[Election-Methods] PR favoring racial minorities (Gilmour/Dopp?)

[Warren Smith]

I agree in principle with Gilmour that some PR systems - such as my
own "asset voting"
and "reweighted range voting" as well as PR-STV systems - see

http://www.rangevoting.org/Asset.html
http://www.rangevoting.org/RRV.html
http://www.rangevoting.org/PropRep.html

for background - should cure underrepresentation of
racial minorities.

BUT this conclusion is NOT based on real world data. Neither asset nor
RRV have ever been tried
as far as I know; and while PR-STV has been tried, it plainly has NOT
led to tremendously representative legislatures.

Instead it is based on the mathematical theorem that
if people vote in a racial manner, then if X percent of people vote
black, and enough
black candidates are available, then we get X percent
black winners.

Party-list-based PR systems should also lead in principle to representativeness,
e.g. if X percent vote for the "black party" then X percent of the
seats will be won by that party.

But, for example, Israel with a party-list PR system has an extremely
ethnically biased legislature.
Far more so than the  USA's plurality-single-winner-district legislature.
So in practice this mathematical conclusion too can fail to be realized.
I believe that is mainly because Israel's system is rigged in various
ways reminiscent of the
USA's "Jim Crow" era and South Africa "apartheid."

Finally I've been asked (since I advocate RANGE VOTING) what that
would do for/against racial
minorities.  I must admit that I currently do not have the  faintest idea.

-- 
Warren D. Smith
http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse"
as 1st step)
and
math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html