[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

[Raph Frank]

On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:25 PM, Juho Laatu <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> The vote could be e.g. C999>C888>C111.
> Pairs of candidates like C999 and C888
> might be rare enough to allow some vote
> buyer to mark numerous ballots.

Ofc, a law banning vote buying might be enough in 99% of cases anyway.
>
> Number of candidates and size of
> districts whose results will be reported
> are also important (and existence of
> "hopeless" candidates too).

Maybe, hopeless candidates could be removed before announcing the results.

Ofc, then you can't use the ballot imaging idea ... or you need some
way of covering the selections.

> Widespread use of the default
> inheritance paths means that parties
> may nominate more candidates than
> before (in STV) and still keep most
> of the voting power within the party.
> It may also be beneficial to nominate
> numerous candidates (like in open
> lists today).

Also, if byelections are determined by looking at the votes in the
election, this also encourages a surplus of candidates.

> One could name also "orthogonal"
> groups that consist of candidates of
> different branches, e.g. "candidates of
> town X" or "all female candidates".

An easy way of achieving this is to allow people to be part of more
than 1 group.

> I noted earlier that the seat allocation
> rules may also observe votes that will
> be inherited by a certain group. This
> may make the treatment of named and
> non-named groupings somewhat different.

What are unnamed groups?

> Actually there could in principle be also
> alternative complete hierarchies.

As always, it is about balancing precision and complexity.

I know in Ireland, a switch to any form of national list would be
promoted on the fact that it would help to weak local "parish pump"
politics.

> Candidates C3 and C4 might not have any
> codes of their own.

This would allow candidates to add names of people who had trouble
with ballot access.