for practical reasons it has to be something easy to calculate.
Europe house of representatives project
- Thread starter TimTurner
- Start date
List PR is actually not that bad. I just use Excel.
The simplest one to do would be the largest-remainder method. The Droop quota ensures no overhang seats. The Hare quota is the very simplest method.
STV is doable, but is probably the most laborious version of PR to calculate.
If it is going to be a story-based TL, then just put it into the Writer's Forum, and leave a link from this thread.
it's not a story-based TL. It's more of an Election night-style TL, with some historic background.
Ah, I see.
Well, Daughters of Elysium was in the post-1900 forum. The main thing to consider is "is the POD before, or after 1900".
easily post-1900; given that all the borders within Expanded Europe are very similar to if not identical to OTL.
Here's my proposal for electoral system.
1)The House has membership of double the number of districts plus one to make it odd.
2) Everyone gets a single vote. By default they are expected to vote for someone listed, by name and party, in their district, but everyone has a right to vote for anyone who qualifies to run in any district, who are going to be more than those listed.
3) Some kind of registration based hurdle can be used to determine each district's printed list, but we make it very easy for small parties to qualify, on two bases--on a quota of qualifying petitions in each separate district or on the basis of a system-wide party registration quota. Independent candidates can also qualify on the former basis. Every party is assigned a random ID number, as are any independent candidates. Independents may form alliances, based on the principle of unanimous mutual approval of duly ratified candidates-the idea here being to balance the desire to capture as many votes as possible versus the desire to make each "list," party or independent alliance, as ideologically unified and distinct as possible. Parties may choose their candidates in each district according to rules they choose; alliances of Independents may fill up the list by similarly choosing, in whatever way the united candidates can agree to unanimously, filler candidates. Alliances retain the "party" numbers assigned to their various qualified candidates, but are called on to indicate one of them again by unanimous consent. Thus, voters who go into the election prepared to back a particular program know in advance a generic index for the party or alliance they wish to back, perhaps a separate number for one individual candidate they wish to back, the name of their chosen faction's district candidate, or they can cast a vote for anyone running anywhere. The voting system is electronic, with menus to allow a voter to enter a party number and choose any district candidate, to help them identify candidates by name (much as our system on this board offers options for "at" tag callouts, but more helpful one would hope) and so on.
Voting for a candidate is also a vote for their listed party or independent alliance. It is possible for a voter to refuse to vote for any individual but only for a party, but not vice versa.
4) Everyone votes for one, generally they will opt to support a person as well as a party. One assumes they generally will vote within their district and obviously the primary listed candidates will have some advantage.
5) Counting only votes from within each district, the plurality winner of each district takes a seat as a representative; this accounts for just under half the total.
6) Using the Hamilton Greatest Remainder method, each party or alliance is assigned a total number of seats proportionally. By its nature the Greatest Remainder method has no quota or hurdle. One takes the total number of votes cast and divides by the total number of seats for a seat quota; each party's total vote is divided by that and the whole number part of the fraction resulting is first assigned to all. This will sum up to less than the total number of seats, the difference being assigned by giving each party one more seat in order of the size of the remainder until all seats are assigned. This tends to assign a single seat to parties that only managed about half a quota of votes. It is maximally inclusive, but the practical difference between this and a more tightly limited qualification (in my view there is no good reason for so tightening requirements, it throws away valid votes quite unnecessarily) is very small. Basically some token voices for small factions are included but in terms of practical coalition building they pose no impediment. Also this opens the door for completely independent candidates who have no alliance ties at all--when I apply this system to the 2016 US election several independents would qualify on Greatest Remainder basis who otherwise would not.
Note that in step 5, votes for candidates outside the voter's district were not counted. From this step on they are counted.
7) For each faction that got seats on a plurality basis in step 5, the number they won that way is subtracted from their faction's quota. The candidates who won plurality seats are also stricken from the list of all candidates each faction fields. Then the remainder seats are awarded in order of the number of votes each candidate got as an individual. In the event a party wins more seats than they won candidates, procedures can be put in place in advance, or after the fact, for the party or alliance to name the persons who fill the remainder. For instance a party can name an alternate for each candidate they ran, who would take that candidate's place if something happened, such as death or severe incapacitation or legal indictment, to disqualify them immediately before the election, and who would in this case serve as a proxy for the primary candidate, and award the remaining seats to them in order of their primary candidate's votes. Or any other rule they like--the principle here is that voters know the policies of each party or alliance in advance and judge their suitability based on everything they do. Some voters might want to insist on grassroots democracy, others might be satisfied to have a central committee or even just one personal leader make these calls.
8) readers may note a certain resemblance to the German MMP system. I evolved this in my own head with the needs and history of the United States of America in mind. It differs from most MMP systems in the following ways: a) assigning PR fill-up seats by number of votes each candidate got primarily (the above procedures for cases where a party wins more seats than they ran for will be quite rare and on a small scale, I think); b) no "quotas" or "hurdles" of arbitrary percentages a faction must get; this emerges naturally from the basic PR method of Greatest Remainders and results in excluding an order of magnitude fewer voters; c) a nearly 1:1 ratio of "fill-up" seats to district, favoring the former by 1; d) one vote only for each voter, not a separate choice of district individual and nationwide party. I'm more than willing to discuss why I think each of these differences is an advantage overall.
9) overhang--it sometimes happens in MMP systems that the number of plurality seats a party wins is greater than the number of total seats they should get from PR. This is likeliest to happen either when we have elections where most voters vote for one of two parties, or when a given district is highly fractured so its plurality winner is from a small party AND that same party wins many districts on that basis.
If we took the party with the largest proportional overhang, and multiplied the number of seats by the proportion of overhang to their proper proportional share, we would automatically eliminate all overhangs, but this will often lead to tremendous increase in the size of this House.
A compromise is to sum up the total number of overhang seats, add that sum to the standard house size, and go back to step 6 and refigure each party's share on the basis of the larger house size. Then accept any overhangs that remain.
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To ground an exercise in a demonstration election on OTL facts on the ground of how people actually do vote in their national elections, I am thinking I might myself do the following exercise:
1) Take the OTL figures from each nation's real elections, the most recent one for the lowest national house, and aggregate them all together in one big list.
2) in MMP type nations like Germany I would look at the party list votes.
3) in nations like France where there are two rounds, I would look at the initial round and ignore the runoff.
4) Having thus obtained a Hamilton Greatest Remainder outcome where each nation's parties are legally separate from those of other nations, I would leave it up to Europeans and close followers of European politics to judge which parties would ally with with which to make a Super-Europe wide coalition and thus determine which general ideological faction leads the super-continental House.
I believe there is not any need for one faction to hold some magic number like 50 percent plus one of all seats for coherent policy and legislation to emerge; we should not be blinded by notions appropriate to systems that have built in bias to magnify mere pluralities into fake majorities and real but small majorities into the appearance of overwhelming unity.
Dementor
Banned
Nice idea! Your thread seems almost designed for my map collection of Bulgaria divided into districts of nearly equal population. This is the one with 7 districts.
And it should really be Sofia Yug, not Sofia Zuchno (though Google translate seems to be at fault here).
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