The problem is more about List PR. Not so much about minor parties that can't get 5%.
The German legislature is occupied by persons, not robots for the party.
People should vote for (or against) persons to represent them in government. Parties are useful, but they should not be burned into the structure of the body politic.
"In the 2024 presidential election, in which Donald Trump won with 49.8% of the popular vote, a majority of voters wasted their votes on losing candidates."
this statement seems to blame the voters for wasting their vote. the election system is to blame.
In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump won with 49.8% of the popular vote, and the election system wasted the votes of a majority of voters.
(if each state give their electoral college seats proportionally to parties based on the breakdown of the state vote, or if each state (or many states anyway) gave their electoral college seats to the popular choice across the country, then fair results might be produced.)
a way to address the fragmentation of the Bundestag is drop country-wide top-up,
do the leveling seats at the level of provinces or regions (sub-province units) with DM of 30 at most, then small parties whose support is scattered all across the country would be denied seats.
the spare vote or other party-based preferential voting could be used to prevent waste and funnel votes to the 7 or so largest parties.
or a party-based Gove system/Indirect STV could be used to set the cross-party transfers, thus saving election officials (or vote count machine) the job of looking at each ballot of small parties.
"In the most recent Ireland elections using ranked ballots, only one percent of votes were cast for parties who failed to win any seats and were therefore wasted."
they were only ones not represented, but that is not measure of wasted votes.
Ireland uses STV and that is strictly district level, so we can't know from that what proportion of votes were not used to elect a winner,
except general rule is that under STV, 80 to to 90 percent of votes in each district are used to elect a winner. so that then could apply overall - and we see that 10 to 20 percent were wasted probably.
Just as in U.S. presidential system we can't say 49.8 percent of votes were used to elect Trump. the Republican votes in New York - the millions of them - were ignored and wasted. for example, even if those voters did in fact get their way.
Thanks for sharing. Great thoughts. I wonder if another benefit of ranking parties might be that rather than the party winning the largest plurality of seats getting the first crack at forming a coalition, that privilege would go to the IRV majority winning party.
Interesting idea Nathan. Off the top of my head, that would seem to make a lot of sense. And would be easy to do on the same voting equipment that is counting the voters' ranked ballots to ensure voters for small minor parties are not wasting their votes on a party preference that cannot make the victory threshold. It would also make it more likely that the party winning the first crack at forming a coalition will be able to do so successfully, since it would be winning the majority position by virtue of attracting second, third etc rankings from the voters of other parties. So...I like the idea.
The problem is more about List PR. Not so much about minor parties that can't get 5%.
The German legislature is occupied by persons, not robots for the party.
People should vote for (or against) persons to represent them in government. Parties are useful, but they should not be burned into the structure of the body politic.
"In the 2024 presidential election, in which Donald Trump won with 49.8% of the popular vote, a majority of voters wasted their votes on losing candidates."
this statement seems to blame the voters for wasting their vote. the election system is to blame.
In the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump won with 49.8% of the popular vote, and the election system wasted the votes of a majority of voters.
(if each state give their electoral college seats proportionally to parties based on the breakdown of the state vote, or if each state (or many states anyway) gave their electoral college seats to the popular choice across the country, then fair results might be produced.)
a way to address the fragmentation of the Bundestag is drop country-wide top-up,
do the leveling seats at the level of provinces or regions (sub-province units) with DM of 30 at most, then small parties whose support is scattered all across the country would be denied seats.
the spare vote or other party-based preferential voting could be used to prevent waste and funnel votes to the 7 or so largest parties.
or a party-based Gove system/Indirect STV could be used to set the cross-party transfers, thus saving election officials (or vote count machine) the job of looking at each ballot of small parties.
"In the most recent Ireland elections using ranked ballots, only one percent of votes were cast for parties who failed to win any seats and were therefore wasted."
they were only ones not represented, but that is not measure of wasted votes.
Ireland uses STV and that is strictly district level, so we can't know from that what proportion of votes were not used to elect a winner,
except general rule is that under STV, 80 to to 90 percent of votes in each district are used to elect a winner. so that then could apply overall - and we see that 10 to 20 percent were wasted probably.
Just as in U.S. presidential system we can't say 49.8 percent of votes were used to elect Trump. the Republican votes in New York - the millions of them - were ignored and wasted. for example, even if those voters did in fact get their way.
There is quite a lot of talk about "wasted votes" here. I think disambiguation would be helpful. https://luckorcunning.blogspot.com/2024/03/can-wasted-vote-really-mean-all-these.html
Thanks for sharing. Great thoughts. I wonder if another benefit of ranking parties might be that rather than the party winning the largest plurality of seats getting the first crack at forming a coalition, that privilege would go to the IRV majority winning party.
Interesting idea Nathan. Off the top of my head, that would seem to make a lot of sense. And would be easy to do on the same voting equipment that is counting the voters' ranked ballots to ensure voters for small minor parties are not wasting their votes on a party preference that cannot make the victory threshold. It would also make it more likely that the party winning the first crack at forming a coalition will be able to do so successfully, since it would be winning the majority position by virtue of attracting second, third etc rankings from the voters of other parties. So...I like the idea.
Any downsides to your proposal, I wonder?
Good question!
I don't think we can actually control who forms working majority in the House.
the good it might do in one case, it might prevent prevent working majority being formed in other time, thus producing deadlock.
it is that after -election negotiation that disempowers voters but don't see that arbitrary rules are solution.
but have no ideas myself.
instead of ranked ballots, a party could register in advance to transfer its votes to another party in cases when not make threshold
like Gove or indirect STV, but party based.
But anything might work.
P.S. I'm not big on voting machines, especially if no human oversight.