[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

>> 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).

I may have suggested this before, but the balloting results could be 
censored. Turn the rank ballot data into a tree. At any time the leaf 
with the least value has less than, say, 10 ballots, snip the branch there.

For instance,

100: A > B > C > D > E
   1: A > C > B > D > E (vote-seller)
   1: A > C > E > B > D (vote-seller)
100: A > C > D > B > E

The tree is

201: A
  100: A > B
   100: A > B > C > D > E
  101: A > C
It would now be
   100: A > C > D > B > E
     1: A > C > B > D > E
     1: A > C > E > B > D
but because of the rule, is instead
   100: A > C > D > B > E
     2: A > C > *** (elided)

There's still some information leakage. For instance, if there had been 
just one vote-seller, the elided information:
   100: A > C > D > B > E
     1: A > C > ***

would have been just as good a proof to the vote-buyer - or nearly so, 
since it could have been just an individualist voting A > C > then some 
other order.

>> 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.)

Another approach, which would be party-based, would be where the voters 
vote for local candidates, and the system completes the ballot by 
ranking all other candidates of that party ahead of the rest. So if X1, 
X2, X3 are local candidates for X, and there are 100 X candidates globally,

X2 > X1 > X3

expands to

X2 > X1 > X3 > X4 > ... > X100 > (rest equal-ranked).

Perhaps also,

X2 > X1 > A1 > X3

gets resolved to

X2 > X1 > A1 > ... > A50 > X3 > ... > X100 (but it's uncertain if that 
would be a good thing).

If you do something like this, it would be relatively easy to have 
"fluid districts", where everybody that's within a certain distance of 
the polling place gets on the local ballot, unless that would clutter it 
unduly.