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The Icelandic Voting System (2024)

143 points by alexharri 1y ago

dheera 1y ago
I absolutely love that you need to read a list of axioms with Greek symbols in their descriptions to make an informed vote in Iceland. Sets a minimum bar of education to vote, which is reasonable.
- smlavine 1y ago
  Nah, just vote for the party you like the most. The nerds at the elections office take care of the math themselves. "Better" than US/UK/Canada where you have to consider a primary system or multiple elections or "Liberal Democrats win here" signs to not split the vote.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    It does underline the comparative disadvantage of America’s uneducated population: something like this wouldn’t get through because most of the population is too stupid to grok it. We’re foreclosed from an entire domain of solutions because idiots won’t or can’t tough through understanding them.
    - smlavine 1y ago
      This is true, this is an inherently more complex system. Personally I prefer the French two-round system as a balance between complexity and proportionality -- America sorta has this with primaries, although them being months in advance and the districts being gerrymandered to hell doesn't help.
      - vidarh 1y ago
        The French two-round system is wildy unproportional to the point that it is just very marginally less undemocratic than first past the post.
    - rayiner 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - Spooky23 1y ago
        I think you’re both underestimating the education of immigrants and overestimating the abilities of your neighbors. A lot of bad shit hides in the averages. Some US states have poor or no standards, or allow kids to bypass standards through various means. Unless they got remedial education in the military or something, the average high school graduate from a poorly performing place is much less capable than a Mexican or Filipino graduate.
        rayiner 1y ago
        [flagged]
        chimpanzee 1y ago
        > You’ve internalized an anti-American racism that’s quite shocking to see. And you’ve internatilized an American racism that’s not so shocking to see, unfortunately. Less than a day later, and you’re back at it. Not even a DEI specific post, but the racism still seeps out.
        rayiner 1y ago
        [flagged]
        chimpanzee 1y ago
        You brought up “racism” when you cracked about gp somehow displaying anti-American racism. Suggesting uneducated immigrants are a major problem is a common trope of racist discussion even if the word “race” is not specifically used. Especially in the context of a system that is currently trying to kick out immigrants who have voluntarily entered our educational system. And our population is among the most educated in relation to which countries? Half the country is below a 6th grade reading level. A quarter is below a 3rd grade level. Abysmal for a developed country. It’s inappropriate to compare the US education level to countries that have historically struggled economically and politically, especially when their struggles have been only exacerbated by self-serving US interference. And when enforced illiteracy is often used as a weapon to keep people down. Granted, GP made the first mistake there it seems, and you responded in kind. (Though I’m not sure because he is specifically comparing the lower percentiles. I haven’t seen data on that.) But more to the point, you’ve previously claimed that your passion for these topics is due to a belief that ethnic identity and DEI is a threat to your children and to the American individualist culture. Yet, here you are bashing immigrants when neither ethnic identity, DEI, nor American individualism are being discussed.
    - Muromec 1y ago
      The good thing is — you don’t have to suffer the idiots. It’s a choice
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > you don’t have to suffer the idiots. It’s a choice Sure. And I don’t anymore. But the casualty of that choice is social empathy.
    - SoftTalker 1y ago
      And yet we push the idiots to vote.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - barry-cotter 1y ago
      The United States has one of the best education systems in the world, as proxied by the PISA test. US Asians have better results than anywhere but Singapore, Macau and Taiwan. US whites have better results than every majority white country besides Estonia and Switzerland. US Hispanics do better than every Hispanic country bar Spain. US Blacks outscore Jamaica, the only majority Black Country in the OECD and many European and South American countries. I guarantee you the average Icelander does not understand how votes are distributed among parties. They trust the people who do it though.
      - Epa095 1y ago
        Interesting that they do so good as young and end up mediocre (or below) as adults https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?plotter=h5&primaryCountry=USA&treshold=5&topic=AS https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?plotter=h5&prim...
        barry-cotter 1y ago
        That’s for the entire US population. If you look at the US population without even attempting to correct for demographic factors the US looks unimpressive at all ages.
  - charlieyu1 1y ago
    Hong Kong used to have a proportional voting system. The pro-China camp is often very efficient, sometimes winning a seat with half the votes compared to another candidate
- AndrewDucker 1y ago
  You absolutely don't. The formula they give for calculating seats from votes is very simple and only uses a few letters from the standard alphabet. The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is for a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic one.
