[EM] Holding byelections with PR-STV

[Juho]

On Sep 11, 2009, at 1:03 AM, Raph Frank wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Juho <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> The hysteresis function may increase the strategic opportunities  
>> since
>> voters could trust that old representatives will be elected in any  
>> case and
>> they could try free riding. But in real life small hysteresis may  
>> well not
>> be too problematic.
>
> Maybe you could play around with the quota.  For example, the Droop
> quota could be used for sitting representatives and the Hare quota for
> everyone else.

Yes, that sounds quite mild, and those quotas also have some rather  
logical explanations (on what one wants to achieve with them and why  
exactly these quota are used).

One rather strong hysteresis function that I came to think of now is  
to keep all those old representatives that got enough votes to become  
elected in the last election but allow elimination of those  
representatives whose seat was saved in the last election because of  
this rule. I.e. if they fail twice in a row they are out.

One strategy against this method would be to try to maintain two  
representatives with one quota of votes and to concentrate votes to  
one of them in each election (A>B>..., B>A>... etc.). Similar  
strategic voting could be used also in other hysteresis cases. The  
party could e.g. recommend vote Cand1>Cand2>Rep1>Rep2>... or  
Cand1>Cand2>Rep2>Rep1>... if they assume that representatives Rep1 and  
Rep2 will get sufficient number of transferred overflow votes also  
this way. They could also fool the proportionality slightly this way  
(=get 4 representatives with 3+ quota of votes if 1/2 quota is enough  
to keep the seat of the old representatives).

>
> Staggering of elections, so that there isn't a single election day,
> may or may not be a good thing.  Would it mean that the government is
> always in campaign mode or would it never be in campaign mode.

Yes, and both approaches could be either a good thing or a bad thing.  
Currently typical systems have periods of campaigning (with promises  
and smiles and fights and contacts to the voters) and periods of work  
(with ability to make decisions that are not very appealing to the  
voters in short term but that make sense in the long run, but also  
with cabinet decisions and with ability to do whatever unwanted things  
(like making money oneself and for one's friends) that will be  
forgotten and overridden with new propaganda before the next election).

If the elections would be held often enough people could also vote as  
in the previous election. One approach to hysteresis would be to use  
the ballots of the previous election for those voters that didn't  
bother to vote this time. This would be quite difficult to arrange  
though. One could use also proxies to achieve some similar effect, or  
the personal computers of the voters could maintain the preferences of  
the voters and send these preferences automatically to the officials  
when needed (maybe every day in some extreme scenario).

I'd be interested in trying also frequent or continuous elections  
somewhere (with or without hysteresis in the method). Maybe the voters  
and representatives would learn new practices, and we would learn from  
that. Different societies would certainly react in different ways.

(Also strategic voting would change a bit since in some scenarios the  
strategic voters would have recent and accurate information on how  
others actually voted. Of course also counter strategies would come  
into play, and people could soon get bored with strategic fluctuation  
and it could become just noise.)

Juho