[Election-Methods] Matrix voting and cloneproof MMP questions

[James Gilmour]

Kristofer Munsterhjelm > Sent: Tuesday, July 08, 2008 1:25 PM
> I don't doubt that the problem exists. After all, the term "decoy list" 
> (lista civetta) comes from the Italian abuse of the system. 
> Do you know of any countries that do have overhang provisions to 
> ameliorate the problem?

While I am sure it was not introduced for this purpose (combating "lista civetta"), an overhang correction (in various forms at
different times) has been used in elections to the German Bundestag.  The Wikipedia page on this says a similar correction is
applied in elections to the National Assembly of Venezuela, but I have not checked that.   MMP elections to the New Zealand House of
Representatives can produce am overhang of constituency (electorate) seats, but no correction is applied.  There is no provision for
overhang seats in MMP elections to the Scottish Parliament or the National Assembly of Wales, both of which use regionalised
versions of MMP.

 
>  > Basically, MMP is a rotten voting system, with or without the
> > 'overhang' correction, and it should be replaced by a better system of 
> > proportional representation.
> 
> Even though I think multiwinner methods should be  party-neutral, I can 
> see the appeal of MMP: parties are guaranteed to get their share of the 
> vote, even if the constituency vote is disproportional.

Surely the fundamental requirement of any voting system for a representative assembly should be to ensure that the VOTERS get
proportional representation of what they, the VOTERS, want, as expressed through their responses to the candidates who offer
themselves for election.  To the extent that the voters vote by party, they will get party PR.

The undoubted attraction of MMP is that it appears to retain the alleged benefits of single-member districts while giving party PR.
Thus MMP has proved attractive in countries that have suffered the appalling British legacy of FPTP elections in single-member
districts.  In fact, research has shown that the alleged benefits of single-member districts (the "elector-member link") are mostly
illusory, and experience has shown that greater accountability of the elected members to the local voters can be obtained in
multi-member districts  -  provided the correct voting system is used.  MMP also creates its own problems, especially in electing
two different types of member.  For more details see the Fairshare submission to the Arbuthnott Commission which reviewed the voting
system for the Scottish Parliament (PDF, 45 KB):		
  http://www.fairsharevoting.org/Fairshare%20Submission%20Arbuthnott%20Commission%2022%20Mar%2005.pdf


> Thus they can't 
> say that they were robbed of seats because of the quirks of  the system. 
> While in reality such complaints would be infrequent (because those who 
> have power in a very disproportional system are those where the 
> disproportionality swung their way), why have disproportionality when it 
> can be avoided?
> 
> If we generalize this, the list part of MMP is a patch to the 
> disproportionality of the constituency method, to take advantage of 
> explicitly-known properties (like party allegiance). That suggests that 
> we use a proportional multiwinner method (like STV) for larger 
> constituencies, and then award list seats (of a much smaller share than 
> half the parliament) to patch up whatever disproportionality still 
> exists - even if the multiwinner method is perfect, rounding errors 
> regarding district size would introduce some disproportionality.
> 
> At that point, the generalized MMP with STV sounds a lot like 
> Schulze's suggestion for Berlin.

If you are going to mess about with MMP to the extent that you suggest in the hope of making some significant improvements to what
is basically a very poor voting system, why not just adopt STV-PR and  do the job properly?

James Gilmour


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