[EM] My nasty system for advantaging urban parties

[David Catchpole]

Hi guys, I apologise but I'll be doing a "Davison plan" over one or two
e-mails.

I'm a member of the Australian Labor Party, which was denied government in
the last federal elections in Oz not by virtue of votes but because of the
geographical nature of Australian political voting. The system I describe
below is intended to compensate for such inequities by giving extra seats
to parties with more than 60% vote in a division, while fitting within
Australia's constitutional restriction that members of the House of
Representatives must be elected directly. It's a prefverential system.

STAGE I- This is necessary unless you really like splitting people's
votes (the example I thought of was a minor party which is repulsive to
both major sides - take One Nation - I'll go into more detail towards
the end). Take the ballots, select 2 candidates by PR. Start again,
ignoring those already selected, and select another two,
and then another. You now have six candidates with which to continue.

This stage may be taken up by any system which selects at least 3 
candidates from the winning side and 1 from the losing side

STAGE II- Take the votes, this time, only considering the 6 candidates
selected from stage I. We now choose 4 by PR.

STAGE III- Take the votes this time only considering the 4 candidates
selected from stage II. We choose 1 by PR (you know what I mean -
substitute "PR" with "STV" through this spiel). We choose another 1 and
then another 1. We have three winners.


If a party has over 50% of the vote but doesn't make it to 60% it has 2
candidates making it to stage III and winning. If it has over 60% of the
vote it gets 3 candidates winning in the division- woohoo!

Apart from the 5+->4->3 system I describe above, there do exist others
with lower "extra" quotas-

7+->6->5	4 sevenths of the vote.
9+->8->7	5 ninths of the vote, etc.

Without stage I, a repulsive party such as One Nation would make one of
the quotas in stage II, stealing it off (presumably) the winner. Even
though if the party had not stood a
candidate, the vote heading for the winner would be more than the "extra"
quota, the winner gets only the "sub-extra" number of candidates won
because of this.


Comments, please!