[EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party

[Kathy Dopp]

Peter, I cannot answer all your questions in detail, even if I had the
time, but this is what I've learned thus far re. proportional
multi-winner methods.

1. Stay as far as possible away from methods like STV that are not
precinct-summable and do not treat all voters' votes equally. (STV
degenerates to IRV and has all the same flaws including
nonmonotonicity, tendency to elect extreme right or left candidates
and eliminate more popular centrists, the spoiler effect, not precinct
summable, removes voters' rights to participate in the final counting
round (or alternative requires that the voter figure out how to rank
all the candidates), etc.

Alternatives to consider include

2.  forms of approval voting that are multi-winner and proportional
(choose one that is also precinct-summable, they may be all fair as
far as I know)  There are two recent working as-yet-unpublished papers
by two political scientists on this topic of proportional multi-winner
approval systems that you may be able to search for on the MPSA web
site from the conference that just ended in Chicago.  Authors are
Steven Brams and Marc Kilgour.  There are at least a half dozen
different multi-winner election methods using approval ballots but not
all of them are proportional and some of them are not precinct
summable.  A working paper coauthored by Brams and Kilgour describes a
new? proportional approval method that is supposed to be
precinct-summable but I haven't read it yet.

3. the party list system is tried and true in many countries.  Often
one is allowed to vote either for a party or for a particular
candidate within a party list of candidates, so that the voters can
determine the order of which candidates in a party are elected first,
second, third, etc. depending on what proportion of votes that party
receives.  There may be more than one counting procedure for party
list systems.

