Proportional Past the Post - The Best Voting System You've Never Heard Of (Until Now)
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- Опубліковано 4 вер 2024
- “Since 1950, First Past the Post has failed to deliver elections that are fair, proportional or allow any meaningful voter choice beyond a few dominant parties. Proportional Past the Post, a type of Proportional Representation, is the answer.
For too long, voters have had to put up with a system which doesn’t listen to their concerns simply because it doesn’t need to. Proportional Past the Post gives the power back to the people by making candidates outperform those in their party as well as their constituency.
This is a rejection of MP complacency. This is a rejection of rejection itself felt by so many up and down the country - and now is the time to make this clear to the politicians that for too long have taken us for granted.
That's why I need you to support Proportional Past the Post.
Make our voices heard.” (Gabriel Haines - Inventor of Proportional Past the Post)
Contact me (all enquiries welcome):
proportionalpastthepost@gmail.com
With who you are and how you found this campaign.
VIDEO SOURCES:
(The views expressed in the sources below are the opinions of the authors and don’t necessarily reflect the policy positions of Proportional Past the Post)
David Cameron PMQs - • David Cameron tells Je...
Theresa May PMQs - • Corbyn and May's most ...
Boris Johnson PMQs - • Boris Johnson's best P...
Liz Truss PMQs - • Theresa May and Liz Tr...
Rishi Sunak PMQs - • Sunak condemned over t...
John Cleese PR Party Political Broadcast - • Cleese on PR (full len...
Crowd Stock Footage - • Crowded People Walking...
Dictator Cartoon - • Hitler and Stalin cart...
Mr Fishfinger - • Lord Buckethead, Mr Fi...
Tactical Voting Blob Demonstration - • Simulating alternate v...
NSW Ballot Demonstration - • How to vote by post fo...
Guardian Report on AV 2011 - • Yes and No to AV campa...
ARTICLES AND DATA:
Conservative Factionalism - amp.theguardia...
Rishi Sunak Approval Ratings - yougov.co.uk/t...
Trust in British Politics ONS 2022 - www.ons.gov.uk...
Loosemore-Hanby Index (DV Score Formula - Evaluation and Optimization of Electoral Systems - books.google.c...
DV Score Explanation - www.democratic...
DV Scores of Devolved Governments and FPTP 1997-2021 - www.electoral-...
Historic DV Score Data - Dunleavy, P. 2018. Chapter 2.1: The Westminster ‘plurality rule’ electoral system. In: Dunleavy, P et al (eds.), The UK's Changing Democracy. London: LSE Press. DOI: doi.org/10.313...
Liverpool Walton 2019 Results - www.bbc.co.uk/...
POLITICO Tactical Voting Poll - www.politico.e...
Spoiled Ballots Scottish Local Elections - news.stv.tv/sc...
Full datasheets used for calculations can be provided on request
BACKGROUND MUSIC/AUDIO:
“Peer Gynt - Morning Mood” - • Edvard Grieg: "Peer Gy...
Drum roll sound effect - • Drum roll sound effect
La Isla Bonita (Instrumental) - • Madonna - La Isla Boni...
luv (sic.) pt 3 (Instrumental) - • Luv (sic.) pt 3 Instru...
#proportionalpastthepost #proportionalrepresentation #electoralreform
Proportional Past the Post (PPP) is a non-partisan campaign founded by Gabriel Haines, a 19 year old state-educated student from Hertfordshire, in February 2024. Its core objective is the implementation of PPP in national elections with secondary objectives of wider electoral reform and anti-corruption also at the heart of the group ethos. The campaign aims to work with small and large political parties/groups across the political spectrum - it is not a registered political party or charity and does not yet have a formal way of joining the organisation.
Hi everyone!
Thank you all so much for your detailed feedback and taking the idea seriously regardless of you agree with it or not. I never would have expected it to take off so quickly so genuinely thank you so much and I promise I'll get back to as many comments as I can when I have time.
To respond to a couple of comments that seem to be coming up frequently (may make this into a future video but here's an abridged version):
- No, this system is not MMP and no I did not copy MMP. Hand on heart, I knew basically nothing when I started working on the idea a few months ago and when I first found MMP I was a bit panicked that all my work was for nothing but thankfully that's not the case for a few reasons. Firstly, and the core reason why it isn't MMP, is what the first two letters mean - "mixed member". Everyone on PPP is elected on the same basis so therefore the major pitfall of "two different types of MP" in MMP/AMS isn't present and voter accountability remains at 100%. Secondly, overhang seats and party lists are a thing of the past in PPP which greatly improves simplicity and fairness in which MPs go where. Thirdly, PPP ignores pluralities whereas MMP require them - the latter leads to the spoiler effect, negative campaigning and independents basically having 0% chance of getting elected whereas the former doesn't. A Parliament elected under PPP will look very different to MMP and whether you agree or disagree with this being a good thing doesn't change the fact that the systems are different. Aside from split-ticket voting, the mechanics of the systems are very different so no they are not the same thing (although AMS like in Wales would be my second preference if PPP couldn't be introduced).
- Independents are essentially parties of 1 with quotas of 1. If they win a plurality or all the other candidates above them in the constituency fail to make their respective quotas then they win the seat (otherwise better luck next time). PPP consistently elects a handful of independents each year which is crucial in reflecting the 1-2% of people that vote for minor parties or single candidates. I am also aware of the "why not get the big parties to all stand as independents" cheat but that can easily be banned as malpractice/a seat cap of 650/1+(number of subparties (eg. Conservative Battersea or Labour Twickenham)) could be introduced to counteract anyone trying to game the system.
- PPP is a national election system that aims to reform a parliament as opposed to an individual seat so another system would be required for individual one-offs. An idea that could work though (especially for councils in which a by-election is probably happening somewhere in the country in that week due to the sheer number of councillors in local government) is to hold like a twice-a-year mini-PPP with all of the proposed by-elections happening on the same day. This would keep the proportionality as much as possible whilst also effectively becoming midterms for councils. I am aware that idea has some problems but I do still think it could work if proper safeguards were put in place.
- The majority of seats (4 in 5) still go to the FPTP winner and if the constituency didn't get their first choice then they almost certainly got their second or third. The key reason why this is fairer than plurality voting systems is that it doesn't treat all first places as better than all 2nds - a plurality winner with 35% is way less dynamic of a performance than someone in the same party with 48% that came second. Furthermore, if the second place to that 35% plurality winner (big party) is a small party with 34%, one of those results is significantly more impressive in context (big party has more national name recognition, resources; the 34% for the small party was probably their best national result whereas the 35% for the big party is mediocre at best). And because the system is done on vote share as opposed to raw votes, by voting for anyone other than the incumbent you are guaranteed to worsen their results (n/m > n/(m+1) where n and m are positive integers) so there's no need to tactically rally behind particular challenger candidates. And if the concern is that not rallying behind a particular candidate will lead to the plurality winner default if everyone does badly, because of the non-zero chance for independents to be elected, provided at least one stands, which is virtually a guarantee under this system, then the PWD can't happen as the party-of-one will reach their quota (of 1) and win their seat.
Basically, if you really value pluralities over all else then this system is not for you - however, if you value any of these things:
- Proportionality
- Truthful voting
- Accountability (relative to other PR methods)
- Simplicity (relative to other PR methods)
- Voter choice
- Competition
Then this system will absolutely tick your boxes.
I hope this answers the common questions you probably want answered but if you have any more then please feel free to continue firing away. With its imperfections, I still 100% believe in this idea as the best way forward and if that makes me a crazy man then crazy shall I be.
Much love,
Gabriel (PPP Inventor).
That's just a variation of MMP. The current German government passed a law that is jet to take effect after which not all directly voted candidates get a seat to reduce overhang candidates, cause the parliament is too big. It's still called MMP and if we reduced overhang candidates to 0 we would still call it MMP and it would be exactly your proposal. You found nothing new mate. Standard party list PR is better anyway.
Yes but the German system still requires pluralities, there are quotas and the Sainte-lague method is different to the ceil(voteshare) in PPP. I understand you have strong feelings about this but PPP absolutely is not the same system as Germany. Instead of being dismissive, why not let’s discuss why you prefer your party list system and I learn from that as opposed to bickering about ideas which are very clearly different.
Politics nerd here. Can confirm that this is indeed district from MMP.
Thanks for taking the time to answer those criticisms; some see bugs where you see features! Perhaps answering each of these criticisms one-by-one could be follow-up videos?
Your chart showed the results confirming better to voter preference. But this wasn't actually measured and so it can't really be known. I'm not sure opinion poll data would be a particularly reliable comparison either. I'd like to see some simulated elections to convince me on this.
How do independents work? Could they get elected without a party?
You have two ballots therefore two votes, my problem, I have with the senedd election is that in South Wales West the electoral region, I'm in they have the most votes on the party list, yet due to them winning the most consituency don't win seats in the party list, single Non transferable vote is bit like first past the post, but is used to have multiple seats, it also has multiple candidates from the same party, so have one ballot with both parties and candidates, if you vote for a candidate you have a double vote, if you vote for a party just a single, have multiple candidates from one party, have one double or one single vote, all from the same party are added together and divided by total number, times 100 to get a percent
Seats × vote share, and I in favour of rounding down and giving them to independent candidates.
Two ways I check if is system is protional
Seats party won/total number of seats
Seats × vote share
Single Transferable vote isn't great but it does stop a party getting a majority with under 50% of the vote share.
Due to the speaker of house and the 18 Northern Ireland constituencies, I believe the number of seats needed should be 316, as it be 631 seats since Conservative and Labour can't win any in Northern Ireland and there always be a consituency which the speaker resides from which is usually Labour or Conservative
Any parties that has 316 candidates should be on an anti plurality ballot with Conservative and Labour being combined, if there is more than those 2 not to be Government if a party get 50% + 1 person vote than they aren't in Government.
I'd disagree that this is easy enough to understand, because in close races where a lower placed candidate from a smaller party wins the seat it becomes difficult to explain to constituents why that happened. You'd have to go through most of the national results to get a full explanation of why specifically the fourth-place candidate is now their local MP, and you'd probably have to settle for just explaining the system and saying "trust us, it makes sense on a national level". That's a recipe for frustrating and alienating a set of voters who in theory still have unusually large influence on who sits in parliament, and leaves the door open for distrust in elections.
