Quickie: Electoral Reform

I recently tweeted this

My personal preference is for FPTP with Parallel PR fill-up seats, with the PR seats being about 20% of total.

I was asked if that is not simply MMP. And it is, sort of.

Lets take Ontario as an example in the last Federal election.

80 - L - 44.8%
33 - C - 35.0%
8 - N - 16.6%
0 - G - 2.9%

There are 121 seats in Ontario. 20% of that is 24. I know the new total is 145, and that of that new total, 24 is only around 16%, but this is what I meant when I said 20% (twitter limits you from being very specific)

Under a traditional MMP system, using d'hondt, we would get the following results
(feel free to use this handy d'hondt calculator to follow along you can put 448 for the Liberal vote, and 350 for the Tories, etc)
L = 61
C = 51
N = 24
G = 4
Since the Liberals have already obtained 80 seats, we can re-calculate this by removing the Liberal party, and, removing 80 seats from our total (145-80 = 65)
C = 42 (33 FPTP seats won, meaning 9 more are added)
N = 20 (8 FPTP, meaning 12 more)
G = 3 (0 FPTP, meaning 3 more)

Thus our end result looks like this

80 L 0 L 80
33 C 9 C 42
8 N 12 N 20
0 G 3 G 3


This is where my proposal differs. I use parallel proportional representation.

Go back to the calculator, and rather than 145 or 65, we are only going to worry about the 24 PR seats. Add the Liberal Party (at 44.8%) back in. From here our result is very easy to determine

80 L 11 L 91
33 C 9 C 42
8 N 4 N 12
0 G 0 G 0

As you can see, the Liberals, despite already being "over-represented" still win seats, but importantly, they win less than half the seats available.

What this means is you still have majority governments, but, you have the following 3 changes

1 - Every region should now see MPs from each of the major parties, no worries about lacking MPs from Rural Francophone Quebec, or Downtown Toronto.

2 - Effective Opposition. While it's not happened as much Federally as Provincially, we have seen oppositions reduced to 2, 1, or 0 seats in some provinces. This system means that never happens, and the opposition will always have at least around 1/12th of the legislature.

3 - Because this will reduce majorities slightly, it means very close elections can see their FPTP majorities turned into minorities; this means majorities are slightly less likely, but still occur more often than not.