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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
