[avar]

The main "feature" of the Icelandic voting system is to dilute the relationship between a voter and their representative representing their interests in their district.

Instead their vote goes to someone in the same political party in another district.

So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis.

That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas over "one person one vote". Icelandic law only starts considering that a problem once your vote counts 2x as much as mine, just because we live an imaginary line apart.

[Taniwha]

There's an intermediate solution - MMP (used in various guises in AoNZ, Germany, Mexico, Scotland, Bolivia, .....) where we have a fixed number of regional seats much like FPP (house seats in the US) and some nationwide extra seats - people get 2 votes one for their local seat and one nationally for a party, after local seat votes are counted extra seats are allocated from parties' lists.

Essentially it's the same as Iceland but party votes are done nationally, this avoids some of the weird stuff mentioned in the article that allows some parties to have more votes but fewer seats - here in AoNZ we brought in MMP after a couple of elections under FPP where one party got more votes and the other more seats. It's not perfect, but better than what we had before.

[avar]

    > There's an intermediate
    > solution

The "intermediate" solution is one Iceland already had in its past.

The number of representatives is fixed at 63. They'd be around 200 if the representatives per capita were the same as in 1903, 140 if it was the same as 1960, and 105 if they were the same as 1984, when the number was fixed at 63.

This "hack" of "moving your vote around" only came about because it became more obviously unfair over time that your representative not making the cut-off left you without representation.

The other "obvious" solution of moving to a national vote isn't possible due to the entrenched interests that benefit from the current disenfranchisement being the ones would need to vote for such a system.

[joeblubaugh]

On the other hand, the whole nation is fewer than 400,000 people on a very compact land mass, so the divergent interests out of district are not all that large.

[themadryaner]

> So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis.

> That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas

Forgive me if I'm missing something, but these sound like contradictory claims to me?

As an American, I feel I'd prefer this system. The number of members of each party that make it to Congress is the main determinant of what policy gets passed. But I can only influence that indirectly, by choosing which party represents my local district. If I'm in a solid minority in the district I live in, I basically have 0 influence on the result of the election. Overall, those invisible lines let politicians crack and pack constituencies so a party with a minority of the votes still gets a majority of the seats.

In this system, the number of representatives of each party would be determined by the national popular vote, meaning I can more directly vote for which party gets the majority. Your vote does two things: it casts a vote for your party against the other parties in gaining them seats, and it casts a vote for your favorite party candidate over other candidates in the party (including those in other districts) to determine which candidates of the party earn the seats the party is given. It reduces the effect of the invisible line in weakening my vote. I'm okay with this meaning that sometimes my vote helps elect someone in a different district, since this would mean my district doesn't have enough members of my party to justify a representative of our own and because a lot of times the lines are arbitrary anyway. It would require bigger districts with multiple winners, and sometimes that the person with the 6th or 7th most votes in the district gets the 4th or 5th seat instead. This, in my mind, is the "gerrymandering correction:" it ensures those parties who were disadvantaged by the line drawing get their fair share of party members.

As for one vote counting twice as much as another, my understanding (and please correct me if I am wrong) is that the main cause of that is differences in turnout between the different districts and rounding representatives to the nearest whole number. Nothing can be done about the later (big problem in the US too -- people per district varies by hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the disparity in the Senate). For the former, you could proportion representatives between districts based on turnout instead, but this is a bad idea since it makes it much harder to campaign in a district if you don't know how many seats are up for grabs.

[avar]

    As an American, I feel I'd
    prefer this system.

You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives?

A representative with absolutely zero self-interest in representing you, as it's highly unlikely you'll be able to "vote for" them the next time around? Your representation being an odd mathematical quirk?

Because that's essentially what the Icelandic system is like. The US has the same lopsided population-to-representative ratio to some degree [1].

    [...]and please correct me if
    I am wrong)

No, it has nothing to do with turnout in Iceland.

You can think of it as an odd way to enact something like the US Senate without a bicameral legislature.

1. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/05/31/u-s-popul...

[Epa095]

.

  You'd like to live in Alaska and vote for say a Democrat, only to have some Democratic representative from say Florida be the one "you voted in" to the House of Representatives?

I don't see how it makes sense to say that the candidate in Florida is 'the one' you voted it. You casted your vote in Alaska for the party. Your vote mattered there, and either the party got candidates in or not.

Then after that mini-election your vote gets to play a second role on the national level, where IF the party got a bad ratio between the number of representatives they got in, and their total vote-%, they can get another candidate. But that candidate is not 'the one you voted in'. You (possibly) voted in candidates in Alaska already, this is your votes' second chance, to get someone in from the party somewhere else (where the party had a particularly bad ratio between representatives and vote-%).

[avar]

This should be easier to understand if you suppose that none of your 50 states shares any of its political parties in the House of Representatives.

The Minnesota FLP[1] got members into the house of representatives in numerous elections.

If you'd voted for it in Minnesota, who do you suppose your vote should transfer to in Alaska or Florida?

Of course that's a borderline nonsensical example in the case of both the modern day US and Iceland, as in both cases The Party (whichever one it is) is something you can vote for in any state or district.

But it's important to understand that the cart came before the horse. That purely local parties are unelectable is partly because the incumbents have shaped the system like this, to their own benefit.

