[EM] STV's Dirty Little Secrets

[Blake Cretney]

On Wed, 25 Oct 2000, LAYTON Craig wrote:

> >    Best to consider MMP for large elections.
> 
> Any system (ie the party list part of MMP) that elects candidates
> without
> the voter being able to discriminate between individual candidates
> isn't
> very democratic.  

Recently, I proposed, as a kind of compromise method the following:

Voters vote for a single candidate, but each district elects 3
members.  Number of seats for each party is determined by total
national party support.  These seats are then distributed to each
district based on local support (using a formula).  Then within a
party and district, the candidates with the most votes are elected in
order of number of votes.

The method is simple for the voter, and allows votes for candidates
and geographic representation.  Districts are larger than FPP, but
smaller than STV.  The details are somewhat complicated, but not so
much as STV.  You aren't able to vote for a candidate independently
of a party vote (except for independents), but on the other hand the
voters do decide which candidates of a party get elected.

---
Blake Cretney