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

[Juho Laatu]

On 4.7.2011, at 16.53, Kathy Dopp wrote:

> That is an interesting idea that would require a different ballot type
> than in existing party list systems whereby one could rank all the
> candidates within a particular party one votes for.

I just note that if we combine party lists and candidate ranking within those lists, then we can have actually quite simple ballots.

In a flat STV election with many candidates voters may need to rank high number of candidates in order to be sure that their vote will be counted fully for their own party and it will not exhaust in the calculation process before that is done. In a list election with STV (or some other ranked method) within the parties it is enough to rank just one candidate to be sure that the vote will go fully to one's own party. That makes voting simple for those who are in a hurry or who don't want to study the background and opinions of all the candidates (to be able to rank them).

For the same reason one could live with quite simple ballots without losing much and still be able to provide much better party internal proportionality than with one single vote (that is the traditional approach in list elections). One could e.g have a white ballot paper with three boxes. Voters would mark the numbers of their three favourite candidates in those three boxes. From ballot complexity and ballot filling effort point of view that would be about as simple as it gets (assuming that writing the numbers of the candidates in the ballot is not considered to be much more complex than ticking some ordered boxes next to the candidates, or giving and ordering number to each candidate). And this would work reasonably well also with very high number of candidates and elected representatives.

(Of course the idea of having proportionally ordered candidate lists in a closer list election would make voting in the actual election even simpler. But then one would need to have a primary to find the ordering for each party.)

Juho