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

[James Gilmour]

Kathy Dopp  > Sent: Monday, July 04, 2011 2:53 PM
> > 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),
> 
> Plurality is how it is done I believe.  To have PR within the 
> party would require some sort of party primary system I 
> suppose to determine which candidates are on each list in the 
> general election for each party.

This suggestion misses the point.  For any voting system to give full effect to proportional representation of the voters, the
selection of the candidates to take the seats won by a party must be decided by those who vote in the actual public election  -  not
decided by any kind of party primary.  After all, the party primary (before the public election) has already decided who should be
on the party's list and has ordered that list.

> The nice feature of existing party list methods is that it 
> allows the election of a large number of candidates to a 
> large national body of legislators without requiring voters 
> to rank individually a huge number of candidates. This makes 
> the job for voters and election administrators much easier 
> than asking voters to rank from among a huge number of 
> candidates.

But it is precisely this "nice" feature of most open-list party-list systems that causes the failure of such systems to produce
proportionality WITHIN parties.

If you are going to do this properly, to produce a within-party PR result, the voters for each party would have to mark preferences
against the candidates in their chosen party's list (not necessarily all candidates, depending on the system you choose).  And then
you would need to use STV-PR (or something like it as you don't like STV) to determine which candidates should take the seats
allocated to each party.  No such system could be precinct-summable, but that is not a priority for everyone.

And as has already been said, if you are prepared to go the bother of counting what is in effect a separate PR election WITHIN each
party, why not go all the way and apply your chosen PR system to all candidates across all parties?  That would give the voters real
choice and would also avoid completely the problem of entrenching the political power of the parties' machines.

James Gilmour