We’re dealing here with perceptions of fairness, not fairness in and of itself. I don’t care if a country suffers from ’sectarian’ divisions or not (can class warfare be considered sectarian?): elections are not a wise arena for counterintuitive results. They need to be easily explainable and not easily manipulable by a disgruntled loser. The type of parties you get out of such a situation is, indeed, absolutely a critical priority… but getting people to sit at the table once again is priority one.

I raised Chile because it had an extremely unfair electoral law instituted in order to protect the Conservatives in the 1988 elections. This provided a crucial incentive for the center-left coalition to stick together, but the Concertacion’s success in maintaining the alliance cannot be attributed to the electoral system itself. The binomial system guaranteed over-representation of the Right by giving it equal power in a district if it could muster just 33.4% of the vote. Think of the U.S. with this system: there would be one Democrat and one Republican per district, unless one party got over two-thirds of the vote in a given district (enough to take 1st and 2nd place).
You would never recommend such a system in order to get good parties. Fortunately, the parties were good enough to press on and were eventually able to make some reforms to improve the fairness of the system.

I don’t know of a case where seat shares were so counterintuitive given vote shares that significant factions refused to respect the result. If anyone understands how seat allocation works, I suspect it’s the person contesting an election.

I disagree about the bad party system. Chile does not have a bad party (or electoral) system in that the parties greatly destabilizes democracy. The system(s) may be unrepresentative, but that is a separate issue. (Nor is Chile divided on sectarian lines.)

Yes, there are tradeoffs, but the types of parties one gets in light of underlying social cleavages should be a major - if not the major - consideration.

And a confusing electoral system can make a divided society from one that had not been previously divided.

BTW, the first reason you cite above for Australians not using their STV fits my rationale that it’s a complexity thing. You could argue that they should not have to rank oder the entire list, but I’d retaliate and say every electoral system has its pluses and minuses when you start talking about matching it with a certain society.

“Priority one” depends on the needs of the country. In divided societies, for instance, the intuitiveness of closed list PR might be irrelevant when the resulting party system is bad for democracy.

Regardless, it would be difficult to convince me that an STV or IRV system be implemented in a country without substantial democratic experience. In electoral democracies, the requisite of obtaining a result that all parties see as legitimate is priority one. While IRV or STV may, at the end of the day, may give a more fair reading of the constituency’s will, they are more difficult to comprehend. For this same reason, and perhaps more importantly, for a candidate interested in advancing her own self-interests in the wake of a losing effort, sowing the seeds of doubt can be an enticing option. STV and IRV seem likely to provide fodder for such arguments.

Although theoretical, this is my rationale behind the statement that Professor Shugart has taken issue with.

But the instruction to voters is pretty simple. “Rank your choices in order of preference. If you vote doesn’t count for your first, it’ll count for your second.”

The strong form of the too-confusing argument turns on culture-bound innumeracy.

Opponents of STV and IRV always reach for the argument that the voters can’t understand it (with precious little–usually no–evidence).

I find it rather ironic that Andrew raises this matter in a comment to a post of his very own in which he (correctly) derided Clinton for pandering to the anti-intellectualism of simple voters.

The only reason I mentioned my $50 is to show that I’m not just a Hillary Hater, as I believe there is a vast contingent of people in this country who have hated her from the beginning. I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt at one point in time and, for that reason, I think my position is somewhat more meaningful (if not more influential).

So, go ahead, make fun of my petty contribution… but you’ll still have to deal with my anti-STV antics.

“Hey, Hill. This is Mandelbaum. I’ve got a check for $2 mil here that says you won’t go negative.”

“By the way, I’ve just graduated from Georgetown. Any leads on a job?”

In all seriousness, I was not being serious. Even if there is a shred of truth in the point. With respect to those worms, I lay down my can opener, having recently skimmed the lit on negative campaigns for a fellow reformer of winner-take-all elections.