So Ralph Anderson made a comment a while ago about the possibility of cheating in a MMP system. He suggested that by not running a party-affiliated candidate in the local election, but instead running an "independent" candidate who would join the party after the election, a party could artificially boost the proportional seats assigned to them. He called this an "enormous loop hole."That intrigued me, so I looked into it. I found evidence of something similar. In the 2001 Italian elections the two major coalitions utilized a technique called "decoy lists" that works much the same way. Instead of independent candidates, however, they just ran coalition candidates from a party that was not contesting the proportional ballot so that the truly popular party could win proportional seats even where the constituency seats were already won by a member of the same coalition.Without wanting to go into the details, there's a couple of reasons I don't think this would happen in Canada. First, it doesn't seem to happen anywhere except Italy. Second, in Italy in 2001 they had 47 parties. Third, the Italian proportional representation system is designed in such a way that combined with a large number of parties it tends to exaggerate the effects of this kind of a strategy. So there wouldn't be as much to gain from it here as there is in Italy.Also, I don't see why you couldn't eliminate the problem by just making it a requirement that if you want your party's name on the proportional ballot, you have to have a candidate listed on the local ballot in that constituency. That doesn't seem like too high a standard to place on small parties. If you expect to get second ballot support from people, surely one of those people is going to be willing to get a bunch of signatures and let their name stand. It would also make decoy list and fake independent strategies extremely risky. The only way to safely use them would be to advertise the fact that you were using them. Considering it doesn't happen in most places now, it's even less likely to happen if the parties had to advertise it.So I'm not worried. But even if I was... when it comes right down to it, you can't argue that decoy lists and fake independent candidates are a problem unless you accept the premise that proportionality is desirable. Once you've accepted that premise, MMP - even with the risk of decoy lists and fake independent candidates - is still one of the best options available, and significantly better than what we have now.