[EM] Competitive Districting Rule

[Dan Bishop]

James Gilmour wrote:
> Juho Sent: Friday, July 14, 2006 10:22 PM
...
>> 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.
> 
> This all sounds very like the "above-the-line" voting that is used in the Australian Federal Senate elections.  It has
> perverted STV-PR very severely, so that that implementation is really nothing more than closed list party PR.

The "perversion" is the rule that requires "below-the-line" votes to be 
fully-ranked, thus discouraging the practice.  I would think that if it 
were easy to vote for individual candidates, more people would do it.