[EM] No geographical districts

[James Gilmour]

Stéphane Rouillon  > Sent: Thursday, September 04, 2008 6:03 AM
> STV-PR suffers from three principal problems that are exacerbated when 
> trying to push the proportionality limit. 

Why would you want to try "to push the proportionality limit"?  The law of diminishing returns applies to representation and
proportionality, as I said in a recent EM post under another topic heading.  The available evidence from countries with a history of
FPTP elections from single-member districts (UK, USA, Canada) indicates that real electors would be very content with much less than
proportionality at the limit  -  indeed, they would demand such a  trade-off in return for guaranteed local representation.  In any
event, proportionality at the limit would bring its own political problems and so would be undesirable and unwanted for that reason
alone.


> They are all caused  by the large 
> number of candidates:

Why need the numbers of candidates be large?  Of course, to some electors who are used to single-member districts contested for
decades by only two parties, any number greater than two might be considered "large".  In my experience such comments usually come
from those who are completely opposed to any reform of FPTP in single-member districts, but I know that group does not include
Stéphane.  Such comments do, however, play into the hands of the anti-reformers.


> 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;

If the districts are of a size that would give an acceptable balance between proportionality and guaranteed local representation,
all the major parties would want to promote teams of candidates because they would have realistic chances of winning more than one
seat.  So while the "star" might well want to behave like a prima donna, any party that allowed that to determine its team of
candidates would be heading for electoral disaster.  Also, internal party democracy should prevail.


> 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 opportunity of getting 
> heard and the others may simply not;

Why would the numbers of candidates necessarily be "huge"?  The issues arising from the availability of money have nothing to do
with the voting system.  To level the democracy playing field, there clearly has to be reform (limitation) of the money that can be
spent by parties and by candidates during any election campaign  -  though I can see such limitation being extremely unpopular in
the USA.  However, we could do much to reduce the impact of those differences by using a voting system that gave proportional
representation of the voters.


> 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.

Why would there be large numbers of names on the ballot?   I agree that random selection might be considered an undesirable
behaviour (though some have suggested random selection would be better than selection by election!), but I don't think it is for you
or me to say that a voter who has knowingly followed his or her favoured party's selection has engaged in an undesirable behaviour.
Indeed, it could be said to be an extremely rational behviour.


> 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.

Virtual districts may not have the three problems you specified, but they do have one real problem:  real electors live (and vote)
in the real world - they do not live in a virtual world.  They want their votes to reflect the real world in which they live, by
giving an acceptable balance between proportional representation of differing political viewpoints and local representation of the
geographically recognisable communities within which they live.

James Gilmour

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