[HN Gopher] The Icelandic Voting System (2024)
___________________________________________________________________
The Icelandic Voting System (2024)
Author : alexharri
Score : 130 points
Date : 2025-04-19 19:10 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (smarimccarthy.is)
(TXT) w3m dump (smarimccarthy.is)
| dheera wrote:
| I absolutely love that you need to read a list of axioms with
| Greek symbols in their descriptions to make an informed vote in
| Iceland. Sets a minimum bar of education to vote, which is
| reasonable.
| smlavine wrote:
| Nah, just vote for the party you like the most. The nerds at
| the elections office take care of the math themselves. "Better"
| than US/UK/Canada where you have to consider a primary system
| or multiple elections or "Liberal Democrats win here" signs to
| not split the vote.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| It does underline the comparative disadvantage of America's
| uneducated population: something like this wouldn't get
| through because most of the population is too stupid to grok
| it. We're foreclosed from an entire domain of solutions
| because idiots won't or can't tough through understanding
| them.
| smlavine wrote:
| This is true, this is an inherently more complex system.
| Personally I prefer the French two-round system as a
| balance between complexity and proportionality -- America
| sorta has this with primaries, although them being months
| in advance and the districts being gerrymandered to hell
| doesn't help.
| vidarh wrote:
| The French two-round system is _wildy_ unproportional to
| the point that it is just very marginally less
| undemocratic than first past the post.
| Muromec wrote:
| The good thing is -- you don't have to suffer the idiots.
| It's a choice
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you don't have to suffer the idiots. It's a choice_
|
| Sure. And I don't anymore. But the casualty of that
| choice is social empathy.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| And yet we push the idiots to vote.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| The United States has one of the best education systems in
| the world, as proxied by the PISA test. US Asians have
| better results than anywhere but Singapore, Macau and
| Taiwan. US whites have better results than every majority
| white country besides Estonia and Switzerland. US Hispanics
| do better than every Hispanic country bar Spain. US Blacks
| outscore Jamaica, the only majority Black Country in the
| OECD and many European and South American countries.
|
| I guarantee you the average Icelander does not understand
| how votes are distributed among parties. They trust the
| people who do it though.
| Epa095 wrote:
| Interesting that they do so good as young and end up
| mediocre (or below) as adults https://gpseducation.oecd.o
| rg/CountryProfile?plotter=h5&prim...
| barry-cotter wrote:
| That's for the entire US population. If you look at the
| US population without even attempting to correct for
| demographic factors the US looks unimpressive at all
| ages.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Hong Kong used to have a proportional voting system. The pro-
| China camp is often very efficient, sometimes winning a seat
| with half the votes compared to another candidate
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| You absolutely don't. The formula they give for calculating
| seats from votes is very simple and only uses a few letters
| from the standard alphabet.
|
| The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is for
| a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic one.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is
| for a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic
| one.
|
| What? It's for all voting systems. It just defines a set of
| criteria that are desirable; it doesn't _describe_ any
| system.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I have voted my entire adult life in a similar system but never
| knew how the sausage was made. I have complete confidence in it
| despite not knowing exactly how it works.
| 986aignan wrote:
| The axioms just state what criteria the Swiss system (but not
| the Icelandic) obeys. You don't need to know them in order to
| vote in Iceland any more than you need to know that first past
| the post fails the Condorcet criterion in order to vote in the
| US.
| lkrubner wrote:
| Sadly, these tweaks don't address any of the more obvious
| oddities that people have with proportional representation in the
| legislature. While such a system won't necessarily end up with
| Dutch levels of weirdness, it is still possible:
|
| https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-does-proportional-repre...
| jltsiren wrote:
| That didn't really make sense. On the one hand, the author
| complains that proportional elections favor a limited number of
| parties, which don't always give voters good options to choose
| from. And on the other hand, the winner usually doesn't get the
| majority of seats, forcing them to negotiate with other parties
| instead of governing unilaterally.
|
| Then there the focus on the left vs. the right, which is no
| longer as relevant as it used to be during the cold war. If you
| choose a single faction (such as the left, conservatives, or
| environmentalists), that specific faction is almost always
| smaller than everyone else combined. When there are multiple
| major issues instead of a single overarching question,
| political divisions become more nuanced than simple X vs.
| not-X.
| Vinnl wrote:
| If your source for "Dutch levels of weirdness" is just that
| article, then keep in mind that the VVD being "in power" meant
| that they were one of the parties in the government coalition.
| They have had to compromise with other parties through all of
| that time, and so it was not the case that those governments
| were only representative of a very small party of the
| electorate, as that article makes it sound.
|
| (In my opinion, the Dutch system is one of the best implemented
| in practice, precisely because of its proportionality.)
| froh wrote:
| this analysis of (mostly European) democracies is not based on
| some metric of how well the population is faring, oecd has some
| of those, but based on handpicked anecdata and peak examples.
|
| the most massive political injustices, poor housing, health
| care, education, elderly care, affordable transportation, queer
| human rights, all of them _despite_ high GDP, just to name a
| few quantifiable properties of a state... the worst digressions
| happen in FPTP systems currently.
|
| also the article throws both hands in the air as if no
| mechanisms exist to further improve democracies. it doesn't
| mention popular vote, or some mechanisms for balance of freedom
| of speech vs freedom to slander and distort and lie ("hate
| speech", the word polemics has 'polemos', war, as root), or
| press codex, or application thereof on all media, including
| "social" media, ad engines made of letters to the editor
| largely left alone and unmoderated... nor does it mention
| panachage and cumulating of votes on lists, the right to adjust
| the party list proposals in the voting booth.
|
| the article _does_ mention the brazen influence of financial
| power as a problem though.
|
| but really, proportional representation is part of the
| solution.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Huh, TIL the Constitution doesn't require Congressional
| districts. A state could technically switch to a model like this
| for assigning representatives at large.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| The two main parties in the US are way too happy with the
| status for any change to happen. If there is one thing they
| hate more than each other it's another party.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _two main parties in the US are way too happy with the
| status for any change to happen_
|
| California could make this change by referendum.
| googlryas wrote:
| Yes but Ds and Rs will come out in force to rally their
| base against it. That's what happened in Colorado this past
| election.
| int_19h wrote:
| Many states could, but why would they if other states
| retain a system that disproportionally skews sits towards
| one party?