  - thaumasiotes 1y ago
    > The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is for a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic one. What? It's for all voting systems. It just defines a set of criteria that are desirable; it doesn't describe any system.
- alkonaut 1y ago
  I have voted my entire adult life in a similar system but never knew how the sausage was made. I have complete confidence in it despite not knowing exactly how it works.
- 986aignan 1y ago
  The axioms just state what criteria the Swiss system (but not the Icelandic) obeys. You don't need to know them in order to vote in Iceland any more than you need to know that first past the post fails the Condorcet criterion in order to vote in the US.
lkrubner 1y ago
Sadly, these tweaks don't address any of the more obvious oddities that people have with proportional representation in the legislature. While such a system won't necessarily end up with Dutch levels of weirdness, it is still possible: https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-does-proportional-representation https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-does-proportional-repre...
- jltsiren 1y ago
  That didn't really make sense. On the one hand, the author complains that proportional elections favor a limited number of parties, which don't always give voters good options to choose from. And on the other hand, the winner usually doesn't get the majority of seats, forcing them to negotiate with other parties instead of governing unilaterally. Then there the focus on the left vs. the right, which is no longer as relevant as it used to be during the cold war. If you choose a single faction (such as the left, conservatives, or environmentalists), that specific faction is almost always smaller than everyone else combined. When there are multiple major issues instead of a single overarching question, political divisions become more nuanced than simple X vs. not-X.
- Vinnl 1y ago
  If your source for "Dutch levels of weirdness" is just that article, then keep in mind that the VVD being "in power" meant that they were one of the parties in the government coalition. They have had to compromise with other parties through all of that time, and so it was not the case that those governments were only representative of a very small party of the electorate, as that article makes it sound. (In my opinion, the Dutch system is one of the best implemented in practice, precisely because of its proportionality.)
- froh 1y ago
  this analysis of (mostly European) democracies is not based on some metric of how well the population is faring, oecd has some of those, but based on handpicked anecdata and peak examples. the most massive political injustices, poor housing, health care, education, elderly care, affordable transportation, queer human rights, all of them despite high GDP, just to name a few quantifiable properties of a state... the worst digressions happen in FPTP systems currently. also the article throws both hands in the air as if no mechanisms exist to further improve democracies. it doesn't mention popular vote, or some mechanisms for balance of freedom of speech vs freedom to slander and distort and lie ("hate speech", the word polemics has 'polemos', war, as root), or press codex, or application thereof on all media, including "social" media, ad engines made of letters to the editor largely left alone and unmoderated... nor does it mention panachage and cumulating of votes on lists, the right to adjust the party list proposals in the voting booth. the article does mention the brazen influence of financial power as a problem though. but really, proportional representation is part of the solution.
JumpCrisscross 1y ago
Huh, TIL the Constitution doesn’t require Congressional districts. A state could technically switch to a model like this for assigning representatives at large.
- rqtwteye 1y ago
  The two main parties in the US are way too happy with the status for any change to happen. If there is one thing they hate more than each other it's another party.
  - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
    > two main parties in the US are way too happy with the status for any change to happen California could make this change by referendum.
    - googlryas 1y ago
      Yes but Ds and Rs will come out in force to rally their base against it. That's what happened in Colorado this past election.
    - int_19h 1y ago
      Many states could, but why would they if other states retain a system that disproportionally skews sits towards one party?
      - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
        > why would they if other states retain a system that disproportionally skews sits towards one party? Because your constituents are better represented. California strikes me as a potent place to do this because I could see a constitutional amendment passing at the ballot box.
        int_19h 1y ago
        But they aren't better represented unless everyone else does the same. Suppose California were to do it, resulting in a proportional allocation of seats in the House for its delegation. If this causes the House to swing from Democratic majority to Republican majority, the net effect is the opposite of what most Californians wanted. Don't get me wrong, I get the point that it is a more fair and equitable way of doing things, and in principle, I agree. But if you play fair at a table where everybody else cheats, you lose. My state (WA) also has referendums, and if such a proposal would come up, I would absolutely vote against it - unless it was some kind of interstate compact where another similarly-sized red state were to implement the same reform at the same time.
krapp 1y ago
Nnnneeeeeeeeerds!
