STV for party candidate lists?

[Herman Beun]

DEMOREP1 at aol.com schreef:

> Mr. Baum ...

Baum?! ;-)

> ... is suggesting the use of a mixture of instant runoff 
> and STV surpluses to elect a variable N persons.

Yes, that's a good summary. 

> The use of IRO is technically defective in a multi-member p.r. 
> election in the same manner that it is defective in a single 
> winner election.   For N seats to be filled each set of N 
> candidates should technically be matched against each
> other candidate (with the other remaining candidates being 
> deemed test losers)

That's an interesting point; is this why you proposed approval voting
at first?

On the other hand, IRO is _already_ a part of STV. After all you use
it to transfer votes to other candidates when not enough candidates
reach the quota by first preference votes alone (as is usually the
case).

> Example--
> N = 20, 100 candidates
> Each set of 20 would be compared against 1 (with the other 
> 79 candidates being deemed test losers) to see if the 1 gets 
> a quota (3000/20) before each of the 20 gets a quota (or the 
> highest number of votes--- noting again that many voters might 
> not make enough choices- i.e. many of the voters in the 79 
> group might only vote for each other's candidates).

Yes, that is very well possible. I don't know to what extend this
happens, but the possibility has been suggested by other party
members.

[ Finnish election system: ]
This sounds very good indeed! Yes, this is more or less how I
imagined implementation of an STV-like system in the Netherlands.

> 1. Yes but the Condorcet math should be done if possible.

Maybe. I'd be in favour of using Condorcet to elect the party leader
(the number 1 of the list). After all, it is important that this
person is acceptable to a large number of people. But I am a bit wary
of using Condorcet for lower places on the list. I do not want only
the candidates from the political middle, which Condorcet elects. I
want the "fractie" to be a broad representation of _all_ the opinions
among the party members. Only, say, 50% of the voters is somewhere in
the political middle. That means that the other 50% are on the
"extremes"; they deserve to be represented as well! 

> 3.  Most (if not all) have party elites choosing the candidates 
> who get on the party's list (which causes many of the problems 
> in parliamentary type minority coalition governments).

Yeah, most Dutch parties, if not all except D66, do it this way.
That's why I asked how other _democratic_ parties do it! ;-)

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Herman Beun                                                    Arnhem
http://home.worldonline.nl/~chbeun/                        Gelderland
CHBeun at worldonline.nl                                       Nederland
                                                                   EU
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