The Australian Electoral Commission employs over 2000 staff on a full-time basis. During federal elections its workforce swells to more than 80,000. Not as many during state elections of course. I don't know how the employees are chosen, but my guess is that the process is open to scrutiny, as are the changes they propose, by all political parties and probably the public as well, none of whom will let the other sides get away with sneaking partisan decisions in.Forty Two wrote: ↑Mon Nov 12, 2018 4:30 pmI think something of this nature should be used. How are the members of the commission chosen in Oz?Hermit wrote: ↑Sat Nov 10, 2018 6:19 amI don't know exactly how we manage to do exactly that in Australia, but that is exactly what we do via the Australian Electoral Commission, which is the independent, non-partisan organisation that ensures seat boundaries are not gerrymandered and voter suppression does not happen. It uses statisticians to determine seat boundaries and locations of polling booths. Being a federal institution, rules concerning voter registration is uniform throughout the country and from state to state. Oopsies do occur, like when 1,400 ballots were lost during the recount for the 2013 Western Australia Senate election that necessitated the subsequent 2014 special election, but they are exceedingly rare.
Yes, in my view one representative cannot properly act on behalf of three quarter million people. He/she will just have to act on behalf of some of them - say, everyone with assets in excess of $10 million. That should make the workload manageable.Forty Two wrote: ↑Mon Nov 12, 2018 4:30 pmOne big problem the US has is a deficiency in the number of representatives in the House of Representatives. In 1929, the number of representatives was capped at 435. It used to be that as population increased, so would the number of representatives. So, now, with almost 3 times the population we had in 1929, we have the same number of representatives, which means that each representative is representing larger and larger districts. I would think that if there were 1305 representatives in the House, each representative's responsiveness to the people of his or her district would be better. And, there would be more districts to dole out. That way, there would have to be a lot more gerrymandering occurring before it made any real difference on control of the house, and gerrymandering districts at that level would just cause other districts to be created that are heavily weighted to the other party.
I wonder if the people who decided to cap the number of seats even considered the effects of population growth on the tasks of each representative and with that, on governability.