[EM] Best method in use?

[Sampo Syreeni]

On 2002-12-16, Narins, Josh uttered to 'Michael Stephan' and...:

>Finnish people tend to brag about their system

Do we really? Anyways what we now have is:

Presidential elections: The first round is a majority vote. If no one
candidate gets a majority, the two leading candidates from the first round
go head-to-head. There have been recent examples of splintering, too, if
memory serves. (I haven't been paying attention to electoral matters for
too long.)

Municipal elections: Each municipality is a single district. Open party
list proportional representation is used with d'Hondt's rule.

Parliamentary and EU elections: The country has been divided into 15 fixed
geographic districts. Each gets seats in proportion to the size of the
population in the district half a year before the election. Within each
district the same procedure is used in the case of municipal elections.

Lists do not necessarily go by party lines. They are created either by
registered parties or by associations of 100 individuals or more (less in
municipal elections). Parties and electoral associations can combine
lists. Combined lists are a common strategy, especially for smaller
parties. The maximum number of candidates on each final list is the
greater of 14 or the number of representatives chosen from a district in
parliamentary and EU elections, 1.5 times the number of representatives
chosen in the case of municipal elections.

(BTW, to shake any on-list US libertarians a bit, population counts aren't
derived from a census. Instead they're drawn from the Population Register
Centre database, which, I tell you, tends to be accurate. There's no
registration for a vote, either -- they know your NID, name, phone number,
address, age, parents, spouse, origin, religion, everything. A slip will
just arrive in the mail for each election. How's that for spooky? ;)

>I think they have sophisticated voting for both their elections and
>their assmebly procedure (rules of debate)

Assembly procedures I know absolutely nothing about, thankfully.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2

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