[EM] Why proportional elections - Power arguments needed (Czech green party)

Peter Zbornik pzbornik at gmail.com
Mon May 17 05:25:45 PDT 2010


Dear all,

thank you for your help with the election system for the council elections
of the green party.
I will try to move on with technical testing of Schulze's methods and the
specification of the elections to the party lists as soon as time allows.
Thanks all for the support and all methods supplied.
I never could imagine that I would get such a response.
When advocating proportional elections in the party, I have found it
difficult to explain to other members of the green party why proportional
elections to our party organs is a good thing.

So far my argument has been the following:
The leadership of the party should represent all members.
Otherwise infighting will follow, which weakens the party both internally
and in the eyes of the voter.
A member of the green party without any representatives he/she likes is
likely to either
(i) leave the party or
(ii) try to get representation of his/her faction by removing all
the current party representatives, which the current representatives
naturally do not like, so both sides spend a great deal of time on
positional battles instead of working for the party.
An other argument is, that it is much easier to tear down a party's
reputation than building it up.

I guess I would need more help with propagating proportional elections
within my party

I would like to ask you if you could help finding some short and to the
point arguments (preferrably with some real-life examples).
We need to explain why a political party would benefit from electing their
representatives to the different party councils proportionally instead of
using the winner-takes-it-all methods (block-voting) which are in use today.

Such power arguments could be a help when I try to sell the idea of
proportional elections in the Czech Green party.

Best regards
Peter Zborník
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