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

[Juho]

On Aug 17, 2008, at 20:05 , Raph Frank wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 6:08 AM, Juho <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> Don't know the details of these mechanisms but tickets seem to me  
>> like
>> add-ons that may have both good and bad effects. They do reduce  
>> the problems
>> of vote splitting due to short votes.
>
> In Ireland, there are no 'how to vote' cards.
>
> Voting the 'party ticket' in this context is just voting for all
> candidates that your party puts forward before giving any
> rankings to any other candidate.

It makes sense to me to allow such generic names and not force the  
voters to list all the candidates of the party to be sure that the  
vote will be counted for the right party (assuming that the number of  
candidates is large).

> A large number of voters in Ireland don't do that.  The voter
> might support FG but still vote for a FF candidate first choice
> because they like that candidate and then vote for all the FG
> candidates.
>
> This is called a personal vote and it has a large effect on tactics
> in Ireland.  Some candidates can end up with almost two quotas
> due to a large personal vote.
>
> The problem for parties is that the surplus doesn't remain within
> the party and leads to a vote management strategy.  (If none
> of their candidates have a large surplus, then they get to keep
> most of the personal votes for any of their candidates).

This is a very interesting real life example on how such "horizontal"  
preference orders may impact the elections and strategies in them.

Do you have a list of the strategies/tricks that are used?

>> I tend to favour counting exact proportionalities at national (=whole
>> election) level ((if one wants PR in the first place)).
>
> One slight issue here is how to define proportionality.  It is  
> implicitly
> assumed that if a voter votes for a candidate, they also support the
> candidate's party.  However, as can be seen with personal votes,
> this is not always the case.

If candidates are seen as individuals then the "rounding errors" of  
such small units are typically higher than the "rounding errors" of  
big units like parties.

(What I was thinking was basically that if there is one quota of  
voters that have opinion X then the representative body could have  
one representative that has opinion X. This could apply to parties  
but also to smaller groupings and individuals as well as other  
criteria like regions (=> regional proportionality) (and even  
representation of other orthogonal groups like women, age groups,  
religions, races if we want to make the system more complex).)

>> I also tend to favour more fine-grained expression of opinions,
>> as in STV or with trees, as a way to allow the voters to better  
>> influence
>> the direction the system takes (reduces the risk of stagnation and
>> alienation of the voters from the "parties and politics that  
>> continue as
>> before no matter how we vote").
>
> I think PR-STV at the national level where the voter votes for a  
> list but
> can override the initial votes is the best compromise between maximum
> expression and reasonably low complexity.

I mentioned earlier also the possibility to use trees here. A bullet  
vote to a candidate would by default be inherited by the (small)  
group that the candidate belongs to, then the party ('party ticket')  
and so on.

> However, that is pretty complex to actually count.

Yes this adds complexity. But this would not be too far from the use  
of the 'party ticket'. Right?

> Another option is to allow a voter vote for local candidates and then
> as their last choice, vote for a national list.

This is maybe yet one step more complex since now candidates can  
belong to different orthogonal groupings (several local parties; one  
party covers all local regions). Or maybe you meant to allow voting  
only individuals locally, not to support all local candidates of all  
parties as a group.

> The local count would be standard PR-STV, but with the same quota
> nationwide (and a rule that you must reach the quota to get elected).

Ok. National level proportionality could influence the election of  
the last candidates in the districts.

> Unallocated seats would then be assigned using d'Hondt or similar
> method based on the amount of votes transferred to the national list.
>
> Also, it could be in effect an open list.  The person elected would be
> from the district that transferred the most votes to the party's  
> national
> list.

Maybe all districts would be guaranteed their fixed number of seats  
(typically based on the number of citizens of each district). The  
extra seats would be first allocated to parties and then to districts  
(using some appropriate algorithm).

Due to the involved rounding errors I'm not sure that this style of  
sending the remaining votes to national level would make the results  
better (more proportional?) than just allocating the remaining vote  
fractions to the local candidates of the party ('local party  
ticket'?). (I'm however not sure that I even understood the intention  
correctly.)

Juho






		
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