PRSA

Proportional Representation Society of Australia; advocating for representative democracy using PR-STV and multi-member electorates.

[PRSA @PR_STV]

New on the PRSA website:

We’d all like our governments to represent us, the people.

Unfortunately the method we use to elect our governments doesn’t deliver representation that matches the diversity of views found in the electorate.
#PR_STV #STV #auspol
https://t.co/BKA3VX6VQB

[PRSA @PR_STV]

@GaryWMorehead @bbs1derzy @leedrutman Here’s Tasmanian @kevinbonham on how to best use your vote when you have 7 seat proportional RCV. https://t.co/audqmVIxZq

[PRSA @PR_STV]

@GaryWMorehead @bbs1derzy @leedrutman Here’s Tasmanian @kevinbonham on how to best use your vote when you have 7 seat proportional RCV. https://t.co/audqmVIxZq

[Andrew James @Melway_27_J3]

@Johnsmithlymb @leedrutman STV is the key basis of @fairvote 's & @RepDonBeyer 's Fair Representation Act/Bill, partly for that reason:
https://t.co/9diGuhAkFN
See also @PR_STV

[PRSA @PR_STV]

@FixOurHouse A well argued piece.

Single member districts constrain voter choice, are doomed to distort and waste more than half the votes.

Merge these five districts into a #FairRepAct MMD. Choice expands and nearly all voters see their 1st or 2nd choices elected.

[PRSA @PR_STV]

@ZacharyKane19 @beachmagoo Be careful what you wish for. Preferential voting in single member districts restricts choice, wastes half the votes and results in distortional misrepresentation.

[FairVote @fairvote]

"Multi-member districts based on ranked choice voting can help voters get the fair districting & fair representation they deserve in Washington."

– @Cornell's David B. Shmoys in @sfchronicle on ending gerrymandering w/ proportional representation https://t.co/GycS61SDsT

[Make Votes Matter @MakeVotesMatter]

How we elect our MPs impacts everything.

Our healthcare. Education. Defence. Our safety. Our rights.

What laws and passed and not passed.

Whose voices are heard and whose interests are represented in Parliament.

Electoral reform it's not a "fringe issue" - it's a priority.

[Yohan @yohaniddawela]

The French hate air conditioning.

So Paris built a 120-kilometre machine under its streets for producing cold.

It’s called Fraîcheur de Paris, and it does for summer heat what district heating did for winter: centralise the problem.

Instead of every museum, office, hotel, hospital and shop bolting its own cooling plant onto the building, Paris moves cold through pipes.

The network sends water chilled to 2 to 4°C through buried supply lines. The water enters a connected building, absorbs heat through an exchange station, then returns at 12 to 14°C to be cooled again.

It essentially functions with two pipes. One carries the cold out, the other carries heat back.

The production plants cool the circuit from 12°C to 4°C. Some sites use the Seine as a heat sink. In colder periods, the system can use the river’s own temperature for free cooling, which means the machines work less and the electricity demand drops. The Seine water doesn’t become the building water. It stays separate, passing temperature across heat exchangers.

The scale is pretty strange when you see it written down though.

It's got 15 production sites, 4 storage sites, 120 km of underground network with 924 subscribers. This has resulted in 7 million square metres cooled, and 493 GWh of cooling sold.

A cold utility running beneath one of the densest cities in Europe.

The Forum des Halles has been cooled this way since 1979. The Louvre since 1986. Galeries Lafayette, Opéra Garnier, Hôtel de Ville, Station F, La Samaritaine and the National Assembly all sit on the same idea. Tourists stand in the Louvre looking at paintings while a municipal cold loop does part of the dull work below ground.

The boring part is the breakthrough.

Cold can be stored at night in chilled water or ice, then used during daytime peaks. The network is monitored from a control room with more than 125,000 control points. A delivery station inside a building takes 5 to 7 times less space than a standalone cooling installation and avoids the roof and façade clutter that turns cities into compressor farms.

