[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

[Raph Frank]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Juho Laatu <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Why only fraction of the vote in the
> election case? Doesn't a vote to a
> party mean that any candidate of the
> party may use it at full strength?
> Naturally once someone uses it it is
> not available to others at full
> strength anymore.

It is the standard proposal.

A=B>C

gets effectively converted into

0.5: A>B>C
0.5: B>A>C

IIRC, the reason is that it means that if you vote

A>B>C

and

A=B>C

and A and B are elected, you want the same percentage of your vote to pass to C.

> Btw, one way that this approach might
> somewhat simplify things is that the
> votes could be shorter than in STV.
> (There might be such shortening needs
> also to keep the votes unidentifiable
> (to avoid vote buying and coercion).
> Maybe limiting the number of entries
> in the ballot could be used in some
> cases for this reason.)

Right, but it depends on how many choices there are.

With 100 candidates and PR-STV, you can have potentially 100! different votes.

With 100 candidates, 30 groups and 10 parties and 4 ranks allowed, you
are still looking at around 400 million different combination. (even
if this is still much lower).

Ofc, if most people just pick a candidate and use his list, then there
would be much fewer possibilities.

> One factor that influences this choice
> is difference between manually written
> codes vs. use of voting machines.
> Simple (handwritten) numbers may be
> easy to read without errors and quick
> to write. Mnemonic names are easier to
> check after one has filled the ballot.

True, it is greatly simplified if there is only 1 number/letter per box.

To combine national level candidate based PR with lots of choices is
going to require computer assistance for the count.