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

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 12:06 PM 4/26/2010, Kathy Dopp wrote:
>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.

Kathy, I don't think you have realized the context. These are 
elections within a political party, and they are small. I assume that 
the ballots will be centrally tabulated, thus precint summability is 
irrelevant. A good STV method is reasonable for them.


>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.

Yes, there are problems. But if proportional represnetation is 
desired, STV is pretty good. Asset Voting, indeed, is a tweak on 
STV-PR, and is one which allows candidates to complete the process 
even if voters bullet vote, which solves that problem. It's also 
possible, as Quinn points out, to use a predeclared candidate list; 
perhaps this list starts out and is used, but then the candidate 
personally takes over the votes only if there is an impasse that 
isn't properly resolvable by the original ballots.

(STV with the Hare quota is not at all the same as IRV, it's more 
like IRV with a majority requirement, which is what Robert's Rules 
actually recommends. The Hare quota will fail, generally, to elect 
all the seats, but that's where the candidates can take over. You 
can't do it from the ballots themselves because that requires the 
voters to be able to rank all the candidates.... It's a big 
discussion, actually.)

>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far as I know)  There are two recent working as-yet-unpublished papers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.

Precinct summability isn't an issue for these people.


>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.

Missed point, again: this is for a political party. How do you use 
party list with a political party, unless you create sub-parties. 
Asset in effect does this but without the party, per se. It is as if 
each candidate has his or her own party, which he or she controls.....