The Liberty Lamp: Libertarian News & Editorials

The video linked to above is a 1984 UK public service announcement/ad supporting Proportional Representation, starring John Cheese from Monty Python. It's entertaining, and provides a lot of good, easy to understand information. Though old and copied from tape to MPEG at somewhat low quality, it's still relevant and worth a look (Run Time: About 10 min.)

As a very brief intoduction, Proportional Representation is a system in which a political party gets a % of the total seats in a governing body as the % of the vote they get in an election. For example, if the LP got 30% of the vote, the Dems 50%, and the Republicans 20%, then each party would get that many % of the seats. To use the US Senate as an example (it has 100 members), there would be 35 Libertarian senators, 50 Democracts, and 20 Republicans.

The PR system is used in almost all of Europe, where the parties themselves get to choose who fills that X% of the seats. Most Americans would find this method to lack transparency, as would I. Luckily, all of the most promising methods purported in the US allow you to choose both the party and the serving individuals. That means you get the best of both worlds- individual selection of your officials (like today), PLUS you gain a much better chance of actually GETTING those people into office. For small parties, this means no more having to win against the RepubliCrats by a landslide in an election!

For more info and articles about PR, visit this site.
An example of a variation on this theme can be seen in Illinois. It was used since almost the beginning in the state, but was eliminated in the 80s. Today, many lawyers and activists are trying to bring it back*.

*NOTE: Though I do not aggree with or advocate the implementation of some of the MDC's ideas, such as unicamiral legislatures, I think that IRV/PR are definately where it's at. Visiting their website will give you some good ideas on policy that you might not have heared of. At lest for me, I had a couple of "Why hadn't I thought of this before!" moments ;)