STV with "uneliminations"?

DEMOREP1 at aol.com DEMOREP1 at aol.com
Sat Oct 19 19:49:27 PDT 1996


Mr. Eppley has correctly noted that the question is in effect, when do first
choice votes get eliminated.

As I noted about 2 months ago, Condorcet for a single winner is the limiting
case of the general case of electing 2 or more legislative, executive or
judicial candidates at the same time using Condorcet.
Example- electing 5 of 10 candidates to a legislative body.

In the simple case, the first choice voters for the losers as a group in
effect cannot join together (by vote transfers) to defeat any one of the
winners. As with single winner Condorcet there must be a tie breaker. 
In the example 2 candidates might be in all groups of 5 candidates; 3 seats
might be in a tie.

With multiple seats especially it would seem natural that the candidate
getting the fewest first choice votes should lose (noting that the voters of
a party would presumably vote for the party's candidates before voting for
some other candidate). Recycle until all seats are filled. A variant would
have party candidates eliminated only compared to each other.

For legislative bodies my remedy is proxy voting with each legislator having
a voting power equal to the combined number of first choice votes and later
choice votes (from losers) he/she receives in the election so that everyone
can get representation (by making enough choices). Such proxy voting avoids
all sorts of problems with 1 vote in 1 seat methods.

In the example, with 100 voters the 5 winners might have voting powers of 30,
25, 20, 15 and 10 respectively in the legislative body.




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