[EM] STV district magnitude

[stephane.rouillon at sympatico.ca]

You seem to have found by yourself a typical
implementation of the general idea of using
birth dates. Demographs should be able to produce
equivalent districts within a +/- 5% error, I suppose.
You can add year modulos if needed, it is not a problem.

For your next remark, I said single-membered districts, not single-winner districts. Again, you are right when you say that "statistically every group would almost certainly vote
for the same party/ideology/whatever.  Every legislator would have almost the exact same stances."
That is why you could compare results obtained by different
candidates of the same party to order them by merits.
The "almost" difference is the difference the electorate
expressed and wants. Virtual districts are single-membered, but can be multiple-winners...

Your comments let's suppose to use FPTP in every virtual
single-membered district.  Please Alex, you know we can do better and I am sure you read several time that I wrote
SPPA is fully proportional.  I use the finnish/brazilian
method to obtain parties support from individual supports.
(for example 6 candidates of the same party getting 40%,45%,
43%, 46%, 64% and 50% produce a mean 50% support so they
should get 3 seats out of 6 in a proportional model). Then I use the best representative of each parties to represent the eelectorate (the 64%, 50% and 46% candidates in the previous example).

So not every legislator would have the same stances. The smallest party could have one seat( with 1% of the votes
for a 100 seats assembly), won by their best runner who got 5% of the votes in his/her virtual district.

Finally, when you say "Of course, I have to confess that I still prefer geographic districts, even if my reasons aren't entirely rational." I do understand. Do not worry, it would scare even myself to "baldly go where no one has gone before". I thinks it's normal... It seems hard to remove something as solid (tengible in french) as constituencies. But please note that what I suggest just goes further in the direction showed by multi-member districts of STV and pure PR models... It is not really a revolution, just the next step in accepting our neighbours are, now in 2003, anyone on this 12000 kms diameter planet. An alaskian maybe that far of a floridian, they can be both concerned by whales fishing laws (I just hope you get the point).

Stephane

> De: "Alex Small" <asmall at physics.ucsb.edu>
> Date: 2003/07/21 lun. PM 01:59:06 GMT-04:00
> À: <election-methods-electorama.com at electorama.com>
> Subject: Re: Re: [EM] STV district magnitude
> 
> > Please explain to me what specific advantages a candidate could
> > give to its electorate when his/her district is formed with
> > the people born between January 1st and January 5th of any year?
> 
> Good point.  I'd only remark that since the distribution of births is
> non-uniform throughout the year, some districts might need to encompass
> different numbers of days, but that's a minor point.  I suppose seats
> could even be apportioned to birth groups by how many people from each
> group voted in the latest election, to avoid the need for a census or any
> pre-determined grouping of dates.
> 
> Of course, getting the electorate to approve this is another matter
> altogether.
> 
> > single-membered virtual districts avoid crowded lists,
> > can be fully proportional and still is coherent with your remarks.
> 
> Single-member virtual districts would be a horrible idea!  I'm going to
> guess that the people born between January 1 and January 5 aren't that
> different from people born between July 1 and July 5.  If each group got
> only a single seat, statistically every group would almost certainly vote
> for the same party/ideology/whatever.  Every legislator would have almost
> the exact same stances.  That hardly provides diverse representation in
> the legislature.
> 
> Virtual districts would have to be multi-member, just like any other
> districts.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Alex
> 
> 
> ----
> Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>