[EM] Re: another idea (proportionality and intra-party competition)

Kevin Venzke stepjak at yahoo.fr
Sat Mar 27 12:43:01 PST 2004


Gervase,

 --- Gervase Lam <gervase.lam at group.force9.co.uk> a écrit : 
> > Open list.  Each voter votes for one list, and *any number* of
> > candidates within that list.  So it's Approval within the party, and the
> > party's median voter could theoretically elect all the candidates for
> > the party.
>
> You started with the idea of each party having a list of candidates.  The 
> voters would use Approval to vote for a list and Approval within each list 
> to vote for candidates.  The most approved candidate from the most 
> approved list is the winner.

I'm calling that method "Party List Approval."  My jury is still out as to
whether this makes it easier or harder for a partisan candidate to win.

> A few or several weeks back, I sort of thought of your idea as a way to do 
> multi-seat elections.  Something that avoids Jefferson, Webster etc... 
> quotas and therefore be much easier to count.  However, it is prone to 
> factioning.

For multi-seat elections, you should probably not use Approval for lists.
But even then I don't know how you can avoid using Jefferson or Webster.  But
are they really so difficult?  You can count the ballots first, quite easily,
and do the quota math afterwards.

> To try to get away from the factioning and more towards "proportionality," 
> I thought of the opposite thing to what you mention:  Approve a list and 
> only vote for one candidate in a list.
> 
> I think my reasoning was that candidates within each list are clones of 
> each other.  Otherwise, why are they all in one party?

I have that thought, too.  But then why vote for only one candidate on the list?

> > An obvious defect is that this Approval-based open list won't preserve
> > any proportionality *within* the party.
> 
> Adam Tarr posted recently about using Cumulative Voting in order to 
> preserve some sort of "proportionality."  He suggested that each voter 
> should be allowed to spread 4 points against any candidate in a 4 winner 
> election.  May be this could be used instead of the Approval/Plurality 
> voting?
> 
> Why not go the whole way and not have party lists at all?  Each voter is 
> allowed to spread the votes among the candidates the voter chooses.

I'm not fond of this, because I think it's too similar to SNTV.  Coordinated
voters will have an advantage over uninformed ones.  Candidates might benefit
by concentrating on a fragment of their district.

Actually, I'm not too fond of my own PR idea now.  I don't think it would be
so much better than a closed list.

Kevin Venzke
stepjak at yahoo.fr



	

	
		
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