| The way we tackle this problem in New Zealand is with the Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) voting system. Under MMP, you have two votes:
1) The delegate you want to represent your district (we call it an electorate)
2) The party you want to support. In addition there are two changes:
1) Each of the parties publishes a ranked list of their candidates. This is imaginatively called their "list".
2) There are more seats in the house (we call it parliament) than there are districts (electorates). We have 71 districts but nominally 120 seats in parliament. Once everyone has cast their two votes (quick brag: We had 92.4% of our population enrolled to vote, and of those enrolled, 79.8% voted -- which I think is pretty good going). The votes are counted like so: 1) The "electorate vote" determines the person who represents your district, in a simple most-votes-wins way. Anyone who wins a district is guaranteed a seat in the house (parliament). 2) The "party vote" is counted up nationwide, and each party gets that percentage of the total seats in parliament. If they won more seats with the party vote than the electorate (almost always), their seats are "topped up" from their list until they have the correct number. (There are some subtleties: The exact way we assign seats is http://www.elections.org.nz/voting-system/mmp-voting-system/... ) This means that each electorate/district gets to choose its representative directly, so local representation is retained. At the same time, the house/parliament reflects the global percentage of votes, so smaller parties can still get proportional representation in government. |