That matters because conventional air conditioning solves heat by moving it somewhere nearby. In a dense city, thousands of private machines mean thousands of outdoor units rejecting heat into streets, courtyards and roofs, plus refrigerants, noise, vibration and maintenance spread across every building.

Paris’s public cooling network has a stated coefficient of performance of 4, against 3 for a wet standalone system and 2 for a dry standalone system. Against an equivalent set of autonomous installations, Fraîcheur de Paris says the network gives 100% higher energy efficiency, 35% less electricity use, 90% fewer refrigerant-fluid emissions and 50% lower CO2 emissions.

The climate backdrop is the real reason this exists.

Paris ran a full crisis exercise called “Paris at 50°C” in 2023. Météo-France’s 2050 reference trajectory for France points to heatwave days becoming five times more frequent, hot nights rising sharply in urban centres, and some local extremes around 48°C becoming possible.

The city signed a 20-year concession in 2022 with Fraîcheur de Paris, owned 85% by ENGIE and 15% by RATP. The contract is worth a projected €2.4 billion. The plan is to extend the network by 158 km by 2042, add 20 production plants and 10 storage sites, and reach more than 3,000 subscribers, including hospitals, nurseries, schools and care homes.

This is basically the infrastructure version of admitting that summer is becoming a public systems problem...

[ProRep Coalition @ProRepCoalition]

"This February, a bipartisan bill was introduced in the Wyoming Legislature that would have led to the state electing representatives to its lower chamber via #ProportionalRepresentation (PR)."

https://t.co/ozjAeUEcjh

[Fair Vote Canada 🗳 🇨🇦 @FairVoteCanada]

Under first-past-the-post, parties ignore seats they can't win.

Proportional representation fixes this. Every vote impacts seat count, so right-leaning parties must care about cities and left-leaning parties must care about rural areas, even if they aren't dominant there.

[Lee Drutman ⚙️🏛 @leedrutman]

I look forward to a future America when we have proportional representation and wonder what was so special about single-member districts that we kept them around even as they failed at their only purpose: enabling voters to choice their representatives.

[FairVote @fairvote]

With proportional representation & multi-member districts, "all voters can affect elections by affecting their party’s representation.

These reforms also reduce polarization, restrain gerrymandering, & boost competition."

– Robert Levy of @CatoInstitute https://t.co/PpNR9SYpqz

[Fix Our House @FixOurHouse]

The Cato Institute on the benefits of proportional representation: "How to Fix the Gerrymandering Problem" https://t.co/5J6XSQmMZ5

[PRSA @PR_STV]

@FixOurHouse A well argued piece.

Single member districts constrain voter choice, are doomed to distort and waste more than half the votes.

Merge these five districts into a #FairRepAct MMD. Choice expands and nearly all voters see their 1st or 2nd choices elected.

[PRSA @PR_STV]

@perfctlyGoodInk @CatoInstitute The Cato Institute reached out to us some time ago. We’d like to think our websites informed them of Australia’s widespread use of #ProportionalRepresentation.
https://t.co/cyrymep6ed
and
https://t.co/UuMsYLqNPI

[David Blain 🇨🇦🗳🇨🇦 @beachmagoo]

The governing of Canada 🇨🇦 is an electoral system issue.

A proportional representation system better reflects the will of the electorate & provides a fair outcome in seats vs votes.

https://t.co/4YPDHG1kp5

[PRSA @PR_STV]

@frankmorano @GeoffreyHPowell @leedrutman Congratulations.

Your diverse commission on proportional representation should consider Australia’s use of @PR_STV.

Tasmania pioneered it more than a century ago.

https://t.co/cyrymep6ed

[Frank Morano @frankmorano]

@leedrutman And my Proportional Representation bill in NYC. The New York City Council - File #: Int 0903-2026 https://t.co/f9Z30qYBx3

[Lee Drutman ⚙️🏛 @leedrutman]

"A system employing proportional representation could halt gerrymandering — and the damage it does to representative democracy — in its tracks." - @henryolsenEPPC
https://t.co/KHAAm4LIyk