[EM] STV - the transferrable part is OK (fair), the sequential round elimination is not

[James Gilmour]

> >>> (PR makes sense in general but I wouldn't deny people
> >> the right to achieve the political balance using two-party systems if 
> >> they so want.)
> >>
> >> How would this decision be made? Majority rule?
> >
> > It's not hard to imagine a referendum with that kind of effect. I 
> > don't see how you can get away from majority rule; even if we elect a 
> > body using PR-STV to vote on the party system, that's still  majority 
> > rule (or a super-majority rule with a possibility of no outcome), it's 
> > just different people voting in the end.

If you genuinely have a two party system, you have no problem.  The "problems" arise when significant numbers of voters do not vote
for either of the two largest parties, but the politicians of the two largest parties want the political system to function as if
there were only two parties and a guaranteed single-party majority after every election.

If you believe in representative democracy and believe that the "representative assemblies" in such a democracy (city councils,
state legislatures) should be fairly representative of those who vote, then you must be prepared to accept the representation the
voters say they want.  If the voters fall into two main categories, so be it.  But if the voters are divided among three, four or
five significant groups, so be it, too  -  that's what the voters say they want.

One of the advantages of STV-PR is that it is party-neutral and it allows the voters to have a direct influence on party behaviour.
For example, for the first 40 years of STV-PR in Malta the voters elected members of 3, 4 or 5 parties to their parliament.  But for
the past 40 years of STV-PR all the members of the Maltese parliament have elected from only two parties.  That change was brought
about by the voters because more than two parties still contest the elections.  So the representation in the parliament could be
different IF the voters wanted that.


> PR-STV was used in quite a few US cities in the first half of the 20C.  
> Mostly, it got repealed when the local majority party realized that  
> they could benefit from majority-take-all voting, and could avoid  
> sharing power by repealing PR.

Big party politics, big business and big media combined in some VERY dirty campaigns to dump fair representation of ordinary voters!


> One can imagine establishing a "culture of PR" where even members of  
> the majority support the idea that others should be represented; this  
> seems to be the case in various places outside the US, and for  
> whatever reason in Cambridge MA. But this has certainly not been the  
> rule in the US.

It may come as shock to many in the USA, but most countries in Europe elect their national, regional and local assemblies by some
system of proportional representation.  Rarely are the voters divided into only two blocks, so single-party majorities are rare.  In
Europe, it is the UK that is the exception, where despite having a genuine multi-party system political system we cling to the
discredited FPTP voting system with single-member districts that artificially (and wrongly) manufactures single-party majority
government against the voters' wishes.  Sometimes our governments have obscenely large majorities despite having only minority
support among these who voted  -  currently a majority of 66 seats (out of 646) with only 35% of the votes.  But that's party
politics!

James Gilmour







No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com 
Version: 9.0.698 / Virus Database: 270.14.39/2469 - Release Date: 10/30/09 07:52:00