[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Raph Frank wrote:
> On 8/22/08, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km-elmet at broadpark.no> wrote:
>>  What I had in mind was something like this: Say there's a single-winner
>> election where the plurality winner has 35% support. Then those voters
>> effectively got 0.5 (+1) worth of the vote with only 0.35 mass. The total
>> voting power of the entire electorate should not be altered.
> 
> Well, they actually got 1 constituency's worth of voting power at
> parliament for 35% of the vote in the constituency.  This is just
> fundamentally unfair and the problem cannot really be eliminated
> while also allowing independents to run.
> 
> If there are no independents, then the problem pretty much goes
> away.
> 
>>  Thus
>>
>>  pA (unscaled) = 0.35/0.5 = 0.7
>>  pB (unscaled) = 1.3
>>
>>  For the sake of the example, consider the case of 1000 votes. Then the
>> scaling factor is x, so that 0.7 * x * 350 + 1.3 * x * 650 = 1000. x is then
>> about 0.918, so the voters for the winner now have voting power 0.6426 and
>> all the other voters have voting power 1.1934.
> 
> This would mean that if a candidate had 55% support, his voters would
> have their voting power boosted (though, I guess in that case, there would
> be no change).  It still has the problem that the constituency gets a non-party
> candidate and also its voters get to vote for a party.

In MMP, party voters also get to elect a candidate and also contribute 
to the national level (to the extent that the total constituency result 
is disproportionate). The reasoning would then go that even a voter that 
elects a nominal independent may have a preference for a certain party 
(the party that is closest to the views of the independent). Thus the 
system should treat the vote as if it was a vote for the party in 
question, if it has to treat the vote as a party vote in the first 
place, and it should do so in order that all voters have equal power 
(influencing both local and national levels).

As for fairness, consider the case where more than "just enough" voters 
voted for candidate X. With your "you either get full strength or no 
strength" scheme, some voters are going to look at the result and say 
"hey, my vote wasn't required yet I have no power. This means my vote 
was wasted, so I'm going to be more careful later". To some extent, this 
unfairness observation would exist in all the cases where some voters' 
votes were unneeded, but at least with continuous reweighting you get 
the counter that your vote did in fact have an effect, in that all the 
others who shared your preference for the independent got more of a say 
in the national round. That's about the best you can do for the 
single-seat local election, since you can't transfer votes when there's 
only one seat.

> I think fairer might be to just exclude the voters who voted for the
> independent from consideration at the party level (if the independent
> is elected for the constituency.)
> They have already obtained 1 full seats worth of representation for
> 1/3 of a seat's worth of votes, there is no point in also giving them
> more representation by including them in the party allocation. Voters
> who voted for other independents or party members would still be included.

I can see two points of view here. The first is that they got more than 
their share by the extent that they were less than a majority, and the 
second is that they got more than their share by the extent that they 
didn't represent every voter. In either case, I think that there should 
be a continuous function, but the point of view matters when considering 
how much power should be retained in contrast to those who didn't get 
anything at all (that is, whose candidate lost).

Looking at it again, the point of view that it should be with respect to 
100% is probably better than the one that it should be with respect to a 
majority. Consider the case where's there unanimity towards which 
candidate should win. Then I think the right way to treat that is as if 
no votes had been cast at all, rather than to give those who unanimously 
decided to elect the constituency candidate double power in contrast to 
those who did not vote (or a hypothetical voter that'd only vote in the 
national election, if that was possible).

> Another option is to have a reasonable number of top up seats.  If 1/3 of
> the seats were top-up seats, then 2/3 of a constituency would be enough
> to be entitled to a seat.  This would mean that independents would be
> able to archive a quota in 1 constituency.  They would have to obtain 2/3
> of the votes to be eligible for election.

If you run the national and local election as a single STV election, I 
think you could get the result where many national candidates get a 
quota and "outcrowd" the various regional candidates, even if those got 
close to a quota. The problem here is that a "local plus national" 
election has a subset constraint (on number of local and national 
candidates) which a plain STV election doesn't have.

Or to put it differently, in a general case. Say that you have a 
situation where there are n seats and n/3 top-up seats. In a district, 
less than 2/3 vote for any candidate (for example, there are ten nearly 
evenly matched candidates). Nobody votes party-line. Who gets the seat? 
If the system can't ensure that a candidate from the district in 
question gets the seat, then by pigeonhole, either a national candidate 
or a candidate from another district gets it, which is quite undesirable.

> Alternatively, independents might be allowed to register as mini-parties.
> They could be allowed to appear on the party ballots in 2-3 nearby
> constituencies.  As long as their 'party' receives 1 seat's worth of votes,
> then they are entitled to be elected in their constituency.

That's interesting. What would happen if it got more than one seat's 
worth? I assume that is possible, because otherwise, the "party" would 
have to be limited to only one constituency, in which case the top-up 
aspect would fail to work.