[EM] Changing the Norwegian election system

[Vidar Wahlberg]

On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 10:14:34AM +0200, Juho Laatu wrote:
>> = Representatives per district =
>> In total there are 169 parliament representatives. These are allocated
>> to 19 districts using Sainte-Laguë based on "population +
>> area(km²)*1.8”.
> 
> Using area to allocate seats is unusual, but I guess Norwegians are used to that. Strange, but quite ok, maybe even wanted.

Yes, it is. The argument for this as I remember it was due to the
greater distances between the inhabitants in the larger districts,
making communicating with the districts more challenging. This was
however decades ago and with the excellent cell phone and internet
connection Norway got, this argument is not that strong anymore.

> Do you mean that the voters will be able to influence the order of the candidates more in the actual election (i.e. not when forming the lists)? I’m used to an open list system where there is no given preference order of the candidates, so I find that approach appealing. Open lists are also not perfect, but I like the idea that voters will decide who will get the seats instead of the party (or party members before the actual election when forming the list). I think open lists could be improved by using a ranked method within each party (for better party internal proportionality and to make it “safer” to vote also the weak but liked candidates). But if Norway wants to keep the current approach or maybe improve it by giving voters more say on the order, that’s probably fine for Norway too.

The current system where it's practically impossible for voters to
change the ranking of the candidates I'm not a big fan of, although I'm
not entirely convinced that letting the voters decide the candidate
order entirely on their own is much better.
As noted this is a fairly isolated system and the current system is
scheduled to be changed, likely to a similar system we use for municipal
elections. In the municipal election each party can mark some candidates to
be prioritized and thus more likely to win even though subsequent
candidates have received more "personal votes", and the voters are able
to influence the order by giving these "personal votes" to candidates.
Sort of a semi-open list, I think this is a fair intermediate, assuming
that the party is better at choosing skilled politicians, while making
sure that it's not impossible for the voters to change the order.
I don't know exactly how many "personal votes" a non-prioritized
candidate needs to be elected in front of a prioritized candidate, but
it's more possible than the current system where a candidate must be
excluded by the majority.

> I favour full proportionality. This system may also treat different parties and different regions in different ways. I will not dive into the details of possible solutions. I just note that the simplest modification could be to increase the number of utjevningsmandat seats.

True, a simple fix to the overhang seats is just increasing the amount
of leveling seats. It does not fix the more or less arbitrary seat
allocation, though.
I should add that it's not just the final seat that tends to be
curiously placed. In Norway we have notably 3 parties that tend to
receive a larger portion of the leveling seats. One of those parties
usually got its votes fairly even spread out among all districts while
the other two are stronger in some districts and weaker in others. This
often leads to those two parties getting their leveling seats first,
while the third party gets their seats that remains when all other seats
are taken. This was shown very clearly in 2005, when said party got 4
leveling seats, and those 4 seats were the last seats to be distributed.
The party received seats in a district where it didn't matter how many
supported the party, they would've gotten the seats there regardless.
Of the 19 districts, those 4 seats where given in the 10th, 13th, 14th
and 19th districts, ranked after the quotient (which roughly says where
the party had the most support), or all in the half that made least
sense for the party to win seats.

> You can create a more balanced algorithm to implement exact national proportionality, but that would be a bigger change than e.g. just increasing the number of utjevningsmandat seats. All algorithms will have some "rounding errors", but they cn be made smaller.

Yes, I will make sure to mention this. I do favour biproportional
apportionment due to it reducing those "rounding errors", but the
election threshold and overhang mandates are bigger concerns.

> Small districts have some benefits that you may want to keep. If so, the problem of small parties not getting any representatives and voters not voting for them even if they support them can be maybe fixed by having good national proportionality. If district A will not get any party X representatives, but neighbouring district B will, then those representatives can (informally) represent also the party X voters of district A. Voters of district A can safely vote for party X if they know that their vote will not be “wasted”, but will lead (with full weight) to election of more candidates of party X in other/neighbouring districts.

The smaller parties usually do this, if a district didn't win a seat
then the elected parliament member of a neighbouring district becomes
their connection to Stortinget.
There are still some issues, for example the northernmost district don't
have that many representatives so it's not unusual that some parties
don't win any seats in the northern half of the country. There are some
different values between the districts, it may not be very well received
that a representative from the southern parts of the country is to
represent the northernmost districts.
This may not be a very significant issue, and there's always the debate
on whether representation should be degressive or linear to the size of
the population (i.e. should a population of 100,000 have 4 times as many
representatives as a population of 25,000?).

>> = Replace current apportionment with biproportional apportionment =
> 
> This sounds like a big change. But maybe it is not. Maybe it is a small change in the sense the although the algorithm is very different, from the outside the systen looks pretty much the same to the voters and even to the politicians and candidates.

The algorithm is different, and it does remove overhang seats (good) and
make the election threshold absolute (maybe good, maybe bad, irrelevant
without an election threshold), but the parties will receive about the
same amount of seats and the seat allocation have fewer "rounding
errors".
Most likely, this system is actually easier for the voter to understand,
the leveling seat algorithmen is not trivial.
Sadly, even a change like this may be too radical.

>> = Two votes per voter =
> 
> You could also vote for different parties in different elections, or flip a coin. Maybe a plain and simple system would be better.

Some do vote for different parties or flip a coin in our 3 different
elections (national, county, municipal).
Every 2nd year we got an election, there's 4 years between each type of
election and county/municipal elections are done at the same time. In
the county/municipal elections some people tend to vote for two
different parties when they are split between two parties.
County elections may disappear in the future, though. There are plans to
reduce our 428 municipals to somewhere around 125, which may make the
county elections less necessary.

I don't think such a change like this would be well received, I'm only
contemplating on mentioning it as a possibility, but will drop it if the
consensus here is that any value it may add wouldn't outweight the cost.

>> = Specify 2nd preference on ballot =
> 
> This would make it easier to vote for some very small parties. This is also already a ranked ballot, and is therefore linked to the possibility of allowing voters to rank candidates (instead of parties). Already two or three slots could do the trick for candidate ranking.

Indeed, but it makes voting more complex. This too is something I will
just mention as a possibility if anything.

> There can be also other approaches, like allowing the parties to form groupings where e.g. a “wasted” vote to a minor left wing party will be counted for the other left wing parties. But parties may be unwilling to show support to each others and form permanent groupings this way.

Instead of letting the voters decide 2nd preference the party will. It's
a possibility and it doesn't necessarily require a change of how people
vote, even though counting votes still will be slightly more complex. If
I write about letting voters decide a second preference I might just
mention this too.

> That’s all. Just first observations. Hopefully something useful in some of them.

Most useful, thanks for your comments.



-- 
Regards,
Vidar Wahlberg