[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Juho]

On Aug 28, 2008, at 13:18 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

>> One more approach to this would be to provide "perfect" continuous  
>> geographical proportionality. One would guarantee political and  
>> geographical proportionality at the same time. One would try to  
>> minimize the distance to the closest representative from each  
>> voter and make the number of represented voters equal to all  
>> representatives. In short, distribution of representatives would  
>> be close to the distribution of the voters (while still  
>> maintaining also political proportionality).
>
> There would, of course, be limits to the guarantee of having both  
> political and geographical proportionality at the same time. If  
> your immediate vicinity have candidates whose opinion you  
> completely disagree with, one of geographical proportionality and  
> political proportionality will have to sacrifice part of itself for  
> the other.

Yes, smaller political groupings would not get as "near"  
representatives. That is also natural since there are so few of them.  
It is also possible that close to the voter there are many party A  
supporters and therefore they get a seat. In the next neighbourhood  
there are lots of B part supporters, and so on. But probably we would  
still get a more accurate geographical proportionality than with  
large districts.

One seat districts would be geographically very proportional, but  
your nearest representative of your own party could be far away. In  
this new model one could try to improve also this (=> geographical  
proportionality within parties too; or count weights for the  
distances based on the preferences of individual voters).

> As I've said before, in that case I think political proportionality  
> is more important.

Yes. Political decisions are more typically made based on the  
political opinions (often parties) of the representatives than based  
on where they live. If the idea of geographical proportionality is to  
guarantee that all regions are present then approximate  
proportionality may be enough. If one wants single seat districts  
then maintaining exact political proportionality requires some  
"tricks" (e.g. some national seats, or not electing the most popular  
candidate in some districts).

> In the long run, the effect might self-stabilize, if for no other  
> reason that if there are many Y-ists in an area, one of them is  
> going to notice and want to become a candidate.
>
> I'm not quite sure how to do perfectly continuous geographical  
> proportionality.

I think perfect geographical proportionality would violate perfect  
political proportionality, so we can only provide approximate  
geographical proportionality if political proportionality is a must.

Let's take a basic closed list method. First we will count the exact  
proportionality split between the parties. Then we will (in theory)  
check all possible combinations of candidates that respect the agreed  
political proportionality split. Out of these we could elect e.g. the  
one where the average distance to the nearest representative is lowest.

Juho

> My "two linked ballots" idea would probably work, but I think we  
> can do better by using the distance information directly. Just how,  
> though, I'm not sure.



		
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