Alternative to First Past The Post voting

[patman post]

The reasons behind the idea seem laudable but, like most PR systems, it's too complicated.

If the idea is to get a Parliament that is more representative of the various factions voted for, I suggest that unless one candidate gets more than 50% of the votes cast, the top two are entered into a second ballot.

Two further points: I'd make voting forms machine readable, and I'd reduce the number of MPs — 500 seems enough with the number of other elected assemblies and authorities there are...

[Paulus de B]

BeElBeeBub, it's a really good idea.



But - there's always a but - the House of Commons is too big, so simply halving the number of constituencies would still leave us over-politianed (the word exists because I need it to).  Please can we have 200 or so constituencies, instead of 325?  Also, minor parties often don't come first or second, so you've still left a big-party bias.  Could we perhaps have Monster Raving Loony (for example) candidate(s) with the highest number of votes in Parliament, with their votes proportionate to their party's total number of votes from the country as a whole?  There'd still need to be a cut-off point for parties that got less than ?5% of the national vote and didn't come first or second in any constituency.  So even fewer constituencies to allow for that effect - 175 perhaps.

[Javert]

Seems like an interesting idea.

[BeElBeeBub]

Voting Systems



(This is a repost from the old political forum to try and gain more knout from a new audience)



OK, first off this is *entirely* divorced from Brexit, this is just a discussion about the First Past The Post (FPTP) system, other voting systems and a rough idea.



So.....



FPTP has some good features:

1. Simple (to understand and execute)

2. Parties are not required (you vote for candidates not parties)

3. Because of 2 it allows space for "independents" to succeed

4. Again, because of 2 it also allows for a strong local link for the candidate

5. It is said to produce stronger government by avoiding coalitions (this argument seems much weaker since 2010)



However it also has a really bad feature

It can produce unrepresentative governments (parliamentary majority is divorced from popular vote)



Other systems have been proposed that offer greater proportionality however they are often complex (ranking preferences with transfer quotas) or rely much more on the parties for party lists.



I propose a system that keeps the simplicity of FPTP (you just put a single cross on the ballot and it is tallied up for each candidate) but adds much greater proportionality whilst keeping the local link and minimizing party power (i.e. no lists)



<Drumroll>

It works like this.



1. Candidates stand in a constituency to be that constituency's MP (as now)

2. Independents can stand (as now)

3. Voters vote by selecting who they want to be their MP (as now)

4. The votes are tallied to give each candidate's vote totals (as now)



So far, this is *exactly* as we have now. There is no difference up until the point a person votes.



The difference is that rather than the candidate with the most votes becoming the MP, the top 2 candidates become MPs



That's right, each constituency returns 2 MPs (this also works with 3 MPs or more, but for now I will stick to 2)



So now we have a parliament with {2 x number of constituencies} MPs. Obviously, if each MP had one vote (as now) then you could get the CON and LAB  MPs (who might be 1st and 2nd MP in a lot of constituencies) just cancelling each other out.



So, rather than each MP having 1 vote as we do now, each MP has the number of votes that were cast for them



So if we had a constituency:



CON 22,000

LAB 19,000

LDM 10,000



Rather than returning a CON MP with 1 vote you would get a CON with 22k and a LAB with 19k.



This means that on an issue where CON and LAB are opposed the constituency provides a net of 3k votes for the CONs, but on an issue where the CON and LAB MPs are united, the constituency would produce a net 41k votes.



I believe this system would produce a few interesting (and desirable effects)



1. A constituency that was heavily in favor of 1 candidate (say LAB 30k, CON 4k) that MP would have more "weight" than one that was split (LAB 13k, LDM 12k) unless the two MPs worked together.



2. I think this would encourage candidates to up the turnout as that in turn would boost their weight within their party (an MP who could deliver a net 25k vote for their party would have more heft with their party than one who could only deliver a net 1k).



3. The voters would have a link to their MP as the MP would, in a very real sense, be wielding their votes.



4. There could be an interesting dynamic regarding recalling MPs and triggering by elections - say we had an MP who fiddled their expenses or whatever and it was thought they ought to resign. This could be achieved by the other constituency MP resigning and thus triggering a by election. This would be easy enough to do so that it was effective, but there would be a cost to the "triggering" MP (and potentially their party) to prevent it being used frivolously.



I've run the numbers from the 2015 GE.



The popular (%) vote was



CON = 36.9

LAB = 30.4

UKIP = 12.6

LDM = 7.9

SNP = 4.7

GRN = 3.8



but the seats were (Party, seats, % of parl)



Party  MPs  %

CON   330   51%

LAB   232   36%

SNP    56     9%

DUP     9      1%

LDM     8      1%





As you can see the imbalance towards the Conservatives was huge. The smaller parties like Green, UKIP, LDM got much less than their fair share.



If you look at the % of the constituents who voted for their MP under FPTP (the representation)



- The highest was 81%

- only 17/650 MP had more than 2/3 of votes

- 322/650 MPs had less than half of votes cast

- The lowest was only 25%



I think you'll agree that isn't great.....



Under my proposed system the votes in parl (Party, total votes, % votes, num MPs)



Party    Votes              %     MPs

Con     10559215   46%   519

Lab        8406397   36%   493

SNP       1454436     6%   67

UKIP      1101269     5%   129

LDM       1000273     4%   79



Under the proposed system with 2 MP per constituency

- The highest was 92%

- 602/650 MP had more than 2/3 of votes

- only 2/650 MPs had less than half of votes cast

- The lowest was only 47%

- 75% of voters had the candidate they voted for as their MP (vs just under 50% for FPTP)



Of course, if we keep the current constituencies and return 2 MPs per constituency we will get 1300 MPs in parliament! Clearly that is crazy (unless you are an estate agent for duck houses)



So we would need to reduce the number of constituencies to around 325. This would make the constituencies around 160k or 250k each.



An effect of this would be that coalition governments would be much more common. This may be a bug or a feature depending on you point of view



The biggest down side I can see is that it doesn't allow for tweaking the constituency sizes to give small groups a bit more representation.



This would mainly affect some very small island constituencies which have constituencies around 25k vs the average 75k. They could still be a constituency with multiple MPs but their MPs would necessarily be "weaker" because the max number of votes they could command would be limited.



Thoughts?