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

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Peter Zbornik wrote:
> Hi Kristoffer,
>  
> The election methods you proposed are a great help.
> Just one clarification in order to avoid misunderstandings: The 
> president and the vice presidents are all members of the board, i.e. you 
> have X board members out of which one is the president, vice president etc.
> Should have stated this more clearly.
>  
> My idea was that you elect all boardmembers in one election, and the 
> person getting the highest number of votes will become the president, 
> and the runner-up the vice-president etc.
> Or maybe it is required to elect these people in two elections, as you 
> write below.
> Could I ask you to reconsider a reformulation of your answer to the 
> questions below (especialy point c]) and if appropriate send it to the 
> group?

Yes, I can do so. I hope you don't mind me just replying to this mail 
but on-list as well as off-, so that the election-methods list also gets 
a copy.

I'll get to the other mail - I just need a bit more time for that.

> I wrote:
> 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.)?
>  
> You wrote:
> First do an election for president and VPs. Run the ballots through the 
> method of choice to get an ordering. The one who is listed at top on the 
> ordering (outcome) becomes president. The one who is second becomes the 
> first VP and so on down. That's one election.
> Then elect the rest of the council. Run the ballots through STV (QPQ, 
> ...) to get the composition of the rest of the council.
>  
> 
>     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.
> 
>  
> You wrote:
> I think it's better to do the presidential election first. Consider the 
> case where the council/board is elected first. Then those who support a 
> candidate X has to be careful not to rank him too highly, because they 
> may want him for president, but if they ranked him too highly he would 
> be elected to the "rest of the council" first and so be excluded from 
> standing for president (as he couldn't keep two positions at once).
> 
> Therefore, it makes sense to elect the higher positions first. The 
> voters that don't get their candidates elected as president can still 
> vote for them in the ordinary council election.

I'll try to explain why I set it up as two separate elections as shown 
above. The primary reason I did that is as a concern of proportionality. 
Consider a situation where the party members are evenly split between 
two opinions - there are two wings, each of the same size. I think that 
in such a case, a tied council should be broken by a centrist - a 
candidate that considers all sides of the issue.

A Condorcet method is good at finding and electing such candidates, but 
a proportional method would allocate half the council to each wing, and 
so there would be no such centrists in the council from which to elect. 
Therefore, it makes more sense to elect the centrists from the same pool 
as the rest of the council, then elect the rest of the council separately.

If making use of multiple ballots is a problem, you could just make use 
of the same ballot input for both the Condorcet method and the 
multiwinner method. Elect the president (and VPs) first, then remove 
those candidates from the ballots and elect the rest of the council.

If you need to elect new presidents from the council/board more often 
than you elect the council itself, then you have little choice but to 
elect from the council itself, of course. If that is the case, elect the 
whole council first (using STV), then elect the president and VPs from 
the council using Condorcet.

There is also, more theoretically, the issue of proportionality. Say you 
have a board of 9 members, and two of these are president and VP. If the 
party is divided into three wings that are of nearly the same size, then 
removing the two members from the proportional council (to serve as 
president and VP instead of just members of the board) will distort the 
proportionality no matter how you do it, because one can't cleanly 
divide 7 by 3. An election in two parts would let the multiwinner method 
try to compensate, since it knows the council size will be 7. This issue 
is less important than those I've already mentioned, but I thought I 
should show it for the sake of completion.

> ---
>  
> Thanks for your understanding and your help.
>  
> Vänliga Hälsningar
> Peter Zborník

:-) You're welcome.