[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[James Gilmour]

Jonathan Lundell  > Sent: Monday, August 25, 2008 3:42 PM
> > On Aug 25, 2008, at 7:28 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> > Dividing a nation into districts before performing STV elections is
> > itself a constraint on the geographical distribution of the  
> > candidates. If constraints should be done away with, do you think  
> > that nations employing STV should have only one district? If not,  
> > why not?
> >
> 
> I think it's reasonable to restrict the size of an STV ballot somehow;  
> presenting hundreds of candidates to a voter doesn't strike me as a  
> great idea. Does the restriction need to be geographic? Perhaps not,  
> but we see from the proliferation of mixed-member list systems that  
> the idea of local access to representatives is attractive.

Yes, the superficial attraction of MMP does indeed provide evidence of the strong desire for guaranteed local representation.  MMP
fails to deliver on that, but it seems very hard to get that message across to electors who have had a century of electing their
representatives from single-member electoral districts.

Some the idealists who promoted STV-PR for the UK Parliament (Westminster) in the 1880s had utopian views on representation.  They
wanted the whole of the UK to be one electoral district so that voters would have the widest possible choice of candidates and
overall proportionality to the n-th degree would be the outcome.  Fortunately for the achievement of practical reform, wiser
counsels prevailed and the concerns of real electors were addressed, together with the issues raised by the politicians, a majority
of whom have to be got on-side for any reform to be approved and implemented.


> I suppose that with electronic voting, you could have the voting  
> machine recommend candidates, Amazon.com-style. "Other voters who  
> voted for Candidate X also voted for the following candidates...."
> 
> (That was a joke.)

Jonathon - many thanks for this!  I roared with laughter when I read it.  Then I remembered that I am not in favour of the use of
voting machines for public elections!  The Amazon.com approach also delightfully encapsulates the current consumerist view of much
of our political activity.

James

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