enacted a bill that would allow the state to the redistricted in a way that would favor the party he represented, which was the Democratic-Republican Party, over the Federalists. When the redistricting plan was brought to the press, the term was created using Governor Gerry's name and salamander after one district in Boston appeared to look like a salamander.

A primary election is where voters in each state votes for a presidential candidate by

According to fairvote.org there are many great proposals for a new system of electing the President. Direct election with instant runoff voting allows voters to pick and choose their favorite candidates rather than choosing only one candidate. Then when the votes are counted the candidate with the most votes gets elected, but if that is not the case the candidate with the lowest number of votes becomes eliminated and you simply repeat the process until a candidate receives a majority of votes. Another avenue is to proportionate the allocation of electoral votes. This system would split each states electoral votes to match each candidates popular vote percentages. For example, this method would give a candidate with 30 percent of the popular vote to receive 30 percent of the electoral votes from that state instead of zero. On the other hand, this method has its downfall because we would not know how to allocate electors proportionally. Many believe such problem can be resolved by increasing the number of electoral votes to the number needed in order to reduce margin of error while others suggest rounding to whole votes. In the end an elector cannot represent multiple candidates and in the end mistakes are a high probability of making a mistake and essentially every vote will not count equally. A direct vote with plurality rule would abolish the Electoral College, but in order for this system to work it must be combined with the instant runoff proposal otherwise it would only compliment one-half. Additionally, the congressional district method is intended to divide the electoral votes by district giving each district one vote and placing the other two votes toward the statewide popular vote winner. In essence thought this system would not fix the disproportional aspects about the Electoral College because it simply uses districts to identify each elector and people would become discouraged as most

If you care about your say or the people’s say when voting for your country’s leaders, then you should know that gerrymandering is an unfavorable and atrocious way that many politicians have attempted to deceive the voting system. Gerrymandering violates the US Constitution that our founding fathers worked so hard to create. It is a very inequitable thing to undertake. Therefore, I am 100% against the idea of gerrymandering as it gives many parties an unjustified dominance in many states when voting electorally. Additionally, this issue also violates the United State citizens’ individual rights, and infringes on two of the seven constitutional principles.

The process of Gerrymandering is a very controversial and corrupt, which is outlined throughout the piece “How to Rig an Election” and “Scrambling the Lines: Redistricting Gone Awry”. Throughout the second article, the author discusses how the GOP is willing to break every rule stated to increase its electoral power and have a better shot at winning. Furthermore, the GOP used Gerrymandering to alter seven democratic districts in Texas to allow them to lean Republican. The U.S. House Majority Leader DeLay “channeled millions of dollars into the state race through Political Action Committees” and therefore giving the Republican party the State House of Representatives and the State Senate in Texas. On the same topic, the Democrats wished to adjourn

Proportional representation is an electoral system where parties will earn congressional seats in proportion to how many votes people cast for them. This would be an extreme opposite to the result of gerrymandering. People would then feel the need to vote because they know that their vote will actually go towards something. If 25% of the voters supported a certain party, that party would then get about 25% of congressional seats. Proportional representation is a way that could help fix the unfairness of the plurality system. The plurality system allows for larger parties to get an unfair amount of congressional seats whereas smaller parties do not have this advantage and also have a huge difficulty in winning any representation at all, also known as Duverger’s law. This would be a great way to prevent gerrymandering which helps with the redistricting issue majorly. Proportional representation could be brought in without a constitutional amendment in some cases, but the system born from this would not work well unless the powers of the Governor General were made clear. What would require a constitutional amendment would be a change to the powers of the Governor General. If it were simple enough to not require a constitutional amendment, I feel as if this would be an excellent idea and help solve many problems and unhappy people with our current

Gerrymandering is the use of redrawing certain districts and manipulating the boundaries allowing a political advantage to one’s party and the other a disadvantage. This process occurs every ten years as new political candidates run to be a government official ( Fan 737 ). It started in 1812 where Governor Gerry redrew the district lines of Massachusetts, giving his party an advantage. That is how Gerrymandering got its name. Usually, the person who redraws the district goes after the urban areas because of how populated they are compared to rural areas. This is not good for the United States because of many reasons; Gerrymandering create districts that are confusing to voters because of the weird shapes and sizes, claims of the party can be contradictory, and the fact that gerrymandering is around, makes the people believe that the candidates are corrupted and running the right the vote. ( RULEY 785 ).

Winner-take-all systems tend to be significantly simpler and more stable. However, the representatives in this system tend to be more polarized than the average voter in the districts they represent. Additionally, winner-take-all systems tend to keep a very small number of parties in play, limiting the voters’ perceived reasonable choices. As pointed out earlier, the majority vote does not even need to be a majority of the total. A candidate only needs more votes than any of the other candidates to win, which may not be representative of the electorate. In a system with two major parties, one of the worst-case scenarios could be an election where the winner only has about 45 percent of the total votes. This would mean that around 55 percent of the district’s population is not being properly represented. Minor parties are often looked at as hopeless non-options, since they appear to be lacking the support necessary to win. Voters do not want to waste their votes, so they will try to make what they believe to be the best decision between two highly polarized parties. It is like trying to draw a rainbow in black and white—possible, difficult, yet not likely to produce an accurate depiction. While this makes the system significantly simpler for voters, it also makes the system more easily corruptible, and almost certain to produce a less accurate representation of public interests. Part of the appeal for the argument of keeping this system is that doing so

The advantages of the plurality system are that it can easily be understood by the voters, and provide a much faster decision. Overall it is convenient and tends to be low budget in order for the method to be produced. There is a responsibility between the candidate and the voter, that the plurality voting provides, which for a country that believes in democracy, helps power that belief. However, there is the big disadvantage of if there are more than two candidates. For example, if you have two strong major candidates, one republican and one democratic, they are just fighting each other and the democrats will usually vote for the democratic party, while the republicans will vote for the republican party. However, if you introduce a third candidate, who has a weaker following and popularity rate, it can still easily change the outcome. It could easily split up the republican or democratic vote, depending on the third candidate. IN the

There are many types of parties in the U.S. such as the Libertarian party, the green party, justice party, and the constitution party. Those parties need to have a voice in congress. The democrat and the republican parties monopolize our government and take the decision making the majority and put it into the hands of the party. A multiparty system in the United States would make sure that all political opinions have a voice in congress. We have two main parties, democratic and republican, however these parties only are accepted to a limited amount of views.

be noted that elections have been characterised by violence during and after the elections, and also despite the conduct of elections, Zimbabwean political culture is that of a one party which has been able to win all the elections since post- independence. Also, from the literature above, there seem to be lack of consideration on the aftermath of democratic elections in terms of electoral violence. There is much emphasis on regular conduct of elections as a determinant to democratic governance, but there seems to be ignorance on the mechanisms to sustain democratic governance. Elections do not indicate a perception of elections as a tool for political empowerment of the poor but rather indicate perception of an opportunity to trade votes for material profit or favour.