[EM] 3 seat Largest Remainder Hare avoids the pit-falls of most ordered party-list elections.

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

David L Wetzell wrote:
> I blogged about this at my blog a while back in response to the args 
> given by the Electoral Reform Society of the UK against ordered party 
> list forms of PR.  
> http://anewkindofparty.blogspot.com/2011/05/electoral-reform-society-united-kingdom.html
> 
> I think a better way to do a mixed method parliamentary election than 
> what is done in Germany is to have a large number of 4 seat 
> super-districts, where 3 seats would be elected with a 3 seat LR Hare 
> and the 4th seat would be elected by some [deliberately unspecified] 
> single-winner election rule besides FPTP.  

That sounds a lot like the Loring Ensemble Rule. You might be interested 
in reading about it at http://www.accuratedemocracy.com/e_ler.htm .

Loring argues that Plurality councils can swing wildly and deny 
representation to people who should be represented, while PR councils 
can still be off-center due to kingmaker scenarios, and that one should 
therefore pick a center that can break ties while not giving any voting 
bloc undue power.

He then proposes to use STV, but shield the CW from losing. The 
Condorcet winner represents the center or common consensus position, 
while the other winners represent the diversity of opinion among the 
people. Because the process is done inside a single method, in the case 
the CW is off-center, the proportional representation aspect of the 
algorithm will even this out by compensating.

The same sort of shielding could be used in any type of multiwinner 
system. If it's sequential, you just keep the CW from being eliminated. 
If it's combinatorial (like Schulze STV), you only consider those sets 
of winners that include the CW.