[EM] No geographical districts

[Raph Frank]

On 9/5/08, Stéphane Rouillon <stephane.rouillon at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> http://www.citizensassembly.bc.ca/public/get_involved/submission/R/ROUILLON-65
>  You are welcome to comment. At least I hope you have fun reading it if you
> find the time.

Your implementation of IRV is non-standard (though I agree with the
none of the above change and it is needed for your 2nd step).

Perhaps, votes would only go to none if the voter actually ranks none.

E.g.

A 1
B
C
None 2

would transfer to none if A is eliminated, but would be exhausted if
the voter didn't vote for None.  However, that would mean that the
voter has no effect on the PR stage, so probably a bad idea.

it might be better to use a divisor method (d'Hondt or Webster's
methods) to share out the seats.  This has some advantages in terms of
resistance to weird effects
(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alabama_paradox#Alabama_Paradox ).
Your method looks like the largest remainder method.

I also don't agree with independents getting a seat with 0.51 seats
worth of votes, but that is another discussion (see previous PR
thread)

Also, you could include the None votes as a None-party.  This party
could be assigned seats.  They would be left vacant.  My opinion is
that they should be considered to vote against every bill (though with
the crutch option, it probably doesn't matter).  Alternatively, they
could just trigger a by-election.

For example, of all the valid arrangements (each party has the correct
number of seats), find the one where the elected representatives have
the highest total votes.

I am not sure I agree with the 'crutch' but, if you must have it, I
would suggest a modification.

After the election, the new parliament tries to nominate a PM.

First they vote to keep the current PM.  If he fails to get a
majority, he becomes a caretaker-PM and he and the cabinet can't
excersise major powers, without consent of the House.

They can then try to nominate others in the ordinary way.

If after 1 month, no nomination motion has obtained majority support,
they can attempt to use the crutch rule.

Any member of the House may stand as a candidate.

The House holds three sequential votes.

In the first round, an approval ballot is used.  For the last 2, each
member votes for 1 candidate.

The candidate who wins the plurality of the vote is considered
nominated to be PM (with crutch support).

The additional candidates are added, but they only remain members of
the House for as long as the PM remains PM.

Also, they cannot vote in motions which nominate someone else to be PM
(or motions which declare that the PM has gained support of the
majority of the House).  They also cannot vote in motions which call
for a new election to be held.

The term limit is reduced on a pro-rata basis.  If the PM is PM for 1
year and then they manage to get a majority, then under your example,
that would count as 7/4 * 1 year = 1.75 years used.  Thus the term
would have 2.25 years left (of 4).

This system has the advantage that it allows the smaller parties the
option to try to form a coalition.  If the split was 40%, 30%, 30%,
under your rule, the 40% party could declare a minority government
against the wishes of the 60% of the other 2 parties.

It also allows 2 parties which has a larger vote between them access
to the crutch system.  For example, if the split was 40%, 30%, 15%,
9%, 6%.  It would allow a coalition of the 30%+15% parties to form the
minority government as it has more votes than the 40% party.

In addition, it allows a moverment by the House back to a majority
government.  In the above example, if the 40% party finally managed to
get the 9% and 6% parties into a coalition, they could vote to
nominate the leader of 40% party as PM.  The additional members due to
the crutch would not be allowed to vote for this motion, so the new
coalition would win by 55% to 45%.

It might also be worth allowing them to switch crutch-coalition.  For
example, once the 40% party gets support of the 6% party, it now has
the plurality of the vote.

It might also be worth having a rule that within 1 year of the end of
term, the crutch rule cannot be used.

I was thinking that a better way of having Heterogeneous districts
would be to based them on polling stations.  If each district needed
10 polling stations, then you could randomly allocate polling stations
to districts.  This doesn't get perfect blinding, but is much easier
to implement.

This might be better than social security number as the districts
could be completely different each election.  Also, social security
numbers are static (and set by the government), so districts might
have overlap from the previous election.

If you waited until the last possible moment to decide the polling
stations, then a politician wouldn't know where to direct pork and in
any case, it would be hard to direct it at a specific polling station
area.

I don't know if a party 'front-bench' member would actually be willing
to stand against the cabinet.  Even if more than 1 of them can be
elected from the same district, the odds of more than 1 are reasonably
low.  I think the strategy would actually be to try to find a district
that nobody 'important' was standing in.

It does mean that a cabinet member would need to make sure his
policies have the support of the majority.  I actually don't know if
this is a good thing.  Sometimes, it is helpful to implement unpopular
policies (e.g. a 'basket' of policies might have 70% support, even
though some individual policies have support of less than the a
majority.)

Your system has an unusual blend.  Each party gets a PR share of the
seats, but a random sample of the voters get to decide which party
members actually get elected.

I think this may lead to the more off-centre parties only nominating a
fixed number of candidates.  Otherwise, the majority might elect all
their inexperienced members.

It might even be worth running as independents for non-centerist
parties.  This is especially true since your method favours
independents.  This means that a known party member gets elected based
on the party's vote.  Ofc, that prevents the party from combining its
vote over multiple districts, so may be not.

Also, an actual independent is not likely to win.  He would need to
have large support nationwide.  However, if that is the case, it would
be expected that he would be in one of the mainstream parties.

Btw, have you considered Fair Majority Voting.  This also elects
candidates based on a combination of PR and districts.  Unlike, MMP,
it doesn't have top-up seats.