Exactly my thoughts! I think a much better system is where the local representetive is chosen based on FPP voting but the "lost" votes (lost votes are votes that didnt go for the winning representative) go to a national list, and based on that national list the parties that lost many votes in such a way get assigned extra seats. This way the local representation stays fair with the person getting the most votes gaining the seat in parliament, but the national representation will also be proportional to the populace's preferences.
Precisely
@@barnabasigari3109 It sounds like you've just described the Additional Member System, used for the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments and the Greater London Assembly. Also used in New Zealand, where it's called Mixed-Member Proportional
@@MelvinSowah Hmm i didnt know that. Well i think it would be great on a national level anyhow
@@barnabasigari3109 We have something similar here in Germany, where every constituency elects a parliamentarian via FPTP and every voter also gives an additional vote to a party list for the second set of candidates to make the parliament proportional based on all votes. Sadly that leads to Germany having an obscenely bloated parliament.
can you make another video going over some theoretical election results, similar to how CGP Grey it? i think it'd help people understand better
That's a good idea. Lets see how this works in the standard CGP Grey jungle election. #vote_the_lions_out
It's better to show what It's like in countries that have multiple parties as the politics have already adapted to the system. It freaks out UK voters to simulate the party that gets 3% at 17.
Doesn't even have to be theoretical, he's clearly already run some election results from past elections. He's minimized error on the national scale but presented no statistics on each local election's error.
Hypothetical scenarios would definitely help to see the worst case for gerrymandering.
Also, what are the restrictions on how a candidate's party is assigned? Because in this system it sounds like being an "independent" candidate has the most advantage, since your max number of seats can never be reduced below 1 unless you got no votes.
STV in one sentence:
Choose a favourite and second favourite candidate and if your first vote is "wasted" then your second is counted instead.
That explanation doesn't differentiate between STV and AV.
Alas, STV doesn't work very well. Australia has something like it, and their parliament is just as bad as in countries with first-past-the-post. (And they have even fewer minorities actually getting in parliament than in the UK and US.)
@@lostcarparkAV is just the single winner version of STV. Voting is identical. STV is usually for scenarios like councils where you want to elect multiple councillors for the same area.
@@lostcarpark but getting lost in the weeds is why its hard to explain. Nobody explains all the ins and outs of a fptp system they just say "the person with the most votes wins". They don't explain boundaries and seats. My sentence is sufficient, imo.
But a better one would be.
Each area selects more than one candidate and you put the candidates in order of preference so the selected candidates best match your preferences.
@@avisian8063 That's a good point. So I think the honest response to "You can't explain X system in one sentence" should really be "well you can't explain FPTP properly in one sentence either." I mean an explanation of FPTP isn't really complete without going into gerrymandering and tactical voting, is it?
If you're expecting the country that voted against AV because it was "to complicated to understand" to agree to this, you're having a laugh.
The allocation algorithm needs some work. For instance, if you have Green party candidates running only in a few seats where Labour is very strong, those seats will go to the Labour candidates who are very high on the allocation list. Meaning, no seats for the Greens and a parliament with too few MPs.
Also, in general, I'm not sure if people will be happy to be represented by an MP who got less votes than their competitor, which is how your method tries to achieve proportionality. The constituency wouldn't have a clear cut way of getting rid of their MP other than by rallying around another candidate - tactical voting!
And how would by-elections work?
You make very good points and I understand these concerns will come up a lot but I do think these problems are solvable.
In 2019, the Green Party stood in 472 seats. If labour win a few seats triumphantly that the greens also do well in then they still have 400+ candidates left to allocate. And Parliament will never have too few MPs, if 1st place doesn't meet the quota then it goes to the 2nd, then 3rd etc and if there's no one left then it goes back to 1st as a "best underperformer" option. If you mean that the greens will represented, yes that is true but that's only because they tend to come last or near last in every seat so the algorithm can't justify giving them loads of seats if each candidate only scrapes by with 1000 votes. They do still get more representation in PPP than the current system though and if we factor in 30% of people voting tactically then in the future we could absolutely see this system awarding greens many seats if there is mathematical justification for doing so.
If people are concerned about the non-winners getting control, show them the 1951 and Feb 1974 elections - more votes for Party A and still Party B wins the seat. The idea of a "wrong-winner" in local seat allocation is a necessity for any PR system to accurately reflect true voting intention but with this PPP it does the best job of allocating the next best alternative without also being insanely complicated or removing the OPOV principle.
If this was MMP then yes, rallying behind a particular candidate would be required but crucially, because any extra vote that isn't for Party A will automatically dilute their voteshare, there is no requirement to find a particular challenger therefore tactical voting still remains a thing of the past. Provided you vote for someone other than the incumbent, that will reduce their voteshare so no they don't have to tactically vote to get rid of a sitting MP.
This system is specifically for national elections but if you want by-election reform as well, one idea that could work is holding by-elections at regular 6 month intervals and doing almost a mini-PPP on the 3 or 4 seats that are up for the taking. I'm not necessarily advocating for this because it comes with its own logistical challenges and the election of one MP by FPTP isn't exactly going to do much to the DV score but yes there are workarounds to that too.
By no means am I saying this system is perfect because no system can be; but I still think it's pretty good and certainly better than what we have now.
@@ProportionalPastthePost I'm not from the UK so I didn't know that the Greens ran in that many seats. Anyway, substitute them for a small party that's concentrated geographically.
I think my point about tactical voting is still valid. Consider a constituency that votes 27% Lab, 27% Con, 21% LD and 25% UKIP (are they still around?). Let's presume that Lab and Con are still the predominant parties in the UK, meaning that the 27% vote shares of their candidates probably doesn't earn them this seat, which goes to the UKIP candidate instead. Now, suppose the remaining 75% of the constituency are unhappy with that and want to change that. How are they supposed to vote in the next election? They have to rally around one candidate to get his/her vote share further up the list! That's tactical voting. It's not enough to vote against the UKIP candidate.
Edit: Of course it's still an improvement that the voters can give the party vote to their preferred party in any event.
I agree with @matthiasm4299 , maybe it's just the way this video is presented but it seems like this system was "designed to get the best score on the DV index" rather than to give human citizens what they want. It doesn't seem to account for geography which is why gerrymandering is still somewhat possible (not possible with STV).
@@aceman0000099 proportionality was the core objective but certainly wasn’t the only factor. Simplicity, accountability and still maintaining the constituency link I think are absolutely critical in getting popular support for an FPTP alternative and STV just won’t work nearly as well as PPP. And who says that proportionality isn’t what “humans” want? STV is decent but party list PR still does better with a regional link and doesn’t violate OPOV. And to the point above, that scenario has only happened once (Irish constituency in 2015 or 2017 (can’t remember which)) and also assumes that no independents are standing that would prevent the plurality winner default that I assume Matthias is referring to - because of the weakened link between pluralities and winning seats this simply wouldn’t happen. Even still, the party vote would still ensure that you have representation nationally and certainly compared to MMP is way easier still to get rid of weak incumbents.
MMP already solves the problems, and still gives people the local MP they voted for, I don’t think people will be happy if the MP that got the highest vote in their constituency isn’t the one who gets the seat
In Ireland you just rank candidates in your order of choice as far as you want (be it only one or all 10 people running in the constituency) and constituencies have between 3 and 5 seats.
It works well - we have loads of independents, loads of small parties, and currently the 3 biggest parties are similarly sized.
Much better system then this. You could end up with a local MP with
@@Jay_Johnson It would incredibly unlikely to be assigned a seat outside the top 3 but the problem with that assessment is that it doesn’t factor in the increased competition from minor parties decreasing the standard deviation and making results like that significantly less likely. Small parties don’t necessarily mean fringe - swap EDL for Women’s Equality Party and giving representation to them would be seen as a good thing.
The plurality part of the system needs work but there are safeguards in place for what you described to be highly unlikely.
@varalderfreyr8438 If they were then it would be MMP/AMS like in Scotland or Germany
And the country’s gone to hell.
People should be made aware of the unique political context in Ireland. The three main parties are divided not so much by the left-right issues that exist in other countries, but by their position in the Irish civil war.
The idea of individual seats being won by candidates that came second or third in their constituency while the winner is skipped would create outrage. It would be a democratic deficit as local people would feel that they have no way of choosing their own MP as it would depend on the results of the rest of the country. This would be far worse a problem than I think you're anticipating as well - you're using the 2019 election as an example, but an election with a PR element will have far greater share for smaller parties, meaning the cap would come in very early and a huuugggee number of skips would start to happen. Also your claim that this is somehow the easiest voting system to understand is completely made up and unsubstantiated - the whole skipping process will cause confusion, people will not understand how their votes actually correlate to a seat, especially if their local vote doesn't match with the result and is dependent on what the rest of the country is voting. It seems you were so laser focused on creating a system that perfectly fixes the DV score problem that you put a wrecking ball through the rest of the process. (You're not alone in this, I also think crazy voting systems like 'Star Voting' are too focused on perfect results and are utterly ridiculous in reality). You're better off having a more moderate option that does a reasonable, if imperfect, job of both the proportionality and local candidate aspects, like Additional Member Voting.
I wouldn't say there's an actual democratic deficit, but I do agree that people would perceive there to be one. Most people choose who to vote for based on which party they like the most, not which constituency candidate they like the most, and under FPTP less than half of the population gets an MP they actually voted for in some cases.
I do agree that it would still be hard to explain that to people though, you'd have to make it clear that the candidate ballot was secondary and more advisory, and focus more on the party ballot. I personally would rather do the candidate ballot by approval.
"The idea of individual seats being won by candidates that came second or third in their constituency while the winner is skipped would create outrage"
No it wouldn't, because the second and third candidate would still have to be relatively popular, and this will always happen in at least some constituencies in any proportional representation system.
