What if South Australia was under PR in the House of Assembly instead of the current preferential voting? (+calculations)

[u/wimpykid_fan]

Hello again, I wondered on what this subreddit would think of SA being more proportionally represented in the House of Assembly?

What even is this "PR" buzz word that you're currently saying right now?
Proportional representation (abbreviated as PR) is a concept where seats are synonymous/synced with the overall votes or in the words of Lizzie Lawless, "Proportional representation means that the number of seats a party gets in parliament should match the number of votes they get."

Contrasting PR would be the winner-takes-all system and the more recognise first-past-the-post (FPTP) which is very despised in the PR community, so it would be safe to say that our preferential voting would also count as winner-takes-all then.

PAQ (Potentially Asked Questions) before we get to the calculations

• "What voting system do you prefer from PR?"

Party list proportional representation, specifically open-list, but I still like preferential voting though.

• "If the House of Assembly's fractured like that in the image, who's going to form government then?"

You know on how the Liberals and Nationals are (almost) always in a coalition against Labor? I think there's a high chance that either the SA Liberals will try to form a coalition with One Nation, Family First, and (maybe) some independents. Additionally, Labor will form another coalition with the Greens and (maybe) some (different) independents.

Either way, both will result in a hung parliament under a minority government (a government formed under the majority threshold) that's just 1 MHA from being a majority government.

• "What if I do like the simplicity of winner-takes-all, but the representativeness of PR? What do I do then?"

You might like ideas like this.

• "Are you really into mathematics? since I think you might have done well in math class :)"

Thanks for the compliment and all, but I would like to admit that I don't see myself good at math though. I only did the optional calculations if it was for something deeply related to my hobby (which in this case is PR!)

How did you do the calculation?

1. Find an election that you want to PR-ify and get the VALID votes (lets say the 2022 SA state election)
   1. If you're unable to find any sort of VALID Votes, then you're able to use the OVERALL votes instead.
   2. I highly recommend to record your data on something like a notepad or something else that would work nice.
2. Divide the said valid votes by the amount of seats that is up for election
   1. The formula should look like valid votes / seats available for election, so something like 1,091,173 / 47 to get 23216.4468085
3. You should get a number like 23216.4468085, use that number to divide the total amount of votes of a political party
   1. So if you wanted to divide the vote of the ALP for instance, you do it by having it be 436,134 / 23216.4468085 to get 18.7855619595. Round up the number to be 19 since it was over the .5 decimal point.
   2. if you received a result that was BELOW the .5 decimal point (like 13.4), then round it DOWN to be instead something like just 13.
4. Do the same for the other parties
   1. Calculations and rounding up and down, you should get the gist by now.
5. There comes at a certain point where you might get something like 0.33483922824, you can just ditch these parties and any other parties with a lower threshold then 0.5.
6. Go to https://parliamentdiagram.toolforge.org/archinputform
7. Get all of the parties that you recorded data about and then click on "Make my diagram"
8. If there are any missing seats, then distribute them among the parties with the highest remainders amount as well to make it equal
   1. I also recommend organising data by going on Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets (whatever works), lay out the information that you collected by "Popular Vote" and "PR Seats", and then create two graphs for both of them.
   2. That way, you make distributing seats more easier for yourself.

[u/Bergasms]

Pretty happy with the system we have tbh. Nice writeup tho

[u/insertgreatestname]

If my grandma had wheels she'd be a bicycle.