[EM] Another approach to geographical proportionality and single-winner districts (was: PR for USA or UK)

[Juho Laatu]

One feature of single-winner district based political systems is that voters will have a clearly named "own" representative that is as local as possible. In a PR context with multiple parties one could redefine this idea so that people should have a known representative that represents them in the assembly. A two-party / single-winner district system has the problem that often the local representative is from the "wrong" party. The requirement could be modified so that the idea is to have a local representative of one's *own* party. With that approach we will lose some of the locality, but on the other hand we may get more natural local representatives.

This kind of methods could work for example so that first the number of seats that each party gets will be determined at national level (to provide perfect proportionality between parties). The country is divided in small voting areas. We know the number of votes from each voting area to each party and the location of each voting area. (Votes are summed up in voting areas instead of using individual votes directly in order to guarantee voter privacy.) Also candidates have a location. That location could be approximate and it could be used only to indicate that the intention of the candidate is to represent certain region. Voters will then vote for the candidates. The system could allow only bullet votes or one could user ranked or rated ballots too.

Then we need an algorithm that takes the votes to some party and their geographical distribution, and the geographical distribution of the votes to different candidates of the party into account. The whole country will be divided in (party specific) regions, and one candidate (of this party) will be elected in each region. Now all supporters of this party will have a single "own" representative of their own party. The size of the regions should reflect the density (or sparseness) of votes from that region. The size of each district would be about the same in terms of votes received from that region. One could allow also disjoint regions, but if one wants the regions not to be too fragmented, one could add some parameter that favours compact regions. One should form such a set of regions and set of representatives in them that the overall happiness of the voters (of this party) is maximized (= local representatives having local support etc.).

One could develop also systems with no party structure (with ranked or rated ballots). In such systems each geographical spot could have exactly one representative. Or alternatively one could agree some (small) number of representatives that each spot should have (= layers). That would allow every voter to have a local representative from their own "wing" at least. Also in this approach different layers could have different regions, and the size of the regions could reflect the popularity distribution of that candidate. (Actually the layers need not be separate layers. It is enough if each representative has a region, and each geographical spot is included in the agreed number of regions.

The end result so far is thus a mixture of strict political and geographical proportionality requirements, leading to electing a fixed number of representatives for each geographic spot. But of course one could still give up the idea of keeping the number of representatives per spot constant :-). One could instead optimize the number of representatives per spot so that it reflects the uniformity of opinion in each location. If some place has only small number of different opinions it could have only a small number of very local representatives, while another place (with similar population density) could have numerous but less local representatives. I guess we will keep the requirement of all representatives having in their regions about equal number of supporters to represent.

One problem of systems without clear district structure and geographic proportionality is that candidates from the capital region and other major cities and television tend to become overrepresented. The discussed system above had no clear fixed district borders (although it could have) and it may allow voters to vote also distant candidates, but it may still maintain regional representation quite well (also without limiting the area where each candidate can collect votes) since individual candidates are more likely to be elected if they get their votes from a "region size" geographical area.

I wrote this mail as a response to the "PR for USA or UK" mail stream, and particularly to the question how to offer good political proportionality, geographic proportionality and local representation at the same time. This model is however not a very concrete and practical proposal for the needs of that mail stream. If one looks for a practical implementations of this approach, maybe the party based approach with one party representative for each spot is closest to being a practical proposal (= one layer per party). The art of districting is anyway already now well known in the two-party countries, so maybe doing that at party level (without fights between political parties (but potentially with some fights between candidates to be elected :-) )) could be an additional positive thing in this proposal.

Juho