[EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats

[Juho Laatu]

Some late comments follow.

Vidar Wahlberg wrote:

> The short answer to "why not vote directly for persons?" would be that
> in Norway there's more focus on the goals of a party rather than the
> goal of its politicians, and some may argue that the extra abstraction
> layer is a good thing, as well as I'd like an alternative that won't be
> completely alien to the common people. I'm hoping that any discussion
> that may arise won't focus on this aspect, though.

Open lists would be one easy modification, but I note that you prefer ranked ballots, so let's skip open lists. Ranked ballots can also provide better party internal proportionality (between different sections of the party or between different parts of the districts) than basic open lists.

> I don't have any proof that it will degenerate into a populist
> competition, but I do see the potential that it will, when you vote
> directly for a person rather than a party.


In principle ability to vote for persons helps populist candidates. My best understanding is that in Finland, that uses open lists, well known candidates (from sports, TV etc.) probably have slightly better chances to win a seat when compared to countries using closed lists, but that difference is not big. Also closed lists can be populated with well known figures to get "populist votes" (in addition to nominating experienced politicians).

Also campaining could in principle be more populist in open lists, but I don't see big difference here either. In FInland the level of populism differs more between parties than between the candidates of a single party.

All in all, I believe the risk of excessive populism is not big in ranked methods either.

> The leveling seat algorithm is... peculiar.

You said that you don't like methods that lead towards a two/three party system. In other words the method should allow also small parties to survive. I note that typically small districts are one key reason why small parties do not get any seats. If you e.g. have a district with 3 seats, it is obvious that only two/three largest parties can win there. The leveling seats (that are allocated based on support at national level) could fix that problem, but I understood that n Norway they don't apply to the smallest parties. Therefore the 5% threshold probably effectively reduces the chances of the smallest parties to get their proportional share (at national level) of the seats. It does not make sense to the voters to vote for parties that most likely will not get any seats in their district anyway.

I don't know what the situation in Norway actually is today. My comments here are thus just general comments on how multi-winner election methods usually work.

> I'd like to get rid of both leveling seats and
> election threshold.

If you want to achieve exact proportionality (also for small parties) I think it is important that proportionality will be counted at national level. Also in ranked methods it is not enough if each district does its best alone since the small number of seats per district will distort proportionality at national level. From this point of view the leveing seats (or any construction that aims at providing proportionality at national level) is good, and thresholds are bad.

- - -

I note that you can achieve national level proportionality in list based methods also without leveling seats. In Finland there was a proposal that was alrady once accepted by the parliament but then cancelled by the current government. This proposal counted the proportionality first at national level, and then allocated a predetermined number of seats to each district so that at the same time also the calculated national proportionality numbers were met. This means that the last seats in some districts were slightly "forced" to correct parties, to meeth the national proportionality target. All methods that try to reach multiple targets, like political proportionality and geographic proportionality at the same time will have some "rounding errors". In the Finnish proposal those rounding errors were thus solved by slight distortion in who and which party wins the last seat in each district, instead of using e.g. leveling seats to capture the rounding errors.

- - -

You had interest in guaranteeing that the "lost" votes of small parties will go to parties that are similar-minded. If one counts exact proportionality at national level the number of lost votes will be quite small. That alone might be enough for some needs. The traditional way of voting for one party or one candidate only could thus be enough, and there would not be need to have ranked votes for this reason. (Ranked votes could be there for other reasons, like to support party internal proportionality.)

Ranked methods may also be quite heavy for the voter if there anre tens of candidates to rank. For the needs of Finland I have been interested in methods that would combine lists and ranked votes in another way. The idea is that ranking would be used within one party only. This approach does not allow the ranked votes to be used to improve the proportionalty between parties (as in your original proposal). One reason why ranking would be party internal only is that in this way also bullet votes to one single candidate and votes that do not list all the (tens of) candidates of one single party would support the intended party with their full strength (the whole strength of each short vote will go to the intended party). It might be too tedious for the voters to first rank all the candidates of one's own party, then all the candidates of the next best party, then the third and so on. One could thus achive (almost exact) national proportionality by counting it at national level, and still keep voting simple, also when there are tens of hundreds of candidates (in each district). The actual paper ballots could be large lists of all candidates, or just simple paper ballots with maybe three slots/boxes for the numbers of three candidates (of one party).

If one wants to be more exact with national proportionality between parties (without forcing voters to rank also the candidates of other parties), one solution could be to allow the parties to determine their relationship to other parties. For example left wing parties could join together so that their extra votes would support other left wing parties and not the right wing ones. This gets however quite complex, and parties may not be interested in agreeing which parties are cosest to each others. Another approach would be to allow voters to rank also parties in addition to ranking candidates, but also that gets quite complex.

Juho