[EM] Holding byelections with PR-STV

[Raph Frank]

On Mon, Sep 14, 2009 at 4:19 PM, James Gilmour <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk> wrote:
> The 'count back' procedure with STV-PR provides an alternative approach to the principle of preserving the proportionality
> determined at the previous main election.  Then the voters would get the proportionality they would have got at the main election
> had the member who caused the casual vacancy not stood at the main election.  Where the elections are partisan, this
> approach would
> provide an incentive for the political parties to nominate more candidates that the numbers of seats they expected to win, so that
> they would have one or more "spares".  In Malta the main parties take this to extremes, as they both have sometimes nominated
> 12
> candidates in some 5-member districts.

I think, in the end, this is probably the best plan.  The "spares"
give an added bonus that voters get more choice.

Under Meek, would this just be a matter of setting the resigning
candidate's keep value to zero?

Setting a candidate's keep value to zero should only increase the vote
totals of all the other candidates.  Thus, all elected candidates
would stay elected and Meek's method never changes the keep values to
eliminate an elected candidate.

The problem would be that setting an eliminated candidate's keep value
back to 1 could bring an elected candidate below the quota.  One
option would be to set all "running" candidates at the highest
possible keep value such that all elected candidates have more than a
quota worth of votes.