What voting system(s) do you like? Poll for multiseat elections

[lpetrich]

I wish to ask what voting systems you people like. Here, I will ask what you might like for a multiseat body, like an assembly or a council or a legislature or a parliament or whatever. This assembly serves a region where its voters live.

Single-member districts Divide the region up into electoral districts, one for each assembly seat. Each district's inhabitants then do a single-seat election for each seat's occupant (FPTP, IRV, ...).

Party-list proportional representation Vote for a political party, and each party will get a number of seats in proportion to the number of votes that it had received. One then uses some algorithm that gives every party an integer number of seats. Parties usually publish lists of candidates that they want to seat, thus the name.

Parallel voting The assembly is divided up into two uncoupled sub-assemblies, one of district seats elected in single-member-district fashion, and one of list seats elected in party-list fashion. One votes for both a district candidate and a party.

Mixed-member system Like the parallel system, but the list seats are assigned to make the entire assembly proportional, both list seats and district seats.

Single transferable vote Like instant runoff voting, but with winners in addition to losers. A quota or threshold for winning is established, (total votes)/((seats) + 1), and a candidate who gets more than the winning quota of top votes gets seated. That quota of the candidate's ballots is removed from the count, with the candidate's excess ballots remaining in the count, or else all those ballots remain, but get weighted by (excess)/(total). If no candidate can get a seat, then the candidate with the lowest top votes gets removed, as in IRV. As each candidate gets removed, the ballots in the count gets recounted, and this counting continues until all the seats are filled.

STV is done in multimember electoral districts with 3 to 7 seats or thereabouts, because more than that requires ranking a *lot* of candidates. Likewise, party-list and mixed-member elections can also be done in multimember districts, with the mixed-member ones subdividing those districts into single-member ones for the district seats.

Magical brownies In case you are all confused.

 

[Blahface]

I think it might be interesting to see a combination of MMP and a delegated STV.

For the house, you can have each state elect 5 candidates through delegated proportional representation. Instead of voting for a party – you vote for a candidate. After the results are in, each candidate creates a list to rank each other candidate and they participate in their own STV election with a vote weight equal to the number of votes they received.

In addition to that, the same local candidates would participate in another election to get fill an additional 251 seats in the House to bring it to a total of 501 seats. Again, they would have a vote weight equal to the number of votes they received. They would rank all the candidates that didn't get a seat in the previous election and use STV to fill the seats.

There would be a lot of candidates to rank and they would probably need to rely on advocacy groups to help them rank the candidates. They could have a special software that creates a list based on how different advocacy groups rate different candidates.

It is just an idea. I don't know how it would pan out in practice.

 

[bigfield]

Why not just use IRV? For N seats, award the seats to the candidates who finish Nth and above.

 

[dx713]

I like the representation offered by proportional voting or STV, but I also think it's important that each place has a voice via a local majority representative, so I chose parallel.
Now, I could get onboard with different systems if they give the two advantages of representation of minorites and voices for local majorities.
For instance, a two-chambers parliament, one elected through single-member districts and one through STVs in larger regions and/or proportional voting through the whole country.

Also, it depends on the size of the place the elected body legislates for.
I would be okay with STV for my (small) town council.
Large towns could already do with a bit of districts representation, but I wouldn't loose sleep over it.
National assemblies definetly need them.

To add: here in France, we have a strange mix of two-turns winner-takes-all and proportional representation for town councils: basically the parties battle through two-turns election as if they were persons, then the winner gets 50% of the seat (guaranting them a majority in any party-lines-split votes) and the remainder of the seats are assigned through proportional representation with the second turn figures.

Yes, we tend to be obsessed with two-turns elections.

 

[lpetrich]

Seems like we like multimember districts the best, single-multiple hybrids in between, and single-member districts the least.

There are some additional possibilities that I did not present.

The bloc vote is where one votes for as many candidates as seats. It has the deficiencies of First Past The Post for single seats.

The limited vote or the single non-transferable vote is where one votes for only one candidate for a multiseat position.

 

[Blahface]

Seems like we like multimember districts the best, single-multiple hybrids in between, and single-member districts the least.

There are some additional possibilities that I did not present.

The bloc vote is where one votes for as many candidates as seats. It has the deficiencies of First Past The Post for single seats.

The limited vote or the single non-transferable vote is where one votes for only one candidate for a multiseat position.

Single non-transferable vote may be the only voting system that is even worse than first-past-the-post.

 

[Jayjay]

Bloc voting is used in some third world countries, for example Lebanon. I would argue that it's one of the worst possible methods.