PAL representation
PAL (Proportional, Accountable, Local) representation is a system for electing a proportionally-representative legislature. It's designed to be a gentle change from a single-member-district system; districts can remain unchanged, and if single-member districts are giving fair proportions from cohesive parties, PAL representation will elect exactly the same members. The difference is that most representatives will represent multiple districts, and each district will have multiple representatives (one from each winning party). This allows each voter to know who their representative is, while preserving ballot secrecy. Thus, whereas currently only 60-70% of US voters voted for their representative, and many of those because they have no real choice, with PAL voting over 80% overall, and over 95% in large states, would be guaranteed have a representative whom they'd supported directly or indirectly.
The basic idea is:
- Candidates pre-announce their preference among parties and their approvals within parties.
- Voters may vote on the candidates in their or nearby districts, or write in candidates from farther off. Single-candidate "bullet" votes are delegated to that candidate but voters may refuse to delegate by voting for more than one candidate.
- A legislature is elected by a version of STV (with fractional transfers and a Droop quota.)
- Each district "drafts" one member of each elected party from the elected slate.
- Your representative is the member of the party you voted for who is representing your district.
Full Procedure
- Candidates pre-announce their rank-ordering of the parties (starting with their own party) and may optionally approve/disapprove within each party.
- Voters may vote on the candidates in their or nearby districts, or write in candidates from farther off.
- To simplify the ballots, the population is separated into a "district" for each seat, and "districts" are grouped into sets of 2 or 3 "co-districts". The ballot for each district lists the incumbents and candidates from that district in a larger font, and the candidates from its co-districts below that in a smaller font. Write-ins may be used to vote for candidates from other districts not listed on the ballot. Larger parties will usually run one candidate per district; smaller parties may run just one candidate per co-district set.
- Each vote is transformed into the pre-announced party preference order and individual approvals/disapprovals of the candidate it chooses. Votes will never be transferred to a candidate who was disapproved in the pre-announced list.
- A legislature is elected by a modified version of STV, using the following steps:
- The iteration number I is set to 1. (Higher iteration numbers mean lower quotas. The process will be run from scratch with an increasing iteration number until a full slate of candidates reaches the quota)
- The quota Q is set to the rational number (V+1)/(S+I), where V is valid votes and S is seats. (For the first iteration, this is a form of the Droop Quota.)
- Delegated votes first count full-weight for their chosen candidate. Once that candidate is elected or eliminated, a vote is divided equally among all non-disapproved, non-eliminated members of the top party remaining on that ballot with any such members.
- Undelegated votes are divided equally among all approved, non-eliminated candidates on that ballot.
- Any candidates who reach the quota are immediately and simultaneously elected, and their ballots are reweighted to eliminate a Droop quota.
- If there are no candidates who reach the quota, the party with the fewest votes is identified, and the candidate from that party with the fewest votes is eliminated. All votes for that candidate are reassigned as outlined above.
- If the above finishes without electing a full slate, the process starts from scratch with a lower quota:
- All ballots are reweighted to 1
- All elected representatives return to being hopeful candidates
- The iteration number is increased by 1. This reduces the quota Q, as if it were the Droop quota for a legislature one seat bigger.
- The counting process is rerun from scratch, starting with step 3.
- Each district "drafts" one member of each elected party from the elected slate. The draft proceeds as follows:
- First, each representative is drafted by their home district.
- From then on, the draft proceeds in descending order of votes. That is, if more votes from district 1 go to candidate A than any other eligible district:candidate pair, then A is drafted to that district. Eligibility rules are as follows:
- All representatives from a party must be drafted N times before any representative from that party may be drafted N+1 times.
- No district may draft two representatives from the same party.
Your representative is the member of the party you voted for who is representing your district. If no member of the party you voted for was elected, then you may look at the public ballot of your chosen candidate to see which of your district's representatives is yours.
Optional party threshold
Optionally, one additional rule can be added to modify step 5 above:
- No representative may be elected unless their party got at least T votes, where T is some party threshold.
This would encourage small parties to join into coalitions, and thus promote a less-fragmented legislature. There are various options for T. It could be as high as 5%, similar to the 5% threshold used in the German parliament. Or it could be as low as V/(S+I-1) (that is, the Hare quota V/S, if the process completes in just one iteration); this would actually allow independent candidates to be their own "party", but only if they have enough support to fully deserve one of the S seats.
This rule complicates the system somewhat, so it is not recommended if the PAL representation is to be implemented by a voter referendum. If the system is being passed by a legislature, they may be more concerned about fragmentation, so they could use a relatively-high 5% threshold. And if the system is implemented by a constitutional convention, a V/(S+I-1) threshold is ideally fair.
Sample Ballot
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District 5 ballot ▢ ________________________(write-in; see attached list of all declared candidates for preference information) If you only vote for one candidate, your vote is delegated, which means it may help elect that candidate's preferences. If you do not wish to delegate your vote, you may vote for more than one candidate, including write-ins. |
Example
Imagine that Tennessee is having an election on where to locate 3 public universities. The population of Tennessee is concentrated around its four major cities, which are spread throughout the state. For this example, suppose that the entire electorate lives in these four cities, and that everyone wants to live as near as many universities as possible.
