[EM] Electing a proportional executive/cabinet

[James Gilmour]

> Gervase Lam Sent: Monday, March 20, 2006 11:35 PM
> The only solution I can think of is to let the STV voting 
> itself determine the power of the posts.  The first candidate 
> elected gets the post he was voted in for.  By "definition", 
> this would be the most important post filled.  The second 
> candidate elected gets the post he was voted in for.  By 
> "definition", this would be the second most important post 
> filled.  And so on.

I think this misunderstands how STV-PR works.  If you have a cabinet of, say, 10 members, STV-PR could find you the ten
most representative members of the party forming the government, but the order of their election in that 10-member
election would not necessarily put them in the correct order of precedence.  Our parties here in Scotland have a similar
problem in selecting and ordering the 12 candidates for the closed lists used in our version of MMP (here called AMS).

To do this, some of the parties use STV-PR to find their 12 candidates from among all those who have offered themselves
for election (15 - 20).  To order the list of 12, the parties then use "reverse STV" on that group of 12.  So they
successively "elect" 11, 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1.  The one who fails to get the last place in each "election"
takes the lowest vacant place on the party list, so the list is filled from the bottom.  This works and is accepted by
the electors in those parties that use it.

For more info see:
http://www.cix.co.uk/~rosenstiel/stv/orderstv.htm

James Gilmour