Depends on the system. In Norway, parties fields lists, but you can strike out the names of candidates you don't like, or add additional names.

The list you vote for determined how many seats that list (party) get in each region, but striking names or adding names of people on other lists alters the order in which seats will get allocated to the people on the lists.

It is not very often used, but when particularly controversial candidates are fielded it sometimes does affect who gets in.

Assuming the party-list system. It depends on how high the party has placed him on the list. If you vote for a candidate so low on the list that he probably wouldn't be elected, he might get enough preferential votes to oust out the last person on the list that would normally get a seat through the top-down assignment, but that only really works for getting someone in, not to get someone out.

Better vote for another party instead.

With the party-list system, you generally vote for parties and not for persons.

Right now, in the UK, we have no say in candidates other than our local constituency. I can't vote out Ed Balls. I don't get a say in the Prime Minister. I can't vote for Julian Huppert. So I don't really see how this is much of an difference in practice.

Can't vote out Ed Balls? You just did!!

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/08/defeat-ed-ba...

No he means personally vote him out. Only the residents of Morley had the power to vote him out, which they did of course (thankfully!)

Depends on the model of PR you go for, in NZ we have MMP and on the party vote side of things you can't say I vote for this party but not Joe Bloggs.

If you look at the Australian model, you actually can do this. You can either vote above or below the line (forget which is which), with one you vote for the list the party derived, the other you select the party and then rank all of their candidates. In practice thou the majority don't rank and it is sort of irrelevent that you can.

IMHO, even with individual candidates it is more or less the party they represent that decides the winner anyway.

In Australia the 'above or below the line' voting system is used for the upper house (senate), which is state-based representation (and you can only select a single party, or number 40+ boxes below the line).

For the lower house, we have optional preferential voting. So you number from 1 to something, and stop when you want. Then a slightly complex counting system occurs where votes for least-voted candidates are redistributed to the next preference, and repeated until you get a result.

The upper house voting system does have some issues though. Most people consider voting below the line complex, and you can only mark one party above the line. Then independent senators only appear below the line, since they are in no party (which has caused an independent senator to make a party, just to appear above the line).

Why do you believe that you can do that in FPTP? We just had an election the day before yesterday when various party bigwigs getting voted out was acclaimed as an astonishing, once in a century upset, and even then it was fairly localised.