[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

[Raph Frank]

On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<km-elmet at broadpark.no> wrote:
> I think Schulze's MMP idea would work well here. Use STV (or some other
> neutral method) for district seats, then "top up" by nationwide MMP. His
> concept includes ways of fixing the decoy list problem (basically,
> downweighting votes for a party if it got more top-up seats than it
> deserves).

Do you have a link to that?

> It's kind of a hack, and it only ensures party proportionality, but people
> probably aren't going to want to rank 10+ candidates required to get
> proportionality the direct way.

One option would be to allow people to to rank 2-3 candidates and then
their 4th choice would be a party list.

This would balance control and convenience.

> So, a proposal might be: have an average of >5 seats, with a minimum of 2 or
> 3, (and perhaps also a maximum of 10 or 11, so people won't get exhausted
> trying to vote in the megadistricts).

I don't think a max is really required, as there is an incentive for
those in power to make them as small as possible.

Ofc, Australia went the other way, and used massive ones and the above
the line system to introduce de-facto party list.


>  If needed, have a commission
> redistrict, or do it algorithmically; or just use the natural first-level
> borders ("counties"). Then, for the next level up from the districts (may be
> national, or may be an intermediate level like raions), add a small fraction
> of top-up seats, perhaps a tenth of the number of seats encompassed by that
> particular intermediate-level district.

Some counties in Ireland would barely be entitled to even 1 seat.

> How about this? A voter picks a party, and also, if he wants to, ranks their
> candidates as in a single-winner system.

Again, this fundamentally assumes that a party vote is a personal
vote.  It is perfectly possible for a voter to like a specific
candidate, but not like the rest of the party.

> For each district, the party runs
> the method (probably some sort of Condorcet method), and the winners get the
> seats.

So you are picking centerists from each party rather ?

> There are two problems with this idea. First, strategic voters may vote for
> a party they don't support, just so that their ranked vote can move a
> disliked candidate first (same problem as in an open primary, but weaker).

This effect could be reduced by the party only running centerists, but
that forces a requirement for a party primary.


> One could use STV, but at that point, why not skip the
> middleman and use STV-MMP?

It has a slight advantage that the ballots are less complex.

> The system above could be implemented fairly easily: a voter picks a party's
> ballot paper, marks the candidates if he wants, and then puts the paper in
> an envelope (to conceal it) before dropping the envelope in the ballot box.
> This, by its nature, makes it impossible to rank the candidates of any other
> party than the one the voter's voting for.

Right, however, all the ballots would need to be the same colour/size
and somehow, the voter would need to take a ballot in such a way that
the polling station workers don't know which party's ballot he picked.

> That seems reasonable. The lower the percentage, the more people are
> encouraged to run, so set it just at the level where having more candidates
> would clutter the ballot unduly.

In principle, if there was 10 seats, you might auction 20 slots on the ballots.

Ofc, that allows people to buy the election.

> No, it creates a disicentive to vote for parties that are below the
> threshold, not just close to it.

Right, sorry, I meant parties that are close to the threshold or below it.

If the threshold is 5% and the party got 6% in the last election, then
there is a risk by voting for them.

> Another possible way would be to use a multiwinner method.

Right, but that adds complexity.  Allowing 2 ranks is sufficient to
remove the risk that your vote is wasted for voting for a small party
(assuming your 2nd choice is a large party).

> Above the line, along with the requirement to rank everybody, changes it
> from true PR to party list. It would be better if they permitted truncation.

Right, or allowed you pick a party list and your ranks override.