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Originally Posted by Charlatan
Regarding the compromise... ultimately what it does is make the issue of a Christmas election a dead issue. Neither side can truly get any milage out of it they are both sharing in the repsponsibility of the election timing.
I agree with your take on if vis-a-vis the shooting but that isn't the point in this sort of political posturing... this manouver, gives the opposition an out and renders the "issue of a Christmas election" a non-issue.
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My point is, offering to rob someone instead of shooting them does not absolve you of shooting them.
Saying "call an election in Febuary, or we will call an election in December" does not absolve you of calling an election in December. 3 parties voted for a December election, and one party for a Spring election.
If you care when the election is, then you know the positions of the various parties. 3 are for a Christmas election, one is for a Spring election.
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As for proportional representation. My feeling on the matter is that it should be a combination of MPs elected by the electorate (based on "locality of representation") as well as representation based on a percentage of the popular vote gaining you X number of seats.
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If you divide the popular vote by party, those X seats are more bound to the party than to the electorate. If you "balance parliament" so that it matches the popular vote, then a massive chunk of parliament will be more beholden to party than to a particular electorate.
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The system still functions as it does now with ballots being counted by "little old ladies in church basements".
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*nod*, it manages the "hard to cheat" requirement. It fails on the "
MPs are beholden to their electorate more than the party" and "
MPs are geographically bound" requirements.
Political parties are, if anything, too powerful under the current system. Any PR system that makes membership in a party more important is not good.
I have figured out how to do it, if you do away with the "one person -- one vote" in parliament:
Each riding has 10 seats. Each "seat" is a vote in the house of commons.
You run for a seat with a running mate. This is called a "slate".
The 10 seats are allocated in a pseudo-fair way amongst the slates voted for in the riding. If a slate has 50% of the votes, it gets roughly 5 seats.
The person running and their running mate split up the seats. The seats are s split, but the person running gets
strictly more seats than the running mate.
Every person with at least 1 seat gets to vote in the HoC. The number of votes that person has is equal to the number of seats they have. Members of a slate, technically, have no responsibilities to each other once elected. In practice this may not hold.
Technical details:
The only purpose of the "running mate" is to reduce the varience in the number of people in the HoC, and somewhat reduce the number of votes one person can hold in the HoC. If your slate is barely elected (1 or 2 seats), your running mate does not get into the HoC.
Slate Seats/Candidate Seats/Running Mate Seats
0/0/0 ... 1/1/0 ... 2/2/0 ... 3/2/1 ... 4/3/1 ... 5/3/2 ... 6/4/2 ... 7/4/3 ... 8/5/3 ... 9/5/4 ... 10/6/4
The "running mate" is sadly more beholden to the candidates support than I'd like. But giving some MPs up to (theoretically) 10 times more votes than others also seems yucky.