[EM] 04/06/02 - Meek and Droop can be eliminated:

[Donald Davison]

04/06/02 - Meek and Droop can be eliminated:

Mr. Stéphane Rouillon,

Meek is the policy of adjusting the quota downwards after every transfer of
ballots in order to allow for the loss of exhausted ballots.

I claim this Meek policy is not necessary because the Droop quota has
already lowered the quota more than enough to allow for the exhausted
ballots in most Preference Voting elections.

In other words, if someone said that the quota must be lowered because of
Meek, I say we raise the Droop quota the same amount to offset Meek.  I'm
serious.  Droop will still have its value if it is a few votes higher.  A
few votes more is not going to make some faction try to average its votes
at the ballot box.  The faction would have to know how many exhausted
ballots they had to adjust for at the ballot box.  It's too much trouble
for a small return, if any.  No need to use Meek.
  Besides, most of the exhausted ballots will be excluded along with the
ballots of the runner-up, that is, most exhausted ballots do not show up as
voids in the sums of the elected members.

The question is:  `Who benefits from the use of Meek?'  Answer, only the
larger factions may benefit because Meek helps to even out the votes over
all the candidates of the larger factions.  The additional votes
transferred to the lowest candidate may result in that candidate avoiding
the next elimination.

Droop and Meek both work towards evening out, or averaging, the candidates'
votes of each party, but if we directly average the votes of each party,
then we don't need Droop and Meek, we can eliminate both of them.
  That is exactly what my new elimination rule does, it directly averages
the votes.

Regards, Donald


  ------------ Original Letter -------------
Date: Thu, 04 Apr 2002 07:02:32 -0500
From: Elisabeth Varin/Stephane Rouillon <stephane.rouillon at sympatico.ca>
To: election-methods-list at eskimo.com
Subject: [EM] Meek ?

Sorry, I forgot:

what does Meek mean ?