Anti-Climacus

AND: Actually, while I'm still thinking about this reapportionment set of questions, let me shoot down Matthew Yglesias' suggestion, I think, fairly easily:

Any system other than plurality rule by it's very nature is descriminatory*, because it manages to both contravene the principle of one-man, one-vote, and because it's inherently biased against people who only have one candidate they want to get elected (there's a huge difference, after all, in asking people to order Bush, Nader and Gore (though this would be biased against people who only wanted, for example, to vote for Gore, since they'd have no second choice) and asking them to order Dean, Kerry, Lieberman, Kucinich, Edwards, Gephardt, Mosley-Braun, Sharpton and Clark). These sorts of proposals tend to get made by people who spend lots of time following politics, and can thus make those sorts of fine-grained distinctions, and tend to ignore how this would work out for people who vote but don't really follow politics.

*Except, of course, for intensity rules, though those descriminate against people with more than one choice. Plurality rule is nice because it puts everyone on an even playing field, regardless of the sophistication of their thinking about the candidates running.

AND as I look at the rule he proposes again, it looks like a Hamiltonian apportionment system, as is used in some party caucuses, though I think the Hamiltonian system has fewer problems because it sets the bar of X/N, weeds out all the candidates who fail to get a certain percentage of the votes, then re-votes amongst the remaining candidates, apportioning by X/N. Of course, even this rule has structural flaws that I won't get into right now because I should probably think about having to get up for work in the morning...