Random Ballot
On having the cake and eating it
FPTP
Until 1977, Sri Lanka had a “first-past-the-post” or FPTP [1] voting system. The country was split into several regions known as “constituencies”, various individuals contested elections in these, and whoever got the most number of votes, won the election. This was a simple system, and candidates were known to, and hence (at least in theory) accountable to the voters.
FPTP also had several disadvantages, including the fact that, for a given party, the number of candidates who got elected, was not proportional to the number of votes the party got.
For example, in the 1970 Parliamentary Election [2], the SLFP 91 seats with 36.86% of the vote, while the UNP won just 17 seats with 37.91% of the vote. The LSSP which got just 8.68% of the vote, managed to get 19 seats.
PR
After 1977, FPTP was replaced with Proportional Representation or PR [3] for the general elections that elected candidates for the 225 seats in parliament. 196 seats were allocated to districts and were distributed to parties in proportion to the votes they got in each district. The candidates with the highest votes from each party were voted in. Similarly, a remaining 29 seats were allocated at a National Level, and each party had a “National List” of candidates.
While FPTP solves the “proportionality” problem, candidates were associated, not with constituencies, but with districts, or a broader National List. As a result, it was more difficult for voters to know who their representative was. The power to select representatives was effectively with the party.
Having the cake and eating it
The problem with FPTP is that it is not proportional. This is a problem because many votes (in theory, and often up to 50%) don’t get to influence who gets elected. On the other hand, it is a simple, easy to understand system — a vital characteristic for a participatory democracy. The problem with PR is that voters don’t know who their representative is, and conversely, representatives are less accountable to the voters.
What if there was a constituency-based voting system, which was also proportional?
Random Ballot
A Random Ballot or RB [4] works as follows: The country is split into “constituencies”, and Various individuals contested elections in these, just like FPTP. Of all the votes cast, one vote is selected at random. Whoever, the candidate is, wins the election.
RB has never been tried out in practice, and was first suggested by Akhil Reed Amar, as a “thought experiment” in 1984. It has the nice property that every vote has an equal probability of determining the outcome of the election. On the other hand, it also possible that a candidate who does not “win” the election (i.e. gets the most number of votes), does not get elected.
Any chance that RB will be considered in Sri Lanka, or anywhere else?
References
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-past-the-post_voting
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceylonese_parliamentary_election,_1970
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_ballot
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_parliamentary_election,_1989
