Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on Yesterday at 09:53:46 AMThe people's will is best and most directly expressed by their vote, and we should be careful about wise elders deciding when the people's will shouldn't count.

This is exactly why I oppose expanding off-list appointees or softening party list requirements any further, since it is essentially elder party leaders deciding that the directly expressed preference for a certain slate of candidates should not count as long as it's convenient for them.

But setting all that aside, what do you think of the voting system I proposed a few posts ago?

QuoteElections to the Cosă shall be conducted following the principles of personalised proportional voting.

• Voters shall be given the choice to either vote for a single party list at-large, or to distribute exactly 20 individual votes among all candidates listed on all party lists. A single candidate may be awarded up to three individual votes.
• Seats shall be apportioned among party lists according to their at-large party list votes as well as the total individual votes for their candidates using the largest remainder method. Individual candidate votes shall count as one twentieth of an at-large party list vote for the purposes of party seat apportionment. In case of a tie, the party with the higher total vote count is prefered.
• Party seats shall be apportioned among their list candidates according to their individual votes using the largest remainder method. In case of a tie, the candidate listed higher on the list is prefered.

I've heavily edited my previous post to fix several syntax and phrasing errors, for the record.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on Yesterday at 09:40:00 AMRight, but circumstance we're discussing is a new party whose share of the vote expands faster than their personal recruitment.  It's already tight, and we're proposing making it much worse.

Your party is not exactly "new", is my point. You should've foreseen that the same people that were highly popular before under a different label would still be popular now, and accounted for it. If the demand exceeds the supply, it is your responsibility as a party leader to keep up with the demand.

QuoteI'm not really presupposing that... it's been a fact in the past -- Dien is the only one who has ever run for office with no party list, I think, and he got only a few votes (presumably from people who did indeed want that!)

Not even remotely the same as what you've been suggesting here. Plus, I don't think "we've always done it like this" is a good enough argument to continue flaunting the basic principles of democratic conduct. Talossa, in the past, has not been a good democracy. It should be in the people's interest to improve Talossan democracy, not worsen it.

QuoteBut this flexibility doesn't exist for convenience, it exists because power should be distributed according to the will of the people, as much as we can manage.  This is the most basic of basic democratic principles.

The power to concentrate power in a few unelected appointees loyal only to the party leadership is absolutely only a convenience, and enabling this conduct any further is the exact opposite of democracy. It may be *your* will, but it's not the people's will.

Quote from: Françal I. Lux on May 27, 2026, 04:26:48 PMAs long as the voters can choose who they want as their representatives regardless of party affiliation, I would be ok with an open list voting system as a compromise.

What do you think of something like this?

QuoteElections to the Cosă shall be conducted following the principles of personalised proportional voting.

• Voters shall be given the choice to either vote for a single party list at-large, or to distribute exactly 20 individual votes among all candidates listed on all party lists. A single candidate may be awarded up to three individual votes.
• Seats shall be apportioned among party lists according to their at-large party list votes as well as the total individual votes for their candidates using the largest remainder method. Individual candidate votes shall count as one twentieth of an at-large party list vote for the purposes of party seat apportionment. In case of a tie, the party with the higher total vote count is prefered.
• Party seats shall be apportioned among their list candidates according to their individual votes using the largest remainder method. In case of a tie, the candidate listed higher on the list is prefered.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on Yesterday at 09:07:54 AMYes, fast-growing because our appeal at the ballot box has dramatically increased in a short period of time, faster than active Talossans have been initiated into the party and established that they are good representatives of party interests.  I have no idea what planning could have prevented this

Simply by having more people on the list than the absolute bare minimum. These people don't even have to be a member of your party, mind you.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on Yesterday at 09:07:54 AMWe shouldn't soften basic democratic standards, and a pretty darn important one is that the outcome should match the vote.  When we argue that voters shouldn't get what they want, it's concerning.

You're presupposing that voters want to be represented by unelected, unaccountable off-list appointees, or alternatively that they want to concentrate all power into a single person. The fact that Talossa currenty even allows off-list MCs or more than one seat per MC is a grave violation of basic democratic principles, and it exists solely to make the lives of Talossan party leaders easier. I find it concerning that these generosities are not only taken for granted but considered not generous enough.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on May 27, 2026, 06:40:46 PMfast-growing party

"Fast-growing" would mean your party is quickly gaining new members. The problem you have is the opposite: your party growth seemingly couldn't and can't keep up with its popularity at the ballot box, which I think you could've easily foreseen. Everyone on the PROG party list last election bar one is a former member of the previous highly popular conservative party, the TNC, and thus already easily recognisable to these voters.

