STV-PR Re: [EM] Using weights to compensate multiple votes (It's mostlyabout PR)

[Dr.Ernie Prabhakar]

Hi James,

On Aug 25, 2004, at 4:20 AM, James Gilmour wrote:
> One part of a "smaller" solution would be to make the list order 
> irrelevant, but that would not
> please the party managers.  Even if you did that and allowed voters to 
> mark several candidates
> within a given party list, you would not achieve PR within the 
> parties.  To achieve that, you need
> preferential AND transferable voting within the parties.  But if you 
> do that, why not go all the way
> and allow the voters complete freedom to express preferences across 
> all candidates?  Which will
> bring you back to STV-PR.
> James

This actually brings up my earlier question, which Toplak was alluding 
to.   With STV-PR, is there any way to preserve 'weak' locality?  That 
is, say I have district magnitude of 20, so I can conceptually identify 
20 subdistricts which have been combined into a single district for PR 
purposes.   Now, for the extreme cases where one party wins all the 
seats, it would make sense (at least to me) to have each of those 
candidates from a particular subdistrict.   That of course would be 
relatively easy to enforce.

But, with PR, it can get quite complicated.  Has anyone thought about 
the 'fairest' way to maximize locality while preserving PR?  Or, is 
there a really strong argument that one should ignore locality 
completely?  Or is it just too hard?

Thanks,
- Ernie P.

P.S.  Does STV-PR actually allow voting for predefined lists as well as 
individual candidates?  I had trouble understanding the existing 
articles on this point.