[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

[Juho Laatu]

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

> In Ireland, the constitution requires at least 3 per
> constituency and
> over time the average number of seats per constituency is
> being
> reduced.  It is currently illegal (by statutory law)
> for
> constituencies to have more than 5 seats.  For the
> upcoming EU
> elections, Ireland's 12 seats are being returned from all 3
> seat
> constituencies.

It practice that seems to set the limits
to max 4 and min 2 parties/groupings per
constituency represented in the Dail.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_30th_D%C3%A1il>

> > One could also develop rules that would
> > make the system more proportional at the
> > country level
> 
> I think care needs to be taken here, as votes for a
> candidate are not
> necessarily the same as votes for a party.
> (The tree system can resolve this).

Yes, some tricks needed here.

> > 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.
> 
> STV is actually neutral on this issue.  The voter can
> vote by party if
> they wish, or can vote by personality if they wish.

Yes, in the sense that the only problem is
complexity in the case that there are many
candidates.

> Party list systems aren't neutral at all.

Yes. Or one could say that they may
allow votes to individuals but they do
not allow voters to define any arbitrary
inheritance order of the vote (unlike in
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.
> 
> I assume you mean that it would be very easy for
> independents to
> clutter up the ballot, since there are so many candidates?

Yes. One could try to limit the number of
candidates to keep voting easy from the
voter point of view and to keep the size
of the ballots sheets manageable. And of
course to keep the "irrelevant" candidates
out (= individuals that want to be on the
list but that don't have any realistic
chances of being elected now or in the next
elections) (this last reason applies to all
methods, not only STV).

The rules could include allowing current
representatives to participate (as you
mentioned), allowing parties to nominate
candidates based on their earlier success
in the elections and allowing any party or
individual in if they collect some
sufficient number of supporter names.
Also money has been used somewhere.

(One additional point is that in elections
where the votes to an individual will be
always (or by default) votes to the party
the parties may benefit of naming numerous
candidates while in STV nomination of
numerous candidates might mean that the
party will have weaker chances of getting
maximum number of their candidates elected.)

> i.e. you meant "... Since STV elections typically can have
> many
> candidates ... "?
> 
> ... or did you mean that party list systems don't have many
> choices?

I don't know what is a typical number of
candidates in one constituency in the
Irish Dail elections. In Finnish open
list elections I'm used to have some 150
candidates.

(In the Finnish model one benefit is that
voters have great freedom of picking any
candidate that they like (not the one that
the party recommends). One problem is that
the system is not proportional within
parties since within each party and
district the system elects simply those
candidates with most votes.)

> > But once on the lists then independents
> > are quite equal with the candidates of the
> > well established parties.
> 
> Right, but there are surplus transfer issues.

Are there some specific independent candidate
related surplus transfer issues (more than that
they don't have any fellow party members to
transfer votes to)?

> I would probably allow ranking of parties, so that if a
> candidate gets
> a quota (or fails to be elected), votes that he held 
> can be
> reassigned.

Could you tell a bit more about the
intended technique?

> > (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".)
> 
> I think the tree method is superior to even open party
> lists systems.

Yes, I agree. In addition to providing
more exact proportionality I find also
the property that the voters can steer
the internal evolution of the party
interesting.

(Ability to influence => more interest
=> more direct citizen driven democracy.
This line of development may be beneficial
in typical stable democracies that may
already have some flavour of stagnation
and excessive control of the party inner
circles and external interest groups in
them.)

> However, PR-STV gives even more freedom to the voters, they
> aren't
> locked into voting according to the tree inheritance
> system.

Yes.

It is also possible to develop systems
that mix both styles. That could mean
e.g. default inheritance order (tree or
even candidate specific) for short
(exhausted) votes but allowing voters to
define their own order / deviate from
the default order if they so wish.

> OTOH, it gives up national level proportionality.  A
> candidate based
> list system (each candidate submits a ranking) also allows
> national
> level proportionality.
> 
> I think a mix of 5+ seater PR-STV seats and a quality
> national level
> system (say candidate list or tree list) might be a good
> compromise.

How exactly did you assume the STV and
tree/list inheritance (and national level
proportionality?) to be combined here?

There are multiple options. There could be
separate ballot entries for personal and
party votes, or maybe parties/branches
could be named as candidates in the ballot,
or maybe each candidate would just have a
link to some party/branch. The calculation
process could also be implemented in many
ways.

Juho