[EM] PR in student government

[James Gilmour]

> From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax > Sent: 17 April 2007 17:15
> I didn't claim that this information was "what STV-PR is all about." 
> It is primarily a method for creating a proportional representation 
> assembly. The information I'm talking about is not directly relevant 
> to that goal. But, I assert, it should still be made available. If it 
> is determined that public funding shouldn't be spent on that, then 
> ways could be provided for private funding (such as through 
> nonprofits or media) to cover the costs of counting. If nobody is 
> sufficiently interested to count all the votes, that's another 
> matter..... but I think there would be interest.

You may be interested to know that in our elections on 3 May, electors
will complete conventional ballot papers (real paper) with an old
fashioned stubby pencil (chained to the polling booth) or vote by post.
The ballot papers for the Local Government STV elections (and for the
Scottish Parliament elections that are being held on the same day  -
MMP voting system!!) will be scanned and data files created by
intelligent optical character recognition software.  The ballot data
will then be counted electronically. 

So the full ballot data will be readily available in an electronic
format and COULD be published in a suitably anonymised form, i.e.
removing all references to the ballot paper number from the file of
ballot data.  With thousands of voters in every one of the 353 elections
and only small numbers of candidates in each of the 353 wards (local
government electoral district), the chances of identifying any voter
from a "unique" sequence of preferences are probably so small that they
can be safely set aside in the greater public interest of making the
full ballot data available at ward level.  This was done with the full
STV-PR ballot data for three constituencies in Ireland in 2002.

Unfortunately, our government (= "Scottish Executive") has followed the
conventional approach to paper records relating to elections and so the
Election Rules specifically prohibit the release or publication of any
of the electronic information although all the electronic information
has to be retained for four years (until the next election).  However,
following some agitation on this issue, the government has agreed to
carry out a consultation on this after the elections are over.  So we
may yet see the full STV ballot data from all our 2007 local government
elections.  Then we might have independent validation of the results and
lots of interesting (and amusing) political and sociological analysis of
the preference patterns.
James Gilmour