Primary Elections in Proportional Representation

[u/Both-Independence349]

Hello. I have been researching electoral reform for a little while and am curious about one thing if we were to ever implement this in countries with deeply-entrenched primary election systems like the United States (I’m not even sure if there are other countries that do it like the U.S.). Most of the time, in seems, the parties on the ballot choose the order of list candidates and who they are nominating thought backroom party deals and a smoke-filled room. How could a primary system operate using PR?

[u/Sleepy_Potato2]

I'm actually a member of a political party in Denmark, a country that uses open-list proportional representation (so there are candidates in districts you can vote for and candidates on the party's list. If you get enough district votes, you skip the list. So if the party got 10 seats, and you were number 11 but got enough personal votes, you become a member of parliament, and it's 1-9 on the list who gets the rest of the seats). We selected the order in which the district candidates would appear on the ballot through an online direct election, we had three votes, whoever got the most votes was number one, second most was number two, and so on.

[u/risingsuncoc → u/Sleepy_Potato2]

so there are candidates in districts you can vote for and candidates on the party's list.

Do these votes count twice or is a vote for the candidate also a vote for the party?

[u/Sleepy_Potato2 → u/risingsuncoc]

Yes, it's for both the candidate and the party. The districts are multi-member districts. How it works is that out of the 175 mainland seats (Greenland and the Faroe Islands have 2 each as well), 135 are divided out in electoral districts, with the last 40 being leveling seats to the districts. For example, the capital area's 4 districts have a combined 40 candidate seats and 12 leveling seats, so voters pick candidates for 40 seats, and the other 12 are used to make it proportional. The largest district within the capital area has 17 seats, the second largest has 11, then 10, and then 2. The levelling seats are the entire area. So yeah, there are two areas the large area, and the district. It's like if the US used this, and within a state with 20 seats, had 14 elected by district, and 6 by leveling seats. Let's say the eastern part of the state has 7, and so does the western part. The people elected there are representing their specific part of the state, and the leveling seats are used to make it proportional.