It seems we've argued over different things. I picked up the "perfect" from the headline and came up with a counter-example. Comparing it with an obviously broken system doesn't make it any more perfect.
If you're looking for possible alternatives, I find Germany's model not too bad: two votes, one for per-district representatives and one for parties which is evaluated proportionally. Not perfect, but works out in practise.
I'd like one mode change though: instead of giving one vote per list, I'd like to allocate an arbitrary number of votes per list, but you can give at most one vote per candidate or party. That way you can vote for blocks of parties/candidates, or even vote against somebody by voting for everybody execpt that one party/candidate.
This would remove a lot of tactical debate if you're vasting your vote on candidates/parties who don't have huge chances for success.
That happens with annoying regularity. I have a system for dealing with that too, but that's a different blog post. ;-)
> I picked up the "perfect" from the headline and came up with a counter-example.
Well there's a reason "perfect" is in scare quotes. If I really thought the system were perfect I'd actually be advocating it instead of going "Hey guys, here's a neat idea. I'm not really sure if I'm actually for it or not".
The meaning of perfect here was intended to be that it has a lot of the properties which many people claim are impossible to coexist and summarise under the heading "there is no perfect voting system" (it overcomes the impossibilities by being non-deterministic), whilst remaining very similar to the existing and familiar system
Can you explain why that wouldn't lead to the introduction of parties like Tories2, Tories3, ..., Tories100? One could allocate 1/#votes "points" to each party voted for, but that gets you back to strategic voting.
That was my first idea, but the comment I'm replying to included
> This would remove a lot of tactical debate if you're vasting your vote on candidates/parties who don't have huge chances for success.
which doesn't work if you give each party 1/#number_of_parties_voted_for votes (voting for CoolGuy gives your vote on EstablishedAndNotTooBad less weight, after all.)
Creating a party and running it in an election is a tad more onerous than creating a Reddit account. You can't create 100 parties just to try to game the lottery.
If you're looking for possible alternatives, I find Germany's model not too bad: two votes, one for per-district representatives and one for parties which is evaluated proportionally. Not perfect, but works out in practise.
I'd like one mode change though: instead of giving one vote per list, I'd like to allocate an arbitrary number of votes per list, but you can give at most one vote per candidate or party. That way you can vote for blocks of parties/candidates, or even vote against somebody by voting for everybody execpt that one party/candidate.
This would remove a lot of tactical debate if you're vasting your vote on candidates/parties who don't have huge chances for success.