He never said it is the easiest to understand, just that it is easy to understand, which is a marker of a good electoral system
This is an awful system if you're assigned, for example, the fascist candidate just because you're in the area where they got the most votes. Even if they received 5% of the vote where you live, compared to 1% nationally, it doesn't work. I believe a similar system was proposed in Canada a few years ago, though I forget what it was called. You're trying to square a circle that can't be squared; there is no system that can perfectly match local representation with proportionality.
Additionally, this system assumes that achieving maximum proportionality nationally based on party lines is the fairest outcome, as opposed to balancing proportionality with local representation, as the Single Transferable Vote (STV) system does.
STV does tend to give larger parties a winner's bonus, however, I think that's ok as it tends to avoid the sort of deeply fragmented results opponents of PR tend to allude to.
See, I'm all for reforming the electoral system, but trying to fit it into the mould of our current *legislative* system is inherently going to create problems. PPP arguably gets closer than others, but putting the entire burden of representation onto the House of Commons means that you're still trying to be representative of the nation AND the community at the same time, with obvious drawbacks. And then of course you have the problem of conflicting jurisdictions with other representative bodies like metro mayors, unitary authorities & county/borough Councils, some of which have been integrated into the system better than others yet all of which add another layer of confusion to the whole thing.
I don't think any conversation about electoral reform is complete without a conversation about legislative reform.
How would this work for independents? The national party, just tick independent? This doesn't quite work because of this I fear?
you could handle independents first before assigning seats to the parties but that would create problem of parties running bogus independents in safe seats
Trouble with this system is that it means the hardest working candidates get picked, wouldn't go down well with MP's.
Why do people in the UK have this obsession with single-memeber constituencies? just make the consituencies larger, and then have proportional representation within those consituencies. Every party can have a list with their candidates, and you can strike candidates you don't like and even mix lists just by writing the names under the one that's been struck (stricken?).
You mean like we did with the European Elections? That ended well :-(
We could use county borders and the have for instance the county of Derbyshire sending say 7 MPs elected by say stv open lists, pptp, or other methods.
People don't like party list as it gives party organisations more power.
"Every party can have a list with their candidates, and you can strike candidates you don't like and even mix lists just by writing the names under the one that's been struck (stricken?)."
/\ /\
How does this work? sounds much more complex than Ranked choice within multiple representative constituencies.
@@Jay_JohnsonIf you do it like in Switzerland, it will not give parties more power, quite the opposite actually.
@@Jay_Johnson I used to think this was a strength of FPTP, that an unpopular politician that is favoured by the party can be eliminated. But then if a politician is highly favoured by a party, the party can put them forward for constituencies that are deemed safe for their party until they get elected. An example would be Michael Portillo who was put forward for the then safe Tory seat of Kensingtion after losing his position in the previous election.
I had the same idea a few years ago, but the problem is with legitimacy, I do think that "The winner in this constituency came in 3rd place", just because they got a disproportionate amount of votes among their party's candidates, won't play well. People would be pretty upset when the candidate they supported locally won't make it into parliament despite them having won the local race. In fact, if you have a party with say 5% of the votes, they'd likely never get above 10% anywhere in the country, and would not be first in any constituency
If voters aren't willing to support the Alternative Vote/ Ranked Choice (67.9% against in the 2011 referendum), why would they support this system which is literally going to have candidates go to parliament who under the current system would be absolutely illegitimate?
If its legitimacy you're after, look at Belfast South in 2015. SDLP win the seat with 24.5% of the vote - imagine if their top performing seat (47.9% in Foyle) was a second place; how do think they'd feel if they lost out whilst another of their own gets elected with less than half of what they did? Not all first places are better than all second places and this accounts for that. If you want to know the best track and field athletes at the Olympics, you compare the track and field athletes - not the athletes within the same country.
If you want a case study of parties that get 5% of the votes, look at the Greens and The Brexit Party in 2019. In both cases, there were many seats in which they got barely anything but in pockets (metropolitan areas and Yorkshire respectively) there were absolutely strong performances that whilst weren't enough to win pluralities would certainly give them strong chances in PPP.
As for the AV point, AV was rejected not because people really wanted pluralities but because it was horrifically complicated, not proportional and attached to the name of Nick Clegg who was about as liked at the time as a fart in a lift. If you look at the Parliamentary report into the AV referendum, 2 out of the 3 main reasons people backed the no campaign were based on simplicity and the other was on tradition; PPP is still simple compared to the other PR methods and keeps the tradition of single-member constituencies. Put AV against PPP in a referendum and PPP wins hands down not because I'm arrogant but because it does what both parties (FPTP and PR) want whilst maintaining simplicity and allowing scope for future change.
I do appreciate your feedback and if you have any other points (evidently great minds think alike judging by the first sentence) then please do let me know and I'd be happy to respond to them as soon as possible :)
@@ProportionalPastthePostI’m sorry but AV is way less complicated than this. Maybe some of the complexity is obscured for the voter. But I can understand fairly intuitively how Ranked Choice works and how my vote is counted. I don’t understand how my vote is counted here even after watching the video. The details are fuzzy. And I don’t see how an ordered list of preferences is complicated. It’s really not, and being able to rank your candidates just makes a ton of sense to me.
@@Phoenix-yk7ne The counting is quite straightforward. It’s just the seat allocation that’s a little hard to understand.
@@Phoenix-yk7neit’s not complicated for you maybe, but the statistics on its use in practice prove people don’t understand it.
It must be added that as with many political campaigns, the public was repeated lied to regarding the AV referendum. Political campaigns don't legally have to tell the truth in the UK (unlike say an advert for a chocolate bar) so the results you get are affected by people who were lied to and fell for it.
As a German I'm sorry bro but you didn't invent this system, impressive you discovered it on your own though, we've been using a version of it since the unification of Germany in the 1870s
I don't think they invented it, but I also don't think they were thinking about Germany. I do hope that they can sell it as a "hey this country tried and already proved this system" instead of "hey here's another new voting system that might work"
This is actually a variant of the Hansard society system, which was proposed as long ago as 1976 (sic). Under that system though, only 75% of MP’s are elected through constituencies as at current, but the other 25% are elected as top up according to how many seats they would have won had the election been proportional. The problem with that system is though that bigger parties would still be over represented. I.e. in Wales Labour won 27 of the 32 seats under FPTP with only 37.0% of the vote which should entitle them to 12 if proportional. So if the number of seats in Wales was reduced by 25% to 24 Labour would be massively over represented?
@@zeronothinghere9334 Either way it's definetly superior to what the UK currently has. Bro is a smart one ngl
Though waht I dislike about the german system ist that the Candidate Vote (Erststimme) ist still a FPTP per election-zone and thus still subject to tactical voting; there is practically no good reason to ever give your candidate vote to a candidate that few people will vote for, as this (like for every FPTP) favors a candidate to win whon you dislike more than your second choice that could have won if you voted him instead of your first choice.
I thus really wished germany would introduce STV for their candidate vote (STV Erststimme).
And I also belive STV for the proportinal party vote would be a good idea, since due to the 5% clause we have, your proportional vote can be solst too (STV Zweitstimme).
FInally I've always wondered if instead ov voting a whole government it wouldn't be fairer/more interesting if people voted a small party proportional "mini parlament" for every ministry, then the general (government) parlament is compraised either of just all the ministry parlaments or comprised by them partially and partially by direct proportional votes.
The problems with this are: how is it decided what ministrys exists and what their duties are? How can local representation be ensured?
Inherently this will be more complex than current systems, though I'm not sure this necessarily means it's more complicated...
So I just wanted to comment on you argument that PPP can be explained in one sentence, and that it's easy to understand.
"Ranked by voteshare, allocate seats to the highest performing candidates until each party gets proportional representation and all seats have been filled."
That sentence kind of makes sense when you've just watched a video on it, but if you were to state it to the average person, that hasn't watched a video on it, I would bet money on them not understanding. It doesn't actually explain how the system works, it just gives you the underlying principle.
It's possible that I'm just being a bit dim, but I had to watch the explanation three times and I to completely understand it. I'm clearly not the only one in this boat though, as a lot of people in the comments are saying it's the same as MMPR.
As with any new system, the idea would have to be explained a few times but once the idea hopefully becomes more mainstream more and more people will be familiar with how it works. The key to this system is that the 2 or 3 explanations required for PPP is significantly less than say STV which absolutely can't be explained in a sentence even in principle and will take significantly longer to understand - and when making a choice between the status quo and change, "significantly longer to understand" is not the best start when advocating for a new system.
One thing this does bother me on is that I don't know if it solves for parties that fail to deliver on manifestos. If the most popular members are not the leaders, then those who are voting proportionally but without expectation that their local candidate will win are voting primarily on the idea that the manifesto will be delivered.
I feel like this could reward (sorry, watching from the US, so that's my context) a US Sen. Joe Manchin, where there's more likelihood of them defecting in a vote that is locally to him unpopular but which the party has a mandate to deliver (if unfamiliar, he's a Democrat with strong ties to the fossil fuel industry).
@@ProportionalPastthePost STV = "rank your votes, count by first choice, if your first choice isn't elected or already has been your vote moves to the 2nd choice etc, til all the seats are filled"
@@ProportionalPastthePost Your system is incomprehensible to me after watching the video through once whereas I understood STV as soon as I heard "single transferable vote". Why do you think STV is hard for people to understand?
@@bonnie115 Could you describe STV? I looked it up on Wikipedia and it seemed like it was a little more in-depth than the name lets on.
Have a look into mixed member proportional representation systems. It's quite similar. I would even say we could categorise your system as a version.
In Germany each constituency elects an MP by plurality. Then the rest of the seats that a party should have according to total vote share are allocated via party lists. It's even more sophisticated in some state elections, where you can rank candidates on those lists up or down.
It's recently been slightly changed but remained in principle.
South Korea and NZ adopted similar systems in the last decades. Dear UK, feel free to adopt it. We don't charge fees.
I can agree that it’s similar to MMP but I disagree with the idea it can be classified underneath it simply because of what MM means - mixed member.
In PPP, everyone is elected by the same method or the same list if you see it like that. MMP also generates overhang seats and needs party lists and neither of those apply to PPP.
