[EM] Cumulative Voting w/ elimination

[Bart Ingles]

Bear in mind I was talking about a method which would work on ordinary
(for the U.S.) punch-card ballot equipment, although some software
changes would be needed to handle the fractional votes.  It would also
be much more forgiving to "strategy mistakes" than ordinary cumulative
voting.

The proxy method below would require new hardware to handle ranked
balloting, and the unequal voting power of representatives would
complicate the legislative process more than it would simplify ballot
counting.  You might as well use STV.





DEMOREP1 at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Who needs cumulative voting when a simple proxy p.r. method (below) exists
> ???---
> Sec. xx. (a) An Elector may vote for 1 or more legislative candidates on the
> ballots in a district (plus not more than [2] write-in votes) by voting “1”,
> “2” and so forth for his or her first, second and so forth choices. (b) If
> there are more than [5] candidates (or remaining candidates) in the district,
> then the candidate having the lowest number of votes shall be a losing
> candidate. (c) Each vote for a losing candidate shall be transferred to the
> Elector's next choice (if any) who is a remaining candidate in the district.
> (d) The 2 prior steps shall be repeated until there are [5] remaining
> candidates in the district who shall be elected. (e) A lottery shall be held
> if tie votes occur in any step. (f) Each member of a legislative body (or his
> or her replacement) shall have a voting power in the legislative body and its
> committees, in person or by written proxy, equal to the votes that the member
> finally receives in the Election. (g) Example-
> C = Candidates          Voting Power
> C1  21          = 21 +   1   = 22
> C2  20          = 20 +   5   = 25
> C3  15          = 15 +   3   = 18
> C4  12 + 5    = 17           = 17
> C5  12 + 1    = 13 - 13   =   0
> C6  11 + 3    = 14 +   2   = 16
> C7   9  - 9     =   0          =   0
> VNT 0            =   0 +   2  =   2
>     100            100           100
>    C7 Loses   C5 Loses
> VNT= Votes not transferred
> 
> I suggest a 5 factions limit in districts to reduce the number of single
> issue parties (which causes all sorts of anti-p.r. freaks to come out of the
> woodwork who continuously bring up Italy and Israel as bad p.r. examples).
> 
> I mention again that head to head comparisons also technically applies to
> multi-member legislative body elections but a computer would most likely be
> needed to do all of the comparisons for all but very small elections.  The
> above would likely be about 95 + percent accurate (compared to head to head).