I said this the last time we were debating this bill, for the record:
With all due respect to Ishan and Poirot, I'm not really sure that argument holds water.
Our special elections are a carryover from the USA OTL, where House special elections are held to fill a vacant seat for the remainder of a term. In OTL these elections are held within a district, with a specific electorate which is reasonably close to the electorate that previously elected the dead, expelled, resigning, or incapacitated representative. When we say "will of the people," this is the constituency of people we are referring to. But we use STV for House elections, and there is no guarantee that this OTL property will hold in Atlasia under those conditions. Technically speaking, the same nationwide electorate elected razze and Jessica in December. Their voters are scattered around the country, however, and it is not a given that, in the hypothetical event of a Jessica resignation, Jessica's voters will be the ones getting to decide on a replacement for the representative to whom they previously gave a mandate, even though they are the "people" whose will we wish to gauge. In fact, as things stand, they will always be overridden by razze voters. It is more democratic in the sense that the majority of our electorate would prefer a left-leaning representative to fill a vacancy, and thus a 9-0 House if all nine seats simultaneously required a special election for each seat.
If Lumine's goal is to give voters a direct say over who represents them, and we are referring to the voters who elected the vacating representative, then there is no directly democratic way of satisfying their will – it would be disingenuous to hold an election for them and them only. (Lumine can correct me if my assumption is faulty, of course, though the alternative would seem to be giving the nationwide electorate the final say over who gets elected to a seat that only a fraction of them previously voted on.) In existing situations where the party chair can appoint, statutory law can be modified to enforce an ideologically similar appointment to the vacating representative (as Yankee currently does) so as to preserve the will of the people who elected that representative. If the party chair is also required to explain their decision, so much the better for purposes of transparency.
There is no consistent theoretical basis for electing an at-large senator by one method (STV), with one voter base, and then switching to a different method (FPTP) and different voter base to replace that representative in the event of a vacancy. It does not do the job of making sure those voters are represented, as the goal for special elections ought to be. That is done far better when party chairs can appoint an ideologically similar replacement that preserves the will expressed by those voters.
I would be more convinced if there were some attempt to fix the situation with resigning independents, as that is in fact an actual problem to be solved and one where the House (including myself) collectively faceplanted the last time we had this debate, but judging by his advocacy this does not appear to be a problem for the sponsor.
Similarly, I am not a fan of getting the president to change the legislative composition by fiat. I don't think AGA's analogy is right — the president is a separate branch of the
same government. A more accurate comparison would be the governor appointing members of the regional legislature.