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _why would they if other states retain a system that
| disproportionally skews sits towards one party?_
|
| Because your constituents are better represented.
| California strikes me as a potent place to do this
| because I could see a constitutional amendment passing at
| the ballot box.
| int_19h wrote:
| But they aren't better represented unless everyone else
| does the same.
|
| Suppose California were to do it, resulting in a
| proportional allocation of seats in the House for its
| delegation. If this causes the House to swing from
| Democratic majority to Republican majority, the net
| effect is the opposite of what most Californians wanted.
|
| Don't get me wrong, I get the point that it is a more
| fair and equitable way of doing things, and in principle,
| I agree. But if you play fair at a table where everybody
| else cheats, you lose. My state (WA) also has
| referendums, and if such a proposal would come up, I
| would absolutely vote against it - unless it was some
| kind of interstate compact where another similarly-sized
| red state were to implement the same reform at the same
| time.
| Taikonerd wrote:
| I've had this exact thought: that Texas and California
| should have some sort of compact to do it at the same
| time. That would be a boon for Texas Democrats (of whom
| there are many) and California Republicans (ditto).
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > California could make this change by referendum.
|
| No, it could not, because Article I, Section 3 (emphasis
| added): "The times, places and manner of holding elections
| for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in
| each state by the legislature thereof; _but the Congress
| may at any time by law make or alter such regulations_ ,
| except as to the places of choosing Senators." (the last
| part of that about choosing Senators has its effect
| eliminated by the 17th Amendment, but that isn't important
| here.)
|
| And Congress has exercised its authority in U.S. Code Title
| 2, Section 2c (emphasis added): "In each State entitled in
| the Ninety-first Congress or in any subsequent Congress
| thereafter to more than one Representative under an
| apportionment made pursuant to the provisions of section
| 2a(a) of this title, _there shall be established by law a
| number of districts equal to the number of Representatives
| to which such State is so entitled, and Representatives
| shall be elected only from districts so established, no
| district to elect more than one Representative_ (except
| that a State which is entitled to more than one
| Representative and which has in all previous elections
| elected its Representatives at Large may elect its
| Representatives at Large to the Ninety-first Congress). "
| whatshisface wrote:
| I don't think that is actually true. It is in part
| redistricting that lead to the ascendancy of extremism, by
| putting all of the strategic emphasis on the primaries in
| uncontested constituencies.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| "Redistricting" isn't a new recent thing, it is a process
| done by state legislatures to state and federal legislative
| district every decade that has been used for both personal
| and partisan advantage since the founding; the word
| "gerrymander" was coined in criticism of a particular
| instance in _1812_.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I think there is a primary-related problem going on right
| now that could change historically held positions on the
| value to financial backers interests of uncontested
| general elections.
| smitty1e wrote:
| 1. The original 1787 apportionment would result in a House of
| Representatives of ~30k members[1].
|
| 2. That's obviously unwieldy, and so we haven't had a bump in
| seats since ... 1910.
|
| 3. 'Factions' were viewed dimly by the Founders. I would
| argue in favor of two immediate changes:
|
| - Term limits for everything, including shorter max civil
| service careers. Capitol Hill, like any compost heap,
| benefits from regular turning.
|
| - A "bidder bunch" rule, whereby if Congress can't manage its
| key function--that of producing a budget--then none of these
| goofs (even the ones I admire) get to run for their seat when
| next up. There are copious talented alternative people to put
| on ballots. Do your job or face corporate punishment, say I.
|
| [1] https://thirty-thousand.org/
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _A "bidder bunch" rule, whereby if Congress can't manage
| its key function--that of producing a budget--then none of
| these goofs (even the ones I admire) get to run for their
| seat when next up_
|
| This creates an obvious and huge perverse incentive to
| throw a wrench into the works any time you want a do-over.
| smitty1e wrote:
| And copious peer pressure not to be That Guy.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _copious peer pressure not to be That Guy_
|
| How? You don't think you could find Democrats, today, who
| wouldn't roll the dice on a new Congress? The proposal
| essentially gives a narrow minority the ability to call
| no confidence.
| smitty1e wrote:
| ...and self-immolate. You don't work that hard to get
| elected and then piss it away.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _You don 't work that hard to get elected and then piss
| it away_
|
| If it gives your party a chance at retaking power? It
| would be an obvious trade for an administration to do.
| smitty1e wrote:
| So, you're saying that a large number (say, 100) of
| minority members of the House would scuttle their current
| seats in order to blow away the majority party's seats?
|
| I remind you that, under the current regime, Sen. Schumer
| (D-BY) played along with the GOP Continuing Resolution*
| not because he fancied the CR, but to avoid giving the
| Treasury the power of the purse that would come with a
| shutdown.
|
| *And took a napalm shower for it in social media.
| morpheuskafka wrote:
| Not having a real budget is just a parliamentary
| procedure tactic, creating pressure opportunities when
| various continuing resolutions come up. If they have to
| make a budget they'll make one, that doesn't mean they'll
| actually stop being partisan fools and put together a
| good one. It'll still be subject to all the usual
| nonsense.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| Yep. The US has had several years without a budget, and
| it meant exactly nothing.
|
| Sort of like the debt limit, it leads to a lot of
| political maneuvering but doesn't actually limit
| anything.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| 30k electors sounds great to me. One for ever ~12k people.
| It could be unpaid citizen body.
| smitty1e wrote:
| Would likely prove unwieldy.
|
| They don't call for a vote without a known outcome;
| politics hates surprises.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| sounds better and better
| smitty1e wrote:
| The whole point of a Federal government is to make the
| year-on-year business of government more predictable.
|
| The question here is how to add enough feedback to keep
| the corruption minimal.
|
| We've known anecdotally for a long time that our
| government has gone to seed; DOGE has both broadcast the
| problem and generated will to reform.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| with 30k electors in the house, I expect it would be much
| more predictable.