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
yorwba 1y ago
It's interesting that it's possible to achieve proportional representation with respect to geographic distribution and party votes simultaneously. (Though, as the article notes, Iceland falls short of this ideal.) This makes me wonder: why stop at two? Some places have explicit quotas for different ethnic or religious groups as a compromise to avoid civil war. Could they use a tripoportional system? And why not add in even more demographic variables? Age, gender, income, level of education, ... I suppose at some point it stops being a secret election because the number of voters sharing all attributes becomes too small, or the parliament would get unwieldily large trying to represent every hyperspecific constituency.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > It's interesting that it's possible to achieve proportional representation with respect to geographic distribution and party votes simultaneously. That would be interesting, but it's not even possible to achieve one of those things by itself.
- themadryaner 1y ago
  It is possible! But with more than two dimensions, you have to allow deviations from perfect proportionality to guarantee a solution exists. The more dimensions, the worse it gets, until eventually proportionality breaks down entirely. [1] defines a method to do this and simulates the results on an election where district and party seats are distributed proportionally and divvied up by gender proportionally. The result is a better national proportionality at the expense of worse local proportionality. [1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109305119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109305119
- lambertsimnel 1y ago
  That's a fascinating suggestion! > I suppose at some point it stops being a secret election because the number of voters sharing all attributes becomes too small, or the parliament would get unwieldily large trying to represent every hyperspecific constituency. I'm not sure about that. Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I'd like to think such a procedure could be run with a legislature of any fixed size, at the cost of the proportionality being increasingly inexact for smaller demographics. Furthermore, I suspect the representatives from any demographic would be elected partly with votes from other demographics. Anyway, the number of voters would presumably be thousands of times the number of representatives - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law - so any voting demographic with dedicated representation would at least be thousands of voters.
avar 1y ago
The main "feature" of the Icelandic voting system is to dilute the relationship between a voter and their representative representing their interests in their district. Instead their vote goes to someone in the same political party in another district. So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis. That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas over "one person one vote". Icelandic law only starts considering that a problem once your vote counts 2x as much as mine, just because we live an imaginary line apart.
- themadryaner 1y ago
  > So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis. > That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas Forgive me if I'm missing something, but these sound like contradictory claims to me? As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. The number of members of each party that make it to Congress is the main determinant of what policy gets passed. But I can only influence that indirectly, by choosing which party represents my local district. If I'm in a solid minority in the district I live in, I basically have 0 influence on the result of the election. Overall, those invisible lines let politicians crack and pack constituencies so a party with a minority of the votes still gets a majority of the seats. In this system, the number of representatives of each party would be determined by the national popular vote, meaning I can more directly vote for which party gets the majority. Your vote does two things: it casts a vote for your party against the other parties in gaining them seats, and it casts a vote for your favorite party candidate over other candidates in the party (including those in other districts) to determine which candidates of the party earn the seats the party is given. It reduces the effect of the invisible line in weakening my vote. I'm okay with this meaning that sometimes my vote helps elect someone in a different district, since this would mean my district doesn't have enough members of my party to justify a representative of our own and because a lot of times the lines are arbitrary anyway. It would require bigger districts with multiple winners, and sometimes that the person with the 6th or 7th most votes in the district gets the 4th or 5th seat instead. This, in my mind, is the "gerrymandering correction:" it ensures those parties who were disadvantaged by the line drawing get their fair share of party members. As for one vote counting twice as much as another, my understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that the main cause of that is differences in turnout between the different districts and rounding representatives to the nearest whole number. Nothing can be done about the later (big problem in the US too -- people per district varies by hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the disparity in the Senate). For the former, you could proportion representatives between districts based on turnout instead, but this is a bad idea since it makes it much harder to campaign in a district if you don't know how many seats are up for grabs.
