[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Juho wrote:
> On Aug 18, 2008, at 12:10 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> 
>> The extreme would be a voting system where people just say how much 
>> they agree with an opinion, for all relevant opinions, and then the 
>> system picks the maximally representative assembly. Such a method is 
>> not desirable, I think, because it would be very vulnerable to 
>> strategy, and someone would have to say which opinions were "relevant" 
>> and then redo the list when voters' priorities change and other 
>> opinions become relevant. In a simulation, one can do this easily 
>> because the voters vote mechanically (and so the what the opinion 
>> "really is" doesn't matter), but in the real world, not so much.
> 
> In principle STV allows (especially if ties are allowed) voters to 
> determine any sets of candidates (without requiring someone to fix them 
> beforehand). Voters may e.g. list all female candidates. It is also 
> possible that any number of such group definitions would be available. 
> Candidates could indicate themselves which opinions they support, and 
> voters could include references to those lists in their ballot. Also 
> opinions created by others than candidates themselves could be 
> available. The lists could freely overlap. Someone could vote e.g. Women 
> (1st priority), candidates that indicate that they support election 
> reform (2nd priority) and candidates that were listed by the election 
> reform society (3rd priority). An STV like ballot would be derived from 
> this information.

To a limit, yes. But say that you prefer women and leftists. Also assume 
that there are some women who are leftists, some leftists that are not 
women, and some that are both. Then you'd rank those who were both above 
either of the two.

In my simulation, a voter who preferred women and leftists would rank 
male leftists and right-wing women randomly with respect to each other. 
In reality there could be different preferences among those. The point 
is that no concatenation of two lists would produce the correct result. 
If the list is by political ideology, then it could rank men on the left 
ahead of women, and if it was by gender, then it could rank right-wing 
women ahead of left-wing ones.

A tree could solve this, but it'd get increasingly more complex for 
numerous opinions. The complexity is probably a true issue - that is, 
not an artifact of the system - and one may wonder if voters would 
compare candidates on all issues in order to figure out a true 
consistent ballot (even for a party-neutral system). I have no data for 
that, so my simulation assumes the voters do so, since that taxes the 
proportional representation of the method more than if the voters didn't.

>> That sounds like MMP. I think MMP can work if done right (with STV 
>> instead of FPTP as base, and reweighting to avoid lista civetta). 
>> Using party list here is probably better than the party-neutral 
>> version where you'd rank representatives for local, regional, and 
>> national levels, and then it keeps the reweighting at each stage; 
>> simply because there would be an immense number of candidates at the 
>> national level, and ranking them all would be Herculean.
> 
> MMP style is also one option, although I was still thinking of methods 
> where all representatives are of the same type. The method would in that 
> case have to force the districts to elect so that also election wide 
> balance is maintained.

What would the method look like, so that a voter could specify (for 
instance) women ahead of men on both a local and national scale? The 
only thing that seems to work is candidate ranking on both the local and 
national level, which would take a lot of time and produce extremely 
long ballot papers.