[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Juho]

On Aug 22, 2008, at 12:36 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

> 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.

If we are taking about methods that rank the candidates the idea is  
to define a grammar and terminology so that the most common voter  
opinions (orderings or approximations of them) can be expressed using  
short expressions. Bullet votes and tree inheritance is one (very  
compact) option. Giving a complete ordering of the candidates is  
another (complete) option.

> 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.

I like trees since I think they do simplify things. If many people  
feel the same way they are expected to establish a party. If many  
people within that party feel the same way they should establish a  
subgroup. Most people support the ideology of some group (that they  
feel most familiar with) (instead of creating an ideology of their  
own) and therefore the one of those groupings that other citizens  
have created might be just what they need. Bullet voting with tree  
inheritance does not give full ordering of the candidates but may be  
accurate (to the level of groupings, but not to the level of detailed  
candidate ordering). Probably the interest to give a more detailed  
ordering will in most cases appear within the tree structure, nearest  
group first etc. Typical voters could thus quite often be happy with  
ranking few candidates of their closest group and leaving the rest  
for the default inheritance order to handle.

>>> 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.

Trying to guarantee proportionality for women at national level may  
be tricky if there is no "woman party" that the candidates and voters  
could name (well, the sex of a candidate is typically known, but that  
is a special case). If some voter ranks all women in his/her vote in  
his/her own district first we can not tell if his/her intention was  
to vote for these candidates because they are women or for some other  
reason.

In order to guarantee proportionality (of any imaginable grouping) at  
national level we may need to allow the voters to rank all candidates  
nation wide (as you noted). The next question then is if we allow the  
voters of one district to have a say on which candidates will be  
elected in the other districts. If we allow that then we could simply  
arrange a national level STV election with some further tricks. The  
trick could be e.g. to refuse to nominate any candidates from some  
district after the agreed number of candidates has been elected from  
that district. (This was just one quickly drafted option.)

Originally I was thinking about some simpler and more district  
oriented methods. E.g. a tree based method (proportionality  
guaranteed to named groupings of one tree only) could work simply so  
that first all the (district level) votes in the trees are counted  
nation wide to fix the number of seats for each branch at national  
level (one could also stop counting national proportionality at some  
granularity level (=forget national proportionality in the smallest  
branches)). Then one could again e.g. elect candidates in the order  
of strength nationally (this is the simplest but not necessarily the  
most accurate way) and skip those candidates that can not be elected  
(=district already full).

It is possible to extend this process to cover also other than (tree  
based) political proportionality and (district based) regional  
proportionality. One could e.g. maintain proportionality of men and  
women (either based on their proportion among the citizens or based  
on how people voted), or one could do the same for age groups etc.  
There could also be additional yes/no questions in the election, or  
in principle even another tree of opinions (on some other question  
that is orthogonal to the regular political/ideological questions of  
the first tree).

Juho


P.S. One approach to determining which party/group will get the vote  
of one voter who ranks multiple candidates by default in the nation  
level tree based proportionality calculations is to give the vote to  
the smallest group that contains all the ranked candidates.





	
	
		
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