[EM] Cumulative and Limited Voting

[Bart Ingles]

Donald E Davison wrote:

> The big flaw of Cumulative Voting is that it puts all the voters into
> a Catch 22 position.  The voter needs to know the results of an election in
> order to wisely cast his votes in the same election.

I note that a growing number of jurisdictions in the U.S. are using
cumulative voting fairly successfully.  A number of school board
elections, etc. are adopting it in order to settle lawsuits charging
inadequate minority representation.

In contrast, STV has only been used in Cambridge, Mass., and the NYC
school board.  And it only survives in NYC because the Justice Dept.
claimed that the replacement method (LV) would be unfair to minorities. 
If they had changed to cumulative voting instead, STV would probably be
long gone in NYC by now.

[...]
> I placed Limited Voting ahead of Cumulative Voting because it does not
> put the voters into the Catch 22 position.
> 
> I rate SNTV higher because in a small election, SNTV can give results
> that are close to STV, not as good, but close.

Just the same, I maintain that the three are logically equivalent, with
the exception of LV for small minority groups.  SNTV and CV are always
logically equivalent.

This means they all have the same Catch 22.  

I was mainly questioning the fact that SNTV and CV are not adjacent in
the order for that reason.  In other words, LV is different from the
other two in some situations, and probably shouldn't be in between the
others.


> I do not know the `so-called Peoria system', so I cannot comment on it. [...]

This is a form of Cumulative Voting said to be used in the Peoria, IL
city council (I have not confirmed this).

The voter votes for X number of candidates, and each candidate receives
1/X of the voter's voting power.  There are no "points" to assign, and
each candidate receives the same sized fraction of the voter's voting
power.

Bart