[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

[Juho Laatu]

Some systems use explicit thresholds
that cut out the smallest parties.
Many systems use districts. Use of
districts also tends to cut out the
smallest parties.

Districts also tend to favour local
groups. A "pro district X" group with
10% nation wide support might easily
get seats (probably in district X) but
a "pro country" group might not get
any seats since its support is not
focused on any particular district.

There may be cases where some country
has good reasons to cut out small
parties (although they have more
support than worth one seat) to keep
the political life of the country
stable enough, but I think there are
nowadays more countries where the
democratic systems has more problems
with too few and too stagnant parties
and political set-up.

So, in most cases I wouldn't have
anything against offering the voters
full proportionality.

(That is not to say that countries
that *want* a two party system should
not use it. But if one allows multiple
parties then groupings of size 1/n
(local or evenly spread) could well
be allowed to get one of the n seats.)

Juho


--- On Sun, 3/5/09, Anthony O'Neal <watermark0n at gmail.com> wrote:

> It is a rather huge problem.  It
> effects the proportionately 
> surprisingly little though - all the major parties still
> win a roughly 
> fair number of seats.  Districting tends to produce
> much more 
> proportional results than the seat size would suggest, as
> random 
> political differences in geography give some smaller
> parties too much 
> support in some areas to make up for their unfair lack of
> support in 
> other other areas.  This is clear just looking at
> single-member 
> districts.  Event though the threshold is technically
> 50%, it's rather 
> obviously much fairer than a party list system with a 50%
> threshold.  As 
> the number of seats gets larger, this effects seems to be
> exponential.
> 
> However, IMHO, the minimum seats per district should be
> around five, or 
> at least the average amount of seats should be five or
> seven.  The fact 
> that Irelands average number of seats has dwindled so
> dramatically over 
> the years makes it clear that the big parties just can't be
> trusted when 
> it comes to proportionality.
> 
> The minimum number of seats in BC-STV is two, the maximum
> seven.  
> There's really nothing from keeping them from making nearly
> every 
> district a two or three seater.  Clearly, as the
> situation in Ireland 
> shows, this is much better than single-member districts,
> but the article 
> should have been amended to state that the average number
> of seats per a 
> district should be around five, which would leave room for
> two-seaters 
> in rural districts but keep the big parties from colluding
> and 
> implementing a seat number to their favor.
> 
> Juho Laatu wrote:
> > --- 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
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >       
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> >   
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