How would you make elections fairer?
AV? That didn't get a good result in the 2011 referendum with about 2/3 of people voting for the status quo.
AV won't make elections fairer - it would just go from ignoring minor party votes to forcing voters to chose which one of the two major ones they dislike the least. Which in almost all seats will be the one that wins anyway.
It changes the result in a handful of marginals, that's about it.
PR? How would that work? Would it be national, meaning that everyone could vote for parties such as Shin Fain, Plaid Cymru and the SNP?
Alternatively, would it be regional, meaning that SNP would still get a very high number of MP's in Scotland whilst the Tories would still get lots in England potentially giving a similar headline result to the 2015 election (beaing in mind under PR Scotland would have something like 10 Tory MP's)?
List based PR systems are not necessarily the way forward, because of the problems with regionalist parties.
Any PR top up arrangement would involve four-nation level seats in all likelyhood - because there are no real regionalist parties in England and the larger the regions the more proportional the result would be - Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland would be run seperately for the same reason.
The SNP would get the same number of seats in Scotland under a list-based PR if the seats had been distributed properly.
50% of the vote in 10% of the seats is the same as 5% of the vote in 100% of the seats. They should (in theory) get approximately the same number either way.
Wouldn't also mean the loss of local MP's with groups of say between 3 and 10 MP's serving a large area? If the areas are too small (say 3) then it would still be possible for a party in second place to get 18% of the vote and the major party get 55% and the major party still get all the MP's for that area.
The
Additional Member System, you elect a certain number of members using constituencies as you do now, you then award "top up seats" using the
D'hondt method to parties that in a true proportional relationship should have more seats than they won in constituencies. You continue making it more proportional until you run out of "top-up" seats.
You don't even need a party list in most cases, since you can take the "highest scoring loser" candidates (in percentage terms, obviously) for the parties to make up the top up list. You would however need a list of extra candidates just in case the total number of seats won by each party were more than the number of (local) constituencies, but that would be very rarely used for obvious reasons.
This system has the advantage that you can keep the current constituency boundaries, avoiding a recounting of the boundaries and allowing it to be implemented almost immediately, by merging adjacent constituencies to form the new larger ones.
For example, Scotland would be merged from its current 59 to 30, with the remaining 29 seats being used for top-up. (All but three constituencies formed out of two antecedents, one out of three and two individuals - as the Western Isles and Orkney/Shetland have big cultural differences from the mainland).
In this case, the SNP would have won 29 of the 30 constituencies (Orkney and Shetland would have still gone Lib Dem) - but they would have been unlikely to win any of the top up seats (what was the total SNP share of the vote in Scotland?) which would have mostly have been won by Labour and Conservative candidates who would have been unseated.
This way we still have constituency MPs but Parliament looks a lot more proportional because ~50% of its members are chosen by proportional schemes. By first using failed constituency candidates instead of a party-HQ decided list you also weaken the ability of HQ to pack the house with political cronies - since you would only allow a list if they had 100% constituency coverage across the voting area (which in England would be huge).