themadryaner 1y ago
I wanted more details on how this works. For those interested, I found an English pdf describing the full system [1]. The interesting part is Article 110, which discusses how the adjustment seats are allocated. Here is my best summary: 1. Using D'Hondt [2] on every party's national vote share, determine which party should be given the next seat. 2. For every constituency which has adjustment seats available, calculate the D'Hondt quotient of the first candidate in that party who has not already been elected using the constituency vote share. So if a party received V votes in a constituency and two party members were already elected from this constituency, their quotient would be V/3. 3. Elect the candidate with the highest quotient to fill an adjustment seat for their constituency. 4. Repeat until all adjustment seats have been given away. There's arguably a step 0 here, which is determining how many constituency and adjustment seats every constituency gets, and this is done before the election is held. This is described in Article 10. It's pretty bad. First, the adjustment seats are hard-coded. Second, unlike the US where we reapportion after every census, Iceland appears to only reapportion the constituency seats when the constitution demands they do it. This happens when there are twice as many voters per seat in one constituency compared to another. Furthermore, they only adjust as few seats as possible to get back under this limit rather than actually recalculate a fair apportionment. I'm not sure what the logic of this was, maybe to minimize how often the number of seats in each place is changing? Either way, in the 2021 election this resulted in one constituency with 199% as many voters per seat as another and no changes were made [3]. [1]: https://www.stjornarradid.is/library/03-Verkefni/Kosningar/Kosningalog_enska.pdf https://www.stjornarradid.is/library/03-Verkefni/Kosningar/K... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Icelandic_parliamentary_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Icelandic_parliamentary_e...
curtisszmania 1y ago
[dead]
bjornsing 1y ago
This seems to gloss over the major difference between Scandinavian voting systems and e.g. the US one: They are very party-focused. At the end of the day it’s the cabals at the top of the major parties that decide who gets to sit in parliament and how they vote. Sometimes it feels like it would be more honest if e.g. Swedish parliament just had 8 members and their voting buttons controlled more / fewer lights on the voting results dashboard. Leads to a very collectivist political culture.
- jakobnissen 1y ago
  That's up to the voters, ultimately. You can choose to vote for independent MPs, right? Or MPs who promise not to always tow the party line? I suppose if people choose to vote based on parties, of course you get party focused politics.
  - bjornsing 1y ago
    No you can’t really vote for an independent MP in the Swedish voting system. They would have to register a party, it’s very hard to win a seat, and there is no guarantee that they will not win two or more seats – thus perpetuating the collectivism.
    - 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
      At least you don't have the spoiler problem like 3rd parties in the US have though, right? Why is it hard for a new party to win a seat? In the US, for a 3rd party to win, something like 50% of the relevant electorate has to coordinate their vote to switch to the 3rd party. It sounds like in Scandinavia, the fraction of the electorate which needs to coordinate is just 1 / num_seats, which is way smaller. If I were a Swede, I would be tempted to troll everyone by setting up an "independents party". The seats for that party are allocated based on a separate vote, open to the public. Candidates of the "independents party" have absolutely no obligation to vote together, and act as free agents once they get elected. Sort of like a democracy-within-a-democracy.
      - 1y ago
markvdb 1y ago
The main problem with this system: even most university educated people cannot thoroughly understand it. [0] That potentially undermines trust in the system. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf
- Epa095 1y ago
  Maybe democracy just has to be a bit complicated to work? As a bit on an anecdote, I know two Canadians, and I asked them if they were voting in the upcoming election. They both answered 'Maybe, but there is really no point, since liberals/conservatives always wins my riding anyway', and that made me pretty sad. I wonder how many people live in Democracies where their vote just don't matter at all? The best would be a simple, proportional and geographically representative system. But if we can't have all, I think dropping simple is better.
  - trollbridge 1y ago
    Parties tend to like safe seats. (This is one thing that dominant parties on both sides of the aisle can agree on.) Unfortunately, the very concept of a "safe seat" means one individual's vote doesn't matter.
  - lambertsimnel 1y ago
    There's a distinction between the complexity of choosing how to vote, completing a ballot paper and administering an election. I don't expect any one can be minimised without raising another. The tradeoff might be made easier by expecting less of any single elected body/office. If we had a national legislating chamber, elected by at-large proportional representation from a single constituency, and we turned instead to local government for geographic representation, and the second legislative chamber were elected by local government to exert geographic influence over legislation, then maybe voters could make fewer, easier, and more impactful choices. I don't know of any country that works like this, but Germany is close.