|
| It seems plausible to me that it would decrease
| corruption. It is a lot easier for power brokers and
| interests to lobby a 435 member house, than 30K member
| house. Inversely, it is a lot easier for a citizen to
| lobby their representative when they are 1/12,000 instead
| of 1/800k.
| AngryData wrote:
| I find it hard to believe the House of Reps could be any
| more unwieldy than it already is though. More seats would
| make it far harder to buy and corrupt legislation votes and
| make it easier for independents and 3rd parties to gain
| seats.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Just replacing FPTP or any other proportional non-party
| list system would accomplish that.
| smitty1e wrote:
| You can't physically seat them in the current venue, for
| starters.
|
| Also, for all of the defects of First Past the Post, it's
| well-understood and supports entry-level participation.
|
| The theoretical superiority of Ranked Choice Voting is
| overshadowed by the hidden assertion that everyone
| casting a ballot in RCV has done the homework.
|
| Having served as an election officer for the last 12yrs,
| the KISS superiority of FPTP is the least-worst
| alternatives. I wouldn't want RCV even at the county
| level.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > can't physically
|
| Why? There is no need to increase their number.
|
| > overshadowed by the hidden assertion
|
| Even then it's still superior. Even if everyone ignores
| the individual candidates and votes for a party in e.g. a
| 5 member constituency where the vote is split ~70:30 the
| minority party would likely get at least one seat when
| now votes are effectively thrown into the thrash bin.
|
| > Having served as an election officer for the last 12yrs
|
| The implication being that it would make the job too hard
| for you?
|
| FPTP is a horrible system any way you look at it. It
| results in almost 50% of the votes being outright
| discarded and permanently entrenches a 2 party system.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > were viewed dimly by the Founders
|
| Hypothetically that was true. Until those founders started
| engaging in actual politics and became rabidly partisan.
|
| There was a brief period when the Federalists collapsed and
| US effectively became a single party state with the
| Democratic-Republicans controlling everything but that was
| decades after the constitution was signed.
| paul7986 wrote:
| We need another one whose motto is "Country Over Party," and
| is backed by locked down solid ethics that always follows
| right vs. wrong with right (not politically right or left)
| guiding everything this entity stands for and is guided by.
| Present day it's neither party standing for right vs. wrong
| it's the b.s. Right (politically) vs. Left(politically) or
| Left vs. Right! Gross, there's neither party today cares
| about right vs. wrong or integrity just divide the country
| further!!!
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _locked down solid ethics that always follows right vs.
| wrong with right (not politically right or left) guiding
| everything this entity stands for and is guided by_
|
| As in?
|
| People can legitimately disagree about what is right and
| wrong, or what even falls on a moral continuum. Nailing
| down a moment's broad truth is among the most revered roles
| in any society.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Can they ... poll a group of people (right and lefties)
| and ask...
|
| If vandalizing a Telsa and vandalizing the US Capitol are
| both wrong and my focus is only the act of vandalism in
| asking this question. Overall, both acts are clear cut
| wrong!
|
| Those who refuse to say both are wrong their brains are
| driven now by political emotional mind control babble
| where they've thrown out knowing and standing for right
| over wrong.
| lostdog wrote:
| What are your feelings on vandalizing shipments of tea?
| paul7986 wrote:
| Not driven by feelings or political emotional babble as
| it's hard to believe anything when it comes to politics.
| Im all about clear cut right from wrong and clear cut
| facts, as well that was a wrong act! It was something
| that led to the revolutionary war, which is a clear cut
| fact!
|
| I guess you showed that your mind is driven/controlled by
| political emotional babble & narratives made up by the
| right (tho maybe your left or an independent who leans
| right) & it's media (right or left .. all make up
| narratives) you consume. But I don't want to jump to
| conclusions.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you showed that your mind is driven /controlled by
| political emotional babble & narratives made up by the
| right_
|
| I rest my case that models that cast the world in black
| and white are the wrongest of the bunch, as they're
| essentially a hard default for legalism and the _status
| quo_.
| atoav wrote:
| I can easily imagine a myriad of situations where
| vandalizing a car is ethically the right choice, e.g. if
| it is made by someone who is the sieg-heiling number one
| supporter of an president struggling to overthrow
| democracy.
|
| And I studied ethics. Meanwhile you have supporters of
| Trump vandalizing the capital because _they couldn 't
| accept the result of a democratic election_ with the goal
| to force their minority opinion onto the majority.
|
| Those who don't equate the two simply realized that
| context matters in ethics. Example: Stealing is wrong.
| _Not_ stealing when a child is starving and no one can
| help is more wrong. However stealing from someone whose
| child is starving is more wrong than stealing from a
| faceless multinational corporation that exploits
| millions. This is btw. something you can also observe in
| real life ethical decisions. That doesn 't mean the
| excuse people find for themselves is always factually
| correct, but in US politics one side sees actively making
| shit up as a strength now, so that should tell us
| something about how much care is given for reality.
|
| You likely tricked yourself into equating the two
| (vandalizing a symbol of a unelected fascist billionair
| VS a mob trying to force the senate to ignore the will of
| millions) by drawing a mental bubble around the word
| "vandalized" and assuming two acts are the same because
| their description may contain the same word. This is
| quite frankly an astonishingly simplistic stance to take.
| Words are things used to describe reality, yes, but
| reducing real acts down to one word, removing all the
| context and then equating words is not how ethics work.
|
| Maybe you remember the trolly problem craze from a while
| ago. The original trolly problem premise is that murder
| is wrong and you have a lever where you can save 5 lives
| by switching the lever to a track with only one person
| stuck. The variations on the trolly problem are
| essentially a mental experiment to explore the ethical
| context of a decision. Our ethics prof e.g. liked to
| propose a variation where you have to push one person off
| a bridge in order to stop the trolly, suddenly everybody
| would deem it wrong. Turns out whether it is a lever or
| you have to touch a person makes a huge difference in how
| close to murder it feels.
| dornan wrote:
| I'm not sure you've really demonstrated the ethics of
| vandalizing the car. In this trolley problem there's a
| billionaire that you're upset about riding in the trolley
| and the lever you suggest pulling just destroys some
| random dude's car without affecting the billionaire. Elon
| Musk doesn't own the Tesla cars you see driving down the
| street, they're owned by people who wanted a car that
| doesn't create smog.
