[EM] Nanson in Wisconsin or Michigan?

[Sampo Syreeni]

On 2003-01-23, Markus Schulze uttered to election-methods-list at eskimo.com:

>here is a paper on Nanson's method: [...]

One passage in the text sort of woke me up. There is a brief mention that
Nanson at one point advocated a system where parliamentary votes are
weighted by the size of each representative's constituency. The scheme is
dismissed as giving rise to perverse incentives. Has such a system been
considered on-list? Are any online analysis of such a thing available?

The reason I'm interested is that, when I was first introduced to
splintering and the accompanying strategy, my first solution was to use a
weighted electorate. Later I thought combining it with IRV/STV would be a
good idea. Now I've become a fan of Condorcet, but I no longer see how
weighting might fit in.

The idea still fascinates me, beecause with a fixed number of
representatives and disciplined party voting, most of the seats in a
parliament seem sort of wasted -- each party will vote uniformly, so PR
reduces to weighting parties' votes by headcount. More than one seat
simply means a higher weight for any vote a party casts. OTOH, if there
was just one representative per party with a higher weight, most parties
which are currently rounded out in the election (that is, do not get even
a single seat) would still be present in the parliament, albeit with a
very low weight. Alternatively we might be able to do with a smaller
parliament. To me, both ideas seem appealing.
-- 
Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:decoy at iki.fi, tel:+358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front
openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2

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