In any case. The Icelandic voting system asks you to intern two seemingly mutually incompatible ideas:

- That local politics are so unimportant, that you may as well not care who your local representative is, because you may be getting some party critter from the other side of the country, and the difference shouldn't matter to you.

- That you shouldn't worry too much about some people having up to 2x the voting power you have, based on which district they vote in. That outsized influence being something that transfers indirectly to what constitutes their national party policy.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Farmer%E2%80%93Labor...

[Epa095]

.

  > If you'd voted for it in Minnesota, who do you suppose your vote should transfer to in Alaska or Florida?

Did it get more than the national cuttof level for adjustment seats (5% in Iceland, 4% in Norway)? Lets assume it did! Then first we calculate the results from all the local elections. Then we look at the total vote-% vs mandates disparancy for all parties across the whole country, and we can calculate how many adjustment seats each party should get nation-wide (we give one seat to the party with the worst disparency, then recalculate until all adjustment seats are used up).

Let's assume now that the Minnesota FLP won one or more adjustment seats this way, which is completely possible in your scenario. Then we figure out which riding the Minnesota FLP should get another candidate from. For this we look at all ridings where they have a candidate, and chose the riding where the disparancy between vote-% and mandates are the worst. In your example, where the party is only registered in a single riding, that will be the riding they get another candidate in from.

You CAN have a system where each riding can get in at most one adjustment seat, and then you can come in the ackward situation where there are no ridings available for a party which should get a adjustment seat if they do not have listings in every riding. But that is not an essential part of the system, you can allow to get multiple adjustment seats in from a single riding.

  > Of course that's a borderline nonsensical example in the case of both the modern day US and Iceland, 

Yeah I agree, but its a fun though experiment. The interesting part is really when you have a party in some, but not all the ridings. Then you absolutely get that a lot of votes for the party in riding A helps the party get in another candidate in riding B. But notice that this is votes that in a system without adjustment seats are just lost. So it is not that "your vote escapes" and help some asshole somewhere else, its that your otherwise dead vote gets another chance.

  > as in both cases The Party (whichever one it is) is something you can vote for in any state or district.

Surpisingly(?) this is not true. The list "Ábyrgrar framtíðar" is only represented in Reykjavíkurkjördæmi norður. And this is not a freak occurent, its quite common in the Scandinavian countries. In the Norwegian parlament there is today a single representative from the list "Patient Focus", which was formed in April 2021, as a support movement for an expansion of the hospital in the town of Alta in Finnmark.

  > In any case. The Icelandic voting system asks you to intern two seemingly mutually incompatible ideas: 
  - That local politics are so unimportant, that you may as well not care who your local representative is, because you may be getting some party critter from the other side of the country, and the difference shouldn't matter to you.

This is really not the take-home. Remember that most of the seats are constituency seats, not adjustment seats. From the article it seams like the ratio is roughly 6-to-1 in Iceland (in Norway its 150-to-19, so 7.8-to-1). So most of the parlament will be people voted in with votes soley from their own constituency.

The question is, what to do with the "leftover" votes which were just barely not enough to get a candidate in? The American system is to discard them, they get nothing, they mean nothing. In the Icelandic system they get to participate in the election of the roughly 1/6th of the parlament which is adjustment candidates.

  > - That you shouldn't worry too much about some people having up to 2x the voting power you have, based on which district they vote in. That outsized influence being something that transfers indirectly to what constitutes their national party policy.

So yeah, don't copy this part:-p Of course, this is not in any way a requirement for the adjustment-seat procedure. It is also not unique to the Icelandic system, and the disparancy is even worse in the US, where a single elector could represent between 200,000 and 700,000 people[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...

[avar]

    > The list "Ábyrgrar framtíðar"
    > is only represented in
    > Reykjavíkurkjördæmi norður.

A party that got 144 votes nationwide and ran in one election.

But yes you're strictly correct. It's not illegal to only run for election in a subset of districts...

    > And this is not a freak occurent

It really is in Iceland, I don't know about Norway.

Even new upstart parties run for elections in every district, because to do otherwise is leaving "money on the table", as in were.

The only exceptions are one-off parties with practically no following.

    > This is really not the
    > take-home. Remember that
    > most of the seats are
    > constituency seats, not
    > adjustment seats.

I'm of the opinion that this aspect of the system has a more widespread overall impact than suggested by a mathematical review of who's directly impacted in each election.

It heavily biases the system away from one-district parties, and those parties in turn further encouraged to become monoliths where each representative is merely an interchangeable cog in the party machine, not someone voting with their own conscience.

On the other hand it's not like that wasn't happening before.

Another thing you haven't considered is that whenever you vote for a party your vote can be helping to elect someone nationwide, but you're only allowed to strike out the names of people listed in your local district.

So if you really dislike someone who's running for the party in another district, you might not vote for the party at all, least you help them.

   > So most of the parlament
   > will be people voted in
   > with votes soley from their
   > own constituency.

Those people might be "tainted" too, even if you look at this from a purely mathematical point of view.

Your seat in parliament may not be an "adjustment seat", but you may have pushed out a more popular candidate in your own district.

There's cases like that every election, e.g. the party with 20% in a district getting 3 members, and the one with 25% getting 2 members or whatever, because the difference of 5% in that district is accumulated to elect 4 members overall.