[EM] No geographical districts

[Raph Frank]

On 9/4/08, Stéphane Rouillon <stephane.rouillon at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Dear "baby" Jonathan,
>
>  STV-PR suffers from three principal problems that are exacerbated when
> trying to push the proportionality limit. They are all caused by the large
> number of candidates:
>  1) A pre-selection occurs within each party, in order for the star
> candidate
>  of each party to get elected, that star often tries to kill concurrency
> having bad collegues running with him or none at all in order to increase
> its own election probability;

This is somewhat true.  This can be justified (to the party
leadership) on vote management grounds.

However, voters aren't necessarly bound to one party.  Inter party
transfers can be significant.  If a party runs useless candidates, it
tends to do badly.

>  2) It is hard to make fair debates when the number of candidates is huge
> and they are not even the same for several parties: in the end the
> candidates having the most means (money and visibility) have the opporunity
> of getting heard and the others may simply not;

In Ireland, any debate on TV is held between the national parties.
For the last election, it was a debate between all the minor party
leaders (about 6) and then another debate the following week between
the 2 potential candidates for Taoiseach (Prime minister).  There was
also some debates on other issues with each party represented by a
'spokesman'.

Local candidates are often on local radio stations though.

In the US, would the representatives from each district debate each
other on TV?  Since your districts are so large 600k+, I can see that
working.

>  3) voters complain about the large number of names on the ballot adding
> several undesirable behaviours like random completion or following a party
> pre-selection.

This hasn't been an issue in Ireland, people love watching the count
and seeing where their vote went.  Also, most people will just
truncate once they have no further opinion.

>  Equivalent virtual districts have no such problems: they allow comparing
> all candidates with every party proposing a unique candidacy per district.
> The result is you can obtain PR results like using only one district for
> STV-PR, without the previous problems.

I don't think it  gives PR at all.  I think it ensures that the
majority party will win all the seats.

Also, with non-geographic districts, it means that local TV/radio
can't be used to host any debates.