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

[Kathy Dopp]

Oh Yes. I'm sorry.

That's right. So only the approval ballot PR methods I suggested apply
then, unless there are factions within the party so that the party
list system could be used.  Sounds like the approval PR methods would
be best.

STV would be good for them if they want to elect extremists. The Utah
Republican party just dropped (stopped) using IRV for their own
primary elections.  I would highly recommend against using STV for
*any* purpose.

Cheers,

Kathy

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 1:30 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
<abd at lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> 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.....
>
>
>



-- 

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