cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/39298754

I realize this community generally favours proportional representation, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on a different approach to the problem of 'unrepresentative government'.

I question whether the goal of proportional representation, "every voter has 'their representative'", actually achieves what I consider to be a higher goal, "the government represents the interests of as many voters as possible".

If:

• you have a perfectly 'proportionally representative' parliament
• 51 of 100 of seats in said parliament are needed to form government
• winning seats as a single party requires difficult campaigning
• adding a party to a coalition requires difficult negotiation

Then anyone trying to grow a party or coalition with the goal of forming government will stop growing the coalition once they get 51 of 100 seats, because growing the coalition further requires difficult campaigning or negotiation, but yields no further benefit to the members of said coalition (since they would already have a majority at that point).

So even with PR, you still end up with a government that caters to a narrow majority and ignores social and economic problems that impact people outside that majority.

My solution, "a block of seats awarded in a nationwide winner-take-all Score Voting election," approaches this problem differently:

• electing the ruling party directly,
• and using Score Voting, where voters give each candidate a numerical score on an independent scale (note that Score Voting =/= Ranked Voting: a voter can give two different candidates the same score on the same ballot),
• where a party can have 60% support and yet lose to a party with 70% support,
• incentivizes candidate parties to try to exceed a 'mere majority' by as much as possible,
• because a majority is no longer enough to guarantee a win,
• because parties can no longer count on their own supporters exclusively supporting them.

I argue for Score Voting, but my rationale applies to Cardinal Voting systems in general.

TLDR: Score Voting is good.

Canadians want national unity.

The ideal of the Good Parliamentarian claims that politicians should, once elected, represent all their constituents and not just their core base, and that a governing party should, once elected, represent the nation as a whole, and not just their members.

So why is national unity a fleeting thing that emerges only in response to external threats, like American rhetoric about annexation and economic coercion, and why does it dissipate and devolve into factionalism once the threat is resolved (or when political campaigns simply drown the threat out)?

Because the Westminster System, in its present form, is institutionally biased towards division.

There are two reasons:

1. Within individual constituencies, a narrow majority of voters is enough to guarantee a win, and
2. In Parliament, a narrow majority of constituencies is enough to form government and pass law.

These have a common root cause:

Acquiring a narrow majority of something is the most efficient way to achieve the maximum reward.

If the easiest path to a win is to get the support of half-plus-one, who cares if you alienate everyone else on the other side?

The Solution: the Score Bonus System

This proposal suggests an incentive-based solution to create national unity:

The Score Bonus System: award a winner-take-all block of seats to the party that achieves the highest average score nationally in a Score Voting election.

Under this system, Canada's existing single-member districts are replaced with about half as many dual-member districts, each containing one 'constituency' seat and one 'national' seat.

In each district, candidates stand either as a 'constituency' candidate or as a 'national' candidate.

Voters mark their ballots by assigning numerical scores between 0 and 9 to each candidate, where higher scores indicate stronger approval.

Unlike ranking systems, this allows voters to express support for multiple candidates simultaneously.

Sample Ballot, Mapleford North, filled in by a sample voter

Seat	Party	Candidate	Score (0 to 9)
Constituency	Brown Party	Jaclyn Hodges	5
	Taupe Party	Dexter Preston	0
	Independent	Cecelia Olson	9
		Janice Fritz	5
National	Brown Party	Isreal Robles	7
		Gale Sloan	8
	Taupe Party	Royce Brown	0
	Beige Party	Billie Burton	9

Each district's 'constituency' seat goes to the 'constituency' candidate with the highest average score in the district.

The collection of all districts' 'national' seats form the 'winner-take-all' block, which is awarded in full to the party with the highest nationwide score.

When a party has multiple candidates competing in the same constituency:

• When computing nationwide averages, the score of its best candidate in each constituency is used.
• If the party wins the highest nationwide average, its best candidates from each constituency win the 'national' seats.

However, if no party achieves a national average score of at least 50%, the 'national' seats instead go to the 'national' candidate with the highest average score in the constituency, effectively falling back to the 'constituency' method.

Seat Type Breakdown

Seat Type	Seat Count	Winning Candidate From Each Constituency
Constituency	172 (one per constituency)	'Constituency' candidate with highest score within constituency
National	172 (one per constituency)	If any party has >50% approval nationwide: best 'national' candidate from party with highest score nationwide; otherwise: 'national' candidate with highest score within constituency
Total	344 (two per constituency)

Example Election Results

Constituency Results, Mapleford North

Seat	Party	Candidate	C. Score	N. Party Score
Constituency	Brown Party	J. Hodges	65%	N/A
	Taupe Party	D. Preston	20%	N/A
	Independent	C. Olson (Constituency Seat Winner)	80%	N/A
		J. Fritz	70%	N/A
National	Brown Party (Winning Party)	I. Robles (Eliminated by G. Sloan)	65%	75%
		G. Sloan (National Seat Winner)	75%
	Taupe Party	R. Brown	15%	55%
	Beige Party	B. Burton	80%	65%

National Results

Constituency	Brown Party Score	Taupe Party Score	Beige Party Score
Mapleford North	75%	15%	80%
Rivermere South	70%	70%	20%
Ashbourne Springs	80%	55%	25%
...
National Average	75% (Winner)	55%	65%

Takeaways from example election results:

• All three parties exceeded the 50% minimum average score threshold to be eligible for the 'national' seats.
• C. Olson, an Independent, won the constituency seat for Mapleford North by having the highest average score (80%) of any candidate in the constituency. The next best constituency candidate was J. Fritz, a fellow Independent, who got an average score of 70%.
• The Brown Party won all 172 national seats by having the highest national average score (75%) of any party in the nation. The next best national party was the Beige Party, which got a national average score of 65%.
• The Brown Party ran two candidates in Mapleford North: I. Robles and G. Sloan. Of these candidates, G. Sloan had the higher score, of 75%, so I. Robles was eliminated and G. Sloan contributed his 75% constituency score to the party's national average.
• G. Sloan was the surviving 'national' candidate nominated by the Brown Party in Mapleford North. Because the Brown Party won all national seats, G. Sloan won the 'national' seat for Mapleford North.
• Candidates running for constituency seats do not affect the scores of national parties

Why This System?

