[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

[Juho Laatu]

--- On Wed, 6/5/09, Raph Frank <raphfrk at gmail.com> 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.

Yes, that may be enough in most societies.
Societies are different. In some societies
the moral deterrent is enough. Somewhere
else "only fools don't cheat". Coercion
is somewhat more difficult to defend
against than vote buying because often it
takes place behind closed doors. Also
privacy problems have somewhat different
characteristics. But in general, one need
not defend more than what is necessary in
the society in question.

> > 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.

Removing hopeless candidates has
problems too. Maybe they themselves want
publicity since they want to grow to
strong candidates. It is possible to set
stricter limits on who can become a
candidate. And one could also give up
all kind of ballot imaging. In STV like
methods this is unfortunately not as
easy as e.g. in Condorcet style methods
where the ballots can often be summed
up to a matrix. Of course also here one
must be careful with the level of
verifiability that the society needs
(i.e. can you trust that the votes will
be counted right or do you need special
arrangements to guarantee that).

> > 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.

Yes. But I'd like to keep the primary
tree hierarchy as clean and simple as
possible to make it easy for all voters
to understand the basic structure of
the political space and to make voting
easy (and to some extent to tie the
candidates to something concrete, to
avoid vote fishing with artificial
additional lists). I.e. careful
consideration needed to determine how
easy it will be to add more groupings
and candidates.

> > 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?

If we have lots of votes where some set
of candidates (e.g. C1, C2, C3) are the
first three candidates then it could
have been beneficial for these three
candidates to name themselves as a
group or a party (if the seat allocation
rules give some reason to this). The
number of different subsets of candidates
is huge, so we can afford to check only
some of them (in this case the named
ones) during the seat allocation process.

A related point:
You mentioned that votes 10: A=B can be
seen as two sets of votes, 5: A>B and
5: B>A. If the quota is 8 then we neither
A nor B can be elected yet. But if A and B
form a party of two candidates, then the
seat allocation algorithm could see that
together they actually have more than one
quota of votes, and as a result one of them
can be elected. (The A=B voters might vote
for the party code.) Unnamed groupings
would not be handled the same way (since
there are too many of them to check all of
them). (This is why I earlier commented
that it would be possible to see both A
and B to have full support of all the 10
votes.) It is another question if one
should flip a coin and decide between A
and B right away or to wait for some others
to be eliminated (and votes transferred)
before doing so. I note that your interest
to keep the elimination rules different
from the election rules are related. Note
that the hierarchy allows also conclusions
like vote C111>G11=G12 to contribute to the
total sum of party P1 support - although the
vote contains also strict preferences, not
only ties between all the listed codes.
(I used term "direct inheritance" in some of
the earlier mails to describe this kind of
votes.)

> 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.

Would use of larger districts alleviate
the problem? I guess also here we need a
balance between guaranteeing nation wide
local representation and keeping the
thoughts on nation wide questions.

(One radical approach (not necessarily
a good one) would be to allow voters to
vote any candidate in the whole country
but still use a seat allocation
algorithm that forces regional
proportionality.)

> > 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.

Yes. There have to be some rules that set
limits to who can nominate candidates and
how many candidates (and groupings) one
can nominate. My rough thinking is that
there should maybe be a reasonable chance
of each nominated candidate to become
elected either in these or in the next
elections. Additional rules are needed for
use of orthogonal groupings, number of
hierarchical levels etc. The system may
also force use of levels (some parties
might prefer to use closed lists or not
to create any divisions within the party).
Rules could allow any group of nominated
candidates to declare themselves as a
grouping (no permission needed from the
party) etc. This battle is a bit like the
battle of constituency sizes. Maybe we
just need some common agreement on what the
target levels are and then monitor and
adjust the rules as needed.

Juho