One of the simplest, if not the best ways to do a proportional system is to have voters simply put an X next to their favorite party.

And then you take those results from the citizens' votes and you try to match your representatives to that as closely as possible, given the number of seats that you have in your legislative branch.

But one of the philosophical problems that you might have with such a system is that the citizens aren't voting for individuals in particular, they're voting for the party in general. And what that means

is there needs to be a meeting that happens somewhere at the party headquarters where they

determine who their favorite candidates are. And so when the monkey party gets told that they

have three seats, they have already made a list of who gets the first seat, the second seat, and the third seat.

Proportional systems do have the advantage that their explicit goal is to try to match the legislative branch of the government as closely as possible to how the citizens have voted.

STV is a bit of a proportional-ish system.

Proportionality is not its goal.

Its goal is actually trying to make sure

that as many citizens as possible

have local representatives that they voted for

and also to minimize the number of unhappy voters.

And as a side effect, you get a roughly proportional legislature,

but not exactly.