Mixed Transferable Voting

This is a form of one-vote Mixed-member proportional (MMP), using delegated transfers. It's designed to be simple for voters; familiar to those used to FPTP; highly proportional; and favorable to relatively large parties, with internal diversity. The acronym for this method is MTV, but the hashtag would be #MTVoting to distinguish it from the music television channel.

Here's how it works:

1. Seats are divided into two groups: district-based (50%-67%) and at-large (33%-50%). One equal-population district is drawn for each district-based seat.
2. There is an open primary in each district, which guarantees and allows 2-3 winners per district. Winning candidates then affiliate with parties (which may or may not have pre-set rules limiting who can affiliate with them).
   1. For instance, a simple primary election method would use choose-one ballots, and the winners (those who progressed to the next steps) would be those who ((got over 25% of the primary vote) and (got over 12% of the amount of votes in that district from the most-recent general election)) and/or (were in the top two candidates in this district's primary).
3. Each candidate pre-rates other candidates on a 0-4 star scale (based on the assumption that they'd save the 5-star rating for themselves). Party-affiliated candidates must give other same-party candidates 3 or 4 stars, and different-party candidates 0-2 stars.
4. Ballots list the candidates in the local district, with a write-in line for each party. Write-ins may identify candidates by party and name, or by party and district. Lists of all candidates, and their pre-ratings of each other, are available in polling places.
5. Voters choose a single candidate, either by choosing one of the local candidates or by writing in a candidate from another district. Voters may also vote for a party without choosing a specific candidate, by putting a check next to that party's write-in line without writing anything in.
6. Each ballot is "filled in" with the pre-declared ratings of its chosen favorite candidate. Ballots that choose a party but not an individual candidate are filled in with ratings of 5 stars for every candidate in that party and 0 stars for all others.
7. Any candidates who get over 50% of the votes from their local district are seated. Each seated candidate uses up up to one Droop quota of their direct votes. If they have more votes than that, their remaining voting weight will be used up in step 8 or transferred in step 9.
8. For each seated partisan candidate who did not use up a full Droop quota, use up the remainder of their quota if possible. Begin by using up excess votes from step 7, then all other votes for the party.
   • For instance, say candidates W, X, Y, and Z were from one party; and that W won with 120% of a quota, X won with 70% of a quota, and Y and Z survived with 40% and 10% of a quota. That means that after step 7, there would be 20% of a quota of transfer-ready votes left over from W, and you'd need to use up 30% that X was lacking. The 20% from W would be used up first, leaving 10% to use up. Taking that proportionally from Y and Z would leave them with 32% and 8% respectively.
9. All remaining votes are used to fill the remaining seats by some proportional method, with the restriction that any district that does not yet have a winner must get at least one winner.
   • For instance, the underlying method might be ER-STV with fractional transfers (as explained here: Single transferable vote#Ways of dealing with equal rankings). Note that ER-STV here is chosen to be a familiar method, not an optimal one, as the difference between different methods at this stage is relatively minor.
   • Note that this requires the underlying method to be modified in two minor ways. First, it must guarantee one winner per district; and second, there must be some way to decide who gets seated even if step 9 did not use up enough votes, so that there are more quotas than seats. In most cases, there is an obvious way to make such modifications. For instance, for ER-STV, you would add the following three rules:
     • A candidate is seated as soon as all the same-district rivals are eliminated, and vice versa.
     • As soon as the number of un-filled seats is no greater than the number of districts without a winner, all candidates from districts with a winner are eliminated.
     • If more candidates have a quota than there are empty seats, the seats are allocated sequentially, in descending order of number of votes.

The key differences from a vanilla MMP method are:

• Unlike most MMP methods, voters need vote for only one candidate, who may be local or from another district.
• This method uses delegated transfers (see steps 3, 6, and 10). This allows proportional outcomes (intra-party as well as inter-party) from the simple choose-one ballot.
• There is no party threshold for winning seats; a party can win with just one quota of votes. However, because of the open primary step, parties which don't have at least 25% popularity in at least one district would not have any candidates survive to the general election. In practice, this would probably tend to mean that most (but not quite all) seats would go to the two or three largest parties, but that independent and/or minor-party candidates would still have a fair chance to win seats occasionally. Smaller minority groups (ethnic, ideological, or other) would still be represented insofar as they voted together, but they'd be more likely to be factions within a party than separate parties.