Ziu Reform Possibilities

[Françal I. Lux]

I'm not suggesting we abandon party politics and I'm not explicitly commited to STV, but I'd like for everyone to consider shifting elections to focus more on individual candidates running for office instead of accepting them in bulk on a party list.

We should give the electorate the option to choose which candidate(s) they want to represent them while also forcing the candidates themselves to actually campaign for votes instead of relying on the party to carry them.

How is it democratic when we allow parties to curate who the candidates will be beforehand then present a list of people to the electorate as if to say these are your options, now pick. If John Smith likes MC A from Party 1 but also MC B from Party 2, why shouldn't he have the option to split his vote? What if John Smith doesn't like MC C from Party 1 because, say, they're not a very active public servant? In a party list, he has no choice but to vote for that candidate because he has no other option since Party 1 best represents his vote.

If we allow individuals to run on their own merits, then candidates would be compelled to defend their own ideas, campaign for their own success, and it'd likely discourage anyone who isn't really serious or committed to public service from running.

[Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC]

It's even less democratic when the party leader just picks the MCs, unrestricted by any list.

[Marcel Eðo Pairescu Tafial, UrGP]

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.

[Françal I. Lux]

It's even less democratic when the party leader just picks the MCs, unrestricted by any list.

Isn't this, in practice, the current system we have now?

What I have in mind is simple: Anybody is free to associate with whatever party they want, but running in an election would be the individual candidate's choice, no lists needed, and the onus is on them to take lead in running their own campaign.

Since we're moving to a 20-seat Cosa, I would argue that individual candidates' ideas and principles should be scrutinized more during an election and voters should have a direct say in who's representing them instead of being forced to pick lists of people.

[Françal I. Lux]

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.

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

[Miestră Schivă, UrN-GC]

Isn't this, in practice, the current system we have now?

At the moment, at least 2/3 of the MCs have to be on a list of candidates that the voters saw at election time and approved of. I think it should be 100%. Because party leaders have just brought people into the Cosa who have no democratic mandate at all.

[Mic’haglh Autófil, O.Be]

It's even less democratic when the party leader just picks the MCs, unrestricted by any list.

Isn't this, in practice, the current system we have now?

As Miestra pointed out, this is not quite the system we have; party lists do provide restriction on who the leader may appoint to seats in the Cosa. Granted, at least one party leader seems to disagree, but that's a job for the judiciary at the moment.

Since we're moving to a 20-seat Cosa, I would argue that individual candidates' ideas and principles should be scrutinized more during an election and voters should have a direct say in who's representing them instead of being forced to pick lists of people.

This is just my two bence, but I would argue that the provincial seats in an MMP setup could satisfy this preference, no? Yes, it does still factor into a partisan distribution of seats, but hear me out:

* Talossa as a country does have a fair amount of its activity revolve around politics, regardless of what one may think of this.
* Quite a few Talossans prefer a political system that actually features, well, politics. Discussion, debate, and organization based on ideological and ethical stances, as opposed to politics-as-a-popularity contest. (Some Talossans, to be fair, clearly do not share this preference.)
* An electoral system that seeks to balance the evaluation of individual candidates and evaluation of ideological groupings would, to my eyes, function as a compromise between these two approaches to Talossan politics.
* If we have an MMP system and the party list seats are also chosen via an open-list system, that would be a massive shift towards an individualized approach to politics, but it doesn't completely abandon modern, ideology-based partisan politics, either.