I’d say the closest well known system to PPP is AMS like they have in the UK’s devolved governments. I still think those systems have issues which PPP can fix (spoiler effect, accountability, proportionality etc) but if my idea had to be erased from existence then AMS wouldn’t be an awful alternative in comparison.
And yes absolutely the UK needs to get its act together with PR. Whatever the system ends up being, please can it not be FPTP that’s all I wish for.
@@ProportionalPastthePost copium.
@@ProportionalPastthePostTo be fair, Germany just got rid of overhangs, if I understand the changes correctly.
Direct mandates are only allocated a seat up until they have reached their maximum possible seats by percentage in the party vote. All direct mandates that exceed it don't get a seat.
If a party gets more seats through the party vote than direct mandates, those are filled up by a list.
I think the main criticism is that it could lead to some districts not having an elected MP at all, especially in Bavaria where the CSU gets a lot of direct mandates, but doesn't get a sizeable party vote bc it's only electable in that state.
Or if a party gains direct mandates, but can't surpass the 5% in party votes.
I also do not know how that voting system handles independents getting direct mandates...
@@ProportionalPastthePost If County A with a national legislature of 100 seats adopts PPP, then would that mean that Country A would have a total of 100 single-member electoral districts under PPP?
I mean the UK has 650 parliamentary constituencies with fptp so probably
It’s a very interesting idea. And I respect you to have the guts to get up and film a video about your idea. 👍
It does remind me a bit of the German election system.
Personally I must admit Im not that big of a fan of the german election system, though I still think it’s better than the UKs current election system. This proposal though does seem to address some of the concerns I have with the german election system.
I’ll definitely need to think it through and compare with an election system idea I had.
I appreciate your kind words and I’m glad that this system addresses some of your concerns. MMP (specifically AMS like the Welsh system) is definitely my second favourite option after PPP but I don’t think it can do as good a job at the things I particularly value in an election system hence why I invented the system you saw today.
I will say though, I didn’t know about MMP until very late into the ideas stage of my system - I came up with it independently. I still see them as ideologically distinctive for reasons I’ve detailed in other comments but hey if people like my idea because it’s similar to another system they also like then I’m not complaining.
Interesting idea, but the same thing you want this system to do is better accomplished by the German mixed proportional representation system. In that, you elect your local mp and vote for party list, but then on top of the mps elected directly, more mps are added based on the party vote to ensure proportional representation.
There was never meant to ne party politics. Your community was meant to vote for a person from that community to represent the community in parliament.
I'd say it's easier to change the system to match (and better reflect) reality, rather than to try to force reality to match what the system was designed for.
The reality is that people don't vote for local candidates.
I had a bit of a survey and most people in my area could not name or identify our local candidates in the recent GE.
Well, there was never meant to be non-landowners nor women voting either.. So I'm not sure what your historical argument is supposed to prove?
Explaining AV in one sentence : You rank the candidates you like the most, 1=Your Preffered candidate, 2=Your second preffered candidate and so on.
Yes but that’s just the ranked voting part. It’s kind of like saying first past the post is where you put a cross in a box for your favourite candidate - I know how the ballot works sure but the actual allocation is still ambiguous.
@@ProportionalPastthePost I dont think that regular voters will care about how the voting counting works and if they do, they are intrested enough for a 5 minute explenation about AV.
2011 would have to disagree with you there. I don’t see any reason why if the referendum was re-run that the exact same arguments would be able to shoot it down in the exact same way. I see why people like it but it just simply isn’t feasible and unless there’s some massive sea change in attitudes I can’t see it becoming feasible in the near future either.
Voters rank candidates in order of preference and then multiple rounds of runoff elections are simulated, always eliminating the weakest candidate.
@@ProportionalPastthePost I'd argue that AV was killed more by fake information campaigns than on its actual merits. I'd also argue that your system (and any other PR systems) would have the same issues in winning a referendum.
The adverts the Torys ran (see ua-cam.com/video/-obZ9OG_XKA/v-deo.html ) during the AV referendum were utterly appealing. In one ad they aired a purposefully confusing explaination of how to vote on purpose and effectly compared it to astrophysics or brain surgury, while in another they warned of the end of the world thanks to populists and extremist taking over the country. They also tended to say it would lead to rampent government corruption. I even heard a Tory counciler explaining this to some people at the polling station when I was there, "A vote for yes is a vote for the BNP".
The true reason the AV referendum failed is simple, niether of the big parties backed it and the "yes" campaign ended up with almost no funding to fight for it. If a new referendum were held today for your system (PTPP), or the one I proposed in my comment (an STV PR combo), both would fall foul of the same ad campaigns that AV did. Not because they are hard to understand, and not because voting for only 1 party or candidate is good, but because they would perminantly end single party majority (Tory and Labour) governments, and niether party wants to give up power.
I like your funny words, election man! This was a joy to watch!
Thanks for the kind feedback :)
I like it in theory, I can definitely see issues with people complaining about having a MP representing them when they really passionately voted for
I never thought of the instrumental of La Isla Bonita as UA-cam background music before.
Isn't that just mixed member proportional? We have that here in Germany and New Zealand also has it. And it's also just a downgrade from standard proportional representation because the advantages over PR don't matter and the parliament ends up too big. Here in Germany no one understands why we keep the redundant candidate vote.
how do they advantages of PR not matter anymore? also youse only have massive house because youse do the elections on a state level, in new zealand we have one party list on a national level & the most overhang seats we've EVER had is *3*
also the reason we have the candidate vote because people need someone to be able to contact & say "that person's my local mp & they're accountable to me", instead of just writing to some random MP from whatever party you voted for
F*** party lists. I want to vote for people not parties. You just have to look at what happened in the commons 2 weeks ago to see why the party whipping system is Sh*t. AV-MMP is better. Even PPP is better, Though the idea that because every constituency voted ~5% for Reform my constituency was assigned reform would really piss me off.
"the advantages over PR don't matter and the parliament ends up too big" - This may be a cultural difference but everyone I speak to in the UK about electoral systems like local representation and as for the parliament being too big just decrease the number of constituencies. Cameron's Government already proposed that in the UK under the current system.
Not exactly, the uk uses MMP (we call it additional member system) in some elections and this is different. In AMS all plurality winners are given their seat and the party list exists to attempt to even out the gap. The party list MPs don’t represent a specific area.
Haven't listened to Luvsic Hexalogy in a few years. Me and my now-girlfriend used to listen to this before we were dating, when we were just becoming really close friends. Thanks for the memories :) (Even if it distracted me from your talk about PPTP!)
Its funny how music puts time into perspective.
@@ProportionalPastthePost ❤️❤️
You could argue that people in many constituencies will be upset, that the winner of their local elections didn’t win, but these are the constituencies, where the majority likely NOT voted for their winner. This constituency would be never happy and in many proportional systems they wouldn’t get a representative at all, so they should be happy about their representative.
This is very similar to the German system, and they "fix" the constituency problem by having much larger regions to return candidates from. They then have something called the "overhang mandate" which creates new seats for parties that have above 5% nationally. They actually don't know, before the election how many seats they'll have in parliament
It’s cool that people are still coming up with new ideas for how elections should be won
7:55 There _is_ a spoiler effect and there _is_ tactical voting (or to describe in the inverse way, has only ballots that are far from accurately portraying voters' preferences) on a per-constituency level. This channel name is the epitome of MMP and no further reform. If you really want single-member constituencies do alternative vote (instant runoff voting) -and ignore the 2011 referendum because AV plus is what we're trying to implement- or hell even be creative and test the logistics of counting results for a condorcet system, just don't leave electoral reform at 'only add party-list on top'.
Really interesting take, and great work on the video, definitely inspiring to see young people working to fix issues in the political system, but there are a few issues/ areas that I’m a bit confused over.
Firstly, in this system, is the MP for a constituency not depend on the order of assigning seats? For example, image a vote comes out with two parties, party A receiving 50.1 and B receiving 49.9 percent of the vote for 100 seats, with all but one seat voting entirely for one party (the one contested seat being a 10:90 split in favour of B). If we assign A to cap, their quota is 51 seats, and so they win the contested seat, however if we assign B first, their quota is 50, so the seats are split 50/50.
This raises the second issue of wildly misrepresentative seats. If the major parties, having won a solid 40% of the vote across the country, have used up their quota, would we not see a fringe party with let’s say 1% vote in each and every constituency end up with an MP for a place where 99% of the population didn’t vote for them? Indeed, as the votes are split, it would be possible for a candidate to win a seat where they did win a single vote, if people in other constituencies, perhaps ones where the party was not running a candidate, decided to vote for that party on the quota election.
Finally, I’m confused how this system deals with independents? An independent will basically never have a nationally significant vote share, so is it basically down to luck as to whether other candidates parties will take the seat?
This is all correct. Your example is practically guaranteed to happen in Wales and Northern Ireland since they have parties which are always going to be small on a national level. One or two rando independents will get to represent some constituency on ~20% of the local vote - how does that maintain the constituency link? From my perspective it just makes a mockery of it.
It doesn't even eliminate strategic voting. If I'm a Labour voter who cares about my constituency MP in an evenly split Lib-Lab seat I can expect Labour will cap out on seats before they reach me so my incentive is to overhype Liberals on the list and downplay labour, since it increases the chance of Labour getting my local seat. So I should vote Labour on the Constituency vote and Lib Dem on the List.
Having multiple representatives in a larger area is much easier, stops tactical voting and doesn't implement perversive incentives to vote against your own favourite party.
I think that you can imagine extreme cases where this would be a problem, but that's true for most systems. What we need to look at is how it typically works in an average case
▪︎ 100k votes per party seat
▪︎ seats to top polling candidates
▪︎ Low turnout = small chamber
▪︎ NOTA vote → sortition MP
So, yeh, convergent thinking. But mine has sharper teeth.
Seats could be allocated at district level first. Surplus votes aggregated at county, region, and UK levels. For the last few votes, parties are eliminated on an AV basis, nominating their successors. Last seat to last surviving party. Every single vote counts.