|
| Consider the point the parent of this side conversation
| was trying to make: What if there was a party with the
| guiding principal of keeping the country together and
| pursuing policy based on sound principals rather than
| "what will own the libs" or "stop the fascists"? The
| things you complain about are happening because of
| divisive politics. Trump is powerful because he listened
| to people who were being ignored or attacked by the
| political hegemony, and it turned out that was a small
| majority of the country. It's a shame that someone with
| admirable personality traits didn't think of it first.
|
| How would you reform the political and voting system to
| improve the total happiness in the united states?
|
| Another ethical question for you: that mob believed the
| election was rigged and that the senate _was_ ignoring
| the will of the nation. Based on that belief, were they
| acting ethically? Keep in mind that this is bigger than
| the trolley problem. Sort of an iterated trolley problem,
| if you will.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Not that it justifies burning random cars but it's not
| entirely irrational. If some people stop buying Tesla
| just because they are afraid that someone would vandalize
| it etc. that does achieve something..
| paul7986 wrote:
| Im being downvoted by those who love the division and do
| not want unity! They've all lost sight of being able to
| stand for clear, cut right and wrong as if i told any
| them a story saying my friend's car got vandalized then
| they went into their office building where they work and
| that was vandalized too they'd definitely agree that is
| wrong. Yet add politics into the mix and they lose their
| minds/ability to properly judge/stand for right and wrong
| cause they allow their minds to be bought and sold to
| poltical emotional babble/narratives in which they have
| zero way of verifying if any are true!
|
| I think AI should be the next party where people and all
| their b.s. cant affect it's rock solid moral and ethical
| code. It follows clear cut right over wrong, it is all
| about unity, peace/love for all human beings of all
| different types of backgrounds and it uses massive
| amounts of data to adjust how its ethics changes over
| time. So, it's M.O. (one i described) remains updated to
| per how society changes. Of course that could lead to an
| even worse system but just thinking out of the box as i
| do and getting downvoted for such thinking as usual lol
|
| As well AI could be used to monitor all politicians day
| and night routine to ensure veracity in everything they
| do/push for and ensure those politicians are following
| the AIs ethical code of law and they're serving the
| people not the politician or any of the politicians
| cronies or interest groups that do not serve the people
| as a whole!
| wqaatwt wrote:
| They are not the same though. Equating both acts is
| disingenuous and at the very least distasteful. One is
| destruction of private property other is an attempt to
| overthrow the government and possibly murder politicians
| the mob does not agree with.
|
| The closest equivalent would the a mob breaking into
| Tesla's HQ while shouting stuff about hanging Musk.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| There was a time when senators were not elected by popular
| vote. The constitution leaves a lot of this up to the states
| and just by convention they mostly do the same thing.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| The nexus of stupidity in our Republic has less often been
| the Senate; I'm unkeen to mess with it.
|
| The House is a mess. So is SCOTUS. My proposal for the latter
| is redefining the Supreme Court as one drawn by lot from
| appellate judges for each case. This not only solves the
| appointment lottery. It also incentivises expanding the
| judiciary, which we need to do, and removes the modern
| perversion which is the Supreme Court just not bothering with
| controversial cases.
|
| Most importantly, the edits to SCOTUS can be done by the
| Congress. The edits to the House can be done by the states.
| (EDIT: Nah.) Senate requires a Constitutional amendment; that
| window isn't open at this time.
| lostdog wrote:
| Here are my proposals:
|
| The Senate is elected similar to a parliament from other
| countries. Country-wide votes for parties, with
| proportional representation. It would balance out the
| regionality of the House.
|
| The Supreme Court justices serve terms of 12-16 years. Each
| presidential candidate must select 2 supreme court picks at
| least 4 weeks before the election, and whoever wins has
| their picks placed on the court. (After their term, supreme
| court justices retire to the DC circuit).
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| This is something that was defined in the Constitution,
| however. Article 1, Section 3 called for the selection of
| Senators by state legislatures. This is superseded by the
| 17th Amendment, and calls for Senators to be elected by the
| people of their states.
|
| This is important to understand, because the 17th Amendment
| is an on-again-off-again political issue; Republicans have,
| in recent history, held most state legislatures, so repealing
| the 17th Amendment would basically guarantee that the
| Republican Party would control at least one house of Congress
| for the foreseeable future, and give the party greater
| control over who is selected to the office.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Thanks... didn't remember that detail and admittedly didn't
| check the source.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Huh, TIL the Constitution doesn't require Congressional
| districts.
|
| True, but...
|
| > A state could technically switch to a model like this for
| assigning representatives at large.
|
| No, it can't because Congress itself is given the overriding
| power in the Constitution to regulate the "time, place, and
| manner" of elections to the House, and has exercised it to
| prohibit at-large districts (many times, with lax enforcement,
| but the most recent mandate, adopted in 1967, has not had the
| compliance problems the earlier ones often did.) The 1967
| mandate was adopted under the dual specter of a some states
| failing to resolve districting controversies and potentially
| facing judicially-imposed at-large districts and several states
| having used at-large districts for non-federal elections to
| effectively disenfranchise Black voters and concerns that the
| same might be done to Congressional delegations as a way of
| blunting the impacts of new rules like the Voting Rights Act.
|
| Additional detail at:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43739929
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Appreciated as always!
| nabla9 wrote:
| There is a federal law.
|
| There has been numerous proposals in the Congress to get rid of
| it, but they don't get ratified because two parties like the
| status quo.
|
| People will have to make it an issue.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Or just use a sane system like STV with multi member districts.
| 986aignan wrote:
| You might need some kind of MMP part if you want it to be
| truly proportional. If the voters can only rank about ten
| candidates before it gets unwieldy, that would give an
| effective 9% absolute threshold. A party that gains 8%
| support everywhere would get no candidates elected.
|
| Here's a paper by Markus Schulze proposing such a method:
| https://aso.icann.org/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/02/schulze4.pd... He uses some very
| large districts, but it should work for smaller districts
| too.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| Yes, STV is non perfect but IMHO it's worth it to not have
| party lists.