The candidate sites for the university are:
- Memphis on Wikipedia
, the state's largest city, with 42% of the voters, but located far from the other cities
- Site 1
- Site 2
- Nashville on Wikipedia
, with 26% of the voters, near the center of Tennessee
- The "Eastern Party", composed of:
- Knoxville on Wikipedia
, with 17% of the voters
- Chattanooga on Wikipedia
, with 15% of the voters
The preferences of the voters would be divided like this:
| 42% of voters (close to Memphis) |
26% of voters (close to Nashville) |
15% of voters (close to Chattanooga) |
17% of voters (close to Knoxville) |
|---|---|---|---|
|
|
|
|
The quota is (100.0008%/(3+1))=25.0002% (The small fraction represents one extra virtual voter, to ensure that the quota cannot be met by four different sites). Since both Memphis (site 1) and Nashville are over the quota, both are elected first. Memphis votes are multiplied by 17/42 and transferred to Memphis site 2, and Nashville votes are multiplied by 1/26 and then split evenly between Chatanooga and Knoxville. Totals are now:
- (Memphis 1: 25.0002% (elected))
- Memphis 2: ~17% (actually 16.9998%)
- (Nashville: 25.0002% (elected))
- Chatanooga: ~15.5% (actually, 15.4999%)
- Knoxville: ~17.5% (actually 17.4999%)
The party with the fewest remaining votes is the Memphis party. Within that party, Memphis 2 is the site with the fewest votes (in fact, the only remaining site), so even though it has more votes than Chatanooga, Memphis 2 is eliminated. The votes are pass over the already-elected Nashville to tranfer to the Eastern party. Within that party, Memphis disapproved Knoxville, so the full total is transferred to Chatanooga. Chatanooga now has ~32.5%, more than the 25% quota, so it is the third and final site.
If Knoxville had not joined a party with Chatanooga, then Chatanooga would have been eliminated, and Knoxville would have been the final site. But Chatanooga could have responded by threatening to prefer a second Nashville site, or even Memphis 2, over Knoxville, if Knoxville would not cooperate in the Eastern party. In the end, Knoxville's strategy may or may not have worked. In general, such strategic gamesmanship would be less profitable and more dangerous in a real election, with more seats overall as well as a significant degree of polling uncertainty.
Advantages
P
- Proportional
- Thus, a large majority of voters have real representation
- Each representative is elected with the same number of votes.
- Prudent; not a radical change from single-member districts
- No redistricting necessary
- If:
- all votes are for one of the two main-party candidates in the voter's district,
- all candidates approve everyone from their party
- and the districts are divided fairly so that plurality would give a proportional result
- ... then PAL representation (like Balinski's "Fair Representation") gives the same results as plurality. These assumptions will not generally be perfectly true, but they will generally be close to true, so PAL representation will give results that are recognizably similar to those of single-member districts. It is hoped that this would make it a more acceptable system to politicians who have won under single-winner rules.
A
- Accountable
- Voters, not party bureaucrats, decide which members of a given party get seated.
- Since the total votes needed for election is higher, the "margin of victory" is reduced. There are no safe, gerrymandered seats where corrupt representatives can hide.
L
- Local
- Representatives know who is a constituent and voters know who is their representative.
- Neighbors can organize to lobby their shared representatives.
- Fair attention for local issues.
Compared to other PR systems
Other PR systems have problems which make them extremely hard to pass as a replacement for single-member districts. PAL resolves all of the following issues:
- A closed list system would be (rightly) attacked as a power grab by party bureaucrats. Voters have been souring on parties for decades now, and they wouldn't stand for that.
- A global open-list system such as STV would have unacceptably-complex ballots. Who can keep track of dozens of candidates, let alone fully rank them?
- A districtless system would be too radical a change. People are used to having "their" representative.
- A multimember-district system would help with the above problems, but wouldn't actually solve them. Who wants a system where ballots are only a little bit too complex, where you only sort of know who your representative is, and which is only mostly proportional?
- A mixed member system would be an ugly hybrid. US democratic ideals may be too egalitarian to accept the idea of two different kinds of representative.
- More seriously, a mixed member system would be totally unacceptable to existing incumbents, as it would draw too many of them out of their existing districts. And perhaps this is in part a valid concern. It is true that the public interest is to have representatives who are accountable, not complacent; but that does not imply that there's a value in change simply for change's sake.
- Balinski's Fair Majority Voting, as used in Belgian municipal elections, resolves all of the concerns above, but it would be very hard to justify the fact that some representatives would lose with a majority vote. It's very hard to respond to a simple question like "Why should my opponent win with 45%, when I lose with 52%?" with a complex answer about party balance and compensating for gerrymandering.
- Note that PAL representation would actually give the same result as FMV, but would provide an easy justification for that result. Responding to the question above, you could say: "Each representative needs exactly the same number of votes to win. Your opponent got the vote transfers they needed to reach that threshold and you didn't. Those votes were transferred in accordance with the explicit will of the voters, and to ignore them would be to disenfranchise those voters."
Justification
PAL representation is inspired by Michel Balinski's Fair Majority Voting and by SODA voting. From the former, which is used for municipal elections in Belgium, it inherits the combination of geographical districts and proportionality. However, unlike Fair Representation, each candidate elected by PAL representation has received (directly or indirectly) the same number of votes. From SODA voting, PAL representation inherits the simple, spoilproof ballot format and the optional vote delegation.
A modified version of STV is used as the proportional system for simplicity. Other proportional systems might also work (although a non-LNH system might put perverse incentives on candidates). The equal ranking, and resulting fractional division of votes, is necessary for three reasons. First, it allows for approval-style votes to be counted without complicating the ballot. Second, it allows candidates to exercise judgment independently from their party (disapproving of certain party members), but keeps the voter's judgment as primary. If candidates couldn't exercise judgment, parties would have to waste energy keeping out "crazy" candidates who affiliate only because of the transfer votes they might get. If candidates could fully-rank within the party, as would happen if the PR system were standard STV, there would be too many opportunities for logrolling, at a level of detail where voters wouldn't realistically keep track or hold candidates accountable. Third, equal-ranking allows us to claim that this system could, under reasonable circumstances, elect exactly the same representatives as a non-gerrymandered single-member-district system.