Unless I'm missing something, wouldnt this system result in lots of constituencies ending up with MPs that finished 2nd or 3rd? I don't agree that this is more simple to explain or understand than other systems (MMP for example) and it also seems less fair
Yeah. As a Labour voter the idea that because Reform got 10% in my constituency but due to smaller split vote shares for Labour, the Conservatives and the lib dems, we would be assigned the Reform MP that the (idiot's of the) entire country voted for makes me already hate this system. combined AV-MMP with single member constituencies or STV-MMP with multimember constituencies would be better.
As I do have the data, I will say that if you lived in Chesterfield then that would be true but most of the seats they did win were with 20%+ and all of them were 3 horse races where Labour and Cons did terribly relative to the rest of the country. 4 out of 5 seats are still given to the plurality winner but I understand the remaining 20% could still be problematic to some and if that’s not what you value in a system then fair enough.
Yeah no I commented the same thing, it seems to sacrifice representation on the local level for representation on the national level, which is kinda scky
@@Jay_JohnsonI absolutely agree, this whole idea gives strong "Americans will use anything but metric" vibe, because you could easily just have fully proportional representation with some existing system, which this system seemingly doesn't even achieve. If people are so desperately attached to having constituency MP (that more often than not doesn't actually do anything for them anyway), you could use the same system as London Assembly, ie constituencies with additional list to make the outcome proportional. The only stated downside of European style PR is corruption/nepotism. Picking candidates is always corrupt, whether it's closed list or the current system, because the party leadership can usually decide who they will (not) put on the list. Just look at Jamie Driscoll for an example or indeed Jeremy Corbyn 🤣
@@Gregor_Ekart This system is proportional but it doesn't achieve local representation in a satisfactory way. I would actually prefer PPP to party list PR with no constituencies but PPP really is just PR where each party list is assigned to constituencies based on vote share. Rather than forcing Thinly spread parties like the Lib dems and Reform on constituencies they are not the most popular in giving them additional seats makes more sense as their supporters can go to the additional representatives to air grievances if their local MPs are unwilling.
MMP (Mixed-Member Proportional), the system already in use in South Korea, gets very similar results in a way I’d consider easier to understand-there are two types of seats, 1st are won by constituency with a standard local election method like FPTP or AV/IRV (like FPTP but you rank all candidates in order of your preference so it can simulate you optimally tactically voting in successive runoff elections until someone gets an actual majority), and then the other set are elected at large by taking the numbers PR wants for the whole legislature, taking into account the number already assigned through constituencies, and getting as close as possible to proportional with what’s left.
And being a system already in use, it’d probably be easier to gather actual significant support.
It sounds like an interesting idea. Do you have a detailed write-up of it? Have you been in touch with, for example, The Electoral Reform Society, and asked their opinion of it?
I’ve sent this video to my MP. She is Cat Smith, and is good for standing up for what is right.
This is excellent stuff, I've come to similar conclusions in my own ravings. The one suggestion I would make is multi-seat constituencies. This mostly solves the main issue of often electing candidates who did not get the most votes in their constituency. With multiple seats you are much more likely to have the #1 local candidate elected.
This seems like it weakens the internal party competition argument, until you realise that parties would often stand multiple candidates to maximise their seats.
The final benifit of multi-representative constituencies is that now many more people will have an MP that they voted for, and thus feel more respresented. Also if one of them stops doing their job (*cough* Nadine Dorries *cough*), then the area is still represented by the other representatives.
An advantage I see with PPP is that the number of seats per consituency does not have to be constant, due to the party/candidate split you articulate so well. As such islands can keep 1 as now, some places might have 2 or 3, and some might even have more.
The microsecond this gets implemented I am moving across the pond to the United Kingdom. Respect to your genius from the even more dysfunctional United States!
Okay but imagine we had this here. Elections would be VERY interesting
Prolly better than what we have now, I'm on board.@@fruitfulz
Literally the system for German Bundestag (lower house) elections, but also for some local elections and also internationally. In English it's called "Mixed-member proportional representation" if you want to do some research on it.
You get one vote for a candidate in your constituency and another vote for the national party. Those two votes don't need to be for the same party, you can "split your ticket". All candidates who win their consituency by simple plurality get directly into parliament (=first past the post). After that, based on the party votes (usually called "2nd vote") it is proportionally calculated how many MP each party needs to get in addition to the direct candidates in order to cancel out the disproportionality from allocating only based on the direct candidates (in Germany this is done individually for every state because federalism). The big parties (CDU, SPD) and especially "regional" parties (CSU, Left, AfD) get more direct candidates than they should get based on their 2nd vote percentages, which means that the parties that don't get a lot of direct candidates but a solid 2nd vote percentage (Greens, FDP) get additional seats to parliament.
Sounds good in theory, but the peculiarity of how the Germans do it massively inflates the parliament. Idk how it's elsewhere. In Germany, there's 299 constituencies for one direct candidate each, and by law the designated size of the parliament is 630, to allow some room for redistribution, but to make the percentage more proportional, the Bundestag has grown to 735 (!) members since a court-mandated reform in 2013. For the next elections there's a reform that limits this redistribution in an effort to limit the size of the Bundestag, but the main cornerstone of the reform is that a party can only receive seats in parliament if it gets over 5% of 2nd votes nationally, which means that direct candidates must be backed by such a party, making it especially hard for the two "smaller" regional parties (CSU, Left) to get any representation in parliament even though they would've won direct candidates. (Fun fact: there's an extra rule for parties representing national minorities allowing them to bypass the 5%threshold, which allows a danish minority party to be in parliament with only one representative)
As you see, no voting system is perfect, and all of them are complicated.
I said this is another comment but I absolutely refuse to call it MMP because there is no mixed member part to my system. Everyone is elected on the same list and this also don’t have seat overhangs or sainte-lague to fix the disproportionality. Yes I definitely think the German system is good but no I don’t think they are the same.
The only real similarity it has is the split ticket voting but the allocation is completely different. That being said I really do respect you taking the time to educate me on the problems with the German system and I’ll definitely continue doing more research into this field :)
@@ProportionalPastthePost This is MMP without local accountability, for example smaller parties like Plaid will become the local MP in areas that voted primarily for Labour. This is guaranteed to happen up and down the country because by definition you're trying to boost small parties seat share while keeping constituencies the same.
Full MMP, open list PR or STV(with 5+ seats) is better than this idea.
@@eoghankelly4377 Funnily enough, the seats won by Plaid are actually very predictable and in line with FPTP so that particular example actually wouldn't happen at all. The local plurality link is weakened for a minority of seats in favour of huge reform to the national picture - I assume that you're from the school of thought that local representation is better than national (which is fair enough and all power to you if that's what you want). In that case, this would mean that those alternatives could be seen as better but in every other aspect (tactical voting, inter-party competition, voter choice) I think there's a clear winner and its not the ones you suggested.
@@ProportionalPastthePost I'm actually not overly in favour of the local link, I think it's overrated. You claim to have developed a system that maintains it and I'm just pointing out that you simply haven't.
Fine, it may not apply to Plaid Cyrmu. But who has to get a UUP MP? Their highest vote share came in Fermanagh & South Tyrone so it would probably be there - so you're going to have tell a place that voted mainly for Sinn Féin that they must have a UUP representative because 'an algortithm said so.' It's ridiculous.
@eoghankelly4377 SF won by 57 votes in 2019. One village changing their mind and I could say the same thing swapping SF with UUP. In this case, if SF didn’t win their seat (which they did in this case) then all that happens is someone with .1% less voteshare gets the seat and everyone who voted UUP in Northern Ireland get better represented in parliament. If anything, the decreased two party dominance of the fringe unionist/nationalist parties in favour of the centre could actually be seen as a good thing and examples like the one you just gave highlights this very well.
Bicameral parliament : Lower House elected by popular vote (i.e, nation-wide proportionality), Upper House elected by constituencies.
Both Houses have different terms in order to account for short-term trends.
Majority in both Houses is required to pass a law.
I think the biggest flaw with this is the nature in which you equalise seats to voteshare. Sure it balances it out nationally however I could see many issues locally.
Imagine a constituency that's highly divided between 4 candidates however one stands above the rest leading to them getting 40% and everyone else getting in the 10% range. If they are low down in the parties performance they may be rejected leading to a constituency being represented by someone who only 10% supported.
This also doesn't solve the problem of buddiness with leadership deciding who's elected as the national party can continue to parachute candidates into safe seats
You're assuming that party allocation is ordered by highest total percentage. A way to mostly avoid this problem is order them by margin. This way, someone who got 40% vs 20%/20%/20% (20 pt margin) would be selected before a seat that had a 2 way race that split 52% to 48%. (4 pt margin)
I'm supposing this would massively increase the preference for a MP with the broadest support in a highly contested seat without changing anything else about the system. It would be interesting to model exactly how much of a difference though.
Maybe I am misunderstanding the system, but how would independent candidates be allocated seats?
Yeah I was wondering the same. Surely they wouldn't have enough votes nationally to achieve a seat by PR and so that seat would be allocated to the best runner-up from one of the larger parties. @proportional past the post
Here after the 2024 election. Clearly Britain needs this system.
33% of the vote = 60% of the seats. Seems to make sense, I don’t see the problem.
I think Britain needs a decade of national renewal and if that was acheived by First Past the Post, maybe that's a better system than it's given credit for
@@j.x.x.r3645I mean yeah I voted labour so I’m inclined to agree with you, but we’ve got to realise that’s subjective. If the tories just got 60% seats with 37% votes we’d be furious. As much as I’m happy with the result of this election I think it’s going to completely undermine voters trust in fptp and massively increase disenfranchisement
@@azlanadil3646 Technically, it was slightly worse; 34% of the vote and and 63% of the seats. (Best explained with 1/3 of the vote and 2/3 of the seats in my opinion.)
@@jacobparker1105 Completely agree. This election was a win for the country and a loss for democracy.
We have this system in Indonesia. The only problem is voters can’t say which MP is actually representing them since a district can be represented by multiple MPs from different parties. As a result, voters can’t hold any MP accountable. So, parties are represented well in this system at the cost of people’s clear and direct representation.
Indonesia?!?! Wow this idea really is going global. Thanks for your insight.
