4
Presenting: FPTP on steroids
(en.m.wikipedia.org)
submitted
6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago)
by
SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml
to
c/progressivepolitics@lemmy.world
Put simply, it's like FPTP but instead of being confined to voting on the seat allocated to your constituency, you can choose which seat in the parliament your vote should be counted towards. Parties can still run in as many or as few of the seats as they see fit. The system incentivises a party that thinks it has 10% of the vote to only run candidates in 10% of the seats.
What differentiates this from FPTP is that under this method, speculation about the results has to happen on both sides, as both sides have the potential to influence how many votes get wasted.
Under FPTP
- Voter risk: that splitting their votes between too many political parties will mean that none of them will win.
- Party risk: none
Hence,
- voters have to speculate about which parties might realisticly win
Under SNTV
- Voter risk: that splitting their votes between too many political parties will mean that none of them will win.
- Party risk: that splitting their voters between too many seats will mean that they won't win in any of them. (That running in too few seats means they win by high margins, and the superfluous votes could have been used to win extra seats.)
Hence,
- voters have to speculate about which parties might realisticly win*
- parties have to speculate about how many voters they might realisticly get
Some thoughts:
- It feels like it's PR, except instead of being based on maths it's based on pre-election speculation, which is vulnerable to bluffing and media manipulation.
- under FPTP, it is on the voters to organise amongst themselves (this usually just means reading the hivemind). Under SNTV, it is in the interest of the voters to cooperate with the parties they intend to vote for.
- whilst FPTP incentivizes smaller parties to bluff about the size of their voterbase (so that voters don't feel that voting for them is futile), the two-way speculation under SNTV forces parties to find out how large their voter base actually is (to calculate how many seats they can afford to split their vote between and still win).
*(EDIT: do they? A fringe party might be able to get in if they only run in a single seat – this wouldn't work under FPTP)