143 points by alexharri 1y ago

I absolutely love that you need to read a list of axioms with Greek symbols in their descriptions to make an informed vote in Iceland. Sets a minimum bar of education to vote, which is reasonable.

smlavine 1y ago
Nah, just vote for the party you like the most. The nerds at the elections office take care of the math themselves. "Better" than US/UK/Canada where you have to consider a primary system or multiple elections or "Liberal Democrats win here" signs to not split the vote.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  It does underline the comparative disadvantage of America’s uneducated population: something like this wouldn’t get through because most of the population is too stupid to grok it. We’re foreclosed from an entire domain of solutions because idiots won’t or can’t tough through understanding them.
  - smlavine 1y ago
    This is true, this is an inherently more complex system. Personally I prefer the French two-round system as a balance between complexity and proportionality -- America sorta has this with primaries, although them being months in advance and the districts being gerrymandered to hell doesn't help.
    - vidarh 1y ago
      The French two-round system is wildy unproportional to the point that it is just very marginally less undemocratic than first past the post.
  - rayiner 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - Spooky23 1y ago
      I think you’re both underestimating the education of immigrants and overestimating the abilities of your neighbors. A lot of bad shit hides in the averages. Some US states have poor or no standards, or allow kids to bypass standards through various means. Unless they got remedial education in the military or something, the average high school graduate from a poorly performing place is much less capable than a Mexican or Filipino graduate.
      - rayiner 1y ago
        [flagged]
        chimpanzee 1y ago
        > You’ve internalized an anti-American racism that’s quite shocking to see. And you’ve internatilized an American racism that’s not so shocking to see, unfortunately. Less than a day later, and you’re back at it. Not even a DEI specific post, but the racism still seeps out.
        rayiner 1y ago
        [flagged]
        chimpanzee 1y ago
        You brought up “racism” when you cracked about gp somehow displaying anti-American racism. Suggesting uneducated immigrants are a major problem is a common trope of racist discussion even if the word “race” is not specifically used. Especially in the context of a system that is currently trying to kick out immigrants who have voluntarily entered our educational system. And our population is among the most educated in relation to which countries? Half the country is below a 6th grade reading level. A quarter is below a 3rd grade level. Abysmal for a developed country. It’s inappropriate to compare the US education level to countries that have historically struggled economically and politically, especially when their struggles have been only exacerbated by self-serving US interference. And when enforced illiteracy is often used as a weapon to keep people down. Granted, GP made the first mistake there it seems, and you responded in kind. (Though I’m not sure because he is specifically comparing the lower percentiles. I haven’t seen data on that.) But more to the point, you’ve previously claimed that your passion for these topics is due to a belief that ethnic identity and DEI is a threat to your children and to the American individualist culture. Yet, here you are bashing immigrants when neither ethnic identity, DEI, nor American individualism are being discussed.
  - Muromec 1y ago
    The good thing is — you don’t have to suffer the idiots. It’s a choice
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > you don’t have to suffer the idiots. It’s a choice Sure. And I don’t anymore. But the casualty of that choice is social empathy.
  - SoftTalker 1y ago
    And yet we push the idiots to vote.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - barry-cotter 1y ago
    The United States has one of the best education systems in the world, as proxied by the PISA test. US Asians have better results than anywhere but Singapore, Macau and Taiwan. US whites have better results than every majority white country besides Estonia and Switzerland. US Hispanics do better than every Hispanic country bar Spain. US Blacks outscore Jamaica, the only majority Black Country in the OECD and many European and South American countries. I guarantee you the average Icelander does not understand how votes are distributed among parties. They trust the people who do it though.
    - Epa095 1y ago
      Interesting that they do so good as young and end up mediocre (or below) as adults https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?plotter=h5&primaryCountry=USA&treshold=5&topic=AS https://gpseducation.oecd.org/CountryProfile?plotter=h5&prim...
      - barry-cotter 1y ago
        That’s for the entire US population. If you look at the US population without even attempting to correct for demographic factors the US looks unimpressive at all ages.
- charlieyu1 1y ago
  Hong Kong used to have a proportional voting system. The pro-China camp is often very efficient, sometimes winning a seat with half the votes compared to another candidate
AndrewDucker 1y ago
You absolutely don't. The formula they give for calculating seats from votes is very simple and only uses a few letters from the standard alphabet. The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is for a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic one.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  > The section further with the complicated Greek formulae is for a different voting system, explicitly not the Icelandic one. What? It's for all voting systems. It just defines a set of criteria that are desirable; it doesn't describe any system.
alkonaut 1y ago
I have voted my entire adult life in a similar system but never knew how the sausage was made. I have complete confidence in it despite not knowing exactly how it works.
986aignan 1y ago
The axioms just state what criteria the Swiss system (but not the Icelandic) obeys. You don't need to know them in order to vote in Iceland any more than you need to know that first past the post fails the Condorcet criterion in order to vote in the US.

