[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 03:48 PM 4/30/2009, Terry Bouricius wrote:
>By the way, Abd has an error or typo
>where he miss-states the Droop quota as 1/(N-1), but I assume nearly
>everybody on this list who read his message already noticed that.

Of course Terry is correct, 1/(N+1). Look, he knows I'm quite less 
than thrilled to see IRV being given too much of a pass in the U.S. A 
few experiments, fine, but they aren't being looked at as 
experiments! At least not enough!

With STV, for multiwinner, especially three or more seats being 
elected per district, the more the better, it's a vast improvement. 
(I've come to the conclusion that IRV actually isn't an improvement 
in many places, it's a step backward from runoff voting, and 
especially when write-ins are allowed in the runoff election, as with 
the California default.

And if the runoff were, say, Approval or Bucklin, runoff voting would 
be fabulous. Use Bucklin ballot with runoff voting, i.e., majority 
required, at least in the primary, quite a good system and much 
better than IRV. If everyone bullet votes, reduces to plurality.... 
then, in the runoff, with only two candidates on the ballot, voters 
will know that, if they support a candidate who didn't make it on the 
runoff ballot, they are playing a dangerous game if they don't add a 
second choice vote! (Actually, IRV wouldn't be bad for the runoff, 
either, I think offhand).

My comment about process wasn't about the BC process, but about what 
has happened in the U.S. It looks like it may be changing.

I would support STV for multiwinner election, probably even if it's 
just two seats. Asset is a tweak to it that could be added later.