|
| Also one of the main criticism of people opposed to
| proportional system is the lack of direct representation.
| STV solves that and even is superior to FPTP in that way
| because you are more likely to find a MP who is more
| sympathetic towards your cause/views if there are e.g. 3-5
| members in your district.
|
| Of course I'm not talking about the system proposed in the
| paper your linked, but rather about how MMP works in
| Germany. You get both part list and FPTP style party
| appointed candidates.
| krapp wrote:
| Nnnneeeeeeeeerds!
| yorwba wrote:
| It's interesting that it's possible to achieve proportional
| representation with respect to geographic distribution and party
| votes simultaneously. (Though, as the article notes, Iceland
| falls short of this ideal.)
|
| This makes me wonder: why stop at two? Some places have explicit
| quotas for different ethnic or religious groups as a compromise
| to avoid civil war. Could they use a tripoportional system?
|
| And why not add in even more demographic variables? Age, gender,
| income, level of education, ... I suppose at some point it stops
| being a secret election because the number of voters sharing all
| attributes becomes too small, or the parliament would get
| unwieldily large trying to represent every hyperspecific
| constituency.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > It's interesting that it's possible to achieve proportional
| representation with respect to geographic distribution and
| party votes simultaneously.
|
| That _would_ be interesting, but it 's not even possible to
| achieve one of those things by itself.
| themadryaner wrote:
| It is possible! But with more than two dimensions, you have to
| allow deviations from perfect proportionality to guarantee a
| solution exists. The more dimensions, the worse it gets, until
| eventually proportionality breaks down entirely. [1] defines a
| method to do this and simulates the results on an election
| where district and party seats are distributed proportionally
| and divvied up by gender proportionally. The result is a better
| national proportionality at the expense of worse local
| proportionality.
|
| [1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109305119
| lambertsimnel wrote:
| That's a fascinating suggestion!
|
| > I suppose at some point it stops being a secret election
| because the number of voters sharing all attributes becomes too
| small, or the parliament would get unwieldily large trying to
| represent every hyperspecific constituency.
|
| I'm not sure about that. Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but
| I'd like to think such a procedure could be run with a
| legislature of any fixed size, at the cost of the
| proportionality being increasingly inexact for smaller
| demographics. Furthermore, I suspect the representatives from
| any demographic would be elected partly with votes from other
| demographics. Anyway, the number of voters would presumably be
| thousands of times the number of representatives - see
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law - so any voting
| demographic with dedicated representation would at least be
| thousands of voters.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| > Some places have explicit quotas for different ethnic or
| religious groups as a compromise to avoid civil war
|
| That leads to very dysfunctional outcomes due to obvious
| reasons. When you vote for the same party/candidate just
| because they belong to the same religion/ethnicity (and such
| seats are very easy to monopolize) they a freehand to due to
| whatever they want. So what if they are exceptionally corrupt
| or incompetent? It's not like your are going to vote for other
| side..
| avar wrote:
| The main "feature" of the Icelandic voting system is to dilute
| the relationship between a voter and their representative
| representing _their_ interests in _their_ district.
|
| Instead their vote goes to someone in the same political party in
| another district.
|
| So the entire system is biased away from local representation and
| towards party policy decided on a national basis.
|
| That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of
| geographic areas over "one person one vote". Icelandic law only
| starts considering that a problem once your vote counts 2x as
| much as mine, just because we live an imaginary line apart.
| themadryaner wrote:
| > So the entire system is biased away from local representation
| and towards party policy decided on a national basis.
|
| > That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests
| of geographic areas
|
| Forgive me if I'm missing something, but these sound like
| contradictory claims to me?
|
| As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. The number of
| members of each party that make it to Congress is the main
| determinant of what policy gets passed. But I can only
| influence that indirectly, by choosing which party represents
| my local district. If I'm in a solid minority in the district I
| live in, I basically have 0 influence on the result of the
| election. Overall, those invisible lines let politicians crack
| and pack constituencies so a party with a minority of the votes
| still gets a majority of the seats.
|
| In this system, the number of representatives of each party
| would be determined by the national popular vote, meaning I can
| more directly vote for which party gets the majority. Your vote
| does two things: it casts a vote for your party against the
| other parties in gaining them seats, and it casts a vote for
| your favorite party candidate over other candidates in the
| party (including those in other districts) to determine which
| candidates of the party earn the seats the party is given. It
| _reduces_ the effect of the invisible line in weakening my
| vote. I 'm okay with this meaning that sometimes my vote helps
| elect someone in a different district, since this would mean my
| district doesn't have enough members of my party to justify a
| representative of our own and because a lot of times the lines
| are arbitrary anyway. It would require bigger districts with
| multiple winners, and sometimes that the person with the 6th or
| 7th most votes in the district gets the 4th or 5th seat
| instead. This, in my mind, is the "gerrymandering correction:"
| it ensures those parties who were disadvantaged by the line
| drawing get their fair share of party members.
|
| As for one vote counting twice as much as another, my
| understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that the
| main cause of that is differences in turnout between the
| different districts and rounding representatives to the nearest
| whole number. Nothing can be done about the later (big problem
| in the US too -- people per district varies by hundreds of
| thousands of people, not to mention the disparity in the
| Senate). For the former, you could proportion representatives
| between districts based on turnout instead, but this is a bad
| idea since it makes it much harder to campaign in a district if
| you don't know how many seats are up for grabs.
| avar wrote:
| As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system.
|
| You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat,
| only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida
| be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives?
|
| A representative with absolutely zero self-interest in
| representing you, as it's highly unlikely you'll be able to
| "vote for" them the next time around? Your representation
| being an odd mathematical quirk?
|
| Because that's essentially what the Icelandic system is like.
| The US has the same lopsided population-to-representative
| ratio to some degree [1]. [...]and please
| correct me if I am wrong)
|
| No, it has nothing to do with turnout in Iceland.
|
| You can think of it as an odd way to enact something like the
| US Senate without a bicameral legislature.
|
| 1. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/05/31/u-s-
| popul...
| Epa095 wrote:
| . You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for
| say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative
| from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of
| Representatives?