I can't help but think that this was moreso an instance of overly shortsighted planning coupled with bad luck rather than a problem with the law that needs to be fixed, and I don't think it's prudent to soften basic democratic standards (even more than they already are in Talossa) to enable more shortsighted planning in the future.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on May 27, 2026, 05:34:35 PMBut I think we might need to figure out some other solution here, because I feel like my concerns are valid too!

Seat limits are currently determined by turnout, so an election with fewer active citizens will already result in a higher seat limit, which sounds like exactly what we would want here.

I'll be honest, I think the current system of seat limits (made slightly more generous thanks to reducing the Cosă to 20 seats) and off-listers (made slightly less generous thanks to the same Cosă reduction) already gives way too much leeway to party leaders... in fact, this might be the first time in a long while, if not ever, that a party ran into problems satisfactorily filling their seats. Can someone fact-check me on that?

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on May 27, 2026, 05:17:44 PMMaybe I am misunderstanding something?

Well, it's simple: there is nothing stopping you from only having one person on the party list (in fact, not submitting any party list results in a one-person de facto list by default), who would then get all the seats for that party. We could end up with one person controlling a majority of the seats, and thus concentrating all the power of the Cosă into one person. I don't think we should want this.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on May 27, 2026, 05:03:15 PMMaybe in that case, we can also get rid of seat limits.

I find it disgraceful to try and trade one way of systemically deceiving voters for another, as it were. By which I mean, seat limits, same as party lists (EDIT: as long as apportionment depends on parties), ought to be non-negotiable.

Quote from: Françal I. Lux on May 27, 2026, 04:26:48 PMAs long as the voters can choose who they want as their representatives regardless of party affiliation, I would be ok with an open list voting system as a compromise.

I still think the easiest way of implementing this, without any weird edge cases from trying to marry candidate votes and party votes, would be to implement a system in which party affiliation is listed on the ballot but irrelevant to the apportionment method.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on May 27, 2026, 07:59:16 AMI wouldn't put it exactly the way that Miestra did, but the basic idea is right: my party's voter base tends to be quite large, but less politically active.  While more Talossans support the Progressive Alliance than any other party during elections, we have a smaller group of active citizens who are active between elections... for us, that ratio is larger than for any other party.  So my question is whether or not this system would punish this voting population.

These voters could simply vote for candidates that best reflect their beliefs... I still don't understand the issue at hand.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on May 23, 2026, 01:59:48 AM(b) will this disadvantage the interests of my voter base, which is usually fairly broad but not very intense with active support, when compared to a voter base that is very intense but not as broad?

I'm not sure what this means, or how a candidates-based voting system would do anything like that.

Quote from: Mic'haglh Autófil, O.Be on May 08, 2026, 04:38:40 PM@Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP , could you maybe elaborate a bit on what happens in the event there are fewer than 20 candidates on the ballot?

If there are fewer candidates than seats to fill, then every candidate would get in and the rest is left empty. Needless to say, the system only works if we have enough people to actually run, and if we cant get at least 20 people to run, then maybe 20 seats is too much still...?

This, by the way, is why the Pseudo-Real Cosă is called pseudo: I was afraid that we might not have enough candidates to fill 20 seats, so the old assign post-hoc system would stay in place until a proper Real Cosă can be implemented faithfully.

Quote from: Françal I. Lux on May 05, 2026, 10:59:38 AM

Quote from: Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP on May 02, 2026, 07:32:11 PMI personally champion a form of Sequential Proportional Approval Voting as a voting system that is partyless, fair, and easy to explain and implement (feel free to ask me if you want to hear details), but any reform that furthers the principles of transparency and returning power to the people will do. Conversely, any reform idea that seeks to systematically deceive voters and trick them into helping people into power against the popular will is dead on arrival.

I'd like to hear more about this and how we would implement it in Talossa.

The way it works is that voters would be given a ballot with all the candidates on it, and then would be asked to vote for every candidate they approve of. There is no minimal or maximal number of approvals, and no ranking between approved candidates, every approval is worth the same. You can think of it as "building your own party list" if you like.

Ballots would then be counted in rounds, one round for each open seat. In the first round, the candidate with the most total approvals wins. Before every subsequent round, ballots are weighted: ballots who approve of one winner are worth 1/2, those that approve of two winners are worth 1/3, those that approve of three are worth 1/4 etc, and after the weighting is done you count the totals and whoever has the highest total wins that round. Repeat until all seats are filled.

