[EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoringracialminorities

[James Gilmour]

Juho > Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 5:24 PM
> If you have some issue X, wouldn't it also be natural to have one  
> list "for X" and one list "against X"? I.e. lists but not "party  
> lists". You may need to arrange the candidates anyway according to  
> their opinions in some "lists" to make it clear to the voters who are  
> "against" and who are "for".

Such formal "issue lists" are both undesirable and unnecessary.  Some issues divide on party lines, some issues divide within
parties, and some issues run across some or all parties.  In fact, in deciding their reactions to the candidates who have offered
themselves for election, voters can and do take many more factors into account:  party, issue X, sex, race, language, locality,
issue Y, etc, etc.    Different voters will weight these factors and these combinations of factors differently.  Of course, that
depends on having a voting system that is sufficiently sensitive to allow the voters to express their views in this way.  But
preferential voting provides a workable compromise, where each voter consciously or unconsciously condenses his or her n-dimensional
assessment of the candidates into one dimension to put the candidates into a personal order of preference.


> STV-PR gives the voters some  flexibility  
> that the list (or tree) based methods do not give but here I didn't  
> see anything special that would speak against the use of lists.  

STV-PR does not provide "some" flexibility  -  STV-PR provides complete flexibility for each voter to express her or his personal
preferences among all the candidates on whatever basis that individual voter chooses.  Your preferences and mine may be identical,
but it is probably that we have placed the candidates in that common order for quite different reasons.


> (Lists may also be more practical in some cases, e.g. if the number  
> of candidates is high.)

The largest STV-PR election I know of had 450 candidates for 120 places, but I would not recommend such a high district magnitude!
To allow for diversity in representation you also need a reasonable minimum, so that the larger parties will be "forced" to nominate
at least two candidates each, so that the voters get some choice within parties as well as between them.  For public elections,
however, there is practical trade-off because electors, especially those brought up with decades of single-member districts (UK,
USA), will want a guaranteed level of local representation.  Where you can strike the balance in that trade-off will almost
certainly vary from country to country.

James Gilmour

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