[EM] An Election is not over until It's Over

[David Catchpole]

On Thu, 21 Oct 1999, Donald E Davison wrote:

>      STV has too many `Dirty Little Secrets' - undemocratic Dirty Little
> Secrets, as follows:
>         * Small STV Districts
>         * Droop Quota and/or Lowering the Vote Numbers
>         * Transferring Exhausted Ballots to Remaining Candidates.
> 
>      What we should do is toss in the towel on STV, and support MMP instead.

You can have an STV/MMP hybrid, you know. In fact, that's my current
preferred system for legislatures.

More down further...

> Note: This happened in Cambridge concerning a vacancy and the `Runner Up'.
>       One of the elected members went to jail. The vacancy was not filled
> by the `Runner Up'. His votes were not even used to determine which of the
> non-elected candidates would fill the vacancy. The way in which the
> replacement was determined is that the rules went back to the data of the
> last election, but it only used the votes that elected the now vacant
> member to determine the replacement. None of the votes of the `Runner Up'
> nor any of the exhausted votes were used.
>      The thinking of the rules was that the voters that elected the now
> vacant member, are the only voters that have the right to decide the
> replacement. So much for being the `Runner Up' in a Droop election.
>      The replacement member had less than a majority of a quota, while the
> `Runner Up' had well over a majority of a quota.

I'm not entirely sure of what you mean to imply by this, but remember- in
both Droop and "Hare" (since Hare disowned it, I think you should find a
new name for that system of 1/n,...,1/n,1/2n quotas), the (i) "Runner Up"
and (ii) the person who would be elected had a certain candidate withdrawn
are not necessarily (and are usually not) one and the same.