[LINK] Why Electronic Voting?

[Stewart Fist]

Assuming he was just 'twisting words', Howard wrote:
> Why not protortional representation - better still.



Proportional representative systems have three major failings, in my
opinion.

1. They tend to produce unstable governments afraid to take unpopular action
because the resulting governments (in a two-party system) very often have
only small majorities. This makes them afraid of defections (allowing
blackmailing by members, etc). And this also puts immense power in the hands
of minor parties and independents.    So you end up with a government where
one or two erratic or irresponsible individuals are able to wield immense
power

Our present independents and minor parties are better than the average party
politician in both State and Federal governments (with a couple of notable
recent exceptions like Hanson, etc), but it hasn't always been so.  Without
party discipline, individual members are generally easier to bribe and
blackmail (look at the American system), and often have much narrow
social/political concerns.  Remember the DLP, Joh's use of independents,
Fields, Coulson, Harradine, etc.

The present system usually gives one of the major parties a reasonable
majority, even if percentage-wise they only win by a small margin.  The
value, to a degree, lies in the non-proportionality -- while the system is
still easy to change government every four years.



2. Proportional representation is never truly proportional, anyway, because
it depends on how you divi up the electoral districts, states and
territories.  It can end up being less 'democratic' (in terms of true
overall representation) than the present system.


3. It also ensconces and enshrines the political party structure at a higher
level in the nation's political structure than the elected individual.

Our present system is constructed on a legal fiction that we elect
individuals. Those elected individuals of a like-mind then form a party
structure in parliament.  They then caucus, and elect a prime minister
etc.etc.  

In such a system, the role of the elected individual is paramount.

Parties only ever achieved recognition, when the government began giving
them money for winning votes, and even then, it is done on an individual
basis.

Proportional voting reverses this -- because the party must have a higher
legal role than individuals for the proportions to be recognised.  It
therefore tends to favour the selection of party apparatchiks and
time-servers from the central office of the parties.


Proportional systems are a class of seemingly attractive and seemingly
democratic ideas which don't work so well in practice.