The Icelandic Voting System (2024)
It's interesting that it's possible to achieve proportional representation with respect to geographic distribution and party votes simultaneously. (Though, as the article notes, Iceland falls short of this ideal.)
This makes me wonder: why stop at two? Some places have explicit quotas for different ethnic or religious groups as a compromise to avoid civil war. Could they use a tripoportional system?
And why not add in even more demographic variables? Age, gender, income, level of education, ... I suppose at some point it stops being a secret election because the number of voters sharing all attributes becomes too small, or the parliament would get unwieldily large trying to represent every hyperspecific constituency.
The main problem with this system: even most university educated people cannot thoroughly understand it. [0] That potentially undermines trust in the system.
The main "feature" of the Icelandic voting system is to dilute the relationship between a voter and their representative representing their interests in their district.
Instead their vote goes to someone in the same political party in another district.
So the entire system is biased away from local representation and towards party policy decided on a national basis.
That policy is in turn heavily weighed towards the interests of geographic areas over "one person one vote". Icelandic law only starts considering that a problem once your vote counts 2x as much as mine, just because we live an imaginary line apart.
I wanted more details on how this works. For those interested, I found an English pdf describing the full system [1]. The interesting part is Article 110, which discusses how the adjustment seats are allocated. Here is my best summary:
1. Using D'Hondt [2] on every party's national vote share, determine which party should be given the next seat. 2. For every constituency which has adjustment seats available, calculate the D'Hondt quotient of the first candidate in that party who has not already been elected using the constituency vote share. So if a party received V votes in a constituency and two party members were already elected from this constituency, their quotient would be V/3. 3. Elect the candidate with the highest quotient to fill an adjustment seat for their constituency. 4. Repeat until all adjustment seats have been given away.
There's arguably a step 0 here, which is determining how many constituency and adjustment seats every constituency gets, and this is done before the election is held. This is described in Article 10. It's pretty bad. First, the adjustment seats are hard-coded. Second, unlike the US where we reapportion after every census, Iceland appears to only reapportion the constituency seats when the constitution demands they do it. This happens when there are twice as many voters per seat in one constituency compared to another. Furthermore, they only adjust as few seats as possible to get back under this limit rather than actually recalculate a fair apportionment. I'm not sure what the logic of this was, maybe to minimize how often the number of seats in each place is changing? Either way, in the 2021 election this resulted in one constituency with 199% as many voters per seat as another and no changes were made [3].
[1]: https://www.stjornarradid.is/library/03-Verkefni/Kosningar/K...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Icelandic_parliamentary_e...
Huh, TIL the Constitution doesn’t require Congressional districts. A state could technically switch to a model like this for assigning representatives at large.
Sadly, these tweaks don't address any of the more obvious oddities that people have with proportional representation in the legislature. While such a system won't necessarily end up with Dutch levels of weirdness, it is still possible:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/why-does-proportional-repre...
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Nnnneeeeeeeeerds!
I absolutely love that you need to read a list of axioms with Greek symbols in their descriptions to make an informed vote in Iceland. Sets a minimum bar of education to vote, which is reasonable.
This seems to gloss over the major difference between Scandinavian voting systems and e.g. the US one: They are very party-focused. At the end of the day it’s the cabals at the top of the major parties that decide who gets to sit in parliament and how they vote. Sometimes it feels like it would be more honest if e.g. Swedish parliament just had 8 members and their voting buttons controlled more / fewer lights on the voting results dashboard. Leads to a very collectivist political culture.