This sort of voting system is proportional thanks to the ballot weighting mechanism, partyless because party affiliation doesnt matter for a candidate's victory, and much easier to implement than STV (speaking from first-hand experience); switching the database over to this kind of voting system would as far as I can tell not be super difficult, and the counting and weighting steps are very easily automatisable.

I also think the explanation is simpler than for STV (especially with regards to like, how to handle fractional overflow or what have you) but I'm biased so I'll let you be the judge of that.

The goal of any Ziu reform should be to increase transparency in government and to give back power to the people, instead of centralising it in party bigwigs. Party lists are a simple way of ensuring transparency (even if the current laws concerning off-listers are way too lax), but still rest all power in the bigwigs as Françal rightfully pointed out.

I personally champion a form of Sequential Proportional Approval Voting as a voting system that is partyless, fair, and easy to explain and implement (feel free to ask me if you want to hear details), but any reform that furthers the principles of transparency and returning power to the people will do. Conversely, any reform idea that seeks to systematically deceive voters and trick them into helping people into power against the popular will is dead on arrival.

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on April 29, 2026, 07:26:43 PMWe use RCV for the Senats, but I don't know how you have parliamentary democracy without party politics.  Also that might be a bridge too far for right now.  I don't know, though?

Parties will always exist, but I guess it's a matter of how institutionalised they are.

With the current closed party list voting system, parties are strongly institutionalised, and ultimate power ultimately rests with party leadership.

With a more open and direct voting system, hopefully power would be transfered to the voters and the MZs they elect, regardless of party affiliation (if any). I've spent several years researching proportional voting systems that do not require strongly institutionalised parties to function, and I feel like they might bring a positive change to the current culture.

Quote from: Mximo Malt on April 28, 2026, 06:03:09 PMWhen did we start doing this?

When did we start doing what, exactly?

Quote from: Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC on April 27, 2026, 05:55:36 PM

Quote from: Baron Alexandreu Davinescu on April 27, 2026, 04:44:12 PMlet's say that Party A won 50%, Party B won 25%, and Party C won 25%.  In a 20-seat Cosa, that's 10 seats for A, 5 seats for B, and 5 seats for C.  But if B won six of the provincial seats, then they'd have 30% (more than their share of the national vote) and so A and B would need extra until things were proportional.

You could do it that way, but that's the harder way. The simpler option would be to just live with the overhang. Let's say A and C both won 1 province. Then, Party A gets 9 party list seats (to sum up to 10) and Party C gets 4 seats (to sum up to 5). So that's a total Cosa of 21 seats. Party B gets a small bonus.

Yeah, that's the original MMP system that is still in use in New Zealand. What AD mentioned are called compensatory seats and Germany moved to a system with compensatory seats because the Constitutional Court ruled that the old system was unconstitutionally disproportional (mainly Bavaria's fault), which in turn lead to ever bigger parliament sizes... the system we use now caps parliament size at 630, and abolishes overhang seats entirely: now, if a party wins more constituencies than their party vote would justify, the candidates that won by the narrowest margin simply don't get in, meaning some constitutuencies (IIRC again mainly Bavarian ones) not having a local representative.

My country pioneered MMP in 1949, ask me anything as well.

As much as I think the system has served Germany well, it is a bit difficult to understand at times, especially with regards to overhang seats and independents.

For instance, in the German way, independents who win a local seat do not constitute an overhang, and instead reduces the total number of seats taken in account for top-up purposes by one, i.e. if an independent wins their district in a 20-seat Cosă, the total number of seats stays at 20. However, because independents don't affect the party-based distribution of the remaining seats, people who voted for a winning independent have their party vote ignored, lest they have double the influence on the result as other voters. This step is necessary because otherwise, local candidates could all choose to run as independents while the party vote stays unaffected, transforming Mixed-Member Proportional into Mixed-Member Majoritarian à la Japan.

Quote from: Breneir Tzaracomprada on April 15, 2026, 05:44:00 PM

Quote from: Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP on April 15, 2026, 05:42:25 PMI have no idea what you're even arguing here.

The "terms" are that you man up and take responsibility for your actions, in such a way that Lüc, the victim of your harassment, accepts it. That's it.

Yes, man up and make a third apology rather than refer you back to those already made.
And ignore the name-calling of those who claim to be building a culture of respect and decency.

You can make as many half-hearted and non-serious 'apologies' as you want, if your victim doesn't accept them then they're not worth anything.
Of course, if you want to make excuses, feel free.