[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Raph Frank]

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 8:03 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<km-elmet at broadpark.no> wrote:
> 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".

With a result like

A: 40%
B: 30%
C: 20%
D: 10%

Each voter for A could still be weighted as

(VA - VB)/VA = (40-30)/40 = 0.25

as only 75% of each of their votes was required to win the constituency.

Under plurality, you don't even need a majority, you just need to beat
the 2nd best candidate.

> 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).

I don't think there is a really a way to square this.  If a party had
51% of every constituency, they could guarantee that they win 100% of
the seats.

I think maybe my issue is that constituencies which elect party
candidates are 'playing fair'.  The candidate that they elected gets
added to the party total and thus has an effect on the national level
seats.  A constituency which elects an independent elects an
independent, but that has no effect on the number of seats affecting
each party and yet they still get to decide how the party
proportionality is decided.  This ensures national proportionality and
then they get to add their independent representative on top of that.
This shifts the legislature in the direction of the constituency in
question.

> 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).

Right, to allow them participate in the national vote would give them
double power.

However, it depends on how many additional seats are being used.  If
1/3 of the seats were national seats, then their votes should still be
counted but at a reduced weighting.

The voters in each constituency elect 1 and 1/3 of the seats, that
means that if a district elects an independent locally, then their
votes should count but with a weight of 1/4 of the votes in other
constituencies.

> 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.

As long as the quota per seat is the same, then it should be OK.  In
effect, you are just moving around votes.

Probably the easiest way to work it is to use the Hare quota
(technically slightly lower than the Hare quota) if you are using
PR-STV locally.

However, that is relatively minor as independents can be expected to
hit the quota in multi-seat constituencies and thus PR-STV + MMP for
rebalancing at the national level can be implemented without major
issues.

> 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.

I would give it to the plurality winner (or other single seat rule
winner) for the district.  If nobody has voted for a party, then there
is no issue with those voters getting more power than they are
entitled to.

>> 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.

I guess the candidate could specify a party for overflow votes, i.e.
excess votes if he gets more than 1 seat's worth or all the votes if
he doesn't get enough for a seat.  In principle, he might get elected
on his own party list as one of the top-up seats ... though that might
be going to far.

Anyway, I guess my concern is shown by the decoy list strategy.
Fundamentally, MMP allows an independent to get a seat while not
having enough votes to be entitled to that seat.  This leads to
potential abuse or just unfairness.