[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

[Juho Laatu]

--- On Sun, 3/5/09, James Gilmour <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk> wrote:

> This issue has been raised again in Malta, and there was an
> interesting paper on possible solutions in the January 2009
> issue of
> Voting matters:    
>   http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE26/I26P1.pdf

Interesting paper that contains some
very reasonable proposals on how to
combine party proportionality and the
long tradition of STV in Malta. The
results are relevant also outside
the Maltese context.

One interesting point was the two
heuristic criteria (page 5) to keep
the number of seats / voting power
of different parties in correct
proportion with respect to each
others. Another simple approach to
maintaining such proportions would
be to use fractional seats / voting
power. On top of the seats that the
parties will get one could give each
one of them one fractional vote
(smaller than one vote), to be used
e.g. by the chairman of the group.
These fractions would be allocated
so that the strength of the parties
will exactly correspond to the
received votes.

Just an idea. Integers are nicer in
real world but in some cases they may
not maintain all proportions right.

Juho