Cheers,

Kathy Dopp



> Date: Sun, 25 Apr 2010 22:24:47 +0200
> From: Peter Zbornik <pzbornik at gmail.com>
> To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
> Subject: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green
>        party   - Council elections
> Message-ID:
>        <q2nee7b88661004251324mb1910107oee266514846bf082 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> Hi,
>
> I am a member of the Czech Green party, and we are giving our statutes
> an overhaul.
> We are a small parliamentary party with only some 2000 members.
> Lately we have had quite some problems infighting due to the
> winner-takes-it-all election methods used within the party.
> I am sitting in the working-group for the new party statutes, and
> would like introduce proportional elections instead.
> So I thought I might find some help in this forum in formulating my proposal.
>
> There are several practical different types of elections in the party,
> which need to be addressed:
> 1. election of council members
> 2. election of delegates to regional and national rallies, where the
> regional and national council members are elected
> 3. election of candidates to the ballot - primary elections
>
> In this letter, I would like to ask you to propose good proportional
> election system for the election of the council members.
> A council exists at all levels in the party organization: national,
> regional and local.
>
> SCENARIO 1: COUNCIL ELECTIONS
> We have to elect the following:
> 1. Election of the party president
> 2. Election of one or more vice-presidents in order of importance,
> i.e. first vice president, second, third etc.
> 3. Election of the rest of the council members
> Normally the council has five or seven members.
>
> CURRENT SYSTEM:
> Currently the president and the vice presidents are elected in several
> two-round run-off elections
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system).
> The rest of the board members are elected by block-voting
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plurality-at-large_voting) in the
> following way:
> 1. A candidate who gets 50% of the vote is elected
> 2. In the second round, candidates with less than 25% of the votes are
> eliminated
> 3. In the third round, candidates with less than 30% of the votes are
> eliminated. Now only 40% of the votes is enough for election.
> 4. New elections are arranged for the rest of the mandates, where
> candidates who got at least 20% of the votes in the previous election
> rounds can run as candidates in new elections:
>
>
> DELIVERABLES FOR IMPLEMENTATION:
> In the end, if proportional elections are to make their way into the
> party statutesm, then I have to deliver the following:
> 1. a proposal of a text to the statutes, describing the election rules
> and procedures
> 2. a motivation of the proposal which shows why it is better than the
> present one.
> 3. a vote counting computer program which works
> 4. preferably a ballot scanning program
> 5. preferably some good examples that the system works in real life.
>
> CRITERIA:
> I am looking for a approximately proportional election scheme, which is
> (i) simple for the party members to understand - this is the main
> criterion. A complex system like Schulze-STV has no chance of getting
> required political support
> (ii) simple to use, i.e. where it is quick to vote and vote counting
> is also quick (max 400 votes cast)
> (iii) gives results which leave most party members reasonably
> satisfied with the result
> (iv) votes are cast "secretly" on paper ballots, alternatively on some
> smart electronic voting system that is as secure as paper ballot
> voting.
> (v) asset voting is excluded due to lack of political support
>
> ASSUMPTIONS:
> There are several types of board elections in the party, where several
> types of assumptions apply:
> 1] 70-90% of the voters are "dishonest" - i.e. they vote strategically
> as they are told by leaders, who want to maximize the number of
> "their" people on the board - this is the case for the election of the
> national party board
> 2] 30-60% of the voters are "dishonest" - the roughly regional election case
> 3] 20% of the voters are "dishonest" - this is roughly the local election case
>
> Currently I am considering Re-weighted range voting and range voting,
> since it fulfills the criteria above, but other simple-to-understand
> methods could be used.
> Maybe the RRV system will have be reduced to approval voting for the
> high dishonesty scenario.
> This would lower its attractivity.
> A contender to the RRV-range voting system is the STV-IRV system used
> by the green party of the USA, since it evidently works, but is more
> difficult to understand than RRV: see
> http://www.gp.org/documents/rules.shtml#section7
>
> QUESTIONS:
> Please propose a voting system fulfilling the criteria above with the
> given assumptions, and answer the following questions:
>
> 1. if the proposed election system is as simple to understand as RRV
> and range voting,
> name what advantages and disadvantages it has to RRV and range voting.
> Alternatively, which specific variant of RRV and range voting do you
> recommend for the elections described above (normalization of voter
> scores, number of categories, given that 70-90% of the voters vote
> strategically)?
> To clarify: Asset voting is excluded for this election type, since we
> have problems with transparency and political support.
>
> 2. In which order should the election of the board members be
> performed in order to insure that all the voters will be reasonably
> satisfied with.
> a] how should the elections be done, it the current election order
> should be preserved (i.e. first you elect the president, then the vice
> presidents etc.)?
>
> b] Is one election enough to give an unambiguous winner, even if the
> president is elected by the margin of one vote?
> The talk about RRV not electing the Condorcet winner makes me a little nervous.
> The election of the president has to be unambiguous, and several
> elections is not a problem.
>
> c] if you reverse the election order, i.e. first you elect the board
> members, then the president and the vice presidents, and lastly you
> elect the president? This order of election seems to be more simple to
> conceptualize.
>
> d] what are the main advantages of the your preferred method to the
> current election system?
>
> e] (optional question) if a member of the board leaves his/her
> position before the end of the election period, and a new member of
> the organ has to be elected, how should this election take place in
> order to insure proportionality is retained?
>
> Specific questions for RRV:
> f] what is the minimal number of votes a person needs in order to be
> elected (if all voters except for one put an "X" for the candidate and
> the last voter puts maximum points, is this candidate normally
> elected?)
>
> 3. If the following exists for your selected election method, could
> you please provide a reference to:
> a] a text which describes the election procedure and can be used in
> statutes (preferably a text in existing statutes)
> b] an explanation of how the voting system works and an explanation of
> the vote counting procedure for a person who knows nothing about
> election methods. For RRV I do not understand the d'Hondt style
> re-weighting. Why d'Hondt? Why does it give proportional
> representation?
> c] an open-source program for windows which makes it easy to count the
> votes, once you have entered the data in the computer.
> d] a list of organizations, which use the method
>
> 4. As we have to count the ballots quickly, I would appreciate a tip
> on the following:
> a] A tip of a good and cheap and open source system for creating and
> digitalizing paper ballots.
> b] Alternatively a free electronic voting system with the same
> security level as a paper ballot system could be used, preferably with
> paper ballot receipts, which would be counted later for confirmation
> of the vote.
> If you know of any such system, please let me know.
>
> OK, that's the first scenario.
> Any help answering some of the questions above is greatly appreciated.
>
> Peter
>
>
>
-- 

Kathy Dopp
http://electionmathematics.org
Town of Colonie, NY 12304
"One of the best ways to keep any conversation civil is to support the
discussion with true facts."

Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting
http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf

Voters Have Reason to Worry
http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf

View my research on my SSRN Author page:
http://ssrn.com/author=1451051