Let’s say you have multi-member constituencies. You hold an election with an outcome that looks roughly like this:
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Candidate #1 received 12,000 votes
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Candidate #2 received 8,000 votes
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Candidate #3 recieved 4,000 votes
All three get elected to the legislature, but Candidate #1’s vote on legislation is worth three times Candidate #3’s vote, and #3’s vote is worth half Candidate #2’s vote.
I know that the British Labour Party used to have bloc voting at conference, where trade union reps’ votes were counted as every member of their union voting, so, e.g., if the train drivers’ union had 100,000 members, their one rep wielded 100,000 votes. That’s not quite what I’m describing above, but it’s close.
Bonus question: what do you think would be the pros and cons of such a system?
It almost sounds like a parliamentary system where you vote for a party and the party gets proportional representation based on vote share.
And when parties don’t get a majority they have to create a coalition government. All sorts of benefits.
Yes, pretty much that!
This reminds me of an idea I had for a hybrid between representative and direct democracy where every citizen would be entitled to vote on any bill, but if they didn’t have the time/will to do their research, they would be allowed to delegate their vote to one of the political parties. Thus, you would have some votes coming from individuals, and some coming in batches from political parties voting on behalf of individuals.
I’ve heard of that idea but frankly I’d be frightened by how many people would be parted from their votes by manipulative tactics or people finding ways to buy such votes (even if explicitly disallowed, they’d find an indirect way). That second point in particular would be a big concern because the people who have little else to sell but their own vote would be the ones most likely to sell it and organizations buying such votes would likely be those with a vested interest in keeping the poor, poor which would now be even easier.
I’d be frightened by how many people would be parted from their votes by manipulative tactics
Yeah, round our way, we call that Brexit.
The thing is now, manipulative tactics are used to persuade people to choose one option over another either for representatives, or in some cases like Brexit, directly for specific policies. In that scenario one might argue that those that successfully made the case for one side of the referendum did so by knowingly presenting the outcome of choosing one policy differently from what they knew to be the reality hence “manipulating” people.
However, with this proposed idea of being able to delegate your vote to other people or organisations, I’m concerned people will be manipulated into giving up their ability to vote on something one way or the other they don’t even need to be convinced of the merits of something, just convinced to give it up. Seems like a small difference but I can imagine people being unknowingly disenfranchised thinking they’re giving up something else, or possibly having to give up their vote even though they do want to use it because if they’re offered some tangible immediate benefit in exchange, they might not be in a position to decline such an offer.
In these cases the distortion of the democratic ideal is worse than in the Brexit scenario for example, because at least in that situation one could say (however disingenuously) that that vote more or less reflected how convincing the case was for the leave campaign and argue that anyone saying that leave voters were manipulated is just being patronizing to such voters by denying their agency in the decision. Of course that’s a simplistic way to portray it, but there’s an element of truth there. At the very least that referendum does tell you what most people decided to vote for even if the details of how the cases were presented might be dishonest. Delegated votes would more accurately be described as a reflection of who successfully obtained votes through whatever means, not who prosecuted a case the most convincingly.
All very fair points, and I agree. I was just being flip re Brexit really :-)
That’s just what we have now though. At least under the proposed hybrid approach people would have the option of voting directly.
Yes that’s what I was thinking too. The worst case scenario under what I propose would be what we have now.
You’re not alone! This concept is called Liquid Democracy
Good to see I’m not the only one who had this idea
No because that would defeat the point of having regional representatives at all. If I live in City X and there is a really tight race between two candidates, and one of them wins by a hair, then you’re saying that all of the people in city X now have the person representing them being weaker in the legislature. It would amplify the bandwagon effect where people vote for the person they think is going to win rather than voting their conscience, because strategically what you’re suggesting is incentivizing the bandwagon effect.
That’s not what they’re suggesting. If it was a tight race and candidate A got 13,000 votes while candidate B got 11,000, both candidates would “win.” Their voting power would just be proportional to their votes. In a way, it would be more representative than what you’re saying, because how it works now is that the 11,000 people voting for candidate B wouldn’t have any representation at all.
Ah, I see. In that case I think the criticism is that you would have proliferation of way too many representatives in legislatures. IMO a legislature shouldn’t be much more than 200 people (though many nations break this threshold). My reasoning is that there is research showing that a person can’t really maintain relationships with more than 200 people.
Yes, I think there would have to be some kind of threshold. Otherwise I could stand as a candidate, vote for for myself and have a seat in the legislature where I wield my one pathetic vote!
If I live in City X and there is a really tight race between two candidates, and one of them wins by a hair, then you’re saying that all of the people in city X now have the person representing them being weaker in the legislature.
I think OP is saying that City X would have Reps 1, 2, and 3 (etc), and that (in your scenario), 1 would have a slightly stronger voting power than 2, while 3 had less power again.
This would mean that almost all voters in the city had some representation that they agree with, but with power apportioned proportionally.
Compared with City Y (same population), where candidate N won 99% of the vote, N would wield more power than 1, 2 or 3 individually, but the same amount of power as 1, 2 and 3 combined. So the city’s representations would be equal overall.
