I’m not very well-versed on all this but it seems
First Past The Post
Benefits the two parties in a two-party duopoly system like that of the US. Boom or bust, black or white. When the party in power pisses you off you vote their competitor even if holding your nose.
Seems like there must be a better way, maybe just not as good for those who prefer shooting fish in a barrel
The problem with proportional representation is that it assumes candidates are fungible.
It’s bad enough that people vote for a party over an individual, and inherently limits the element of trusting the human being that should be the deciding factor in how people vote. Systematically assigning vote to a party rather than a person is much worse.
I see your point, but the reality is most people do vote for parties rather than people.
I imagine you would see more smaller parties in a PR system anyway, rather than the current big neoliberal tent parties.
But when you have a problem, you complain to your representative that represents your area and knows all the details. That’s a powerful thing.
In the UK at least there are a lot of seats that are swung by those holding them rather than their party.
You can’t prevent that.
But any system that actively enforces party lines should be automatically disqualified as a legitimate electoral system. It strengthens the power of the dumbest, least informed voters at the expense of rational voters willing to actually understand who candidates are.
There are versions of PR that mitigate this issue. Mixed-member PR sacrifices a little bit of precision in the proportionality, but limits the seats assigned to party lists to only some additional ones used to balance out the un-proportionality of the results. Most of the elected body is not from party lists.
You can also carry out a vote where you choose the party for the proportional vote, and then rank the members of that party. And the party assigns the seats they win to the candidates with the widest support.
That doesn’t solve the issue of people liking candidates from multiple parties though.
I’ve not heard of that one before, but I can see the reasoning behind it. Is there a name for the system that I can look up?
I’d love to help more, but it’s been years since I studied electoral systems. I’m not even sure if there is anyone currently using that system, or if it was just a theoretical election model.
Mitigation isn’t good enough.
Any member of the body not being scrutinized by the entire relevant electorate and actually elected on the ballot is not OK.