I like your example, Ed.
Unfortunate for us, the United States is the nation in the world with the largest incarcerated population in the world. No nation has as many people in jail, percentage-wise, as the United States.
So, if we were to compare the female incarcerated folks in the United States with the same in nations with proportional systems, we know the US will look terrible. The US looks terrible when it comes to jailed people — period.
But I like your thinking that we have to be very careful what populations we compare. The legal system and its outcomes are not positives, they are negatives, so I would not use that to declare anything about our voting system (but you made me dig deeper and the US still loses that by a long shot).
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Personally, I add 1 or 2 to the following:
If 1 in 2 is female, then I will not consider the system very fair until the level of representation is 1 in 3 (I added 1 to the 2 to get to 3). I would not consider 1 in 4 as part of the best, but when it is 1 in 5, I know for sure that the system sucks. In the case of female representatives, our system sits between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5.
If 1 in 8 is African American, then I will not consider the system very fair until the level of representation is 1 in 10 (I added 2 to the 8 to get to 10). Of course, if it is 1 in 11 or 12, I am not going to lay awake about that at night. But if that number is 1 in 33, then I know for sure the system is unfair.
But we do not need to look just at people to see that the system is unfair.
Our system produces two political colors only: red and blue.
The horrible part is that we start to think accordingly. We all have a tendency to start seeing things from a red or blue perspective, politically.
As you can see in the image to the right, green is rather well represented. And it can be used to see what happens in our system and in our thinking.
The green in the right picture gets spun in our system so it becomes some kind of red or blue (to be liked or disliked). Our system is known to have a lot of spin. The other system is not known to have much spin.
Our voting system does something similar to us. Before we cast our votes, we look at the polls and discover which candidates have a good chance of winning. Beforehand, we make up our minds, knowing that only one can win. We gnaw on the possibility whether our candidate has a chance or not.
In the We The People system to the right, people do not battle each other for the win in the voting booth. There is no battle. Every person handpicks their own representative. Green is represented by green representatives. People pick their candidates based on their own political color, not on the chance of winning a seat or not.
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We are segregated in districts and we battle each other over the single seat. That is pure divide-and-conquer, and that is pure medieval.
As mentioned the good part is that the US Constitution asks us already to put the better system in place in our cities and counties.
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Thank you, Ed, and compliments once again for your excellent example. I hope you’ll accept my response as sufficiently explained.
