Now, I've never seen Weighted Votes proposed for national elections, but it's the way companies work - the weight of a shareholder's vote is just the number of shares they hold. It seems to work pretty well for them. It's also used at TUC conference, where it's called the Card Vote - a union's delegation is issued a card with a number representing one vote, plus one vote per thousand paid-up members. It was this that set me thinking how it could be used for parliamentary votes.
While it could be extremely simple to implement WV – it would require the tellers in the division lobbies to add up a column of numbers, rather than just count heads – it could also be part of a more comprehensive change. So, for example, the electorate could have two separate votes at the polling station, one for your local MP and one for your preferred party (and this second vote would be the one that determines the party's weighting in Parliament). This is the system used in New Zealand, but they don't have WV, they use the party vote to allocate additional members from party lists.
The beauty of WV is that we could have proportionality right away, in a form that gives an extremely low Gallagher Index; and then add other components, such as the separate Party Vote, or Score Voting, or AV+, or rolling bye-elections, at a later date.
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