Information Alexandria's Got a New Election Law

[Capt11543]

From the Office of
Prime Minister Capt11543
​

Alexandrians,

Today, the Single Transferable Party Vote Act passed Parliament and was delivered to Her Majesty the Queen for Royal Assent. I am not exaggerating in the slightest when I say this bill has been in the works since the start of the term! There have been extensive discussions, drafts, revisions, negotiations, and compromises involved with the government’s efforts to reform the election system and restore public trust in elections. I’ll get into that more further down, but before that, I should talk about how exactly we got here, and what exactly this bill fixes.

October Election Post-Mortem​

The October 2025 election failed to deliver a truly democratic result, and everybody knows it. By all accounts, Labour/Public Servants and the Greens won a combined three more seats than we should have. This result has weighed on me the entire term, and why I opted to fill a vacant LPS with an independent who ran in October when given the chance. I believe the skewed result can be traced back to one pernicious clause in the Alexandrian Electoral Act that was in force for that election (at §5(2)):

One half of mandates, rounded up, shall be elected directly through a system of Single Transferrable Vote.

Combined with the mechanics of STV and Sainte-Laguë, and the splitting of the ballot between candidate votes and party votes, this clause directly caused the fundamental imbalance in the election result. Because of this, an independent candidate needed to strive for 4.22222 candidate votes in order to get a seat, while a party could count on winning a seat with only 2.25 party votes.

This wasn't the only known issue with elections in Alexandria. There has been a need to strengthen election integrity since August. In the August election, a candidate was disqualified because the single individual in charge of configuring the polls made an honest mistake. Though I don't ascribe any malice towards that individual, that mistake could still have prompted a lawsuit that would have unraveled the whole election. Also, in October, the Ministry of Internal Affairs deregistered the Conservative Party of Alexandria during the submission period. Although the Conservatives' registration had genuinely lapsed, the fact that the Ministry did not act until the election was already underway was nonetheless damaging to public trust. (I also suspect that the October election wouldn't have been as nakedly disproportionate if the CPA was not deregistered during the election.)

In light of all of that, it was very clear that we could not simply patch over the holes in the current election system. I knew that in order to restore public confidence in this Kingdom's elections, the election system we would use in January needed to satisfy the following goals:

• Award seats based on proportional representation (this is required by the Constitution, so no way around it)
• Continue to give independent candidates a viable path to Parliament, without treating the entire group of independent as a unified bloc
• Ensure that independent candidates and political parties all compete for the same pool of votes
• Be easier for the Alexandrian voter to understand
• Provide safeguards against accidental or malicious breaches of procedure
• Be as transparent and publicly auditable as possible, without compromising the Constitutional right to a secret ballot

These are quite a few goals to strive for at once, and there were a great many attempts put forward. For one reason or another, most of those proposals were not viable. The Single Transferable Party Vote is the proposal that will, finally, be making it over the line.

The Single Transferable Party Vote​

As (I hope) the name implies, the Single Transferable Party Vote system applies many of the mechanics of traditional Single Transferable Vote, but recognizes the Constitutional reality that parties, not necessarily individuals, are the primary vessel of political representation in Alexandria. This system aims to treat each independent candidate as a party unto themself; thus, each unique campaign platform will appear on the ballot in the upcoming election. (If you aren't familiar with the mechanics of traditional STV, I recommend this video by CGP Grey as a primer.)

When polls open for that election, each declared party and independent will appear on the ballot. (The new bill refers to parties and independents using the umbrella term "contender", so I will also use that term from now on.) You will be asked to rank one or more of them in order of preference. During adjudication, the elections team at the Ministry of Internal Affairs will calculate a quota value--this is the number of votes that a contender will need to win in order to obtain at least one seat. Just like usual, if a contender's vote count doesn't reach that quota value, then they are eliminated and their votes are transferred down-ballot. The key difference is how contenders who have a surplus of votes are treated, and it depends on what type of contender it is. If an independent candidate ends up with a surplus, their votes are transferred as normal. On the other hand, parties will retain their surplus votes, and will continue accumulating transferred votes.

If that doesn't quite make sense to you, consider that even as this system views an independent candidate as a type of party, it is still the case that one person cannot fill more than one seat. Thus, in order to make sure that the voting power of voters who ranked an independent candidate first is fully accounted for, independents transfer their votes if they achieve a quota. On the other hand, a party could easily field a high number of candidates. Votes attributed to parties, then, are used to determine the proportional power they will have in the next step of the process.

By the time all the ballots are counted, the parties and independent candidates which will have a presence in Parliament. Each independent candidate who achieved a quota will have a seat set aside for them. Each party who achieved a quota will compete for the remaining seats using the Sainte-Laguë procedure, which is by now a mainstay in Alexandrian electoral systems. Party seats will be filled by each party's candidate list from top to bottom; parties are also given a chance after the election to fill seats that they won, but didn't have a candidate for.

