> If the US had districts with 10 representatives,
> then one would only need to obtain 10% of the vote to get a seat, but
> the number of potential voters one has to reach is 10 times greater, no?
> The number of necessary votes per seat is the same, and I don't see how
> the campaign expenditure per necessary voter changes.
Actually, the number of votes you need to get INCREASES.
If you have 10 seats, each with 100,000 voters, then it takes 50,001 votes to win a single-seat election.
If you have 10 seats elected via PR, then you need to get (1,000,000/10+1)+1 votes = 90,910 votes.
But this is 9.091% rather than 50.001%. A much SMALLER percentage. You don't have to try and compete in all 10 seats -- just try to get ONE CANDIDATE elected.
What's even more important, you don't have to do ANYTHING about the 90.909% whose votes you don't need. Of course, that's an exageration, but you get the idea--there's a MUCH larger number of voters you can afford to ignore--at least for the purposes of getting one person elected the first time around.
This means you can focus on communicating in non-massively expensive ways. You can focus on using communication channels developed by already-existing networks of issue-related organizing. You can depend more on word-of-mouth, on endorsements by local unions & their leadership, community organizations, environmental organizations, you name it -- all these organizations can become MUCH more significant players, rather than being drafted into supporting the increasingly less of two increasing evils.
Now, in most of America there are enough people ALREADY fed up with the rightward lunge of the Democratic Party to give a left/progressive party a 10% vote. The main thing preventing this is the fear of total Republican landslide.
But if you remove this fear, so the vote for a left party doesn't end up ACTUALLY electing a super-hideous Republican, then the votes are just their for the taking. All that's necessary is for them to know that there's a candidate for them to vote for. You don't need to do multiple mailings, and counter all kinds of right-wing demonizing propaganda--these voters are already hip to all that, they can reject it all by themselves.
Of course, the crucial factor here is how low the threashold goes, and how high the number of such voters is in any given electorate. In a state with 2 Congressional seats, you need 33 1.3%+1 of the votes. One seat is certain to go Republican, but the other would be up for grabs between the DLC-approved Democrat and whatever left/progressive party we can manage to field.
What's more, you could make considerable inroads in states like Oklahoma, which have completely lost their semi-populist Democratic representatives in single-district elections, but could elect a good chunk of like-minded representatives--maybe 1/3 of their delegations--under PR, who might well ALL be members of a new left/progressive party, rather than DLC Democrats.
Is this scernario optimistic? Yes, of course it is. But not unreasonably and impossibly so. Which is why the Demopublicans are damn sure not about to let ANYTHING like it happen.
But, then, they weren't about to let the Civil Rights Movement happen, either, were they?
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"