lkrubner 1y ago

Sadly, these tweaks don't address any of the more obvious oddities that people have with proportional representation in the legislature. While such a system won't necessarily end up with Dutch levels of weirdness, it is still possible: https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-does-proportional-representation https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-does-proportional-repre...

jltsiren 1y ago
That didn't really make sense. On the one hand, the author complains that proportional elections favor a limited number of parties, which don't always give voters good options to choose from. And on the other hand, the winner usually doesn't get the majority of seats, forcing them to negotiate with other parties instead of governing unilaterally. Then there the focus on the left vs. the right, which is no longer as relevant as it used to be during the cold war. If you choose a single faction (such as the left, conservatives, or environmentalists), that specific faction is almost always smaller than everyone else combined. When there are multiple major issues instead of a single overarching question, political divisions become more nuanced than simple X vs. not-X.
Vinnl 1y ago
If your source for "Dutch levels of weirdness" is just that article, then keep in mind that the VVD being "in power" meant that they were one of the parties in the government coalition. They have had to compromise with other parties through all of that time, and so it was not the case that those governments were only representative of a very small party of the electorate, as that article makes it sound. (In my opinion, the Dutch system is one of the best implemented in practice, precisely because of its proportionality.)
froh 1y ago
this analysis of (mostly European) democracies is not based on some metric of how well the population is faring, oecd has some of those, but based on handpicked anecdata and peak examples. the most massive political injustices, poor housing, health care, education, elderly care, affordable transportation, queer human rights, all of them despite high GDP, just to name a few quantifiable properties of a state... the worst digressions happen in FPTP systems currently. also the article throws both hands in the air as if no mechanisms exist to further improve democracies. it doesn't mention popular vote, or some mechanisms for balance of freedom of speech vs freedom to slander and distort and lie ("hate speech", the word polemics has 'polemos', war, as root), or press codex, or application thereof on all media, including "social" media, ad engines made of letters to the editor largely left alone and unmoderated... nor does it mention panachage and cumulating of votes on lists, the right to adjust the party list proposals in the voting booth. the article does mention the brazen influence of financial power as a problem though. but really, proportional representation is part of the solution.

JumpCrisscross 1y ago

Huh, TIL the Constitution doesn’t require Congressional districts. A state could technically switch to a model like this for assigning representatives at large.

rqtwteye 1y ago
The two main parties in the US are way too happy with the status for any change to happen. If there is one thing they hate more than each other it's another party.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago
  > two main parties in the US are way too happy with the status for any change to happen California could make this change by referendum.
  - googlryas 1y ago
    Yes but Ds and Rs will come out in force to rally their base against it. That's what happened in Colorado this past election.
  - int_19h 1y ago
    Many states could, but why would they if other states retain a system that disproportionally skews sits towards one party?
    - JumpCrisscross 1y ago
      > why would they if other states retain a system that disproportionally skews sits towards one party? Because your constituents are better represented. California strikes me as a potent place to do this because I could see a constitutional amendment passing at the ballot box.
      - int_19h 1y ago
        But they aren't better represented unless everyone else does the same. Suppose California were to do it, resulting in a proportional allocation of seats in the House for its delegation. If this causes the House to swing from Democratic majority to Republican majority, the net effect is the opposite of what most Californians wanted. Don't get me wrong, I get the point that it is a more fair and equitable way of doing things, and in principle, I agree. But if you play fair at a table where everybody else cheats, you lose. My state (WA) also has referendums, and if such a proposal would come up, I would absolutely vote against it - unless it was some kind of interstate compact where another similarly-sized red state were to implement the same reform at the same time.

krapp 1y ago

Nnnneeeeeeeeerds!

