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

[Raph Frank]

On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 10:15 PM, Juho <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> On Aug 18, 2008, at 1:14 , Raph Frank wrote:
>
>> In Ireland, it is rare that parties run more than 2+ candidates in a given
>> constituency and if then, only the 2 main parties.
>
> Sounds quite limiting from the point of view of allowing the voters to
> decide also which persons will be elected, not only to decide which parties
> will get representatives.

Right, however, elections are still very competitive and seats change
hands between parties.

> Failing to elect a popular candidate that gets votes also from other parties
> means that this party will lose all those "other party votes". Electing this
> candidate with double quota means losing only part of those votes.

Yeah, it is a risk.  Normally, what happens is that the popular candidate
wasn't as popular as they thought.

A FF member once told me that if they knew then what they know now
about vote management, they would never have lost an election.

Not sure how true that is, but most elections are decided by a few
hundred votes in tight constituencies (though nobody knows which
ones they are going to be before the election).

> Even if there were no parties proportionality between different segments may
> still be a good thing. (Party like structures are btw likely to appear even
> if the election method wouldn't formally recognize them. Also the
> affiliation of most candidates is probably known.)

Right, parties in and of themselves are a brand name, and help the voters
decide who to vote for.  This is certainly something that trees could add
to.  However, if there isn't a formal reason, it might be looked at as a source
of disunity.

In Ireland, the PR-STV system can lead to hostility between local members
of a party as often the only way to get elected is to win a seat at the expense
of another party member.

The 2 big parties in Ireland aren't that ideological.  They are based
on the 2 sides from the civil war in the 1920's.   Their policies aren't
really that much different (and this is sorta a running joke).  However,
they will never go into coalition with each other.

Most politicians just try to be seen to be working for the constituency.

>
>> Also, constituencies don't need to be assigned integer numbers of seats.
>
> Interesting. What does this mean? Maybe some constituency that has citizens
> worth 10.4 quota could have 10 or 11 seats. Or maybe the last (11th)
> representative would have only 0.4 votes.

In that proposal, exhausted ballots were held by the
last candidate to hold them.  They weren't just dropped.

A constituency that has 3.4 quotas might end up after all the counts, as
follows.

(assume Q = 10,000)

A: 10,500 votes (elected + 500 votes spare)
B: 10,700 votes (elected + 700 votes spare)
C: 4,100 votes (4,100 votes)
D: 3,100 votes (3,100 votes)
E: 5,600 votes (5,600 votes)

This result means that C,D and E's supporters
refused to express lower preferences (or at least,
they 'hated' each other).

Also, some A and B supporters refused to indicate
lower preferences.

A and B might be from the same
party, so they did transfer, or one of them might have
transferred to C, D or E.

Since 2 candidates are elected, the constituency has
1.4 quotas left, this is split between the candidates in
proportion to their spare votes

A gets 0.05 quotas for 500 votes
B gets 0.07 quotas for 700 votes
C gets 0.41 quotas for 4100 votes
D gets 0.31 quotas for 3100 votes
E gets 0.56 quotas for 5600 votes

These add up to 1.4 quotas.

These are then used as the weights for each
of those candidate's candidate lists and the
remaining seats are allocated at the national
level.

In practice, it might be rounded to the nearest
1000th or something before announcing the results.