This is an official petition to Congress pursuant to The Petitions Act.
The problem
Congressional elections have had a problem for a long time, but it has only worsened: elections are not competitive enough. In the last House of Representatives election that had voting, there were 122 voters, but one of the elected representatives got only three votes.
It’s obvious what the problem here is. What does democracy mean if three votes are enough to secure a seat on the supreme legislative body in this state? It doesn’t help competency or public confidence in Congress either.
A sidebar on decreasing seats
One of the original ideas at the constitutional convention, and which has been repeated subsequently, is that seat counts should be decreased to increase competitiveness. While that would have the effect in some cases, this issue is sort of inherent to the voting system we use.
This happens because of our voting system, first past the post. Each voter only gets one vote. But this system is designed for single winner elections, like Governor, or irl, your local representative. It does not work in multi-winner elections.
The solution
Many of the systems used in large countries, like irl in Europe, are much more complex systems. These require developer or founder involvement to implement, like STV in Ridgeway, and are just too complicated for most voters to understand.
Accordingly, this petition proposes a simple solution, and one that could be used on the forums today if the law was changed:
Let voters vote for as many seats as there are.
Each vote still counts the same, but voters can give their votes to different candidates. This means voters vote for all the candidates who will best represent them. Not just one person. And the candidates who truly have the support of the voters get elected, not someone with three votes.
This system is called block plurality voting and best represents the will of the people.
This can be implemented just by changing one setting when election sponsors create the poll. Keep the minimum number of votes to 1, and set the maximum to however many vacant seats there are in the election.
A lego-world example
Vancouver, yes that Vancouver, but bear with me here, used to use the same system we do for their city council elections, where they had 11 seats.
But they made a change to how their legislature work (which did include decreasing seats), so decided to take the opportunity to change to block plurality voting. The result (below) was pretty different.
Just look at the difference in the vote counts of those elected. Each of those votes is a person supporting those candidates; its just that every person can support multiple candidates, instead of just one.
And this effect remained in their next and most recent election:
This system is common sense. But it’s also proved to work.
This is a common sense change but would be transformative for our democracy. It would force Congress to represent the public, not get voted into power by themselves and two friends.
If you support this petition, you can sign it by commenting accordingly on this post (section 2b.iv). If this signature receives 50 signatures, it must be responded to by Congress (section 2e.ii).