[EM] 12/22/02 - Markus Schulze Wrote and Wrote again:

[Markus Schulze]

Dear Adam, dear James,

Adam wrote (24 Dec 2002):
> A long time ago, I had made a suggestion for voting mixed lists of
> candidates and parties, but I hadn't supported equal rankings.  I
> would have interpreted the ranking of party A in rank 5 as the desire to
> rank A1 5th, A3 6th, and A5 7th.  I like your way better since it removes
> any vestige of predetermined ordering from the party list.

In my opinion, a party should have the possibility to suggest a ranking
of its candidates. But the voter should have to agree explicitly to this
ranking. The vote of a voter, who votes for this party but who doesn't
explicitly use the suggested ranking, should be split among the candidates
of this party. This would reduce drastically the power of the party
apparatchiks.

Adam wrote (24 Dec 2002):
> In this system, can your active votes be split among more than one
> candidate?  To use the above example, if B2 and B3 were already elected,
> and the voter's ballot still had strength .7, would the ballot be
> transferred to both C1 and C3 with a weight of .35 each?  If C3 were
> subsequently eliminated, would the C3 portion then transfer to C1 and
> give it the full .7?

Yes, that's exactly what I was thinking of.

James wrote (24 Dec 2002):
> I would not make any provision for ranking parties.  The voters should
> rank the candidates, from "1" to as many or as few as they wish.  The
> "ranking" of the parties should be an outcome, not an objective..
>
> All I would add to this is that "party boxes" are completely and
> utterly unnecessary, no matter how large the district.  They are
> a recent perversion and have no place in STV-PR.

Actually, the main reason why I promote party boxes is that in Germany
STV without party boxes would certainly be declared unconstitutional
because of Article 21 Section 1 Sentence 1. ("The political parties
participate in the political decision making of the people.")

Because of Article 21, in those parts of Germany where open list PR
is being used, the ballots already have party boxes.

By the way: In Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Nuernberg, there
are usually 500-700 candidates on the ballot. In the last Stuttgart
City Council elections, there were 938 candidates on the ballot.

Markus Schulze

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