When a republic is considering reforming the way it elects holders of power, there are certain desirable criteria the chosen method should have: officeholders should be agreeable to all citizens, not just to a fraction of them, since maximizing agreeableness will select for competence and the desire to do right by the people; in bodies with many members (e.g. a legislature, but not a singular executive such as a president or prime minister), the various view points of the voters should be proportionately represented by the various members of the body; and the system should be relatively simple, to allow the members of the republic to verify that things have been done properly, ensuring the system is trusted.
There are systems I have considered that suceed better at the first two criteria, but at the cost of being sufficiently complex to make me worry that practical issues could arise if implemented, and that it could be hard to convince enough people that they are better, which will be needed in order to get them made into law. The following is my current best hypothesis for an ideal system that meets these three criteria, particularly aiming to be simple both to actually use and to explain to people:
Voters are provisioned with a ballot with three fields: first a field to elect the representative of their single-member district, where they can either approve or disapprove of as many candidates as they wish (approval voting); second, a field where they may indicate a single republic-wide list of candidates that they feel best represents them; and third, a field where they may name as many candidates from their chosen list as they wish, to indicate their approval (party-list proportional representation with within-party approval voting).
The single-member districts will select roughly 2/3rds of the body, with the most approved candidate winning in each district. A “similarity score” will be calculated for each winner comparing them to each list: if half of the voters who approved of Charlie voted for the Aleph List, Charlie’s similarity score for Aleph will be 0.5; if instead only a tenth of his approvers voted for the list, the similarity score will be 0.1
For each list, the sum of that list’s similarity score with each candidate will be considered to be the initial number of effective representatives that list has in the body (note that this means the district candidates’ party affiliation does not factor in to this system, since this is based on voter behavior patterns). For each list, consider the ratio of number of votes for the list divided by the number of representatives for the list: whichever list has the most votes per representative is the most underrepresented list, so the most approved candidate from the list will be appointed, increasing the number of effective representatives by one. Keep adding seats to the least represented lists, until the remaining 1/3rd of the body has been appointed, thereby giving the entire composition of the body.
Note that the use of approval voting ensures district candidates will be incentivized to appeal to a broad base, encouraging them to find solutions that take care of everybody’s needs, instead of rewarding them for creating division within their community; while the leveling seats ensure that all voices, not just the most centeral perspectives, contribute to the government.
One potential criticism of this method is the appeal to precedence: while using party lists (modulo the similarity scores, which seems like a straightforward and uncontroversial improvement) in this way has been used to much success in the Nordic countries, approval voting is (somewhat surprisingly IMO) not well established. As far as governments go, I only know of St. Louis and Fargo, ND using approval- that is, two municipalities. One could observe the concern that we don’t have much empirical data on how approval works in the real world.
One response is simply to respond that experiments have to be done, otherwise we will never know what works. Perhaps it is ideal to do experiments starting small (e.g. Fargo and St. Louis) and building up towards larger results; but I also have a sense of urgency that voting reform in the US matters greatly, and the faster it can be implemented, the less likely the world is to go in a bad direction v within the next {5, 10, 20, 50} years.
The other response is to observe that while we lack empirical data, the theoretical case for Approval is very solid and promising (I don’t have time to further substantiate this right now)
When a republic is considering reforming the way it elects holders of power, there are certain desirable criteria the chosen method should have: officeholders should be agreeable to all citizens, not just to a fraction of them, since maximizing agreeableness will select for competence and the desire to do right by the people; in bodies with many members (e.g. a legislature, but not a singular executive such as a president or prime minister), the various view points of the voters should be proportionately represented by the various members of the body; and the system should be relatively simple, to allow the members of the republic to verify that things have been done properly, ensuring the system is trusted.
There are systems I have considered that suceed better at the first two criteria, but at the cost of being sufficiently complex to make me worry that practical issues could arise if implemented, and that it could be hard to convince enough people that they are better, which will be needed in order to get them made into law. The following is my current best hypothesis for an ideal system that meets these three criteria, particularly aiming to be simple both to actually use and to explain to people:
Voters are provisioned with a ballot with three fields: first a field to elect the representative of their single-member district, where they can either approve or disapprove of as many candidates as they wish (approval voting); second, a field where they may indicate a single republic-wide list of candidates that they feel best represents them; and third, a field where they may name as many candidates from their chosen list as they wish, to indicate their approval (party-list proportional representation with within-party approval voting).
The single-member districts will select roughly 2/3rds of the body, with the most approved candidate winning in each district. A “similarity score” will be calculated for each winner comparing them to each list: if half of the voters who approved of Charlie voted for the Aleph List, Charlie’s similarity score for Aleph will be 0.5; if instead only a tenth of his approvers voted for the list, the similarity score will be 0.1
For each list, the sum of that list’s similarity score with each candidate will be considered to be the initial number of effective representatives that list has in the body (note that this means the district candidates’ party affiliation does not factor in to this system, since this is based on voter behavior patterns). For each list, consider the ratio of number of votes for the list divided by the number of representatives for the list: whichever list has the most votes per representative is the most underrepresented list, so the most approved candidate from the list will be appointed, increasing the number of effective representatives by one. Keep adding seats to the least represented lists, until the remaining 1/3rd of the body has been appointed, thereby giving the entire composition of the body.
Note that the use of approval voting ensures district candidates will be incentivized to appeal to a broad base, encouraging them to find solutions that take care of everybody’s needs, instead of rewarding them for creating division within their community; while the leveling seats ensure that all voices, not just the most centeral perspectives, contribute to the government.
One potential criticism of this method is the appeal to precedence: while using party lists (modulo the similarity scores, which seems like a straightforward and uncontroversial improvement) in this way has been used to much success in the Nordic countries, approval voting is (somewhat surprisingly IMO) not well established. As far as governments go, I only know of St. Louis and Fargo, ND using approval- that is, two municipalities. One could observe the concern that we don’t have much empirical data on how approval works in the real world.
One response is simply to respond that experiments have to be done, otherwise we will never know what works. Perhaps it is ideal to do experiments starting small (e.g. Fargo and St. Louis) and building up towards larger results; but I also have a sense of urgency that voting reform in the US matters greatly, and the faster it can be implemented, the less likely the world is to go in a bad direction v within the next {5, 10, 20, 50} years.
The other response is to observe that while we lack empirical data, the theoretical case for Approval is very solid and promising (I don’t have time to further substantiate this right now)