[EM] My summary of the recent discussion

[Juho Laatu]

On 4.6.2012, at 19.18, James Gilmour wrote:

>> A system that counts the proportions at national level 
>> (typically a multi-party system) would be more accurate. Also 
>> gerrymandering can be avoided this way.
> 
> Yes, the votes could be summed at national level and the seats allocated at national level.  But you do not need to go to national
> level to achieve proper representation.  Where the electors also want some guarantee of local representation, a satisfactory
> compromise can be achieved with a much more modest 'district magnitude' than one national district.

In Finland there was a reform proposal that counted the proportions at national level, but the seats were still allocated in the existing districts. (Current government doesn't want to drive that proposal forward.) One can do this trick also with quite small districts. In Finland the size of the smallest districts is 6, but even smaller districts could work.

Both targets can thus be met simultaneously, accurate proportionality and local(ish) representation. All systems will however have some "rounding errors". In this proposal the seats of the parties are allocated to the districts so that the total sum of seats per district and seats per party are exactly correct, which means that some of the last seats have to be "forced to go right", and this may violate the personal interests of some candidates (some other party may get the seat with fewer votes), but in a rather random / unpredictable / unbiased way that people are likely to accept. Political proportionality in the districts is also not as accurate as at the national level, but I guess the national level proportionality is the one that counts.

In theory one could use this system also with single-member disticts, but the "forcing" operations would already be quite violent. If current single-member district countries want to keep the idea of very local representation, one approach could be to use only slightly larger districts tahn today (maybe 3, 4), calculate proportionality at national level, and then allocate the seats to the districts using some similar algorithm as in the Finnish reform proposal. Just an idea, to keep as much of the familiar and maybe liked feaures of the existing system.

Juho