One-round, one-mandate

When out little country (Czech Republic, or Czechland) entered EU couple of months ago, I was standing by the window, watching the celebratory fireworks, listening first to our national anthem, then to the anthem of EU. This, as you may know, is Beethoven's Ninth symphony and I realized an interesting thing. Beethoven originally composed it to the words of Schiller's poem 'An die Freheit' (Ode to Freedom). However, this idea didn't go down well with the Austrian censors, and the title (and content) was changed to 'An die Freude' (Ode to Joy). Nothing seems to me to be a more fitting image of the today's EU as this piece of historic trivia.

Now Czechland is discussing another think typical attribute of EU countries – its proportional electoral system. While seemingly giving more power to minorities, thus being more 'democratic', it dilutes the responsibility of both individual politicians and political parties.

I have little illusions about accountability of politicians under any electoral system, and I am also pretty sure that the electoral system in this country won't change, if only because it didn't do so in the past fifteen years. But for the sake of the argument, let's pretend that this can happen in principle.

The majority (one-mandate constituency) system comes in two basic flavours: one round (winner takes all) and two round (the two candidates from the first round go to face off in the second round). The first has the advantage of being simpler, the later has the disadvantages of being more expensive and also more prone to party horse-trading. However, if any majority system has any chance of being accepted in this country, it is the two-round one, as it gives the smaller parties at least some chances of survival.

But couldn't we combine the two systems into one? If the voter marked his candidates in the order of precedence, it could be then used to emulate the two-round system. When counting votes, we first count the "first place" votes for each candidate. If one candidate gets more than half of the total ballots casts, he wins. If there is no such candidate, we add the votes for the "second place" to each candidate. Again, if somebody now has more than half of the total ballots cast, that candidate wins. The process is repeated until all places are processed, if still nobody gets over one half of votes, the candidate with most votes wins.

If all voters mark just one candidate on their ballot, this system would be tantamount to simple one-round system; if everybody ordered all candidates according to his preferences, the system would work actually better than the two-rounds one (but it could be made to work exactly the same way; the kind reader will figure out how).

Such a system – and no doubt I am not the first person to think about it, and I would be grateful to any reader who would let me know how it is called among electoral professionals – would have an advantage of forcing the parties to show their hand before the elections. Quite often, the period between the two rounds of elections is filled with the most ignominious haggling. The parties and candidates that were at each other's throats become best of friends just to defeat somebody even more loathsome to them. This period of shameless political cynicism would be eliminated but the voters would not be robbed of choice. Instead of necessity to vote for the lesser evil, they would be able to vote for the greatest good and check the lesser evil only as a second alternative.

I wonder if such system is used anywhere in the real world.