Quote:
Originally posted by Ustwo
The problem with proportioanl systems is it gives a lot more power to the fringe groups.
If you NEED the votes of some nutty party that 8% of the people voted for, you end up giving them far more then their wacky 8% is due.
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First of all, it's sort of the point of proportional representation to give more power to the "fringe" groups. Unless you mean that the fringe groups are, literally, given more power than the majority groups, which is patently false.
Secondly, if 8% voted for that "nutty" party, perhaps that party isn't so whacky? That's almost one tenth the population. Should we simply ignore them?
Now, I understand that there's an overhead for giving each party the floor so I'm not advocating giving every small percentage representation. To that end, I'm not advocating a purely proportional electoral system, I'm just objecting to a purely First Past the Post system. This is what we currently use in Ontario and, thanks to it, the NDP party saw their popularity go
up to 14% but saw their seats go
down to 7 out of 103.
To give you an idea of how much aliasing FPtP produces, here are some of this year's election stats:
party - popularity - seats
pre:
PC - 45% - 59
Liberal - 40% - 35
NDP - 12% - 9
post:
Liberal - 46% - 72
PC - 35% - 24
NDP - 14% - 7
So, the Liberals gained a modest 6% in popularity but more than doubled their seats! The PC lost 10% popularity but lost more than half their seats. Furthermore, the NDP lost official party status due to this anomalous phenomenon, made possible only by First Past the Post...