This blog post has been adapted from a series of posts written for r/SimDemocracy. If you haven’t read the previous entries, please start with part 1.
In the previous post we went over how going from closed party-list to D’Hondt allowed voters to have a say in which candidates are elected from each party while still maintaining proportionality. However, we were still using single-mark ballots like those employed under plurality voting, also known as first-past-the-post. This meant each voter could only support one candidate along with that candidate’s party.
This causes two problems, one with allocating seats to parties and one with assigning seats a party won to that party’s candidates. First of all, because voters can only support a single party, similar parties risk splitting the vote with each other. Because seats are assigned proportionally, this isn’t too much of a problem, but when D’Hondt has to decide how to round the level of support for each party to allow an integer number of seats to be assigned, it will tend to favor larger parties at the expense of smaller ones. Tweaking the formula can change what size of parties are favored, but it cannot remove the favoritism.
The second problem is that within a party, seats are assigned using what is essentially multi-winner plurality voting. This leads to a potentially much more severe vote-splitting problem than what occurs between parties. Thus, factions within a party are incentivized to run the minimum number of candidates that they predict will be able to win seats, which will often just be 1 or 2. If a party is uniform enough to not have factions, then internal vote-splitting will likely be far less of a concern than it is for other parties.
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This blog post has been adapted from a series of posts written for r/SimDemocracy. If you haven’t read the previous entry, please do so.
We’ve seen that closed party-list gives more representative outcomes than non-proportional methods like bloc score. However, it also failed to give voters a say in which candidates from a given party would be elected. In the previous post’s example election, this didn’t matter since the voters didn’t have opinions on the individual candidates anyway. But what happens when they do have such opinions, as is the case in real elections?
If the parties all share their voters’ preferences, then this isn’t a problem since the party can just choose the candidates the voters want. But if party insiders prefer a different set of candidates, then the voters could feel cheated out of their say in which candidates get elected. Needless to say, this should not happen in a legitimate election.
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This blog post has been adapted from a series of posts written for r/SimDemocracy.
Sequential proportional score voting (SPSV) is a multi-winner voting method and a form of proportional representation. Like score voting, it uses rated ballots, and it is party-agnostic, meaning it does not take into account which parties the candidates are from. Currently, the only known instance of this method being used is the subreddit r/SimDemocracy, which uses it to elect its legislature.
Before SimDemocracy used SPSV, it used a method known as bloc score. This method was simpler to understand, but it had major issues when it came to electing a senate that represents the voters. This occurred because it was not a proportional method.
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The National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) aims to subvert the Electoral College and elect the president of the U.S. by popular vote. It would accomplish this by having the states that signed on give their electoral votes to whichever candidate won the popular vote. However, the way it defines the popular vote assumes that all states will use single-choice plurality voting in their presidential elections. This is a problem, because Maine has switched its presidential elections to use single-winner ranked choice voting (RCV-1), also known as instant runoff voting.
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In a previous post, I laid out a hierarchy of three different possible meanings of one person, one vote (OPOV). The 1st level of OPOV required that each voter have exactly one ballot. The 2nd level required that each ballot have the same weight. Finally, the 3rd level required each possible ballot to be perfectly cancelled out by another possible ballot. I also created a combination Euler/pyramid diagram to demonstrate the relationship visually:
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