[EM] electoral methods - US and Europe

[Olli Salmi]

The Hare quota is unsound if you use it with STV, because it can give 
an unproportional result. The link discusses only the Hare quota with 
STV.

Sainte-Laguë does not favour smaller parties, it's neutral in this 
respect. If you compare it with d'Hondt, it looks as if it favours 
small parties because d'Hondt favours big parties. The only problem 
with Sainte-Laguë is that it can give the majority of the seats to a 
minority of the voters, if they manage to split in a nice way and the 
votes are almost equal. This is probably no problem in public 
elections, but it may be in committee elections when the parties can 
count the votes before elections.

Sainte-Laguë has recently been adopted in Bremen and a biproportional 
version is being adopted in Zürich.

Olli Salmi

At 21:11 -0800 22.2.2004, James Green-Armytage wrote:
>Do you realize the extent of the theoretical unsoundness of Saint-Lague
>and Hare? I was convinced of it by an example which James Gilmour gave
>last July. Here is a link to the posting which contains that example:
>http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2003-July/010368.html
>	I would say that Saint-Lague systematically favors smaller parties, and
>while I'm all for smaller parties, I don't think that this is a good way
>to go about giving them a bigger role, because it introduces a paradox of
>more people gaining fewer representatives, along with an incentive for
>parties to split themselves up into smaller chunks for purely strategic
>reasons. I've read Lijphart and I think he was wrong about this.
>	I think that the best way to help smaller parties in a proportional
>representation scenario is to use an STV system so that there is no risk
>of people "wasting" their votes on small parties with not quite enough
>votes. Also in some cases the votes transferred from an eliminated small
>party candidate may go towards helping another small party candidate to
>win a seat.
>	As for seat apportionment by state, I admit again that I'm 
>not an expert
>in it. You're saying that the U.S. now uses a Saint-Lague divisor? I live
>in the U.S., and I didn't even know that.
>  >