|
| I don't see how it makes sense to say that the candidate in
| Florida is 'the one' you voted it. You casted your vote in
| Alaska for the party. Your vote mattered there, and either
| the party got candidates in or not.
|
| Then after that mini-election your vote gets to play a
| second role on the national level, where IF the party got a
| bad ratio between the number of representatives they got
| in, and their total vote-%, they can get another candidate.
| But that candidate is not 'the one you voted in'. You
| (possibly) voted in candidates in Alaska already, this is
| your votes' second chance, to get someone in from the party
| somewhere else (where the party had a particularly bad
| ratio between representatives and vote-%).
| joeblubaugh wrote:
| On the other hand, the whole nation is fewer than 400,000
| people on a very compact land mass, so the divergent interests
| out of district are not all that large.
| Taniwha wrote:
| There's an intermediate solution - MMP (used in various guises
| in AoNZ, Germany, Mexico, Scotland, Bolivia, .....) where we
| have a fixed number of regional seats much like FPP (house
| seats in the US) and some nationwide extra seats - people get 2
| votes one for their local seat and one nationally for a party,
| after local seat votes are counted extra seats are allocated
| from parties' lists.
|
| Essentially it's the same as Iceland but party votes are done
| nationally, this avoids some of the weird stuff mentioned in
| the article that allows some parties to have more votes but
| fewer seats - here in AoNZ we brought in MMP after a couple of
| elections under FPP where one party got more votes and the
| other more seats. It's not perfect, but better than what we had
| before.
| avar wrote:
| > There's an intermediate > solution
|
| The "intermediate" solution is one Iceland already had in its
| past.
|
| The number of representatives is fixed at 63. They'd be
| around 200 if the representatives per capita were the same as
| in 1903, 140 if it was the same as 1960, and 105 if they were
| the same as 1984, when the number was fixed at 63.
|
| This "hack" of "moving your vote around" only came about
| because it became more obviously unfair over time that your
| representative not making the cut-off left you without
| representation.
|
| The other "obvious" solution of moving to a national vote
| isn't possible due to the entrenched interests that benefit
| from the current disenfranchisement being the ones would need
| to vote for such a system.
| themadryaner wrote:
| I wanted more details on how this works. For those interested, I
| found an English pdf describing the full system [1]. The
| interesting part is Article 110, which discusses how the
| adjustment seats are allocated. Here is my best summary:
|
| 1. Using D'Hondt [2] on every party's national vote share,
| determine which party should be given the next seat. 2. For every
| constituency which has adjustment seats available, calculate the
| D'Hondt quotient of the first candidate in that party who has not
| already been elected using the constituency vote share. So if a
| party received V votes in a constituency and two party members
| were already elected from this constituency, their quotient would
| be V/3. 3. Elect the candidate with the highest quotient to fill
| an adjustment seat for their constituency. 4. Repeat until all
| adjustment seats have been given away.
|
| There's arguably a step 0 here, which is determining how many
| constituency and adjustment seats every constituency gets, and
| this is done before the election is held. This is described in
| Article 10. It's pretty bad. First, the adjustment seats are
| hard-coded. Second, unlike the US where we reapportion after
| every census, Iceland appears to only reapportion the
| constituency seats when the constitution demands they do it. This
| happens when there are twice as many voters per seat in one
| constituency compared to another. Furthermore, they only adjust
| as few seats as possible to get back under this limit rather than
| actually recalculate a fair apportionment. I'm not sure what the
| logic of this was, maybe to minimize how often the number of
| seats in each place is changing? Either way, in the 2021 election
| this resulted in one constituency with 199% as many voters per
| seat as another and no changes were made [3].
|
| [1]:
| https://www.stjornarradid.is/library/03-Verkefni/Kosningar/K...
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method
|
| [3]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Icelandic_parliamentary_e...
| bjornsing wrote:
| This seems to gloss over the major difference between
| Scandinavian voting systems and e.g. the US one: They are very
| party-focused. At the end of the day it's the cabals at the top
| of the major parties that decide who gets to sit in parliament
| and how they vote. Sometimes it feels like it would be more
| honest if e.g. Swedish parliament just had 8 members and their
| voting buttons controlled more / fewer lights on the voting
| results dashboard. Leads to a very collectivist political
| culture.
| jakobnissen wrote:
| That's up to the voters, ultimately. You can choose to vote for
| independent MPs, right? Or MPs who promise not to always tow
| the party line? I suppose if people choose to vote based on
| parties, of course you get party focused politics.
| bjornsing wrote:
| No you can't really vote for an independent MP in the Swedish
| voting system. They would have to register a party, it's very
| hard to win a seat, and there is no guarantee that they will
| not win two or more seats - thus perpetuating the
| collectivism.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| At least you don't have the spoiler problem like 3rd
| parties in the US have though, right?
|
| Why is it hard for a new party to win a seat? In the US,
| for a 3rd party to win, something like 50% of the relevant
| electorate has to coordinate their vote to switch to the
| 3rd party. It sounds like in Scandinavia, the fraction of
| the electorate which needs to coordinate is just 1 /
| num_seats, which is way smaller.
|
| If I were a Swede, I would be tempted to troll everyone by
| setting up an "independents party". The seats for _that_
| party are allocated based on a separate vote, open to the
| public. Candidates of the "independents party" have
| absolutely no obligation to vote together, and act as free
| agents once they get elected. Sort of like a democracy-
| within-a-democracy.
| wqaatwt wrote:
| It might be hard to convince people to vote for a party
| made up of random people who might have very
| contradictory views.
| viraptor wrote:
| You're describing direct democracy parties and they exist
| in other places in non-trolly way. For example the
| Australian
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Direct_Democracy
| bjornsing wrote:
| > Why is it hard for a new party to win a seat?
|
| There are thresholds to avoid too many small parties /
| independents getting elected. You need to win 4% of the
| vote nationally or 12% regionally to get a single seat,
| and if you do then you typically get more than one.
| Congrats, you're now a collectivist too.
|
| > If I were a Swede...
|
| I've considered it. :)
| barry-cotter wrote:
| toe the line, as in keep your toes behind the line at the
| start of the race, not tow the line.
