[EM] language/framing quibble

[Terry Bouricius]

Ralph,

As I recall the name was largely a 'marketing' thing --- One variation was 
that they also had a handful of low density rural districts having only a 
single seat I believe, to keep campaign travel costs for candidates 
down -- so a few voters did not get proportional representation.

Terry

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Raph Frank" <raphfrk at gmail.com>
To: "Terry Bouricius" <terryb at burlingtontelecom.net>
Cc: "Fred Gohlke" <fredgohlke at verizon.net>; 
<election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2008 7:50 PM
Subject: Re: [EM] language/framing quibble


On Tue, Sep 9, 2008 at 10:00 PM, Terry Bouricius
<terryb at burlingtontelecom.net> wrote:
> The experience and excellent work of the Citizen Assembly
> established by the provincial parliament in British Columbia a few years
> ago is compelling evidence that elections may not be the key to 
> genuinely
> representative democracy.

That is interesting.  The process seems to be that you register and
then they skew the odds for each person so that the resulting assembly
matches the distribution of the population at large.

Also, I think it is the perfect task for an assembly like that.
Examining new voting systems is an area where there is a conflict of
interests between the population and the legislators.

Drawing electoral boundaries would be another one.

I was looking at their BC-STV proposal.  What is the difference from
normal PR-STV (or is calling it BC-STV just a 'marketing ploy' :) )?

The only thing I could spot was compulsory meeting the quota in their
flowchart, but I assume that was just an error in the pdf.

http://citizensassembly.bc.ca/resources/deliberation/BC-STV-counting.pdf

According to the PDF, it would be possible for some seats to be left 
unfilled.