A New Kind of Third Party

Feb 13, 2012

I Will Be Going DeePeR into Direct Party and Representative (DPR) Voting!

I just learned about DPR Representation.It's an attempt to meld multi-party PR into the current voting practices in the UK.
But I fear it's just political science fiction,not unlike my idea of having 4-seat super districtswith 3-seat LR Hare and a one-seat IRV+for each district.
When I officially start blogging in March,I'll write a better comparison and contrastbetween the approaches. dlw

Feb 9, 2012

A Better Way to Elect?

Rob Richie has a great editorial in the NYTIMESthat is coupled with an invitation to others to submit their own lettersto start a dialogue there on electoral reform in the USA.
It doesn't emphasize Proportionality as much I would prefer.In the second to last parag, he writes, "For Congressional elections, creating larger districts with several seats and a proportional voting system to allow more voters to elect a preferred candidate would better represent the left, the right and the center."But maybe that's what will play best with the US public?It's out of my hands.I cannot make it rain, I can only scatter seeds!dlw

Feb 5, 2012

Riforma di elezione dell'Italia!

I got a comment from Amedeo from Italy.

"When we adopted FPTP in Italy,the number of our parties increased instead of creating only two!

Moreover, I'd like to point out that your AV is dangerous, because it could lead to a mafia-style politic. If you want, I'll explain why."

So I told him I'd start a new blog-post...My thoughts are FPTP tends to make it so that there's 2 or 1 dominant parties per region where FPTP gets used. It need not be the same 2 or 1 parties per region.But when it gets used, along with PR of some sort, the predicted effects are not-so-clear cut,so hopefully we'll learn more about Italy's electoral system.

"hallo,
on 1993, after a referendum, we adopted a MMP electoral system (75% FPTP and 25% PR). We came from a 60 years of pure PR with no threshold and many many different governments. So, our hope was to reduce the number of the parties to only two. Unfortunately, parties started to make alliances. All the parties of the left wing decided to share the constituencies putting one candidate each, and right wing parties did the same. In the electoral sheet, electors could choose between only two candidates, but in the parliament we found the same number of parties than earlier. On the second elections using this system, the number of parties increased because in every constituencies new parties were born and started to blackmail the two coalitions (in the FPTP system, as you know, one single vote is important to win).

dlw: Well, you got 2 major coalitions of parties(not unlike our major parties) and since you still used 25% PR, you had minor parties contesting the duopoly or trying to force them to absorb them on their terms... This fits with what I predict.

My prescription though for an alternative Mixed Proportional system is to have many super-districts with 4 seats each and to use 3-seat LR Hare and a better single-winner election than FPTP for the 4th seat. I recommend my approach to IRV, which I don't think you understand.

So, I cannot understand why, in the USA, greens don't make alliances with republicans or democrats using this way. Maybe where you live it would be seen as a "mortal pity".

dlw: They're not strong enuf or the major parties know it's a losing game for them to give 3rd parties any respect whatsoever in our FPTP system.

Second point: I told you AV is dangerous and could lead to a mafia-style politic. Well, when we used pure PR, electors could vote in this way: choosing a party (making a "X" over the symbol) and writing from zero to four names ("preferencies") of the candidates. It was an "open-list PR". Every party gained a number of seats proportionally to its votes and the candidates were ranked following their preferencies.
First of all, you can imagine that our electoral campaigns were SO EXPENSIVE (parties against parties and, inside every party, candidates against candidates).

dlw: I don't care for pure PR.

Secondly and more important, imagine that four mafious south-Italian candidate (A, B, C and D) want to be elected. They "ask" ("ask" is an euphemism) 24 electors to vote for them. They say: elector 1 must vote writing "A-B-C-D"; elector 2 must vote writing "A-B-D-C"; elector 3 must vote writing "A-C-B-D"; and so on. Four names could be written in 24 different ways! At the end of the elections, a candidate ask to see all the sheets, so he can verify if these 24 persons have voted "rightly".

As you can see, the AV system is very nice but it's so similar to our old preferencies PR system and very dangerous if applied in south Italy. I don't know what to think if it would be applied in the USA.

I imagine US using 3-5 seat STV for our US representative elections at the super-district within a state level. Everyone would get to rank up to S+2 candidates, with S being the number of seats. In a 5-seat STV election, I think what's rational is for a "party" to put up 2 or 3 candidates, depending on their expectations, and ask their voters to vote any permutation of those candidates. But because the super-districts will be larger, the percent of voters between the two major parties will be closer on average and so it'd be a horse race still and independents or third parties would get to decide who gets the last seat and it'd be nigh impossible for either major party to dominate the House of Representatives, unlike with the Presidency or Senate. And this will make it harder for either to dominate the whole US government, which means they'd stop trying so hard to get permanent majorities and work together on our many pressing problems.

So even if the system got gamed at the local level, we'd have enough 3-5 seat super districts that it'd still be hard for one party to dominate the whole system and thereby we'd have more checks and balances and more voice for our minorities who speak to move the center.

greetings,
Amedeo

ciao, dlw