Problem: It’s hard for any small new party to get a toehold in Parliament, and, under the raw WV scheme I’ve described, no-one is representing the opinions of their supporters.
Response: This is not a problem of WV, it’s a problem of how we choose MPs in the first place. We might decide, separately from the WV issue, that we will replace Plurality voting with STV in multimember constituencies, or have a second class of non-constituency MPs. But these are about who gets to represent a party in parliament, and can be decided separately from the issue of proportionality.
However, WV does open a different possibility, which is that a small party might assign its votes to another party that shares its values. Meibion Kernow, for example, might be OK having an arrangement of this sort with Plaid Cymru. Like any Confidence and Supply arrangement, it would have to be easy to dissolve it.
Some parties might not be able to find a partner, either because no other party was pure enough for them, or because no other party would accept the poison chalice of being associated with them. That then stops being the system’s problem.
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