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

[Juho]

On Aug 21, 2008, at 2:23 , Raph Frank wrote:

> On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 10:17 PM, Juho <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> Also an STV election that has tens of candidates but allows also  
>> shorter
>> votes may have problems.
>>
>> The favourite party of the voter could have 20 candidates. Let's  
>> say that
>> they are all about equally strong. Based on the size of the party  
>> we expect
>> two of the candidates to be elected. In order to guarantee that  
>> one's vote
>> will benefit the party and will not run out of candidates during the
>> counting process one would have to rank all those 20 candidates.
>
> I think that in such a situation, voters would vote for the 2-3  
> candidates
> who live near them, so they should be reasonably safe.
>
> However, a district with 20 party members would mean that it had
> probably around 50 seats and that is way to large.
>
>> Voters might be too lazy to do that. Some default (or explicit)  
>> inheritance
>> to the party could help.
>
> That is where I would use candidate lists.  However, trees work  
> fine too.

Yes, this is where I see that STV and trees (or lists) can be  
combined in a fruitful way. If the number of candidates is large then  
short votes may lead to problems in STV. To guarantee proper  
inheritance of the votes it would be useful to direct the voting  
power of short votes to some branch of the tree. A bullet vote to  
some candidate would automatically be counted for the local group of  
this candidate and for the mother party too. Longer votes could be  
counted e.g. for the group and party of the last listed candidate by  
default. (There are also other alternative approaches but trees seem  
most natural to me.)

> The key point is to allow the voter directly vote their first few  
> votes as
> that is where 80-90% of their voting power is.

The tail of the vote should be secured too since in elections that  
have many candidates it may be difficult to predict which candidates  
are likely to be elected (and thereby consume the voting power of the  
vote).

Juho





		
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