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

yorwba 1y ago

It's interesting that it's possible to achieve proportional representation with respect to geographic distribution and party votes simultaneously. (Though, as the article notes, Iceland falls short of this ideal.) This makes me wonder: why stop at two? Some places have explicit quotas for different ethnic or religious groups as a compromise to avoid civil war. Could they use a tripoportional system? And why not add in even more demographic variables? Age, gender, income, level of education, ... I suppose at some point it stops being a secret election because the number of voters sharing all attributes becomes too small, or the parliament would get unwieldily large trying to represent every hyperspecific constituency.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
> It's interesting that it's possible to achieve proportional representation with respect to geographic distribution and party votes simultaneously. That would be interesting, but it's not even possible to achieve one of those things by itself.
themadryaner 1y ago
It is possible! But with more than two dimensions, you have to allow deviations from perfect proportionality to guarantee a solution exists. The more dimensions, the worse it gets, until eventually proportionality breaks down entirely. [1] defines a method to do this and simulates the results on an election where district and party seats are distributed proportionally and divvied up by gender proportionally. The result is a better national proportionality at the expense of worse local proportionality. [1]: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109305119 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2109305119
lambertsimnel 1y ago
That's a fascinating suggestion! > I suppose at some point it stops being a secret election because the number of voters sharing all attributes becomes too small, or the parliament would get unwieldily large trying to represent every hyperspecific constituency. I'm not sure about that. Maybe I'm being too optimistic, but I'd like to think such a procedure could be run with a legislature of any fixed size, at the cost of the proportionality being increasingly inexact for smaller demographics. Furthermore, I suspect the representatives from any demographic would be elected partly with votes from other demographics. Anyway, the number of voters would presumably be thousands of times the number of representatives - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_root_law - so any voting demographic with dedicated representation would at least be thousands of voters.

avar 1y ago

The main "feature" of the Icelandic voting system is to dilute the relationship between a voter and their representative representing their interests in their district. Instead their vote goes to someone in the same political party in another district. So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis. That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas over "one person one vote". Icelandic law only starts considering that a problem once your vote counts 2x as much as mine, just because we live an imaginary line apart.

themadryaner 1y ago
> So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis. > That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas Forgive me if I'm missing something, but these sound like contradictory claims to me? As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. The number of members of each party that make it to Congress is the main determinant of what policy gets passed. But I can only influence that indirectly, by choosing which party represents my local district. If I'm in a solid minority in the district I live in, I basically have 0 influence on the result of the election. Overall, those invisible lines let politicians crack and pack constituencies so a party with a minority of the votes still gets a majority of the seats. In this system, the number of representatives of each party would be determined by the national popular vote, meaning I can more directly vote for which party gets the majority. Your vote does two things: it casts a vote for your party against the other parties in gaining them seats, and it casts a vote for your favorite party candidate over other candidates in the party (including those in other districts) to determine which candidates of the party earn the seats the party is given. It reduces the effect of the invisible line in weakening my vote. I'm okay with this meaning that sometimes my vote helps elect someone in a different district, since this would mean my district doesn't have enough members of my party to justify a representative of our own and because a lot of times the lines are arbitrary anyway. It would require bigger districts with multiple winners, and sometimes that the person with the 6th or 7th most votes in the district gets the 4th or 5th seat instead. This, in my mind, is the "gerrymandering correction:" it ensures those parties who were disadvantaged by the line drawing get their fair share of party members. As for one vote counting twice as much as another, my understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that the main cause of that is differences in turnout between the different districts and rounding representatives to the nearest whole number. Nothing can be done about the later (big problem in the US too -- people per district varies by hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the disparity in the Senate). For the former, you could proportion representatives between districts based on turnout instead, but this is a bad idea since it makes it much harder to campaign in a district if you don't know how many seats are up for grabs.