That’s exactly right, thank you.
No worries, it’s an interesting idea to think through :-)
That’s SUPPOSED to be how the US Congress works, not by weighing votes, but by apportioning congresspeople by population, the votes of each Congressperson being equal, but larger populations getting more Congresspersons.
“This region of (n) people elected Bob. The neighboring region of (2n) people is apportioned into two subdistricts, and they have chosen Bill and Ted as their Congresspersons.”
HOWEVER, the number of voting seats in the House of Representatives has been capped at 435 since 1913, by the Reapportionment Act of 1929.
At that time, the US population was 97m, meaning that each congressperson represented 223,000 people. Based on population growth, we would need nearly 1500 Congresspersons just to have the same granularity of representation that we had in 1913.
This seems functionally the same as a proportional representation system like that used in many countries. But typically the number of votes leads to a proportional number of seats and not a single person with a power multiplier. Either way the legislative power is proportional to the vote.
It’s similar but it retains the constituency link, which many people feel is important.
You might like single transferrable vote (STV), then. You have districts with several seats in them (preferably ~5), and then do a ranked-choice ballot to select the candidates who will fill those seats. Key advantages over proportional representation are that it maintains the idea of a constituency and that it maintains voting for individual candidates, not just parties.
Downside, of course, is that it’s not as proportional as proportional representation, but it still achieves pretty proportional results. That’s the tradeoff for maintaining constituencies and individual candidates.
That’s kinda how the EU parliament works
It’s called the qualified majority system, and what it means is that the majority has to both represent a majority of the representatives seated but also a majority of the population represented.
I actually believe this is how the US senate should work (as long as the need for it is taken as given anyways), preventing a tyranny of the majority but also preventing a corn field court.
I didn’t know that about the EU Parliament, very interesting.
I don’t know if this has been used before, but there is a good reason not to:
The concentration of power would be a huge problem for such a system. If a single person gets the majority of votes, then they get to make the decisions. That’s a system with a single point of failure, if corruption is bad right now, imagine what it would be then…
Keep in mind that voters tend to focus on a few key individuals. In a system which you don’t need more seats if you have the votes, the concentration of votes to a few individuals would be taken to new extremes.
One could make the counterargument that if the voters want to be represented by a single person, then it should be their right to get that. However, it’s more likely that such a result would be driven by the choice for the lesser evil.
Maybe a completely different electoral system, (a) without a fixed number of seats (aka a single vote is enough to be part of the decision making body) and (b) really frequent elections (6 months or even less), would work in the favor of the people, but there a tonne of practical issues with both requirements.
PS A single person is the extreme but not unlikely case, instead it’s more likely a dozen or two candidates will gather that decision making majority, but the corruption argument is still the same.
If a single person gets the majority of votes, then they get to make the decisions.
But there would be multiple constituencies in my hypothetical scenario. Someone from the Left Party in District A gets a majority of the District A votes, but someone from the Right Party from District B gets a majority of the District B votes. So, the majorities in Districts A and B get their voices effectively represented, but the minorities aren’t shut out. In District C, no one wins a majority, but all the voters are represented in the legislature.
Compare the current system, where the Left Party in District A gets the majority of votes (or even the most votes, but no majority). The Left Party wins District A, but there’s no representation at all for the voters who didn’t vote for the Left Party. Isn’t it easier to buy the vote of just the one Left Rep for District A?
I need a bit of clarification, are you suggesting that every candidate that gets even a single vote gets to be a representative? or is there some selection mechanism? (minimum votes, fixed number of seats, etc…)
I think for this to be at all practical, there would need to be some sort of minimum threshold and/or maximum number of legislators, yes.
You might be interested in mixed member proportional voting. It’s not exactly what you described, but similar in philosophy. It has FPTP elections and then a second round of regional electors which compensate for the disproportionality of of the first round. It doesn’t achieve perfect proportionality and is potentially open to abuse by some methods involving puppet parties, but it mitigates a lot of the issues with FPTP
Seeing as you referenced the UK Labour Party you might already know this as the system used in the Scottish and Welsh assemblies
Australia has something kind of like this. Essentially the number of votes a party gets influences how many seats they get to fill. These party members then vote on stuff with even weighting but obvs the more votes you have aligned to your faction the better.
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It seems weird that the local district’s competitiveness would affect the national weight. The whole point of first-past-the-post voting is to pick one person for everyone. Under your proposed system, people who didn’t vote for the winner lose their influence on the national level. It would probably influence people to vote for the perceived winner instead of their choice.
It might work better under approval voting, where you can vote for as many candidates as you want, but still would encourage people to vote for whoever they think is going to win.
Good question, it’s an interesting idea!
I think you may have missed part of OP’s idea here. They specify multiple-member constituencies in which all candidates get elected and their power is proportional to the number of votes they get. The total power of the constituency is conserved, it’s just divided between multiple electors.
It would probably influence people to vote for the perceived winner instead of their choice.
This is an issue with FPTP regardless, unfortunately
I did miss that, thanks for pointing it out kindly.
No idea, but it reminds me of the US electoral college.
