by Epa095 | 2025-04-22 17:05:48+00:00
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> If you'd voted for it in Minnesota, who do you suppose your vote should transfer to in Alaska or Florida?

Did it get more than the national cuttof level for adjustment seats (5% in Iceland, 4% in Norway)? Lets assume it did! Then first we calculate the results from all the local elections. Then we look at the total vote-% vs mandates disparancy for all parties across the whole country, and we can calculate how many adjustment seats each party should get nation-wide (we give one seat to the party with the worst disparency, then recalculate until all adjustment seats are used up).

Let's assume now that the Minnesota FLP won one or more adjustment seats this way, which is completely possible in your scenario. Then we figure out which riding the Minnesota FLP should get another candidate from. For this we look at all ridings where they have a candidate, and chose the riding where the disparancy between vote-% and mandates are the worst. In your example, where the party is only registered in a single riding, that will be the riding they get another candidate in from.

You CAN have a system where each riding can get in at most one adjustment seat, and then you can come in the ackward situation where there are no ridings available for a party which should get a adjustment seat if they do not have listings in every riding. But that is not an essential part of the system, you can allow to get multiple adjustment seats in from a single riding.

> Of course that's a borderline nonsensical example in the case of both the modern day US and Iceland,

Yeah I agree, but its a fun though experiment. The interesting part is really when you have a party in some, but not all the ridings. Then you absolutely get that a lot of votes for the party in riding A helps the party get in another candidate in riding B. But notice that this is votes that in a system without adjustment seats are just lost. So it is not that "your vote escapes" and help some asshole somewhere else, its that your otherwise dead vote gets another chance.

> as in both cases The Party (whichever one it is) is something you can vote for in any state or district.

Surpisingly(?) this is not true. The list "Ábyrgrar framtíðar" is only represented in Reykjavíkurkjördæmi norður. And this is not a freak occurent, its quite common in the Scandinavian countries. In the Norwegian parlament there is today a single representative from the list "Patient Focus", which was formed in April 2021, as a support movement for an expansion of the hospital in the town of Alta in Finnmark.

> In any case. The Icelandic voting system asks you to intern two seemingly mutually incompatible ideas: - That local politics are so unimportant, that you may as well not care who your local representative is, because you may be getting some party critter from the other side of the country, and the difference shouldn't matter to you.

This is really not the take-home. Remember that most of the seats are constituency seats, not adjustment seats. From the article it seams like the ratio is roughly 6-to-1 in Iceland (in Norway its 150-to-19, so 7.8-to-1). So most of the parlament will be people voted in with votes soley from their own constituency.

The question is, what to do with the "leftover" votes which were just barely not enough to get a candidate in? The American system is to discard them, they get nothing, they mean nothing. In the Icelandic system they get to participate in the election of the roughly 1/6th of the parlament which is adjustment candidates.

> - That you shouldn't worry too much about some people having up to 2x the voting power you have, based on which district they vote in. That outsized influence being something that transfers indirectly to what constitutes their national party policy.

So yeah, don't copy this part:-p Of course, this is not in any way a requirement for the adjustment-seat procedure. It is also not unique to the Icelandic system, and the disparancy is even worse in the US, where a single elector could represent between 200,000 and 700,000 people[1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...