[EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racialminorities

[James Gilmour]

> Raph Frank > Sent: Monday, August 18, 2008 4:50 PM
> On 8/18/08, Jonathan Lundell <jlundell at pobox.com> wrote:
> > On Aug 18, 2008, at 2:00 AM, James Gilmour wrote:
> > > I have to say I just do not understand the obsession with "lists".
> >  An assumption, I think, that voters won't have the patience and 
> > attention span to evaluate a long list of candidates, and need the 
> > crutch of party guidance to cast their votes.
> 
> I think a system that requires people to rank 10-20+
> candidates is going to run into trouble.

I don't see why there should be such large numbers of candidates in real public elections with modestly sized electoral districts.
The larger parties will usually nominate one more candidate than the number of seats they expect to win and the smaller parties will
probably nominate only one.  So 20 would be a rarity and 20+ would be almost unheard of.  I know about the "table cloth ballot
paper" in Australia, but the Australians do have some ludicrous election rules that result in parties nominating ridiculous numbers
of candidates.  The law of diminishing returns applies to representation, as to many other things, so you get an acceptable
compromise with much more modest electoral districts than some theorists might suggest.

And of course, there should absolutely no requirement for any voter to mark so many preferences, no matter how many candidates there
might be.  All voters should be free to "opt out" (truncate) when they no longer have any preferences among the remaining
candidates.


> Australia is the perfect example where
> voters just don't bother (and thus just vote
> for one of the party lists).

But that is not surprising, given the combination of compulsory voting and compulsory marking of all preferences (though that latter
has been modified, a little, for some STV elections.)


> Ofc, maybe they would fill out the ballot in its
> entirety if that was the only way to actually
> cast a valid ballot. 

If that were the rule, I suspect there would be lots more rejected ballot papers that had not been completed correctly.


>  However, in that case
> they would probably not pay much attention
> to what they are actually doing and would
> probably rank 'don't care' candidates in the
> order listed on the ballot.  Forcing them to
> do that doesn't help democracy.

Yes, there is good evidence for this.  And I would agree with you that forcing voters to express "preferences" they do not have is
not good for democracy.  Indeed, I might even be able to claim that being forced to do that in order to record a "valid" vote, would
be a breach of my human rights.  It doesn't apply here (thank goodness), so don't look for my test case in the court lists any time
soon.


> Giving the option of a list allows a compromise
> to be found.  Your first and second rankings
> are normally the most important in PR-STV and as
> long as they remain under the control of the
> voter, then the balance of power remains
> with the voters rather than with the party
> leadership.

Leaving aside the question of whether such a compromise is really needed at all (not in my book), there are some serious issues
about how you decide which list the vote should be attached to.  Except in Malta, it would not necessarily be correct to assume that
the first preference is for the preferred party.  The first preference could be determined on quite different basis.  Voters have
many different motivations that influence the ordering of their preferences among the candidates that have been nominated in their
electoral district.  And there are well established problems within parties  -  I (and many others) may wish to see the leading
candidate of our preferred party unseated, so I would most definitely not want my ballot attached to my party's list that would
automatically have that candidate at the top.

James



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