alt Hacker NewsThere has to be a better way of representing a population than our current system. There is just no way you can represent real, complex, demographics in a fair and proportional way -- there are an unlimited number of ways to categorize people, and by grouping them one way you will often exclude grouping them in other, and perhaps not less significant ways. What you end up with is a very skewed representation of a population that's only bounded to reality through our notions of which category they belong to.
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Some cantons in Switzerland use a system called biproportional apportionment. They say "okay, party A got 25% of the votes, so they must get 25% of the seats. And district 1 accounts for 30% of the population, so they must get 30% of the seats." And so on. Then they do some matrix math to determine who gets what seats in which districts. The method ensures each party gets the right total number of seats while each district gets its predetermined seat count. You could in principle extend the method to handle three or more dimensions.
This is a strong argument for a broken status quo. It’s essentially dismissing many possible, tangible, in other places implemented approaches to improve representation, by essentially declaring that fixing the system cannot be done, or must first involve some completely new solution.
Germany uses mixed-member proportional representation. You cast two votes in each federal election: one vote for a registered political party at the federal level and one vote for among a list of local candidates from those parties. The ballots famously have the phrase "You have 2 voices/votes" ("Sie haben 2 Stimmen") on the top [1].
The seats in the Bundestag are parceled out in proportion to shares of the national vote among federally recognized parties, and each party has a list of candidates who may or may not get a seat from that party's resulting allotment, based in part on the popularity of those candidates in their local list elections. The math of it is a bit more complicated than that, but it works quite well to completely sidestep the gerrymandering problem. The flipside is that parties must be registered federally to participate, and this gives the government a great deal of implicit power to exclude parties it doesn't like.
CGP Grey has a good YouTube video explaining it, probably better than I have here [2].
[1]: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/german-election-ballot-paper...
[2]: https://youtu.be/QT0I-sdoSXU?si=VInLvyvMlMJzIvoh