World's most demented electoral system?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

The Philippines House of Representative party list seats has to be one of the weirdest things ever conjured up IMO.

[aross]

I nominate Southern Rhodesia (1961-69)

Supplementary Vote is probably the most moronic though.

(also, inb4 electoral college)

[Vega]

The Single non-transferable vote system that Japan used to use for all their elections, and now only uses for the Upper House was and is pretty dumb.

[RodPresident]

Brazil Open List who allow bizarre coalitions between rent parties like PP (former military dictatorship party) and PC do B (former Hoxhaist party), with corporation money who is behind political crisis in Brazil.

[bmw1503]

The system of electing members of the Hungarian Országgyűlés from 1990 to 2010 was pretty spectacular in its needless complexity, but seems to have had little impact on the actual results.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

There have been other systems far more demented, but particular form of PR used in the Weimar Republic was quite special.

[bmw1503]

There have been other systems far more demented, but particular form of PR used in the Weimar Republic was quite special.

It was a pretty terrible system indeed. Nation-wide party lists, 0.4% national vote threshold...pretty much fulfilled every nightmare scenario for PR. The two-round system employed by the Kaiserreich was infinitely preferable IMO.

[rob in cal]

  I think the biggest problem with the German imperial Reichstag election system was the lack of reapportionment, so the urban areas were very underrepresented by 1912, the last pre-war election.

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

Here's some other choice picks:

- the Philippines Senate (the entire country is a multimember winner takes all constituency, so it's filled with cronies and celebs elected on Presidential slates)
- Australia Senate
-tasmania upper house
- Chile's binomial system

[Hash]

Colombia's special seats for Afro-Colombians (in the House) and indigenous (in both houses) started with good intentions but have become complete jokes.

[Vega]

Also, the entire facade of having provinces in South Africa even though it is a very unitary and centralized system is incredibly silly.

[seb_pard]

Chile's electoral system since 1990 until next year is based on a binominal system (that created some gross distortions) and the districts created were based on the support for the "yes" option in the 1998 referendum. Besides that Pinochet created Senators for life (he was one) and designated (4 elected by the army, 2 by the Supreme Court and 2 by the president), although these positions were eliminated in  2006.

Jaime Guzman was an evil genius.

[Hash]

Also, the entire facade of having provinces in South Africa even though it is a very unitary and centralized system is incredibly silly.

South Africa is not a 'very unitary and centralized' state.

[Yeahsayyeah]

And noone mentions the United States presidential election, where the loser can outright win due to the electoral college?

[Vega]

Also, the entire facade of having provinces in South Africa even though it is a very unitary and centralized system is incredibly silly.

South Africa is not a 'very unitary and centralized' state.

It isn't? Why is that not the case?

[BundouYMB]

Also, the entire facade of having provinces in South Africa even though it is a very unitary and centralized system is incredibly silly.

South Africa is not a 'very unitary and centralized' state.

It isn't? Why is that not the case?

Uh, it has provincial governments?

[Vega]

Also, the entire facade of having provinces in South Africa even though it is a very unitary and centralized system is incredibly silly.

South Africa is not a 'very unitary and centralized' state.

It isn't? Why is that not the case?

Uh, it has provincial governments?

But they are virtually powerless and their clout is minimal. The mayor of the province's biggest city is likely far more powerful than the Premier of the Province.

[Hash]

Also, the entire facade of having provinces in South Africa even though it is a very unitary and centralized system is incredibly silly.

South Africa is not a 'very unitary and centralized' state.

It isn't? Why is that not the case?

Uh, it has provincial governments?

But they are virtually powerless and their clout is minimal. The mayor of the province's biggest city is likely far more powerful than the Premier of the Province.

Provincial governments are not 'virtually powerless'. If they are, please provide evidence for such a claim.

[Vega]

Also, the entire facade of having provinces in South Africa even though it is a very unitary and centralized system is incredibly silly.

South Africa is not a 'very unitary and centralized' state.

It isn't? Why is that not the case?

Uh, it has provincial governments?

But they are virtually powerless and their clout is minimal. The mayor of the province's biggest city is likely far more powerful than the Premier of the Province.

Provincial governments are not 'virtually powerless'. If they are, please provide evidence for such a claim.

I would like to ask you, though, why you think South Africa is not a centralized or unitary?

[Simfan34]

Because it is a federal republic with elected provincial parliaments who have constitutionally guaranteed powers? I.e., the opposite of being unitary and centralized?

[IceAgeComing]

Someone else has also mentioned Hungary before the new constitution, I don't know why they decided to do it that way rather than a more simple Mixed Member Majoritarian system (basically, it was a mixture of a two-round system like France with additional party lists in smaller multi-member constituencies (kind of like Russia, its a system that was really popular in post-soviet democracies), but with an additional national list level that I think acted as a compensatory list to provide seats with parties that were underrepresented by the single member constituencies and in the regional lists).  There are plenty of better, simpler systems and I don't see what they gained by just bamboozling everyone...

The Australian Senate with Group Voting Tickets was also silly, especially after all of the small parties realised that they could share preferences with each other before the major parties and therefore end up with some random dude getting elected off of a few hundred first preference votes - the new system is still a very odd version of STV, but its much better than what they had before.  Another odd thing is the fact that Senators don't actually take up their seats until the 1st of July after the Senate election: means that you could have people who've been elected just hanging around for the best part of a year while their predecessors serve the rest of their term.  That's actually the reason behind the Double Dissolution election being after that date: if they'd gone before then all of the Senators would have had their terms backdated to 2015, and you'd either have had separate House and half-Senate elections, or the next government would have to have gone for an election less than two years after the previous one to prevent that.  The SV system that they use for mayoral elections in England is also worth talking about; just because its incredibly dumb and I don't know why they didn't just go for  a proper preferential system...

[Kingpoleon]

And noone mentions the United States presidential election, where the loser can outright win due to the electoral college?

(also, inb4 electoral college)

[Zanas]

The Turkish 10 % PR threshold and its consequences are pretty undemocratic and stupid, but you can cleraly understand the political interest behind it so I guess it's not "demented" per se.

[ag]

The Turkish 10 % PR threshold and its consequences are pretty undemocratic and stupid, but you can cleraly understand the political interest behind it so I guess it's not "demented" per se.

Nor is the Chilean binomial, in that sense. Both a wrong from the standpoint of the society at large, but both perform admirably the job they have been invented for.

[Oak Hills]

There have been other systems far more demented, but particular form of PR used in the Weimar Republic was quite special.

How did it work?