Thursday, January 13, 2005

A New Electoral System

Reading Brash's witterings and various comments on them inspired me to think up a new electoral system - you could call it "A La Carte" voting.

Basically each party gets allocated a number of seats "N" proportional to their vote.

How they allocate the seats is up to them, but it has to be a predetermined system.

For instance, party A could have a conventional ordered list and elect the top "N" people on the list.

Party B could count votes by electorate, and elect those of their candidates who "won" by the biggest margin in each electorate (or lost by the smallest margin).

Party C could list candidates by preference and let the voters decide on an STV basis.

I'm sure there are other ways I haven't thought of..

Wouldn't it be fun! NZ would always win any competition for the wierdest voting system.

2 comments:

Rich said...

I'm mostly trying to be satirical - I can't see anything wrong with MMP and don't believe there is any clamour for referenda every 10 years on our voting system.

Having said that, since Brash thinks we have too many MPs I've thought of a way of allowing for that to. Parties could choose to return say, one MP for each four elected, that MP getting four votes (but only one salary).

Rich said...

I agree we don't have too many MPs. The cost of Parliament is tiny compared to overall public spending.

Having fewer MPs and by extension, fewer ministers means that ministers have bigger departments and less political control over the public servants.