[EM] Delegate cascade and proportional representation

[Michael Allan]

Juho wrote, in thread PR favoring racialminorities:
>
> ... I was also thinking about trees that offer more detailed
> grouping of the candidates.

I just spoke with someone at Texas Tech.  We were discussing how
cascade voting might be used to elect a proportional assembly.
Basically, you just take the roots and branches of the trees (straight
from the election results) and that's your assembly.  Is this roughly
what you guys are proposing, in this sub-thread?

===== quote from private email =====

[This] solution depends on the candidate rankings, as revealed by the
election results.  For example, here are the current rankings in a
demo election (in this case, for a Mayor):

  http://zelea.com:8080/votodemo/w/?wicket:bookmarkablePage=%3Avotorola.a.election.WP_Count&s=demo-mayor

    Or see the screen shot:

  http://zelea.com/project/votorola/a/web/_/guide/results.png

  (These results are unrealistic.  The voters are mostly computer
   drones, and there's only a single cascade - 100% of the votes
   flowing to the leading candidate.  Normally there'd be many
   cascades.)

What you see in the rankings (above) corresponds to the roots, and to
the thickest branches of the cascades, as they exist at a particular
moment in time.  For illustration, in the smaller election below, the
top-ranked candidates are X, W, N and M (left cascade), and J and H
(right).


                        (I)  (K)  (L)
                          \ 1 | 1 /
                           \  |  / 1    (A)   (B)
                  (P)  (O)  \ | /        | 1  /
         (R)        \ 1 |    \|/         |   / 1
           \ 1       \  | 1  (M)         |  /
            \         \ |     |          | /  (E)  (F)
             \         \|     | 4        |/    | 1 /
          1   \        (Q)    |         (C)    |  / 1
      (S)-----(T)        \ 3  |          |     | /
                \ 3       \   |          | 3   |/
                 \         \  |          |    (H)-----(G)
                  \         \ |    (D)   |    /     1
       1       2   \         \|      \ 1 |   /
   (U)-----(V)-----(W)       (N)      \  |  / 4
                     \ 6     /         \ | /
                      \     / 8         \|/
                       \   /            (J)
                        \ /
                        (X)              8
                                        ---
                         14
                        ----

The solution is to call an election for a proportional assembly... and
use the ranked results to populate the seats (N seats).  If we open
the voting to the entire jurisdiction... and take the top N candidates
(rank 1 to N) from the results, enrolling them in the assembly, then
the membership will accurately reflect the structure of the
electorate.  If N=6, for instance, the current members of the assembly
are:

  X, W, N, M  (left side)   J, H  (right)

We could re-enroll the assembly at frequent intervals.  People will be
continually shifting their votes as new information becomes available
to them, and the rankings may shift as a result.

===== end quote =====

My own work is aimed at using a delegate cascade to open actual
legislation, policies, and so forth, to direct voting.  But it's
interesting to consider how it might interplay with PR elections.

-- 
Michael Allan

Toronto, 647-436-4521
http://zelea.com/