[EM] Amnon Rubinstein's Proposal for Electoral Reform in Israel

[Dan Bishop]

Doreen Dotan wrote:
> */election-methods-request at electorama.com 
> <mailto:election-methods-request at electorama.com>/*
>  
> Antonio jwrote:
>  
>  >STV was a half-hearted attempt to fix a broken system, SNTV.
>  
> In learning a bit about SNTV I came across this curious factoid: "The 
> New Party <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Party_%28Taiwan%29> (of 
> Taiwan, my parentheses) had a surprisingly effective system by asking 
> party supporters to vote for the candidate that corresponded to their 
> birthdate. This led to a system of vote allocation 
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vote_allocation> which had been adopted by 
> all parties for the 2004 ROC Legislative elections." 
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_non-transferable_vote). Why is this???

Consider an election for 5 seats with the ballots:

A (New Party): 50%
B (New Party): 5%
C (New Party): 5%
D (Old Party): 12%
E (Old Party): 11%
F (Old Party): 9%
G (Old Party): 8%

Even thought the New Party has the majority of the votes, these are 
mostly "wasted" on a candidate who's already far ahead, leaving too few 
votes for B and C, causing the Old Party to win a 4-1 legislative majority.

If, however, the New Party's votes had an even 20-20-20 split, they'd 
win three seats instead of one.  The purpose of vote allocation is to 
coordinate an even split like that.