[EM] Multiple Winners Revisted

[Moe St. Evergreen]

This list is called, "election-methods", but perhaps it should
be called, single-winner-methods, as that seems to be the focus
of this list.

The only response I received to asking about multiple winner 
elections, was one specifying STV/Hare, and which was posted by what 
appeared to be an IRV advocate, who referred me to a rather loudly 
biased IRV advocating website, the so-called Center for Voting and 
Democracy (should be called the Center for IRV/STV, or else remove 
their personal bias from their Center's media outreach).

Are there other good multiple winner methods that allow preference 
choice? 

Our organization is governed by a large committee, but members can 
create smaller regional committees, or philosophical/diversity based 
committees. In order to achieve proportional representation, we have 
a set maximum number of delegates on the large committee, and 
allocate, out of that number, a number of representatives from a 
smaller committee, proportional to the number of members in that 
smaller committee. Only members of a committee can vote for the 
delegates representing that committee.

We currently use cumulative voting to determine the delegates of the 
smaller committees to the larger committee. The CV procedure was very 
easy to describe in our bylaws and to our members. CV also allows a 
person to allocate the same ranking (the same votes) to more than one 
candidate. CV also only needs to worry about ties for the last seats, 
and thus does not need any randomness in the middle of the process. 
It does have problems with undervotes and overvotes.

STV/hare seems rather complex, and there seems to be some confusion 
on what the fairest implementation of STV is, and on the simplest 
procedural language. It also appears to be more arbitrary on ties, 
where an random/arbitrary tie break could, if I read it right, 
completely eliminate a candidate, that might otherwise have large 
majority approval.

It seems to me that the Condorcet winner should always be among the 
winners in a multiple winner system.

I think we would prefer rankings to CV, but I am not sure exactly 
what to advocate, and I am not sure I can trust the so-called Center 
for Voting and Democracy when it fails to balance its out biases.

Any suggestions would be welcome,
especially if they include pointers to well described procedures
that can be easily tested and advocated.

Thanks,
- Moe.