Hi Robertas, Thank you for asking for our opinions. We like to give our opinions, even if we are not in unison.
To begin with, your current system is much better than what we have here in America. We have very few PR elections. One step towards some improvement for you would be for you to allow independents to run. They can be regarded and treated the same as a small party, if they get enough votes they win a seat, if not, they do not get a seat. The current policy of one municipality-one constituency is good and should be kept if possible, regardless if you keep Party List or go to STV. A single constituency for one jurisdiction yields the best proportionality, that is, a 25 seat election would have four percent units of proportionality per seat while five districts of five seats would require twenty percent units of proportionality. Keep the single constituency. Both party list and STV will give good proportionality, but in STV the voter is allowed to cross party lines as he ranks candidates, including independent candidates - this is good. If you change to STV and the election is partisan, you should not use the Hare quota. The weakness of STV is that candidates can be elected with less than the Hare quota. This tends to not give a party its proportional share of the seats. You should use the Droop quota or my new elimination rule which is: `The candidate to be eliminated shall be the lowest candidate of the party with the lowest average votes per candidate' (The Hare quota is used with my rule). I favor my rule as being better than the Droop because my rule averages the votes of each party exactly, plus there will be no excluded voters left over, but the Droop has been in use for many years, so you should have easy acceptance if you decide to use the Droop. If an election is supposed to be a non-partisan election, then the Hare quota should be used with STV. The Hare will not average the votes of the candidates of any party nor faction. Hare quota will treat all the candidates as if they were running as independents. If the policy of the election is not to help any party nor faction by not having the method average the votes of the parties, then a legal law should also be included which forbids anyone from doing anything to average votes at the ballot box, such as, handing out `How to Vote Cards". I know you wanted our opinions by last weekend, but I always seem to be behind in my email. Consider my letter to be a check so you can see if you are on the right course - Ha Ha. Donald, ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info