[EM] 10/27 - David Catchpole and his STV/MMP hybrid

[Donald E Davison]

Greetings,

David Catchpole wrote:              Mon 25 Oct 1999
Well- Simply consider MMP, only using STV (with an option to the voter of
a full list of candidates or a list of parties for the at-large election)
rather than FPTP and list apportionment. Where there are n electorate
members, there are n-1 at-large members. Votes which go to electing
electorate members are devalued a'la Meek, etc. and the votes then counted
for the at-large members.

Dear David Catchpole,
     Tell me if I understand what you have written.
     Your hybrid will use STV to elect a single member in each district.
And STV will also be used to determine the order of candidates on the party
Lists, but it is not clear how that will be done.
     The voter has the option to vote above or below the line.
     I am not sure if your `full list of candidates' are only the
candidates in one district or all the candidates in all the districts
together. In my hybrid all the district candidates are the list candidates,
in an order determined by how well each did in their district STV election.
     I am not sure if your voter has one or two votes. My hybrid only uses
one vote because it avoids the flaw of overhang members. The number of
overhang members is increasing in Germany, they had 13 in the last
election. The parties are getting better at corrupting MMP.
    I fail to understand why you are using Meek in the election of only one
member.
    Conclusion: I do not fully understand how your hybrid works. You need
to give us more details if we are to understand. You only gave us five
lines - not enough. Go back to the drawing board, and create some more text
on your hybrid.
    The rest of your plan, the derivation, has some good and some bad -
some real bad.

***

David Catchpole wrote some more:
The derivation of this which I advocate for my own State house (we're
unicameral) will probably be a little bit more offensive to you. It
involves basically everything above, only with a _third_ part of the
ballot listing parties with "who is your choice to head government?" A
winner of this third part is found and during the at-large stage voters
who voted for this winner are counted first, ignoring candidates other
than those of the winning party and its designated allies, until it (and
its allies) has a majority of the chamber or votes run out. The rest of
the at-large seats are then selected as per usual.

Donald: I approve of the people voting directly for the party to head
government - that is an improvement - the good in your derivation.
     I do not approve of your design which will give a majority in the
House to the party of the Head of Government. You may as well propose no
election of MPs. Instead the Head of Government will select the MPs - it
will be the same thing. Why go through the motions of an election, it would
merely be a French Farce.
     Why is it so important to you Commonwealth types that the House must
also be Head of Government? That setup is a conflict of interests.
     Your plan would deny representation to as many people as necessary in
order that the Head party could have a majority in the House - that is
corruption.
     Absolute power is an old concept in government, but it is still alive
and doing well today. You have old ideas. There was an English Lord that
had something to say about power and absolute power.
     A `little bit more offensive' is an understatement. I am very offended
by this power grab that you propose.

     The best system of government will be the system that invites everyone
to the table to form government policy. You are a long ways from that
concept of thinking.
     You should join the new wave of thinking about government.
     There is no need for you to be old before your time.

***

     I have been working on two hybrids. One for district elections and one
for an One Area election. The One Area hybrid is finished. I include a copy
below. The District hybrid needs more work because I am trying to
incorporate the feature of allowing different size districts.

Donald,

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The One-Area Multi-Seat Plan would work as follows:<P>

     There is to be no separate primary. The primary is to be held inside
the general election. Choice Voting(STV) will decide which candidate is to
be the lead candidate of each party. The Plan uses the Choice Voting method
because it is the only method that can give us a fair proportional ranking
of the candidates for the Party Lists.<P>

     In this Plan the voter will be allowed to rank candidates and/or rank
parties.<P>

     After the casting of the ballots, the first step is to work the
ballots according to Choice Voting. This is not for the purpose of
determining any of the winners, but instead is for the purpose of
determining the order of the candidates on the party lists.<P>

     This Plan will be using two different quota values, the Choice Voting
quota and the Party List quota. The Choice Voting quota will be based on
only the votes that were cast for one or more candidates, divided by the
number of members to be elected. The Party List quota will be used in the
second part of the Plan and it will be based on total votes cast in the
election, divided by the number of members to be elected.<P>

     We now work all the ballots according to Choice Voting with the
following exception. The vote sums for the political parties can have votes
transferred to them, but the parties are not to be eliminated and are not
to have any votes transferred away from their sums.<P>

     Candidate surplus votes and votes of eliminated candidates will be
transferred to the next choices on the ballots. If the next choice is a
candidate, the vote is transferred to that candidate. If the next choice is
a party, the vote is transferred to that party. If there is no next choice,
the ballot becomes exhausted. If it was the wish of the voter to support a
certain party after ranking some candidates, then the voter should keep
this point in mind and rank this certain party as his last choice.<P>

     The Choice Voting routine comes to an end when the number of
candidates remaining is equal to the number of members to be elected, but
these candidates are not elected yet. This part of the Plan is merely to
determine the order of the candidates on their Party Lists.<BR>
     The votes of all these remaining candidates are to be transferred to
the party of each of these candidates. At his point all the votes are now
contained in the party vote sums of all the parties. We now go into the
Party List part of this plan.<P>

     All the candidates are divided according to their party. The
independent candidates are placed together with their own Independent List.
The candidates of each list are listed in an order as follows:<P>

     The working of the Choice Voting will have divided the candidates into
three general groups. The first group will be the candidates that received
a quota or more on the first count. These candidates are to be arranged in
an order according to the highest number of votes first.<P>

     The second group will be the candidates that reached quota during the
math of Choice Voting. These candidates are to be arranged in the same
order as they reached quota - first is to be first of this group.<P>

     The third group are the candidates that did not reach quota. These
candidates are to be arranged in an order of the highest number of votes
each received during the math of Choice Voting. These three groups
together, in the order of 1-2-3 will be the order of each party list.<P>

     A Party List Quota is now determined by dividing the total number of
votes cast in the election by the number of seats to be filled. Each full
quota a party has in votes, means that the party is allowed one seat. There
is to be no artifical threshold. The natural threshold will be equal to one
quota.<P>

     After all parties have received their share of full seats there will
be a remainder left over for each party, including any small parties that
did not get enough votes to fill one quota - their votes are also
remainders. The sum of these remainders should equal a whole number of
seats. These seats are to be assigned to the parties with the highest
remainders - limit one to a party. This completes the election of the
members.<P>


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   |                         Q U O T A T I O N                         |
   |  "Democracy is a beautiful thing,                                 |
   |       except that part about letting just any old yokel vote."    |
   |                            - Age 10                               |
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