[EM] language/framing quibble

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Sep 10, 2008, at 4:21 AM, James Gilmour wrote:

> Raph Frank > Sent: Wednesday, September 10, 2008 11:49 AM
>>> Depends what you mean by "normal".  There are at least six different
>>> sets of rules for STV-PR now in use for public elections around the
>>> world.
>>
>> Fair enough.  So they are just giving an official name to one
>> of them then?
>
> I would not want to call it an "official" name.  The core principle  
> of BC-STV already has a name (WIGM) in the academic literature
> (Farrell & McAllister) and in literature associated with the  
> implementation in Scotland.  However, there are lots more rules you
> also have to consider for any implementation of STV-PR.  Scotland  
> and Western Australia both have WIGM enshrined in their
> legislation, but many of the other STV rules in these two  
> implementations are different.  I think it would be OK to use the name
> "BC-STV" for the complete set of election rules that will be used  
> for STV-PR in British Columbia, but they have yet to decide on
> many of those rules (there is nothing about them in the BC CAER Tech  
> Report - it far from a complete specification)

The OpenSTV project <http://stv.sourceforge.net> implements a rather  
large number of STV methods; the BC and Scottish implementations  
differ in the number of decimal places to which the calculation is  
carried out. It's difficult to fully specify a method, in the sense  
that any two implementations that comply with the specification must  
produce identical results under all inputs (modulo random tie- 
breaking). Variations abound in surplus transfers, handling of ties,  
and especially arithmetic precision and rounding.