STV for party candidate lists?

[Herman Beun]

Been thinking again...

I wrote:
> and my preliminary conclusion is that probably the best way 
> to solve this is by using the order in which STV eliminates 
> one chanceless candidate in each round. In this way, each 
> candidate is subjected to the STV shuffling of votes as long 
> as possible: that's why the (at first sight more obvious) 
> order in which STV assigns seats in each round is
> not the right choice. 

The conclusion still holds, but the reasoning is a bit misty. The
real reason why it is better to use the elimination order instead of
the seat assignment order is of course that for the elimination you
do not need any information about the eventual number of seats to
fill (which, in this case, is also unknown at that stage): simply the
candidate with the least votes is eliminated each time. When you
assign seats, you do need information about the number of seats to
fill since this determines the height of the quota. 

That's why the order in which candidates are eliminated is the same
each time you do an STV count on the same election result, but for a
different number of seats to fill. The order in which seats are
assigned however differs when the number of seats is varied. I
actually saw this when doing the simulations with PolSim.

Hm, I am getting more confidence in my solution now. :-)

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Herman Beun                                                    Arnhem
http://home.worldonline.nl/~chbeun/                        Gelderland
CHBeun at worldonline.nl                                       Nederland
                                                                   EU
**** Representative democracy is a contradiction in 4 year terms ****
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