The PR4CA model
Vote for the party you believe in. Pick your favorite person on their team.
Mechanism
Open-list proportional representation. Each voter chooses a party and may mark a preferred candidate on that party’s list. Seats in the district are allocated to parties in proportion to their vote. Within a party, candidate preference decides who fills those seats. That is candidate choice without pretending a single-member district can represent a 500,000-person Assembly district.
Assembly
80 seats, unchanged in number, redrawn into 16–20 multi-member districts. Each elects about five members proportionally. District magnitude around five is high enough for smaller parties and independents to win seats, and still local enough that a district is a real place, not the whole state.
Senate
40 seats, redrawn into 8–10 multi-member districts, each electing four or five members. Same logic as the Assembly. No single party is expected to hold a majority of either house on current California vote shares. Coalition government becomes the normal case.
Threshold
No extra legal hurdle. The threshold is natural: set by how many seats are in the district. A five-seat district has an effective bar around 10–15%, depending on the formula, without writing a number into the constitution that opponents can attack. The math is the threshold.
What this is not
- Not single-winner ranked choice voting.
- Not a closed party list where only the party machine orders the names.
- Not mixed-member proportional (no parallel single-member tier).
- Not a larger legislature. Same 80 / 40, different maps.
This is the product. What PR is · FAQ · chris@pr4ca.com