I was aware that Indonesia used a very unique system but I didn’t realize it was similar to mine. The core difference from what I understand is that mine is single member and your system is multi, that doesn’t sound like a big difference but that would deliver 2 very different outcomes as competition decreases and members have a weakened constituency link. I’ll certainly need to do more research into that system but I maintain that the local link is important and if I was to pitch it to voters then I’m sure that would be a key priority for most as well.
How do you do byelections under this system? At the electorate level it would be straightforward, but on the national/list level is it by countback or do you do what the Australian Senate does and get the relevant political party to nominate a replacement.
I mean the UK does that in general anyway with our current system, so I'll take the fact he didn't touch on it as that he didn't change it
Damn good point.
FYI there is no real satisfactory system for by-elections under PR. In Ireland they use AV for by-elections and in Germany the next highest candidate on the list gets elected.
@@davidbatthews3811 With the Hare-Clarke system used in the Australian Capital Territory and Tasmania (Lower house) they will go through the ballots of the departing member and re-calculate the preferences of the voters. Usually it ends up with another member of the same party being elected. Sometimes a member of another political party gets elected (Bob Brown of the Australian Greens in 1983, in Tasmania is the most well known example)
I'm not sure whether I agree with this or not, but I've got a couple of issues anyway.
When New Zealand adopted the MMP system (which I think is similar to the AMS used for some purposes in the UK), it was intentionally decided not to be fully proportional (parties need 5% of the vote to get seats in parliament) because, apparently, countries with fully proportional systems often have difficulties forming governments. I assume this is a real issue, however rather than entirely excluding parties with less than some proportion of votes, I think it would solve the issue just as well to give those parties non-voting seats in parliament.
My other issue is that, even with fully proportional parliaments, governments can be formed out of only slightly over 50% of parliament, excluding almost 50% from decision making. This can lead to flip-flops in power, where new governments reverse the decisions of old governments, and introduce new decisions that may be reversed by the next government. I think this might be alleviated somewhat if royal ascent were replaced with ascent by jury.
I think this relies a bit too much on national politics and national vote share, whereas I'd say MPs should try to get the support of their local population based on what they want. Not everything should be nationwide. By the way, gerrymandering can be fixed by making the districting process independent, like in Ireland. I'm not sure why that was even mentioned in your UK-focused video. Also, the Irish voting system is very easy to understand. You rank and the loser is eliminated and their votes distributed. Fairly simple.
Going to throw another example at you. I don't recall the German state (Lander) which uses the "Best Loser" system. All the plurality-winning candidates (1st place) are elected. This accounts for one-half of the seats. Then the other one-half of seats are allocated proportionally based on statewide votes to the party and independent candidates... typically, those finishing 2nd or 3rd in their district based on vote share. So yes, some districts get two or maybe even three MPs, but they are of other parties (each party can only run one candidate in a district).
This would increase the likelihood that the non-plurality party voters in a particular district are also represented locally. That is a plus in tightly contested districts. It also gets rid of the statewide party list used in the German Federal system which is where the safe seats are given to party big shots. Everyone votes for their candidate and/or party of choice negating the need for tactical voting. And, it is all done on one ballot paper.
I'll add, instead of vote share, you could use "closest margin". Think of it as "near winners". Those candidates from other parties or independents who finished closest to the winner (actual votes or even percentage) would be ranked and the other half of the seats would go to those candidates proportionally according to statewide party votes minus the seats already won by plurality. You might end up with less than perfect proportionality, but it would seem fairer to the voters.
And as an added bonus, this system reduces the effect of tactical voting : no need for candidate C to step down between rounds to prevent B from being elected, since if B wins, the second best voted could also get a seat.
Really well made video, well done!
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If we keep small, single-member, local constituencies, then it generally requires having top-up seats from party lists, which could be closed (candidates are chosen and ranked by each party before the election) or open (chosen by the voter's preference on the ballot paper). However, if instead we have larger (e.g. county-sized) constituencies, with perhaps ten MPs each, then they will automatically be far more proportional in their voting outcomes, obviating the need for top-up seats. The issue then, is people getting their heads around larger, multi-member constituencies, but I think this still provides a local link, and gives the constituents a choice of who they they want to contact if they have an issue, because they can choose an MP from a party whose views are more closely aligned with their own, rather than being stuck with an MP who they didn't vote for.
In The Netherlands 👑, we don’t have constituencies. Voting is fully proportional. There are 150 seats in parlement, so for every 0.667% of the popular vote you get 1 seat.
Who do they then represent?
@@idjles the people who voted for them…
@@JCNL871 The point they're making is they don't actually represent a specific part of the country. In the UK, we like to have local representation in parliament. If you remove constituencies, you have whole swathes of the country who feel like their local issues aren't being fought for and their interests not being represented.
The truth is PR is better for national proportionality, while FPTP is better for local representation. I'd speculate that most Brits like the constituency system, we just don't all like FPTP.
So NL has scattering of parties for every small section making coalitions essential and basically nothing ever changed because it’s either slightly right or left of centre hence its civil service technocracy , also MPs suck up to party leadership that determines rank on list as that determines whether getting in
@@Lilrom2003 I don’t necessarily said it was a perfect system. I just wanted to show that different systems exist, which some people might find themselves interesting
I think where this system might come undone is when you realise that proportionality is achieved at the expense of battleground constituencies getting a candidate that they like. That is the Torys get the save conservative seats, Labour gets the safe labour seats, and the Lib Dems get the safest Lib Dem seats, but constituencies where those three are fighting it out get Reform UK or Green MPs because the big three candidates each haven't performed well enough to get in through their party quota. This in turn incentivises the big three candidates to pull a Bernie Sanders and after securing their party's nomination (to prevent the party from running someone else), they renounce their membership to run as an independent, which would effectively turn the seat into a FPTP election.
Isn't that just Sekihairitsu? BTW, when making a video about election systems, it's always good to have a simulation of the method being calculated (as someone who studied voting systems in college, even academic literature can have a problem explaining voting systems)
Someone else said earlier that this idea reminded them of a system in Germany and when I looked it up I found a link to this. I'd not heard of either system previously but I do think it's different in a few key ways:
- From what I understand, the Japanese system still keeps parallel voting overall whereas PPP makes everyone get voted on the same list
- Sekihairitsu is just for a minority of seats and only accounts for 2nd place whereas my system is for all districts
- Sekihairitsu is far more complex and is basically more of an add-on to an existing system as opposed to its own thing outright.
I didn't want to put a simulation in as I wanted to make it accessible to a wide audience but I have explained in another comment how it would be done. I also have a number breakdown of how many seats each party gets and the Scratch program used to calculate it but again to put that in a video would be very challenging.
Thanks for taking the time to look at my idea and hopefully over time I get to learn even more fun weird and wacky ways that my system compares to other methods.
There is one issue with a system similar to MMP- about half the time, no single party has plurality, meaning coalitions need to be formed between parties. This usually works fine when there is a coalition between two parties and gives the smaller parties more leverage, encouraging people to vote honestly, but kinda breaks when a triple coalition is required. In the case of the 2017 NZ election, a "king maker" type situation occurred where neither the National + Act party combo nor the Labour + Green party combo had enough seats, meaning that the NZ First party essentially had control over the formation of government. In the 2023 election, a triple coalition between National, Act and NZ First was created but the leaders of all three parties spent a month arguing about who was going to be deputy prime minister, eventually settling on some sort of timesharing agreement. So MMP-like systems can have issues with deciding which combination of parties gets power, but I still massively prefer it over two party FPP systems as smaller parties actually have an impact and we get much more choice.
My English is not good,for me your speed is little too fast,and less graphic display,but I think I understand most of it,and you inspired me,I'm thinking about vote system recently too.
I still think that simple straight Proportional Representation is the way to go.
And even a lot easier to explain.
You may or may not agree with his politics but bring this to Nigel Farage if you can
How about we not involve a politician who simps for a fascist?
Or George Galloway
Lol, Farage isnt interested in improving representation beyond that which will give him power. If he gets in that ladder is coming straight up
and this years disproportionality is off the charts
A genuinely interesting argument, I still feel STV to be a better voting system but this is an interesting idea none the less
This is legitimately a great idea, and works a lot better than ranked voting.
Thank you for your kind words :)
What happens to minor parties like Reform or the Greens who have their popularity spread geographically consistently? In 2019, the Greens would have been entitled to 9 seats and the seat they did the 9th best in was Stroud with only 7.5% of vote. What's even the point in even having a locally elected MP if they got less than 10% of the vote? I think your system may work for smaller parties with more geographically centered support such as the SNP or Plaid but fails with smaller parties with more geographically dispersed vote. You can argue that the Greens would have probably gotten more votes and while that seems likely, it doesn't eliminate the problem.
Its a fair point but there are some important things to add to that though.
As you alluded to, because smaller parties have greater odds of getting elected and more parties break away from one another, the spread between each candidate in a seat decreases and shares within each party will move a lot closer to one another. Yes it doesn't eliminate the problem but it does make the numbers a lot less severe.
Also, whilst I accept that PPP has a greater likelihood of candidates with lower voteshares getting elected in some constituencies, there's nothing stopping other systems from getting to very low levels too. Even plurality systems like FPTP are predicted to give some bonkers results this year with some Tory safeseats switching en masse to Reform thus making 3 or even 4 way marginals according to some pollsters that could generate
@@ProportionalPastthePost you can "fix" that problem by diluting the absolute proportionality of the system in the following way: do not elect a candidate if they didn't get above a certain threshold of vote share (say 3% - 5%). Small parties with uniform percentages across the board will get fewer or no seats, so the unallocated seats will have to be distributed to the other parties in a 2nd round.
I like it. Can you provide a complete example from a past election showing what the results would have been seat by seat?
Hi mate, what would you say is the difference between this system that you came up with, compared to Mixed-Member PR or compared to STV?
At a voting conference they held a vote for the best voting system. For the rules of that vote used acceptance voting (tells you something), and the winner was also acceptance voting.
Acceptance voting is super easy. "Vote for 1 or as many candidates as you wish". Old school people who don't understand things can just vote for their favourite as they've always done. People who can comprehend simple instructions can check ("x"?) the box for the multiple candidates they find acceptable, and avoid checking the box for the candidates they find unacceptable.
Or you can just use council system.
