So, me and Eluvatar got to chatting on IRC just now, and we both decided that we rather dislike our current single-transferable vote system that is used to elect the Senate. While proportional it's less so than other systems, and is more complicated than other systems, something which might make understanding the results hard to the common voter and scaling up the size of the Senate more difficult in the future. We both came to the consensus that we much prefer party-list voting. We, however, didn't adopt it when we first wrote the constitution because it requires parties, which were not well established at the time.
That of course has now changed. We have two parties and in fact all Senators belong to one of them already. Moreover, I think we should encourage the existence of these parties and others. It also just so happens that we control 2/3's of the Senate, enough to propose an amendment to the constitution to adopt party-list voting, so we're hoping we can get the support of our dear senators Wast and Gallipoli-China behind this.
More precisely we were thinking of the Finnish style open list, in which what candidates get the seats a party has won is determined entirely by their individuals votes rather than any predetermined party list. This could either take the form of people opting in to voting for an individual candidate alongside a party, or require people to pick a candidate and then count that as a vote for their party as well. Elu was indifferent, I preferred the second at first because it meant voters will only cast one vote and for the same thing, keeping it simple, but now I realize it might be harder to word.
The other important question was the actual language. Elu wants to be as precise as possible, and the election clause for the Senate is currently quite brief so it wouldn't be overly complicated. With that in mind, I'd like to put forward an initial proposal.
1. The Senate will be elected once every seven weeks.
2. All senators will be elected at large by the single transferable vote party-list proportional represenation using the Sainte-Laguë method.
3. Voters will vote for a party of their choice and may also vote for a candidate from the party.
4. The seats that any party wins will be awarded to its candidates with the most votes.
5. Vacancies occurring between elections will be filled by recounting the ballots of the last election as if the absent senator were not running.
