Lo sé. That’s why I went looking for that ballot.
That said, I was assuming that the electoral systems would be the same at all levels of government; national, regional and municipal.
Yes, that’s about right. I just checked Ñuñoa, and it has twelve.
This was a good find. Thanks for this.
La Ley 21.200, que modifica la Constitución Política de Chile, indica que para la elección de los Convencionales Constituyentes serán aplicables las disposiciones pertinentes a la elección de diputados, esto incluye el sistema proporcional conocido como método o sistema D’Hondt, que desde las elecciones parlamentarias de 2017 reemplazó al antiguo sistema binominal.
Sooooo, it seems Chile is now proportional after all! Good! When are the US and UK going to become grownup democracies and do the same??
The GOP/Dem and Tory/Labour duopolies will never allow it.
Anyway, I think that link goes some of the way to explaining how it works but not the whole way. So, again, in South Africa, we don’t vote for candidates, but a party represented by a candidate. This means that you can’t have more than one candidate for a party splitting the vote in any given constituency (which is what the Chilean ballot looked like it did before I read that link). Here is what a ward ballot looks like to elect a ward councillor.
South Africa solves the proportionality problem by using mixed member proportionality at the municipal level which means there is one ballot to have a direct representation for a constituency and one for for proportional representation so that smaller parties can get seats even if they don’t win any wards. In my opinion, this should be the system at all levels of government, but that’s a story for a different day.
Regardless, I think I understand how the Chilean ballot works now. They are basically trying to achieve the same thing with one ballot, which is confusing.
So, going back to my previous example, I now think it works like this:
Again, let’s say that there are 5 council seats and 10 voters in that comuna. 6 of them vote for UDI Candidate 323, while the other 4 voters give one vote each to Candidates 328, 329, 330 and 331, all from the SocDems. UDI Candidates 324 to 327 get 0. In this scenario, according to that link, UDI wins 3 seats and the SocDems get 2, which returns proportionality, but in this case, Candidate 323 for UDI has done all the heavy lifting for their UDI compatriots. Two of them go to council without ever having received a vote. I guess what it DOES do, is give the electorate some kind of influence in the rank order of representatives in each list, but it’s not much less opaque than having parties do it themselves, as is the case in South Africa. As @gringalais points out, information on these people is hard to come by so you are basically just taking a random guess. Rather leave that up to party structures which at least have some kind of vetting process internally.
More than this I can’t ascertain. Do we think I’m interpreting this correctly? I think I will have to actually read the electoral law to understand it completely which is an indictment on Chilean democracy to be honest.
I’m not sure if you’ve seen this link, but you can use it to see the policies of the various candidates. By selecting the relevant candidate, clicking on the red dot and clicking Ver programa, it takes you to a PDF of the candidate’s platform which is quite convenient rather than googling.
That said, as you pointed out, there aren’t programmes listed for the lower levels of government, so not entirely useful.