| lurk2 wrote:
| > You can choose to vote for independent MPs, right?
|
| Not if they can't afford to run a campaign.
| Epa095 wrote:
| Traditionally what a 'independent MP' would do is create a
| new party. Usually it requires a certain number of
| signatures, not from people supporting them, just supporting
| their right to become a party. Then they need to have
| candidates for the ridings they want to be in.
|
| One example is the Norwegian party 'Patient Focus' which
| was formed in April 2021, as a support movement for an
| expansion of the hospital in the town of Alta in Alta
| Municipality in Finnmark county, Norway. In the 2021
| parliamentary election, it won one of Finnmark's five seats
| in the Storting (Parlament).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Focus_(Norway)
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I think you may have an overly rosy view of the US system.
| Search former rep Justin Amash's tweets for keywords like
| "house", "speaker", and "deliberation":
|
| https://xcancel.com/justinamash/status/1486169720911020036
|
| On the other hand, I suppose we do have primaries in the US.
| Sounds like that's not a thing in Scandinavia.
|
| I understand a big part of the job of party leadership in the
| US is simply negotiating with / persuading representatives of
| your own party to vote for upcoming bills. So perhaps that's
| another sense in which party leadership is weaker in the US.
| The focus on local representation also creates problems though,
| since representatives are incentivized to deliver federal
| projects in the district they represent, even if that's not
| best for the nation as a whole.
|
| I really wish there a method for prototyping new democracy
| designs. I feel that this area has been very stagnant, and
| radical improvements could be possible.
| Svip wrote:
| > On the other hand, I suppose we do have primaries in the
| US. Sounds like that's not a thing in Scandinavia.
|
| Whilst we do not have primary elections, you can vote for
| individual candidates on the ballots, moving them up on the
| party list. This strategy does actually work to get
| candidates further down on the list over other candidates
| that would have been selected first.
| rainsford wrote:
| I'd argue that primaries are a serious bug rather than a
| feature of the US political system, at least in places where
| only registered members of a party can vote in that party's
| primary. By requiring candidates for the general election to
| first pass through a gauntlet composed of the most die-hard
| voters from one part of the political spectrum, you
| frequently end up with candidates who are way more extreme
| than the electorate in general.
|
| This seems to be true even if the party in question is the
| minority party for a given race. Instead of picking a
| candidate with crossover appeal from voters in the majority,
| they end up with some raging partisan who can't possibly win,
| making it effectively a one horse race. Another major failure
| mode is that even in pretty evenly split areas it encourages
| pandering to the extreme fringe of the party and winning by a
| narrow margin rather than winning with a broad coalition
| because broad coalitions with crossover appeal don't help you
| get out of the primary. This has been weaponized in recent
| years, with moderates being threatened with primary
| challenges if they don't follow the party line, even though
| this misrepresents the politics of their actual voter base.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I'd like to try a system where everybody had to use the
| same process to get on the ballot and then parties could
| endorse one of them (and probably have that indicated on
| the ballot).
| trollbridge wrote:
| A couple states (notably California) simply have a primary
| election to determine who the 2 candidates will be in the
| general election. They're often both from the same party in
| "one party" districts where people overwhelmingly prefer
| one of the parties.
|
| California's voting districts are gerrymandered along party
| lines, so the districts are about 75% safe seats for one
| party, and 25% safe seats for another party, despite the
| last Presidential election only being 58% for the one party
| and 42% for the other.
|
| Despite this, California has some of the most egregious
| pandering to extremes within the parties (due to the safe
| seats) and has a reputation for having "extreme"
| candidates.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > you frequently end up with candidates who are way more
| extreme than the electorate in general.
|
| I agree (as a non-American), I think the US primaries
| system is weird, but how does this not apply to other
| systems where it's just a small handful of political
| insiders that select who runs?
|
| Is it the case that this middle ground is the worst of all
| worlds?
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| > By requiring candidates for the general election to first
| pass through a gauntlet composed of the most die-hard
| voters from one part of the political spectrum, you
| frequently end up with candidates who are way more extreme
| than the electorate in general.
|
| It's not always that they're more extreme, it's largely the
| people who have the extra time to go to additional
| elections or caucusing. Ex: retirees. And this is affected
| each party differently.
| alkonaut wrote:
| I don't really want to learn hundreds of different individual
| political platforms. It's even a stretch to study 7-9
| platforms. Instead I tick the party that is closest to my views
| but the individual that dissents on a specific issue, or who
| focuses on that particular issue I like. This is how you can,
| as a non member, try to steer the politics of the parties.
| Svip wrote:
| I cannot speak fully to the Swedish situation, but in Denmark,
| MPs are independent as defined in the constitution. Yes,
| elections are largely party-based, but once elected, MPs are
| allowed to vote as they want. Of course, if they chose to defy
| the party line, they risk "losing the whip" as they'd say in
| the UK, which basically amounts to being expelled from the
| party.
|
| That being said, it does not take a lot of signatures to get on
| a ballot as a candidate outside the parties in Denmark (a few
| hundreds, I believe), though only two candidates have
| successfully managed to get elected that way. Conversely,
| Denmark has a high threshold for political parties (requiring
| signatures amounting to 1% of the vote of the last election, so
| usually around 21k), but the threshold to get into parliament
| is only 2% (which I believe is one of the lowest amongst
| countries that uses similar proportional representative
| systems).
|
| Returning to the towing the line (or rather lack thereof), the
| Danish parliament have a lot of independent MPs in parliament,
| because a lot find reason to quit their party after getting
| elected. Wikipedia has a fine table of MPs who has changed
| colours since the last election in November 2022:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_members_of_the_Folketi...
| luckylion wrote:
| MPs are independent in Germany as well, but in practice they
| vote with their parliamentary group almost all the time.
| "Fraktionsdisziplin" (discipline of the group) is a common
| term and generally expected - failure to achieve that is
| considered failure of the leadership and can quickly
| escalate.
|
| And even those who are elected directly wouldn't win their
| local election without their party, so all of them are very
| beholden to their party. Continuous defection on votes will
| see them not get re-elected, even if they don't get thrown
| out of the party.
