[EM] Sainte-Lague addenda

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

I'd like to clarify a few things that need more explanation or emphasis:

1. Choice of electoral reforms

Single-winner reform is by far the most feasible reform for state and 
national elections. State and national govt are the important govt, where 
the important decisions are made. For that reason, in order to create 
precedent for that important reform, I suggest that municipal electoral 
reform efforts should be single-winner reform rather than PR, so that the 
energy and money are spent on something that could quickly lead to 
improvement, by giving precedent to the nationally winnable single-winner 
reform.

For the same reason, I suggest that organizations and student govt, etc., 
should use and demonstrate better snigle-winner methods, because of the 
value of creating precedent for those methods in govt elections.

2. Sainte-Lague rules for legal wording

In my one of my postings yesterday, I showed where Sainte-Lague's 
odd-numbers formula comes from. But I neglected to state the odd numbers 
rule, or the simpler version of it that I prefer:

1. Initially each party has zero seats
2. Divide each party's votes by its current number of seats plus .5  That's 
that party's score.
3. Give a seat to the party with the largest score.
4. Repeat 2 and 3 till the desired total number of seats has been awarded.

The "odd numbers formula" merely doubles the number by which we divide. 
Surely that's done in order to reduce the number of digits, so as to reduce 
the pencil & paper calculation labor. But I claim that the greater 
naturalness of the rules stated above is more important.

3. Demonstration of Sainte-Lague's transfer property

I apologize for the sloppiness of the demonstration that I posted. I didn't 
want to make it any longer than it was.  But I made it clear what I mean by 
a party's "middle" (its quota allocation, before rounding); and what I mean 
by the distance between parties  or between a party and its middle (the 
factor by which their v/s differ). Of course if we reduce a party's 
difference from its middle, in terms of raw seat-count, then we also reduce 
its distance from its middle, in terms of the factor by which its v/s 
differs from the one corresponding to its middle. The v/s corresponding to a 
party's middle is of course the quota that we used to calculate the 
allocations.

Anyway, especially with those clarifications, my demonstration seems valid, 
if not well-worded.

Mike Ossipoff

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