Consider two things true for all elections:

1. Winning votes is expensive.
2. The candidate with the most votes wins.

If a voter can support only one candidate at a time, then the cheapest winning strategy for a candidate is to acquire a slim majority, to the exclusion of nearly half the voters. Any more would be wasteful; any less no longer guarantees a win.

If a voter can instead support many candidates at a time, then a narrow majority no longer guarantees a win: all of a candidate's supporters may also approve of a competitor. A candidate with 60% approval loses to a candidate with 70% approval. This forces candidates into a competition not for the exclusive support of a narrow majority, but for the approval of as many as possible.

The only way a minority group can be excluded under electoral systems with concurrent voter support is if the minority group is so fundamentally incompatible with a candidate's current base that adding the minority would cost them more members from their current base than the minority adds. If adding the minority would result in a net increase in voter support, a candidate must include them, or lose to a competitor who does, even if that candidate already has the support of a majority. Because that majority might be just as satisfied with the competitor.

Electing single representatives

First Past the Post and Instant Runoff voting both fall into the first category (voters support one candidate at a time). Instant Runoff is effectively a sequence of First Past the Post elections; in each round, voters support their top choice. A narrow majority under either system guarantees a win. Hence, Division.

Compare with Score Voting. Voters support many candidates concurrently. Hence, Unity.

Electing multiple representatives

Traditional constituency elections, regardless how votes are counted within each constituency, and Proportional Representation both suffer from the same exclusive-voter-support problem as FPTP and IRV: Each seat is awarded to one representative, so parties and coalitions compete for a narrow majority within the legislature.

While Proportional Representation ensures the makeup of the legislature is proportional to the makeup of the electorate as a whole, it fails to incentivize the ruling coalition to include more than half of said representatives, or by extension, more than half of the nation. Therefore, as long as a ruling coalition is confident in its majority, it will ignore social and economic problems that impact voters outside of said majority, even in Proportional Representation.

Instead, the Score Bonus System creates a nationwide single-winner election to effectively elect the ruling party as a whole, and using Score Voting for this election creates an incentive for this party to include the interests of as many as possible.

Electoral Systems Review

System	Optimal strategy	Effect
Single Seat FPTP	Secure a narrow majority of votes.	Division & Exclusion
Single Seat IRV	Secure a narrow majority of votes.	Division & Exclusion
Single Seat Score	Appeal to as many voters as possible.	Unity & Inclusion
Traditional Constituency Elections	Secure a narrow majority of districts.	Division & Exclusion
Proportional Representation	Secure a narrow majority of voters.	Division & Exclusion
Score Bonus System	Appeal to as many voters as possible.	Unity & Inclusion

Why combine the winner-take-all component with per-constituency elections?

Because:

• It maintains a constituency-first element to politics, even in the winner-take-all segment of Parliament. The ruling party, with a majority given to it through the winner-take-all segment, has a representative from each constituency.
• Allowing multiple candidates from the same party to run in the same constituency forces candidates to compete with fellow party members to best represent a constituency
• Having some seats that are elected only by constituency voters ensures each constituency has a representative accountable only to them
• The national seats only being awarded if a party gets >50% approval lets us fall back to conventional 'coalition government formation' with constituency-elected representatives if the winner-take-all election fails to produce a party with at least majority support. This avoids a party with, say, 35% nationwide approval, getting an automatic Parliamentary majority.
• Having both constituency and national elections occur on the same ballot avoids unnecessary complexity for the voters. Voters get a single Score Voting ballot.The ballot is as complex as is required to implement Score Voting, but no more complicated than that.

What next

I realize we're not getting Score Voting in Canada any time soon. It's not well known enough, and the 'winner-take-all block of seats' component may scare people away.

Plus, no politician content with their party having an effective monopoly on opposing the other side would ever consider supporting an electoral system as competitive as this.

Instead, I offer this electoral system to anyone who wants to take advantage of an "oh won't somebody do something" vibe to organize something, but wants to avoid their organization getting burned by the faulty electoral systems we have today.

A protocol for building a unified chapter-based organization:

1. Launch regional chapters
2. Each regional chapter randomly selects N interested participants, plus one or two 'chapter founders', to act as delegates to meet in a central location or online. The first conference will bootstrap the organization's 'internal parties'. Subsequent conferences evolve into a recurring networking event.
3. Like-minded delegates, possibly assisted by 'political speed-dating', form 'internal parties'
4. In each chapter, 'internal parties' nominate candidates for chapter and national seats.
5. Each member scores each candidate in their chapter
6. The highest scored 'chapter seat' candidate in each chapter becomes the chapter's local representative
7. The highest scored 'internal party' across the organization as a whole wins one 'national' representative in each chapter
8. Canadians, Unite!

Thoughts?