In yesterday's Irish Independent on Sunday there's an article by Senator John Crown, member in the university interest of the Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the parliament of the Republic of Ireland, which currently faces abolition. The Seanad comprises several groups of individuals, most of these groups selected by various appointment panels representing agriculture, industry and so on; Sen Crown's proposal is to extend the provisions relating to the only elected one of these groups to embrace most of the other groups, while remaining within the various harder-to-change constitutional rules establishing the general setup (like the existence of these groups in the first place).

His idea is to replace the appointment panels with normal elections, and each elector gets to choose which of the panels' senators to vote for (under multi-member STV):

Every adult citizen will be able to vote in any "panel" constituency, but only in one of them.

This is a good example of why legislators should leave reform of the legislature to the experts, by which I mean me and my friends. It turns out that the idea of letting people choose their own constituency for upper house elections has been considered and rejected before: if there's no statistical difference between the constituencies, you get the same result. Therefore if you assign upper house constituencies at random, then the same party (under FPTP/AV) or proportion of parties (under STV) wins in each constituency. Letting people choose their constituency opens the system up to being gamed by the political parties.