[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Raph Frank]

On 8/26/08, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km-elmet at broadpark.no> wrote:
>  Well, since we're already talking about logistics-heavy methods

Actually, I don't think your suggestion requires that much additional
logistics.  All you would need would be for the candidates to register
their home address with the election commission and the commission
would enter the location of all the polling stations.

A computer could then generate the required ballots for each polling
stations easily.

The logistical problem is that it prevents votes from being counted
locally.  Since there are no clean constituency divides, the vote
would have to be counted at a national level.

> how about
> this: Take the location of the candidate (his home). Then order the polling
> stations by distance from that location. Find the number p at which the
> circle given by the radius drawn from the candidate's home to polling
> station #p on the sorted list (closer first) encompasses more than N seats
> worth of population. Then the candidate is listed on the ballot in polling
> stations 1 to (p-1) on the sorted list, inclusive.

I don't see why allowing candidates to pick which locations they
appear on the ballot is a bad thing.  The only problem is that they
would pick stations where they feel that they woul be popular and
exclude ones where they wouldn't be.

This would mean that they effectively cover a wider area than they 'should'.

Maybe each candidate would submit a boundary.  The candidate would
appear on all stations within the boundary.

There could be rules on the boundary to prevent abuse.  For example,
the boundary might have to include their home, have to be convex. and
perhaps conditions could be placed on the ratio of the area enclosed
by the boundary to its perimeter.

>  If the politicians have any influence in where the polling stations are
> placed, they would want to put them more or less evenly so that if, for
> instance, all polling stations are to the North of a candidate, one would
> add some to the South too, to get on more ballots.

I think as long as the polling stations have a max population and must
be placed within the area that they are to cover, then it should
automatically be spread out.  (Unless there is actually very little
population to the South, in which case, he loses little).

>  Strategic house buying would be funny! Perhaps parties would have
> "candidate houses", all of which are carefully located so as to maximize the
> effect, and new candidates are given one of them to stay in for as long as
> he's a candidate.

It would be like in the US where the President and Vice-President must
be residents of different states.  It is pretty meaningless Today as
even if it caused a problem, they could just register as resident in a
different state.

Also, unless the stations are static over the long term, the optimal
placement of a house could change from election to election.

Anyway, I think a hard rule would cause more problems than it fixes.
If candidates are free to chose, then they will ensure that they
appear on a reasonable number and reasonably placed set of polling
stations.