[EM] Competitive Districting Rule

[Juho]

Could you explain a bit more what you mean by "flaved" and by "correcting the defect". My first guess is that you refer e.g.  to the tendency of people (at least in current two-party countries) to vote on the two major parties and not tovote e.g. a smaller "Green" party.

In two-party countries this could (at least initially) be the case. Note however that in countries with multi-party tradition the viewpoint of the voters might be different.

A voter may give her vote to the "Greens" with the aim of maximising their number of seats nation wide. The target of making also the local representative green could be a seconday less important target. Maybe there is no chance. But the voter wants to give a green vote and achieves her nation wide target. After the election the voter has both ideological representatives and a local representative that she can contact on local matters (the representative doesn't know if she voted for her or not).

If your term "correct" referred to guessing afterwards what people would have voted even if they didn't, that surely would be quite impractical. I didn't assume that. Rather I expected the voting situation and attitude of voters to provide (sufficiently) sincere votes in the first place.

The question if political parties are a better way to implement ideological PR thand STV style is interesting. I'd just say that both are usable. And there aree also other ways than STV to reduce the "party power" if one so wants (e.g. opening up subdivisions within a party).

Note that I don't promote this particular method as "the best EM" but I think it nicely points out the wide scale of different available "rounding methods" and different priorities between ideological and regional PR. I don't think consider it unthinkable.

One more note. Also 1) methods where districts with e.g. three members and 2) bigger districts above the one member districts with independent ideological PR are interesting.

BR, Juho Laatu

_____ Original message _____
Subject:	Re: [EM] Competitive Districting Rule
Author:	"James Gilmour" <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk>
Date:		13th July 2006 12:13:54 

Juho Sent: Thursday, July 13, 2006 8:46 AM
> James Gilmour wrote:
> > Of course, you cannot have single-member districts and PR, ... ...
> 
> I think there are methods that allow even this. It is 
> possible for example to first count nation wide the votes of 
> each party and decide the number of seats each party will get 
> based on the number of votes they got.

This approach is fundamentally flawed because the nation-wide totals of party votes are distorted by local tactical
voting in the single-member district contests.  There are no clever algorithms available that could possibly "correct"
for this inherent defect.  And of course, the PR you could obtain by such a (flawed) voting system would only be PR of
registered political parties, with all that that implies.  Some of us want PR of the voters  -  we do not want to give
even more power to the parties.
James Gilmour

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