[EM] What's wrong with the party list system?

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Kathy Dopp wrote:
> Thanks for the responses.  In response to the party leaders having too
> much control, I believe it is possible to make "party-lists" on the
> fly from voters' own rank choice ballots in a way that the most voters
> would naturally support -- which would put the control into voters'
> hands and treat all voters fairly and the same (unlike IRV and STV).
> As soon as I have time, I'll write it up.

You could make a party list system that would arrange the list after the 
election, yes. This would have a ballot where you first pick a party and 
then order the party's candidates.

However, either the election method used within each party to determine 
the list orders would be majoritarian (in which case the system isn't 
proportional beyond the party level), or it would be PR (in which case 
you could just as easily remove the party constraint and just use the PR 
method directly).

I suppose a "party list with Condorcet for each party" method would both 
be summable and inter-party proportional[1]. If the largest party fields 
n candidates and there are k parties, then you would have an upper bound 
of k * n^2 numbers, which is polynomial in the summability sense. You 
would in essence do k "mini-elections", one for each party.

[1] that is, proportional between parties, if not inside each.