This new system isn't actually that new; it's fairly similar to a proposal from back in the first Parliament, the IND 2 Act. Like that bill, the STPVA uses proportional representation with parties and independents on the same level. The main addition is the addition of ballot transfers to make sure votes for popular independent candidates do not get diluted. Ameslap must be feeling pretty vindicated as he reads this!

So how does this stack up with the goals?

• Using STV and the Sainte-Laguë method satisfies the proporitonal requirement in the Constitution.
• Independents have an attainable path to a seat: they're in with at least 1/16th of the total votes.
• Since all the results are derived from one ballot, parties need to reach the same 1/16th threshold to earn at least one seat.
• One ballot means less funky rules to keep track of. Just rank the manifestos you like best. The back-end math takes care of the rest.

I'll cover the last two points in the next section!

There is one thing strategic voters may want to watch out for: since parties are likely to get high vote totals and accumulate even more after that, your ballot will probably stay with the party you rank highest.

Safeguards and Transparency
The Single Transferable Party Vote Act also introduces unprecedented election transparency, along with critical procedural safeguards. The roles of Electoral Officers have been clarified, and they are now required to double-check each other's work. Before polls can be opened, at least two Electoral Officers have to sign off on the configuration of the ballot (to ensure that all qualified candidates are listed), and the list of disqualifications (to make sure they were done properly).

Additionally, the electoral transparency required by law has significantly expanded. The Ministry is required to publish the raw votes submitted, provided they are carefully scrubbed of metadata that could identify a particular voter. They must also release documents and spreadsheets that they used to calculate the election results. If any computer programs are used, they have to publish the source code and inputs, too. With this information, we believe our elections will be auditable by any citizen. You will be able to leverage this data to ensure that the declared winners really did win fair and square.

I do know that it will take more than one election to fully restore public trust in the system. But I hope and believe that these additional safeguards are a significant step taken by the government towards that end.

The Long and Winding Road
I have alluded to the previous attempts at this enough, so let's go over them now.

First was the Open List Act, a carry-over from the second Parliament. This bill would have established a more candidate-focused system that inferred party votes from a voter's first and second choices. It didn't make it out of debate because we were afraid the party vote inference would be unintuitive. Voters would be presented with a set of candidates to vote for, but the party votes would have been based on the voter's first and second choices. It did introduce the concept of "achieving quota" in order to earn representation.

Former MP Dartanboy proposed a draft bill called the ELECTIONS Act. which repealed and replaced the current Electoral Act with nicer language that mostly preserved the old system, but removed the damning clause. I originally supported it and attempted to contribute to it, but I pulled my support because it did not remove the independent bloc from the system.

One of my first attempts was the Electoral Terms Act / Direct Representation by STV Act. My theory was that the party system in general was responsible for the conflict at the time, so this was a hard pivot away from political parties. This would have taken a pretty comprehensive rewrite, but I think this draft covered a lot! The Constitutional side of this bill would have also clarified the structure of elections. It gave a proper definition to "dissolving Parliament", and made the protocol around forming (and toppling) government more concrete, as well as vesting 100% of that power in Parliament. The companion bill was an overhaul of the statutes to enforce compliance with the Constitution. It also includes almost all of the transparency and procedural upgrades found in the final bill, so you can see that I've been sitting on those ideas for quite some time! I spent a considerable amount of time looking for co-sponsors for this bill, but I eventually decided that this was far too ambitious, and started working on a scaled-back version. (Looking back, I wish I had figured that out sooner!)

I also have an earlier draft of the Single Transferable Party Vote Act laying around that I am pretty proud of! This bill was significantly more candidate-focused, and would have given the voter a greater degree over the overall composition of Parliament. Instead of putting parties and independent candidates on the ballot, all candidates would appear on the ballot, and parties' proportional power would be derived from summing the votes earned by party candidates after tabulating ballots. Ultimately, we decided not to go with this option because it posed significant mental overhead to the voter in terms of planning for potentially many rounds of transfers. We thought that in practice, supporters of parties will simply prefer for their party to have greater proportional power, and place slightly less importance on the exact composition of Parliament (except perhaps hoping their favorite Prime Minister hopeful gets a seat).

There were some other drafts, written by other people, that never made it to the floor or were never published. I leave it to the authors of those bills to publish and speak on them if they wish to.

TL;DR
Parliament has finally passed a new electoral system. When you go to the polls on January 20, you will be asked to rank your favorite parties or independent candidates in order of preference. The system is ultimately proportional, meaning that in order to get a seat, a party/independent needs to get at least 1/16 of the vote to earn at least one seat. Since independent candidates can't fill more than one seat, then any indies who clinch a seat will transfer their surplus votes down-ballot, to ensure that nobody's voting power is wasted.

This will likely be my last major statement of the term. I hope I have ended it on a high note.

In any case, thank you for reading.

~Capt11543
Prime Minister