[EM] Competitive Districting Rule

[Juho]

The Scottish situation sounds to me like a multi-party system (that has emerged under different rules) has gotten trapped in a two-party EM, and this kind of mixture is not a pretty match (looks actually quite terrible).

I guess the other three parties were fed up with conservatives taking too many seats (more than PR would allow?) and decided to join forces. The others obviously got their revenge and now took more seats than PR would allow :-).

I tend to think that if voters are clever enough to make the 1997 tactic work, they would also be able to use full PR right if they wold be biven the chance. A good voting system is anyway such where one can vote based on one's sincere preferences. And I do believe better EMs exist than the poor multi/two-party combination of 1997.

On STV:

STV gives at least the option of giving first position to a local candidate amd second to some non-local alternative. This scenario has however the problem that typically voters tend to vote well known c.andidates, and they often come e.g. from the capital, not from the loczal community. I guess this is one reson why EMs often force people to vote only the local candidates.

STV style has the problem that voters need to have lots of information about the candidates. Or maybe they'll just vote the most famous ones. My ideal ballot (from the completeness point of view, maybe not if need to avoid complexity is there) would be one with both STV style ability to set voter specific preferences but also party based groupings (including subdivisions, areal criteria and party alliances). I might e.g. vote "James > local conservatives > other conservatives".

(We could also force regional balance (regional PR) even if people would not vote "regionally enough" in the same way the method I describes forced changes in the "single winners" of the districts to gaon national ideologial PR.)

Note that subdivision of parties and their alliances and whatever other groupings add tools to the voter to express what she wants. Also models where STV like ordering is not used but the vote to James automatically goes to the smallest group that James belongs to, then to the next bigger group etc. may work better than current more rough "vote party only" or "vote party member only" arrangements.

In the party subdivision EMs I see potential for making the votes influence the party opinions more than what the case often is today (i.e. when parties often seem to be deaf and push the party office line instead of the supporters' line.

I still have to say that the simple method that I described (single member districts + national PR) would fulfil some of the key targets you maybe had (PR, locality in the UK/US traditional style, more sincere votes), although it had also some "rounding errors" like giving victory in some districts to other than the plurality winner.

BR. Juho

P.S. Sorry about writing in quite hazy terms (to save space and time). I hope you caught the intended direction anyway.

_____ Original message _____
Subject:	Re: [EM] Competitive Districting Rule
Author:	"James Gilmour" <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk>
Date:		14th July 2006 12:49:13 

> > > > James Gilmour wrote:
> > > > Of course, you cannot have single-member districts and PR, ... ...
Juho wrote:
> > > 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.
James Gilmour wrote:
> > 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.

Juho asked:
> Could you explain a bit more what you mean by "flawed" 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 to vote 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.

No, I the distortion I specifically had in mind occurs particularly when you have at least three parties.  We have four
"large" parties here in Scotland that have a serious chance of winning FPTP single-member district elections for the UK
(Westminster) Parliament.  The are also four "large" parties in Wales. In England (our large neighbour, which elects
most of the MPs at Westminster)  there are three "large" parties.  In these situations it is quite common for electors
not to vote for the candidate of the party they support, but to vote for another party, either to defeat an MP they want
rid of or to ensure that a candidate they don't want isn't elected.

So in 1997 in Scotland, significant numbers of SNP supporters voted either Labour or Liberal Democrat, significant
numbers of Labour supporters voted either SNP or Liberal Democrat, and significant numbers of Liberal Democrat
supporters voted either Labour or SNP.  Why?  To unseat sitting Conservative MPs and to make sure that no previously
second-placed Conservative candidates were elected.  This campaign for local tactical voting was called "Make Scotland
Tory free!", and it worked extremely well.  The Conservatives did not elect a single MP from Scotland in the 1997
election, even though they got more votes (17.5%) than the Liberal Democrats (13.0%) who elected 10 out of 72 MPs.  A
similar campaign in Wales also prevented the Conservatives from electing any MPs for constituencies in Wales in 1997.
(Both of these results are damning indictments of the highly defective voting system we use to elect the UK Parliament,
but that's another story.)

Where such tactical voting occurs, and electors deliberately vote for parties they do not really support, it would be
seriously misleading to use the national totals of the parties' votes to determine overall party representation.  You
could do it, but it would not be any kind of fair reflection of the real party PR.

> 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.

But in the actual situations we have seen at successive elections, significant numbers of electors have had very strong
incentives not to vote sincerely.  The numbers of voters who do this vary from election to election, and from place to
place around the country, depending on local circumstances and the practical opportunity for effective tactical voting.

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

Of course both party PR and STV-PR are usable, because we can see practical examples from different countries around the
world.  Political parties are essential for effective representative democracy, but I want to see PR of voters (whatever
they want, as expressed by their preferences for all the candidates), not just PR of registered political parties.
Also, I think STV-PR provides a mechanism that allows an automatic balance to be struck between local representation and
national PR  -  something that is very important for voting reform campaigns in countries (like the UK and USA) where
representation has been locality-based for more than two centuries.

James Gilmour

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