[EM] simple MMP-ish idea - works with plurality voting in single-winner districts

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 03:54 PM 8/30/2005, Adam Tarr wrote:
>Just a random thought I had the other day for a PR system that would 
>work using only single-winner districts.

The scheme, as described, achieves proportionality by awarding 
victory to some candidates who had only weak support in the districts 
from which they were supposedly elected. This cannot reasonably be 
called "single-winner." Rather, it is multiple-winner over the 
collection of districts, and the assignment of winners to districts 
is not a significant detail (except that I suppose that district 
constituents might have someone to petition if they want governmental 
action on something).

For full PR, Asset Voting is the king of the heap as far as I am 
concerned. Not a vote is wasted. I've suggested the simpler form of 
Fractional Approval Asset Voting to use for this. It is Asset Voting 
because those who receive votes may consider them as Assets, used to 
elect themselves directly, or in combination with votes from others 
to elect themselves or others. It is Approval because the ballot is a 
standard ballot, one marking position per candidate. It is Fractional 
Approval because, in this scheme, votes are not lost (as they are in 
regular approval), so dividing the votes is appropriate and, 
actually, necessary. But votes are divided automatically, not, as in 
regular Asset, by voters assigning fractions. This system produces a 
maximally representative assembly with exact proportional 
representation (where it fails to do this, it fails by the acts or 
failures to act of specific and publicly identified persons, who can 
thus be held responsible by those who voted for them.)

(The "Fractional Approval" aspect is not essential, it is only used 
where a voter wants to delegate the votes to more than one person. In 
Delegable Proxy, which is quite similar, the implementations I've 
been working on require a single assignment, and this is quite 
important because DP is not only an election method, it is also a 
communication system that works in both direction....)

To use a form of Asset voting for district-based semi-PR, where every 
district has a representative who has been chosen by majority vote 
*within the district*, tiny subdistricts are used, perhaps elementary 
school districts. Each subdistrict elects a subdistrict 
representative. Approval voting would serve quite well for this. Then 
the subdistrict representative has the authority to use votes equal 
to the district population to elect a member of the assembly. Those 
subdistricts whose votes contributed to the election of that member 
are effectively merged. This is districting by a form of deliberate, 
benign gerrymandering. It would allow any party which can win a 
majority in even the tiniest subdistrict to exercise political power, 
and if they can win a majority in enough of these subdistricts, they 
can gain a seat.

This scheme might pass muster for congressional districts, unless 
federal law requires such districts to be contiguous. (I think that 
there are districts which are "contiguous" only by virtue of weird 
patterns drawn through bodies of water.... so I think this might 
indeed be a matter of state law, not federal. And maybe not.) A 
similar scheme could be used with a contiguity requirement, but it 
would be less advantageous to third parties.

However, full PR must allow parties with scattered membership to 
still have representation, as long as they can muster enough total 
votes to reach the quota. Asset Voting allows this to happen 
*without* being party-list. The individuals who receive the votes 
might be party representatives, indeed, but they might also be 
independent. And, big secret: if write-in votes are allowed (and they 
should be), *anyone* could serve as an elector in such a system. If 
everyone wrote in their own name, how would this be different from 
what we have now? Well, votes would be reassigned in Asset 
*publicly*, which means that quid pro quo can be involved. It is a 
deliberative process. (Some political scientists list bargaining 
separately from deliberation, but to me that are aspects of the same 
thing, and both are quite different from aggregation, i.e., voting.)