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

[Raph Frank]

On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 11:30 PM, Juho <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.)

Also, trees and candidate lists can be considered somewhat equivalent.
Thus, I don't see them as massively different ... the trees just add more
structure and reduce the freedom.
If you have a tree, you can form a candidate list by ordering

1) Candidate himself
2) all members of the same leaf
3) all members of the next branch + other leaves
(etc).

This ranking of all the candidates would then be the candidate's list.

Ofc, it requires that the candidate list allows equal rankings.

This is not allowed under standard PR-STV, but isn't that big an
issue.  There are a few different ways to allow it.   (The easiest
might just to be allow tha candidate to decide how to break ties).

It becomes about balancing flexibility and simplifying info for the voter.

Perhaps, since they are only for a small fraction of each vote,
the reduced load on the voter of trees would be better.  (Though, I would
allow a candidate to opt out).

A candidate might be shown as

Name (Party/Wing)
if he is part of the party's tree system

or

Name (Party/Unaligned)
if they use the custom list.

The only rule would be that they must rank all party members before any other
candidate.  (Though I think parties will insist on that anyway, in
order to be allowed
use the party's brand.)