Question: How do you implement proportional representation without sacrificing the ability of the voters to choose specific candidates?
Primaries and/or ranked choice voting allow for people to know who exactly it is they are choosing to have represent them. Proportional representation generally means that the people are only choosing what party they want, and the party gets to decide who will be their representative. There’s any number of reasons why you might support a party in general but oppose a specific politician. I’d much rather have a system where people can potentially weed out terrible candidates, rather than leaving it to the party to decide.
The closest you can likely get without getting overly complex is Single Transferable Vote/Ranked Choice Voting. No system will be precisely proportional and some voting systems work better depending on the governance system in place (I.e., size of electoral districts, number of seats/seats per district. legislative makeup, etc.).
I like a variation of the German system (not sure if it’s used everywhere in Germany though).
Keep the map and election as is, add seats to the chamber, once the results are in add MPs until the chamber is proportional, they’re selected by adding the party’s leader first then the candidates from their party that had the highest % of vote in their district then the next one and so on.
That means districts where first and second place were close would get two MPs which might swing the next election in the second place’s favour if they do a good job representing their district. It also means the party only gets to choose one of the MPs that are added this way (the leader), the other ones are chosen by the electors.
Someone added that the party leaders could even be added to the list of MPs separately, the moment there’s one MP elected for a party the leader is present in the chamber, otherwise the second a party has enough votes to have a seat it first goes to the leader. They would be there for the country, not a specific district.
Question: How do you implement proportional representation without sacrificing the ability of the voters to choose specific candidates?
Primaries and/or ranked choice voting allow for people to know who exactly it is they are choosing to have represent them. Proportional representation generally means that the people are only choosing what party they want, and the party gets to decide who will be their representative. There’s any number of reasons why you might support a party in general but oppose a specific politician. I’d much rather have a system where people can potentially weed out terrible candidates, rather than leaving it to the party to decide.
The closest you can likely get without getting overly complex is Single Transferable Vote/Ranked Choice Voting. No system will be precisely proportional and some voting systems work better depending on the governance system in place (I.e., size of electoral districts, number of seats/seats per district. legislative makeup, etc.).
Copying a previous comment of mine:
Someone added that the party leaders could even be added to the list of MPs separately, the moment there’s one MP elected for a party the leader is present in the chamber, otherwise the second a party has enough votes to have a seat it first goes to the leader. They would be there for the country, not a specific district.
Who as going to pay for all the chairs? :)