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

[James Gilmour]

Jameson Quinn > Sent: Monday, July 04, 2011 5:03 PM
> As I said in my last message, asset-like systems can let you 
> have your cake and eat it, if you trust your favorite 
> candidate to agree with you in ranking other candidates. This 
> is fundamentally different from trusting your party, because 
> your "favorite candidate" in asset-like systems could, in 
> principle, be arbitrarily close to you - even BE you, if 
> you're willing to give up vote anonymity, and if the system 
> allows this extreme. Most systems will put some limits on 
> this, but still, they are far closer to this extreme than any 
> party list system. Also, there is no need to stay within the 
> arbitrary bounds of any party; a candidate can have 
> affinities based on ideology, so candidates at the fringes of 
> their party (including the centrist fringes) have full freedom.

I am a campaigner for practical reform of voting systems and I do not think an asset system or asset-like system will be acceptable
for partisan public elections  -  certainly not here in the UK.  And I see nothing in US or Canadian politics to make me think such
a system might be any more acceptable there.  


> I disagree about the "no such system" statement. I myself 
> have worked out an unpublished system which is not perfectly 
> droop-PR, but is a ~99% approximation thereof; and which is 
> complicated, but still 2n² summable. It's not worth sharing 
> the details here, but, having gone through the exercise, I 
> believe that it should be possible to do better than I did.

If you have done this I would encourage you to write it up for publication in the (somewhat informal) technical journal "Voting
matters".  In the UK we do not sum or count the ballot papers from any public elections in the precincts, but it would be very
interesting to see how this could be done in a practical way for STV-PR or a system that would deliver comparable PR results.

James