[EM] Asset-MMP

[Richard Lung]

To all,
 MMP gets my vote as perhaps the worlds most dysfunctional voting method, in respectable use. The best that can be said, for its genesis, is that it came about largely by accident, thru a post war collision of the Weimar closed party list and the British occupation zone simple plurality count. 
The ensuing dual candidature has made it a doubly safe seat system, beloved by career politicians, the world over.  -- The reverse of the Labour slogan: for the many, not the few. MMP defies democratic accountability and the public interest. As if mankind had not enough problems. Democracy is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite.

The Richard Report for the Welsh Assembly said AMS/MMP denies voters the fundamental democratic right to reject candidates, counting less than a handful of contrary cases.  Academics have technically described MMP as the "zombie system", because a candidate defeated first past the post, rises from the dead again, on a closed party list. The commission recommended its replacement by the single transferable vote. As have other Welsh reports. And so on...

Allowing for the fact that this list is not a democratic advocacy group, however desirable, MMP still is a scientific nonsense -- HOW NOT TO DO IT, as Charles Dickens would say. MMP is a non-starter, as a self-contradictory axiomatic system. It is based on the inconsistent axioms of single majority winner and party power-sharing.
Both axioms are ill-chosen, making MMP a case of two wrongs don't make a right.
The consequences are not so much a system, as an anti-system or running intellectual civil war. Or, to put it another way, MMP is not a peace but merely a truce between two otherwise warring factions, that at least find common ground in cheating the public.

Over forty years ago, Major Frank Britton of Electoral Reform Society ballot services (since sold off) pointed out that the German system went to the trouble of being party proportional but then imposed a five per cent threshold. A 2022 Saarland election banned virtually 10% of votes just from the Free Democrats and the Greens. 
The warring axioms work their way thru MMP, like termites attacking a piano, mentioned in a Kurt Vonnegut novel.

This unscientific inconsistency makes MMP a degenerate system to a "parallel" system. This is why the Italians, who value party proportionality, got rid of it. The list members were meant to give smaller parties representation. That is why so many electoral reformers are its fans. But larger parties launched "fake" or "decoy " parties, not independent of the larger parties. Forza Italia was such a one, for Berlusconi.
In Scotland, a former SNP first minister launched the (so far failed) Alba party to double count, with the SNP, the vote for Scottish independence. 
 
MMP breaks the first rules of scientific method.
First advice: don't presume what one is trying to prove. But the party vote does presume all people want to vote for a party.
Second advice: make your test unambiguous, so it doesn't just prove whatever one wants to believe. But the single member system doesn't allow voters to show whether they are voting for an individual or a party.
It takes STV to show order of preference for individuals in a party, and for individuals of more than one party, thus making democratic coalitions or governments of national unity, rather than party divisions, possible, if desired.

Regards,
Richard Lung.





On 3 Jul 2022, at 11:18 pm, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:

A thought/sketch for an MMP method that doesn't need to formalize parties:

First elect candidates as usual, possibly with small districts.

Then elect an asset council of say 10x the number of candidates as were elected, based on the surpluses from the first elections (i.e. those who didn't get their candidate elected), using a weighted vote method like EPR or Chamberlin-Courant.

The asset council members then negotiate based on their voting power to elect a certain number of top-up seats, after which the asset council dissolves.

The surplus calculation should be set up so that if everybody votes party line, and the surplus representatives for any given party in the proportional council pool their power to get their share of party representatives elected, then the combined outcome is proportional by party as with ordinary MMP.

The hard part is doing the "surplus distribution" because in a good single-winner method, the voters who don't get their candidate elected still contribute to pulling the winner in their direction. I think Schulze did something Monroe-based in his STV-MMP method; perhaps that could be repurposed.

-km
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