themadryaner 1y ago

I wanted more details on how this works. For those interested, I found an English pdf describing the full system [1]. The interesting part is Article 110, which discusses how the adjustment seats are allocated. Here is my best summary: 1. Using D'Hondt [2] on every party's national vote share, determine which party should be given the next seat. 2. For every constituency which has adjustment seats available, calculate the D'Hondt quotient of the first candidate in that party who has not already been elected using the constituency vote share. So if a party received V votes in a constituency and two party members were already elected from this constituency, their quotient would be V/3. 3. Elect the candidate with the highest quotient to fill an adjustment seat for their constituency. 4. Repeat until all adjustment seats have been given away. There's arguably a step 0 here, which is determining how many constituency and adjustment seats every constituency gets, and this is done before the election is held. This is described in Article 10. It's pretty bad. First, the adjustment seats are hard-coded. Second, unlike the US where we reapportion after every census, Iceland appears to only reapportion the constituency seats when the constitution demands they do it. This happens when there are twice as many voters per seat in one constituency compared to another. Furthermore, they only adjust as few seats as possible to get back under this limit rather than actually recalculate a fair apportionment. I'm not sure what the logic of this was, maybe to minimize how often the number of seats in each place is changing? Either way, in the 2021 election this resulted in one constituency with 199% as many voters per seat as another and no changes were made [3]. [1]: https://www.stjornarradid.is/library/03-Verkefni/Kosningar/Kosningalog_enska.pdf https://www.stjornarradid.is/library/03-Verkefni/Kosningar/K... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Icelandic_parliamentary_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Icelandic_parliamentary_e...

curtisszmania 1y ago

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bjornsing 1y ago

This seems to gloss over the major difference between Scandinavian voting systems and e.g. the US one: They are very party-focused. At the end of the day it’s the cabals at the top of the major parties that decide who gets to sit in parliament and how they vote. Sometimes it feels like it would be more honest if e.g. Swedish parliament just had 8 members and their voting buttons controlled more / fewer lights on the voting results dashboard. Leads to a very collectivist political culture.

jakobnissen 1y ago
That's up to the voters, ultimately. You can choose to vote for independent MPs, right? Or MPs who promise not to always tow the party line? I suppose if people choose to vote based on parties, of course you get party focused politics.
- bjornsing 1y ago
  No you can’t really vote for an independent MP in the Swedish voting system. They would have to register a party, it’s very hard to win a seat, and there is no guarantee that they will not win two or more seats – thus perpetuating the collectivism.
  - 0xDEAFBEAD 1y ago
    At least you don't have the spoiler problem like 3rd parties in the US have though, right? Why is it hard for a new party to win a seat? In the US, for a 3rd party to win, something like 50% of the relevant electorate has to coordinate their vote to switch to the 3rd party. It sounds like in Scandinavia, the fraction of the electorate which needs to coordinate is just 1 / num_seats, which is way smaller. If I were a Swede, I would be tempted to troll everyone by setting up an "independents party". The seats for that party are allocated based on a separate vote, open to the public. Candidates of the "independents party" have absolutely no obligation to vote together, and act as free agents once they get elected. Sort of like a democracy-within-a-democracy.
    - 1y ago

markvdb 1y ago

The main problem with this system: even most university educated people cannot thoroughly understand it. [0] That potentially undermines trust in the system. [0] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014008.pdf

Epa095 1y ago
Maybe democracy just has to be a bit complicated to work? As a bit on an anecdote, I know two Canadians, and I asked them if they were voting in the upcoming election. They both answered 'Maybe, but there is really no point, since liberals/conservatives always wins my riding anyway', and that made me pretty sad. I wonder how many people live in Democracies where their vote just don't matter at all? The best would be a simple, proportional and geographically representative system. But if we can't have all, I think dropping simple is better.
- trollbridge 1y ago
  Parties tend to like safe seats. (This is one thing that dominant parties on both sides of the aisle can agree on.) Unfortunately, the very concept of a "safe seat" means one individual's vote doesn't matter.
- lambertsimnel 1y ago
  There's a distinction between the complexity of choosing how to vote, completing a ballot paper and administering an election. I don't expect any one can be minimised without raising another. The tradeoff might be made easier by expecting less of any single elected body/office. If we had a national legislating chamber, elected by at-large proportional representation from a single constituency, and we turned instead to local government for geographic representation, and the second legislative chamber were elected by local government to exert geographic influence over legislation, then maybe voters could make fewer, easier, and more impactful choices. I don't know of any country that works like this, but Germany is close.