Because, frankly speaking, council democracy is still best kind of democracy invented.
Is there deligation
Taiwan's parliament is a mixture. A portion of the seats are based upon electorial districts where the voters living there will vote for the member of the legislature based on "First Past the Post", but a portion of the seats in the parliament are up for grasp using the "proportional system", giving small political parties their voices in the government.
this would be a joke in practice, why should my local representative be someone no one in my constituency wanted
Well, it probably wouldn't be, it might not necessarily be the strongest candidate, but firstly, for it to not be the strongest candidate, the strongest candidate probably wouldn't be that strong, and secondly, it would still be a candidate who was relatively well liked.
I'd support a version that votes candidates by approval rather than choosing a single candidate.
@@superraegun2649 Yea but still you really don't want to have everyone voting for a great man who sounds like he'll help argue to the local councils & all that other stuff they do outside of the parliament for schools, local medical stuff & heritage & instead you get screwed over with the guy who stood there because he wanted to go with an area he'd get a good few votes because it has a good conservative leaning & boom you get a man like Boris who screws you over & let's the schools continue to decay. at least that's what'd happen in my area we need people like the DUP member Jim Shannon who actually cares about the local area has lived here his whole life pretty much & isn't caring much for the DUP's actual policies but for his people. Men like the ones I can't name aren't likely to be the nice people who sit in local prize days at the school that is really unsustainable or knocking on people's doors to try & raise support. But instead some guy who somehow won over the outer belfast towns through saying the right things & then does a few things for Regent & maybe Saintsfield highschool but never bothers going down the penisula because the schools are shitholes.
@@superraegun2649 I like the idea that you can vote for as many as you like (approval rather than favourite only).
Having lived in New Zealand for 15 years and experienced MMP the big advantage is that because there usually isn't an outright majority, parties need to work more co-operatively to achieve their goals, this means that parties are less extreme than they would otherwise be.
However I have spoken to some well educated people who have said that they split their vote, voting for their preferred candidate and then party vote for the other party, in order to maintain balance. I do find this quite a strange idea, if you think a candidate is the best person to sit in the house, surely you want to give their party the vote to increase the chance of being one of the list MPs elected.
Whatever system is employed, tactical voting is still possible as parties may agree to not stand candidates in seats so as to not split the vote. The former PM and ACT leaders were seen discussing such a situation over tea in order to ensure the ACT leader retained his seat, and his party would support the National party when in government.
Candidates who choose to run as a part of a party that is running other candidates have the disadvantage of possibly getting skipped over. Parties would re-organize to be candidate-independent funding/lobbying groups and every candidate would present themselves as independents. Then the top (however many seats there are) most popular people would win and you've reinvented first past the post but made the whole question of who is aligned with whom more opaque... oh and you have two (now identical, since each candidate is their own party) ballots that everyone has to fill out. This is even worse than the current arrangement since if one person gets 30% of the nation vote, they would still get only 1 seat. Then to avoid throwing away one's vote on someone who is overelected, voters might try to avoid voting for popular candidates to make their vote count more, but that's ultimately a race to the bottom as everyone votes for the most unassuming of the candidates that they feel positively about (or they wouldn't think that far ahead, and would waste their vote on someone popular, either way it's bad).
Study some voting theory and try again. I like your enthusiasm though.
The way to solve this is to require parties to declare local/independent variants (eg Conservatives Barking or Conservative (insert lobby here)) and set a cap of 650/(1 + number of subparties). This would eliminate anyone trying to game the system.
I’m definitely seeing ways to improve PPP further and you do raise a very good point but that’s something that’s easily fixable with a bit of legislation.
@@ProportionalPastthePost I don't think that would fix the issue though, candidates would just create parties that are unaffiliated on paper, while still ultimately receiving funding from the groups. Maybe if we made it illegal for corporations and lobbying groups to donate to campaigns at all then that could work, but otherwise I'm seeing mostly downsides to a political organization backing any two candidates in the same party under PPP.
Alternatively you could ban being independent, or ban organizations from donating to multiple independent candidates... but that seems counterproductive.
Unfortunately I don't think there's that kind of legislative quick fix to this issue.
@@typha Is there a need to ban independents though? It might be enough to remove the subsidiary rule of FPTP so independents can only get a seat if their vote share already entitles them to it. Of course this could seem unfair because it would make it hard for them to win a seat, given that they only run in one district. So maybe allow them to register in multiple districts. Then where they get elected where there support is highest, and if they would be entitled to more seats, those would return to the pool of seats to be allocated by parties. You could say those voting for the independent risk their surplus voting power being wasted, or you could say the independents also appear on the list vote once they are registered in as many districts as many is needed to register lists. Then you could use a spare vote (ranked ballot) system on the list side to reuse these surplus votes.
I tried calculating Iceland's last election with this method but came to a dead stop once I realized that in the UK, 1 constituency is 1 seat, so I'm not sure how to calculate this in a country where technically land doesn't vote.
Our D'Hondt method isn't perfect perhaps, but it's at least easier to calculate.
It wasn't always broken back when people focused on electing a good local MP, which is what the system is supposed to do. It's not supposed to be about big national parties.
I don't see why MPs couldn't take their seats for granted in this. Voters in very party-loyal seats (which there are plenty of in the UK) would still be way more likely to vote for their party's candidate. Closed lists might seen more obviously like they're open to corruption within parties, but the UK has this problem too for this exact reason - the party structures responsible for nominating candidates pick who gets to run in the safest seats.
I’m all for PR until I see Farage who grew up goose stepping (and his party) win 14% of the vote😭
Whether you like him, his party, and his supporters or not, their views are a legitimate component of the public opinion in this country, and they have a right to be heard. It would be undemocratic to ignore and suppress that because you think you know better. This is especially true for politicians in strong positions of power, such as the Labour party now find themselves in. It is one of the biggest failings of the Tories over the years. Let's not encourage Labour to do the same thing.
Let's remember that an MP is the voice in parliament for all of their constituents, not just those who voted for them or agree with them, and a government is there to serve and govern on behalf of the whole country, not just those who voted for them or agree with them.
@@ConorChewy Yes they should have a right to be heard, but not 80 or so seats (which is roughly 13% of 650)
@ConorChewy Yeah fr, although the issue might be a nazi party possibly taking power, the uk would never let that happen, and farage represents millions of voters
Labour have a supermajority with just 33% of the vote. Keeping extremists on the sideline is much more likely under PR.
@@cdaaat6036I cannot stand Farage but under strict proportionality his party would be entitled to 93 seats🤔. I can guarantee that if your favoured party was severely under represented under FPTP you would be furious?
→ I'm not quite sure how independent candidates can get in (except when all parties have their quota expired) - they don't have a party whose ticket to fill?
→ In Germany, we had a 2-vote system for our federal parliament (and I think also most state parliaments) for a long time. It worked a bit differently, though: The base number of deputees in the parliament is twice the number of districts. The party votes decide how many seats that party can get (if the party gets at least 5%, or at least 3 directly elected candidates). These seats are distributed per state, then the directly elected candidates from the districts in that state are assigned, and then the rest filled up from the (per-state) party list. Some parties had more direct candidates elected (in some states) than their share, so in that case the total number of deputees would be increased (and then, for proportionality, also other parties got more seats). Recently this was changed (starting from the next election) to have a cap on the total number of seats, so when a party got more district seats than their share of second votes, not all their directly elected candidates would actually get in. This caused quite some protests from some of the smaller, but regionally strong parties.
→ I think your system could be improved by increasing the total number of members of parliament to higher than the number of districts - so from some districts more than one person can get in, avoiding the paradoxies that some districts are represented by one of the worst resulting people, just because everyone else's list is already filled up. (Though then you might also want to allow multiple candidates of the same party to run in a district.)
Combining this with ranked choice for the party vote could significantly improve the German political landscape too, in my opinion. A ranked choice vote would be an acceptable increase in complexity, given that it could ameliorate the substantial distortion caused by tactical voting in response to the five percent threshold.
The current trend is in the opposite direction sadly, where the most important exception to the threshold rule, winning three districts in the first vote, was recently removed by the ruling coalition.
Brazil already does something similar, but here the constituencies are much larger (basically, each of the 27 states is a constituency).
How it works here: you vote for your candidate. The vote is counted both for his party and himself. Each party gets a number of seats proportional to the ammount of votes they received.
The elected deputies are picked starting from the one with the highest ammount of votes and then picking the one directly following him until all the parties' seats are filled.
The ammount of deputies each state elects is allocated somewhat accordingly to the proportion of people a state has in regards to the nations' total population.
I don't know whether this system will work, but I'm all for anything that dissuades tactical voting.
I'm tactically choosing between putting ham or turkey on my sandwich so if you have any advice on that regard as well then it would be much appreciated.
Norway is extremely close to proportional representation: First we have about 20 constituencies ("fylke") instead of single-seat boroughs, all using proportional representation, then on top of that the final 20 members are allocated so as to fix any remaining country-wide non proportionalism, but you only get any of these if your total vote count is at least 4% nation wide.
We do have some "interesting" intentional skewing however, like the fact that the number or representatives per "fylke" is not allocated by population only, but by a combination of land area and population so that very sparsely areas in the north (particularly Finnmark which borders to Russia) get about 4 times as many representatives as the population only would generate.
It's great that you're thinking about this. There are so many factors involved in the aim and design of a voting system. All of them have flaws and merits. My own view is that the most achievable, practical and realistic improvement that could be made for UK General Elctions would be to have a runoff vote between the top two candidates in constituencies where the winning canddiate failed to secure over 50% of the vote share.
The fact that the MP that wins a constituency by a plurality can possibly not be the MP of that constituency would make this system seem unfair to voters. The national makeup of the vote might be proportional but the entire aspect of accountability via the local MP is for naught once the MP isn’t even the plurality winner
I think you have a great idea, and it would be worth doing a video revealing how the country would look after the 4 July election!! You'd have to assume that everyone votes for the party who represents the candidate they voted for...but actually i think most people would probably do that anyway?? Can't imagine why people would for vote a different party to their candidate unless they were doing it tactically.
