[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Juho wrote:
> On Aug 22, 2008, at 12:36 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>> Juho wrote:
>>> On Aug 18, 2008, at 12:10 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

> 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.
> 

That's a good point. Voters probably wouldn't like to rank tens of 
candidates from tens of parties, so to the extent that it would not 
confuse the voters or make the ballot papers too long, there should be 
shortcuts for the most common patterns of voting.

Those shortcuts could be party list, party tree, a ranked ballot on 
parties rather than candidates, or something similar, with an override 
space for the first few preferences (since that's where most of the 
strength lies).

However, the way the ballot's formatted is going to have some influence 
on the voters simply by what it shows to be the path of least 
resistance. The STV ballots in Australia (that are used as a curious 
form of party list by most voters) provide a good, if extreme, example 
of this. In my opinion, parties shouldn't be given a boost or gain an 
advantage "for free" just because they are parties - this is part of the 
reason that I prefer party-neutral multiwinner methods. Thus one would 
have to be careful when designing the ballot format so that, on one 
hand, the ballots are not too arduous to complete, but on the other, 
they don't obstruct voters that want to submit "personal votes".

How such a ballot would be constructed, I don't know. The parameters 
required (how susceptible the voters are to shortcuts, etc) can't be 
arrived at by mere deduction; they depend on the nature of the voters.

For small districts, a ranked ballot like the one used in Ireland is 
probably sufficient. You pay for it by not being able to ensure national 
proportionality by party. The next step up (in fidelity and complexity) 
is the "you have two votes" form that accompany systems which try to 
correct the disproportionality on the national level.

If the various formats (list, tree, truncated personal vote) should be 
shortcuts rather than the only way to vote, then one needs to use a 
method, or one of a class, that can understand all the formats. I think 
that party-neutral multiwinner systems make up that class of methods. 
The exception is correcting party disproportionality, which it can't do 
by itself.

On the other hand, if you want list (or tree or whatnot) to be the only 
way to fill out the ballot, then you don't need anything as complex as 
PR-STV.

  > 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.)

Another trick related to one that I've referred to before is this: give 
each voter an additional fractional vote where the candidates are ranked 
in order of distance from the voter. "Continuous" districting, if you 
want. The fraction depends on how much you want locality to matter. 
You'd also have to link the two votes' weight somehow, otherwise it just 
becomes minisum distance, which isn't what we want.