[Election-Methods] Determining representativeness of multiwinner methods

Howard electorama.com at howard.swerdfeger.com
Mon Jun 23 20:18:00 PDT 2008


 >One more observation. Nowadays many methods actually try to meet two
 >kind of proportionality requirements, political/ideological
 >proportionality (typically based on the party structure) and regional
 >proportionality (typically implemented by mandating all to vote at
 >their own home district for the local candidates there). These
 >scenarios may be out of the scope of the proposed metric because of
 >the mandated nature of the regional representation, but regional
 >proportionality is one interesting and maybe also measurable
 >criterion for proportionality.

I feel that the need to look for and design a system around geographic 
proportionality is a waist of time (except as a sales pitch).
I believe that geographic proportionality would naturally come out of a 
truly proportional system (if it was important to the voters) where the 
proportionality of all issues important to the voters are taken into 
account.
As an example, if a large number of voter care about the number of pot 
holes on bank street it is likely that many of these voters live or work 
near bank street. and thus would elect at least some politicians that 
live near bank street.

Geographic location is a hold over from the days when communication was 
limited to a local area is largely irrelevant today.



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