Ted— You wrote: Looking at the problem from a higher level, one could instead ask, what is the problem that we are trying to address with legislatures to begin with? One could argue, along the lines of The Wisdom of Crowds, that governing can be compared to a genetic modeling problem. If that is the case, the part of government that proposes and argues new laws can be compared to genetic diversity, while the accept or reject portion of government can be compared to natural selection. That would lead one to the proposition of using Proportional Representation in the lower house, and centrist aggregation for the upper house and executive branches. [endquote] &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Such as a single-winner method repeatedly applied. In an ideal world, that 2-house system might be one of the possibilies. Ideally, I don’t oppose PR, though I don’t consider it necessary or important. GPUS, G/GPUSA, SPUSA and probably other progressive parties too, advocate PR, and I wouldn’t oppose it or take a position one way or the other about it. With a progressive party in office, I’d be content with at least first trying out the government that they propose in their platform, as-is. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& You wrote: So what is the best way to represent the lower house? Consider http://www.thirty-thousand.org/ At one time, there was one representative for every 30K voters. We are now some large distance away from that. Historically, the number of representatives per candidate approximately followed the curve of the cube root of the population, until the number of representatives was frozen in 1913 at 435. [endquote] &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Apportioning seats to states has a built-in “1-person-1-vote” problem: The Senate automatically gives each state 2 senators, regardless of the state’s population. And even the House can’t avoid that problem, because it’s necessary to give a House representative to every state, resulting in unavoidably more representation per person in the smallest states. That could be avoided if we forget about apportionment to states, and just district, disregarding state-lines, the whole country, by Band-Rectangle districting, a districting system in which district lines are established by the Band-Rectangle rule, with no human input. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& You Wrote: Personally, I would prefer a combination of more representatives with PR, so that almost everyone would feel that their voice was represented in the lower house of the legislature. &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& Yes, but the many small districts bring “pork-barrel” incentive. My suggestion of a 7-member all at-large national assembly would avoid that. I suggested 2 ways of electing it: 1. Repeatedly applying a single-winner method to the ballots, so as to elect to each next seat the next highest-finishing candidate. 2. Each party offers a set of 7 candidates to fill the seats, and people vote among the parties. The winning party fills all the seats. I like #2, but its trouble is that every single-winner method can mess up sometimes. The advantage of #1 is that one mess-up would only affect one of the 7 seats, and so it wouldn’t do serious harm. Of course the voters, too, could make a group-error (as may have happened this time, President 2016, if we (without any particular reason) believe that the count in the general election was more honest than the count in the Democrat primary). So maybe, to protect against a group voting-error, it might be better to only elect 7 or 8 of 15 national assembly members every 2 years. That way, an erroneous vote would only affect about half of the seats. But I prefer Bottom-Up. You wrote: The problem with the Bottom Up proposal is that it is basically a hierarchical system like the current Democratic Party Caucuses, and winnows away true proportional representation by discretizing at each level. [endquote] &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&& It isn’t good at national majoritarianism, but its advantages are overwhelming. It, like any acceptable government, would be different from the Democrat Party Caucuses in an important way: Bribery would be illegal. Any offending officeholder would be subject to immediate recall. Any officeholder who evidenced an agenda different from that of hir constituents would quickly find hirself out on hir a**. We’ve often heard people speculating about whether a president is going to keep hir campaign promises. What??! If we elect someone based, at least partly, on their promises, and then they disregard those promises later, when in office, and we’re stuck with them and their broken-promise policies…..Does anyone think that’s democracy? Voting is entirely irrelevant if the officeholder doesn’t have to abide by hir promises that got hir elected. The non-recallability of national officeholders makes no sense, in a supposed democracy. That’s without even getting into the question of vote-count verifiability & count-fraud. Michael Ossipoff