|
| Theory vs practice makes all the difference.
| Svip wrote:
| I don't necessarily think this is a failure of theory in
| face of practice. Most party members _are_ team members,
| and are willing to follow party leadership most of the
| time. Yes, I know the leadership has leverage that ordinary
| members do not, but I think most of the time, leadership
| need not exert that leverage. But the list of members who
| switch party in Denmark between elections suggest that the
| theory is very much practised, but it needn 't be _all_ the
| time.
| luckylion wrote:
| Most of the time leadership doesn't need to pressure
| individuals, because they follow the commands -- not
| because they so well aligned on all topic (they are not).
|
| Of course there's an argument to be made that it would be
| a lot more chaotic if every elected MP truly was only
| beholden to their consciousness, because your certainty
| of how some vote will go would be very low and you'd have
| to actually convince MPs that it's the right thing to do
| (that would open up the question of transparency, i.e.
| who voted for what; official German politics are
| fundamentally opposed to that idea).
|
| Brokering backroom deals among party elites is far more
| efficient and predictable -- you can always buy agreement
| by offering some concessions on a different topic they
| care about. But then we're back to that question: why do
| you need hundreds of people if the decisions are made by
| a few dozens?
| Epa095 wrote:
| In the Norwegian parlament it's actually quite common that only
| part of the parlament is gathered for votes when it's clear who
| would win a complete vote. So in that sense it's actually very
| close to your 8 members.
|
| It still matters who you vote on though, but mostly from the
| representatives ability to influence what gets discussed. And
| there is a lot of 'day-to-day' politics where the details gets
| formed by the representatives, while the 'big lines' are set by
| the party.
|
| Finaly I can't help but notice that the American political
| culture is significantly less diverse than the Scandinavian
| one. Yes, you have the odd representative crossing party lines,
| but in practice it seems like all this possibility for diverse
| opinions ends up being lost when they get squashed into two big
| tents.
| rainsford wrote:
| In modern times the US is really only different in theory. This
| wasn't always the case, but currently national party positions
| totally dominate congressional voting with the individuals who
| happen to fill those seats being largely interchangeable cogs.
| There are exceptions, but those people are largely notable
| because they are so rare. And more importantly, they're slowly
| being replaced by people who will follow the party line.
|
| There have been studies on this that show party line voting
| becoming more and more common over the years to the point where
| it's basically the expected norm today. Arguably the US is in
| an even worse position because it's usually the President who
| sets the legislative agenda and voting position for their party
| in Congress, even though the system is set up assuming Congress
| acts like an independent branch.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Well, not quite. The U.S. house currently has 220
| Republicans, and to pass a bill takes 218 votes. If 3
| Republicans decide they don't like something, the bill won't
| pass, and this is happening quite frequently right now. (The
| Democrats could decide to join the Republicans and pass it
| anyway, but so far this has not happened.)
|
| The current President keeps wanting to pass bills which
| simply don't pass.
|
| Likewise, the Senate realistically needs 60% votes to pass
| controversial legislation, and that just isn't happening
| either.
|
| You're right that the U.S. congress used to vote far more
| upon regional lines or other non-party interests than it does
| now. There is something studied in political science (I can't
| remember its name) that predicts that well-funded, important
| elections will eventually converge on being 50/50, with the
| winner essentially being statistical noise.
| viraptor wrote:
| TIL "(convergence to) electoral mean". But also seems to
| fall apart with more complex issues
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3872446/
| rainsford wrote:
| You're right that defections haven't totally gone away, but
| I think the current Congress actually emphasizes how rare
| they are now. The only reason things aren't passing is
| because the house is so close that a tiny percentage of
| Republicans defecting can sink a bill. But the vast
| majority of Republicans follow the party line and basically
| none of the Democrats are willing to cross over either. In
| a system with realistic local representation you'd expect a
| lot more crossover in both directions.
| trollbridge wrote:
| This was the norm for most of the 20th century. Major
| legislation passed with votes from both parties - often
| over 2/3 and immune to a Presidential veto.
|
| My reaction to this is to focus more on things locally.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| I'm sure part of the issue is the move towards giant
| omnibus bills rather than bills addressing individual
| issues. They tend to emphasize the ideological
| differences between the parties.
| qgin wrote:
| At least in the parliamentary system, you are voting for an
| abstract notion of how things should be run, a worldview, or a
| list of policies.
|
| In the American system, the cult of personality rules above
| all. The vast majority of Americans disagree with what Donald
| Trump is implementing right now. That's clear when you ask
| people in the abstract. But we don't choose that way.
| Personality and celebrity rules the day here.
| markvdb wrote:
| The main problem with this system: even most university educated
| people cannot thoroughly understand it. [0] That potentially
| undermines trust in the system.
|
| [0] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf
| Epa095 wrote:
| Maybe democracy just has to be a bit complicated to work?
|
| As a bit on an anecdote, I know two Canadians, and I asked them
| if they were voting in the upcoming election. They both
| answered 'Maybe, but there is really no point, since
| liberals/conservatives always wins my riding anyway', and that
| made me pretty sad. I wonder how many people live in
| Democracies where their vote just don't matter at all?
|
| The best would be a simple, proportional and geographically
| representative system. But if we can't have all, I think
| dropping simple is better.
| trollbridge wrote:
| Parties tend to like safe seats. (This is one thing that
| dominant parties on both sides of the aisle can agree on.)
| Unfortunately, the very concept of a "safe seat" means one
| individual's vote doesn't matter.
| lambertsimnel wrote:
| There's a distinction between the complexity of choosing how
| to vote, completing a ballot paper and administering an
| election. I don't expect any one can be minimised without
| raising another.
|
| The tradeoff might be made easier by expecting less of any
| single elected body/office. If we had a national legislating
| chamber, elected by at-large proportional representation from
| a single constituency, and we turned instead to local
| government for geographic representation, and the second
| legislative chamber were elected by local government to exert
| geographic influence over legislation, then maybe voters
| could make fewer, easier, and more impactful choices. I don't
| know of any country that works like this, but Germany is
| close.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-04-20 23:02 UTC)