[EM] My summary of the recent discussion

[James Gilmour]

> > 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.

> Juho > Sent: Monday, June 04, 2012 7:48 PM
> 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 
> districts, 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 than 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 features 
> of the existing system.

Iceland currently uses a system that sounds very like the Finish proposal.  Votes are tallied at national level and in six
constituencies, each of which has nine constituency seats in parliament.  Nine additional "equalization seats" are distributed to
constituencies and allocated to political parties so that the parliamentary representation of each party and each constituency will
reflect as closely as possible the total votes received.  This is done by solving a pair of simultaneous equations!  It does have
the effect you describe, forcing out some "constituency winners" and replacing them with "equalisation candidates".  This seems to
be accepted because the constitution demands that every vote shall have equal value.

But of course, you don't need to do it this way, nor does the proportionality have to be just "party PR".  With STV-PR in
multi-member districts the voters have the power to choose the winning candidates on whatever PR basis matters to those voters.   I
do appreciate that STV is totally unacceptable to quite a number of the more vociferous members of this list, but STV-PR does
address effectively many of the issues that arise in electing properly representative assemblies.

James






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