I know others have said it too, but I dont think it's as simple as you might think. The Alternative Vote from 2011 was simpler and even that confused people.
The idea of 'skipping' canditates who have 'won' their seat but exceeded their party's quota would leave people feeling like their vote didn't count, even though their party vote did count. It may be better to pitch it that the party vote is your main vote and the constituency candidate vote is just a subsidiary vote that may or may not be counted.
I still think it's a good idea though.
Hi! Electoral systems nerd from Italy here, mathematician Michel Balinski came up with basically this in 2008, calling it fair majority voting (except for the two ballots part that I understand is to keep independents in the race but I don't think that's the best way mostly due to decoy candidates running as independent, you can't really prevent that legally, we had that issue with the Italian electoral law in 2001), with a better algorithm to decide which party elects its MPs in which one-member constituency, I personally think having constituencies electing 2 or 3 MPs each would be better for local representation but I absolutely agree with your cause against FPTP
Also thought this is basically that, except with the personalized aspect (bit like open lists, but two ballots..?). I assume the two ballots is to make ticket splitting possible, to support a different party than the local candidate, but this might make it not intuitive as your party vote will basically not help your candidate get elected on a local level in that it doesn't give any extra marginal support for their party, and your personal vote will not necessary support a candidate who's seat you tried to legitimize on the party vote level. Interesting side effect on the biproportional principle combined with panachage.
I might have been unclear. Of course ticket splitting implies you try to give support to both separately, but compare this to a parallel vote system (FPTP+listPR totally independent), where your local candidate getting elected doesn't need double legitimacy, only plurality in personal votes. Here your personal vote marginally helps them, and your list vote marginally helps your favorite list. Under this personalized FMV/PPP your local candidate seems to need party vote legitimacy insofar as proportionality is a main goal AND personal vote legitimacy too (although in a non-plurality, non-constituency-based way). This is what makes it weird on second thought.
@@StanAbelHUyeah that too, but I think his idea is to allow independents to have some chances to be elected, none would get a full seat in the proportional part but due to how rests are allocated with his method they would theoretically be in the race for those, problem is major parties can easily play the system with decoy candidates in favourable constituencies and eat all of the non-integer seats
@@Gianni1cv I'm familiar with the problem of that Italian system, actually in Hungary they might have had some inspiration from that to develop the current one, but that doesn't substract all votes of winners but merely adds "surplus" votes for winners, making it at least robust to this kind of manipulation (Notwithstanding it's otherwise one of the worst systems in many respects). I am not sure that totally applied with FMV. But in case it does in this version, I'm going to copy my comment on another comment here:
"Is there a need to ban independents though? It might be enough to remove the subsidiary rule of FPTP so independents can only get a seat if their vote share already entitles them to it. Of course this could seem unfair because it would make it hard for them to win a seat, given that they only run in one district. So maybe allow them to register in multiple districts. Then where they get elected where there support is highest, and if they would be entitled to more seats, those would return to the pool of seats to be allocated by parties. You could say those voting for the independent risk their surplus voting power being wasted, or you could say the independents also appear on the list vote once they are registered in as many districts as many is needed to register lists. Then you could use a spare vote (ranked ballot) system on the list side to reuse these surplus votes."
@@StanAbelHUI mean if they run in multiple constituencies they de facto become a party, the point of being independent MPs is campaigning on local issues, which I find a non-issue as in multi-member constituency systems the correlation of votes by MPs from the same constituency is usually no different from that of two random MPs from the same parties. The second ranked ballot seems an excessive effort for something that most likely won't happen if not once in 5 elections. Note that the same issue with vacant seats arises when any MP resigns, and no list side trick can help you there.
I'm not aware of how the Hungarian system deals with the parallel vote, but I know that any party needs to run in at least a ridiculous amount of single-member constituencies as I remember MKKP having issues with not splitting the opposition vote in contestable regions, doesn't that alone prevent decoy list manipulations?
Here's the catch: Big city centers or areas with minorities (Wales, NIR, London, Manchester,...) often produce more diverse voting results, while more rural areas are more likely to vote for traditional parties with smaller parties mostly underperforming here. This will result in Candidates from a traditional party in rural areas not winning a seat with 30-40% of the vote, while city-center - constituencies will often send between two or five representatives for various small parties. Effectively, politically diverse constituencies will be overrepresented in the House of Commons using this principle. Multiple 5-10% parties will get their representatives from a minimal pool of Constituencies and wide rural areas will not have any representatives.
When I was designing my dream electoral system I came up with a very similar idea, except I only allocated about 15% of the seats this way, the rest were closed-list proportional. It was just a sort of backup to make sure there was at least one MP from each region. Context: New Zealand.
As someone who is from a former British colony that is now part of the Commonwealth, the country basically copies the UK in so many aspects. We're in a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system based on the Westminster system. We elect our local MPs once every 5 years using FTTP.
I do agree that my country should also adopt this PPtP system
Wow, this is almost deceptively simple! I guess the only shortcoming that would somehow have to be solved is the 4th-place-getting-the-seat problem in some constituencies that other people are mentioning.
This is what I've been looking for but could not quite put into words.
This sounds so reasonable and logical…. It will never happen
It's a nice idea but I can't see it ever being acceptable to have a single member constituency where the winner has LESS votes than someone else.
Every single system will have some kind of wrong winner. Twice in the UK and four times in the US have leaders that came second been elected for office and with RCV methods, transfer votes can easily give 2nd or 3rd place a victory (and that’s ignoring all the other problems with RCV like double counting extremist votes, simplicity, proportionality etc). Sure, this doesn’t always award the plurality winner the gold medal, but it does most of the time and also takes into account the silver and bronze medals that are technically more impressive when you ignore the placement. It’s a hurdle, but one that can certainly be jumped over at the right angle.
I think that this system can work well as a component of a Dual-Member Proportional to elect the second MP in each constituency (DMP is a PR system created in Canada with the first MP in each constituency elected under FPTP & the second MP in each constituency being elected based on the region-wide votes as a top-up MP)
Just dissolve parliament altogether and let the king rule as an absolute monarch
Party like it’s 1224 🏰🧙♂️🏰
Why bother with the second vote and the national party vote? Why not total-up all the votes for the candidates of a party to derive the national quota?
It allows people to like the local candidate and vite for them but maybe they prefer the national platform of another party more would be my guess.
I’m in NZ and hate our MMP system because 1/2 the MPs are unelected turkeys accountable to no one. I like your PPP system much better
Better than what we have in America... Legitimately 2 parties with any deviation being fringe. Gotta love alternative methods and I really wish both our countries reformed them to be more democratic - the institutions we have are inherited from a time when voting *was not meant to represent everyone*
This is actually genius. Granted, it probably needs a little polishing around the edges but the principal and idea is fantastic.
Do it like the french. Two rounds, and two elections.
First election is your typical General one, except that the Deputy PM gets chosen by the winning party/coalition instead of a PM. The PM gets elected separately, by the people on a one man one vote basis, two years later. Both elections have two rounds, requiring absolute majority. With a big showdown between the two largest parties in the second round. This is to ensure there are no parties splitting the vote.
You can even skip the entire second round by using the single transferable vote system where you rank candidates from most preferred to least preferred, and your vote goes up the ladder up until it gets to the top two contenders remaining.
This ensures, a complete separations of the Executive and Legislative branch of government, where the people can, through basically a confirmation vote to muzzle whoever is in power at that time. Thus ending the unchecked 4 to 5 years of basically one party rule. Forcing the government to compromise and keep voters happy. It also grants more legitimacy to both branches. As voters can now vote for the MP of their choosing, AND the PM of their choosing without having to compromise.
The system in Germany is much easier. MPs that win their seat win a seat. And then if the seat allocation is not proportionate, parties can add seats from a predetermined list. This makes for some huge parliaments sometimes but it‘s easy to understand and proportional.
I suggested this to the Electoral Reform society. They emailed back and mentioned Hungary where they do something similar. The problem is you get some MPs elected on very small local vote shares. I think Hare-Clark may be the best compromise between having local and national representation.
I have no affiliation with the UK, so this doesn't affect me but I wish you and all Brits the best in achieving this ambitious goal. In my opinion, such a voting system is long overdue and perhaps the only reason why you're stuck with the current system is that back when it was established, no one knew better (or it was actually better under the contemporary circumstances) and since then, no one dared to, or was successful in organizing the change. Proportional Past the Post seems quite similar to how voting is done in Germany (even though there are still differences).
Best of luck! Establishing a good voting system is a powerful step in turning things around for the better.
I think its the most graceful idea I’ve seen yet to fix our system, but i worry how regional parties like Plaid Cymru would fair. Northern Ireland also has a very different political landscape to mainland Britain so seeing how that is taken into account in a national election would be interesting.
I’ve not yet heard the word graceful put to this idea so thanks for that :) I’ll add that to the “things I didn’t expect to happen this week” list (which currently is very very long).
Funnily enough, Plaid Cymru is probably the most boring party in terms of how much change happens, or really should I say lack thereof. In each year, they win 4 seats and they’re consistently the same from the same pool of 5 or 6 iirc (which also happens to closely match FPTP). SNP is the regional party that changes the most but that is to be expected because I don’t know about you but winning 95% of the seats with 50% of the vote (2015) isn’t exactly fair imo.
As for NI, PPP very much would lead to a more moderate political scene as the DUP and SF win less seats but also independents seem to do well sporadically to and I think that’s due to the wildly different voteshares the major parties have constituency to constituency (I believe in one year there were 2 seats in which SF won 60% and 2% of the vote respectively). When making the seat maps NI is noticeably colourful which depending on your view could be seen as a good or bad thing (but I say a good thing because it reflects the moderates in NI that currently don’t have a significant voice in UK elections).
@@ProportionalPastthePostFYI the PC vote is closely correlated to how Welsh speaking the area tends to be, so they never get anywhere near in places like Monmouth?
i didn't get it until 7:45, its much simpler to say "parties get directly proportional amount of seats, but individual leaders also have to be highly preffered, encouraging competition"
Actually you can reduce to one single vote and consider the vote in the candidate as a vote in the party (as many systems do). Yet, it does not consider independents whom should be allowed to run for office.