Excellent job writing a novel, Dave. You got me enticed in the storyline. You’re a better writer than I am.
I’m showing you this image for a reason. I found it on the internet while googling my last name. This is a town in the Netherlands and it has eleven council seats. I recognize three parties by name from national politics, and one party’s name translates loosely into Local Needs and Interests. It got four seats in 2010.
In proportional voting, the voter is the essential feature, not the party. Depending on the political platform, people adjust their voting. The local group does not exist at the national level of politics. But the national level of politics is organized in such a way that it cannot hurt local voters voting for local parties.
’06 refers to elections four years prior the 2010 elections. In 2010, the local party got four of the eleven seats. The centrist Christians got three seats. The libertarians remained at two seats, though they did lose a little. The social-democrats lost a seat.
Compare this to San Francisco, also eleven seats. All of them are registered democrats. It is very much the same throughout the United States at the local level: one party occupying all the seats.
Modern democracy means cutting up the pie according to the voters’ wishes. Proportional voting cuts up that pie. Not so in district voting: it’s a game and it has just one winner per game.
One note of caution: large nations should not have twenty little parties. That is a possible outcome if there are 200 seats or more. If the counter gets stuck at seven distinct political directions then that would be fine with me. But two parties are a fallacy of course.
For the local level, when there are just a handful of seats, fifteen or twenty seats at the most perhaps, then proportional voting works really well and there is then no need for limiting the number of political directions: the voters will already adjust themselves to the limited number of seats. In the example shown above, voters did not pick 11 parties; they picked four. That is an extremely natural outcome for a place with eleven seats. Voters are smart; they really are.
Always good chatting with you. And yes, you can become a real writer of real novels. You already are. You have it in you.
