[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

[Juho Laatu]

--- On Thu, 30/4/09, Raph Frank <raphfrk at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 3:18 AM,
> Kathy Dopp <kathy.dopp at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even
> worse.
> 
> I think that it has all the same flaws, but that the damage
> they do is
> mitigated by the fact that it is a multi-seat method. 

Yes, some of the main problems of
IRV get smaller when the number of
seats increases.

> OTOH, it has
> large benefits over other PR methods.

Yes. But not necessarily superior in
all aspects.

The first problem in my mind is that
STV sets some practical limits to the
number of candidates. This means that
the voters will have less to say and
the parties will have more to say on
which candidates will be elected (bad
or good).

This limitation also favours districts
with few seats only, which then favours
large parties. In the BC proposal some
districts had only 2 seats. That may
eliminate the smallest groupings/parties
from those districts (= groups that may
get representatives in the largest
districts).

One could also develop rules that would
make the system more proportional at the
country level, balancing the bias towards
large parties that the small districts
lead to (=> allow also small groupings to
get their proportional share of the seats).
Full proportionality could mean in an n seat
representative body to guarantee one seat to
all groups that have 1/n (or 1/(n+1)) of the
votes (at national level).
(I don't however recommend any radical tricks
to BC at the moment since the change is already
significant from the current state and since
complexity of the new system already seems
to be one argument against it.)

Large number of candidates is problematic
in STV since ballots get larger and
ranking sufficient number of candidates
gets tedious. I understood that in BC the
proposal is to list all the candidates of
each party together (in the candidate lists).
That at least makes it easy to see which
candidates are "from the right parties".

There may be also different opinions on
how person centric vs. how ideology centric
the election in question should be. STV
represents the person centric viewpoint but
allows the voters to apply strict party
preference order as well. Methods that force
the candidates to clearly identify the
ideological grouping and subgroup that they
belong to may be more binding with respect
to how the candidate will behave after being
elected and during the campaign. These
differences are subtle, but they exist and
may have impact on how well the voters are
able to use their voting power efficiently.

> 
> It allows PR while at the same time keeping the power to
> decide which
> candidates are elected in the hands of the voters, rather
> than in the
> hands of the party leadership.

Yes. Or at least voters can choose which
ones of those candidates that the party
did nominate will win..

> 
> It also doesn't discriminate against independents. 

This depends also a lot on the nomination
rules (that need not be related to STV).

It may be easy or difficult for the
independents to become candidates. Since
STV elections typically don't have very
many candidates there may be a need to
not allow independents on the lists very
easily.

But once on the lists then independents
are quite equal with the candidates of the
well established parties.

> This gives party
> members more freedom to vote against the party, as they can
> still be
> re-elected if they get kicked out of the party.

Assuming that they will be on the
candidate list.

> 
> Compare that to New Zealand, where if a person leaves their
> party,
> they have to resign from parliament  (Though most PR
> list countries
> aren't quite that bad).  Candidates represent the
> party, not the
> public.
> 
> What is yoru view on something like CPO-STV?  This
> method collapses to
> a condorcet method in the single winner case.  Ofc, it
> is super
> complex to count.

Yes, it fixes some of the anomalies of
STV and could be claimed to yield the
ideal result. Unfortunately its complexity
makes it unsuitable for many environments
(and the small problems of STV may often
weigh much less).

(To me also open list (or tree) based
methods seem to offer interesting paths
forward. Here word "forward" should be read
as "if the target is to move towards a
proportional multi-party system".)

(Maybe I should still note that also single-
seat and few-seat districts can be forced to
be fully proportional if one strongly wants
to keep both features (and accept some other
anomalies).)

>
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Juho