[EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PRfavoringracialminorities

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Aug 16, 2008, at 10:08 PM, Juho wrote:

> I was thinking of the regular political parties that otherwise exist  
> in the country but that are not relevant in these school elections.
>
>>  But you
>> cannot have "lists" without some comparable formal procedures.  And  
>> in any event, "basic lists" are never sufficient, if you believe
>> that the essence of representative democracy is allowing the voters  
>> to select their representatives as freely as possible.
>
> It is a positive target to allow voters to select their  
> representatives as freely as possible. There are however also other  
> criteria (e.g. simplicity, clarity), and in these school elections  
> also simple lists might well be sufficient. (I don't see lists as a  
> necessity in these school elections but as an option that would  
> probably work well enough.)
>
>>  Lists of
>> any kind will always be constraining.  And they are unnecessary (as  
>> well as, in my view, undesirable).
>
> Constraining in the sense of not being most flexible, yes. Why do  
> you see lists as undesirable?

What problem are they solving? My local school board and city council  
elections under STV would have five seats open, and based on the  
experience of the last few years, maybe ten candidates. If candidates  
want to run as slates, and encourage a particular ranking, they're  
free to do that; they do that now with FPTP elections. Voters have  
unconstrained choice (within the set of candidates, anyway).  
Interposing lists between the voters and the candidates seems like an  
extra and unnecessary layer of complication.

I can see that direct ranking would be burdensome if California (say)  
were to use at-large STV for the entire state assembly, and have 80  
open seats and hundreds of candidates on a single ballot. But STV  
proposals are typically more modest than that, with districts having  
on the order of 5-9 seats.