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

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 11:37 AM 4/28/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote:


>2010/4/28 Raph Frank <<mailto:raphfrk at gmail.com>raphfrk at gmail.com>
>On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Juho 
><<mailto:juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk>juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> > Do you mean that voters would concentrate on the first rankings and
> > strongest candidates? The used method should be such that this kind of
> > behaviour will not be rational.
>
>Yes.  If the order of election matters, then your first rank is
>effectively for the president's position .. and it is a plurality
>election.
>
>
>Minor note: I proposed using order-of-election for vice president, 
>not for president.
>
>How about this: Elect the council with STV. Elect the president from 
>the council with Condorcet. Elect a two-member subset of that 
>council with PR-STV. Any members of that two-member council who 
>aren't the president are vice presidents.

Actually, a council can use standard deliberative process, which is 
far simpler, to elect officers by majority. So the task becomes one 
of making sure that the council is truly representative.

It's up to the council to decide which is more important: that the 
officers represent the mainstream thinking within the organization, 
or that they reflect the diversity of the organization with some kind 
of power-sharing. They can also use any kind of polling method they 
like, they can look at election results from their own election, and 
analyze them in whatever way they want. If a range-type ballot is 
used, they can look at factional strength, they can look at how 
important preferences are, they can do condorcet analysis, all the rest.

Deliberative process is far more flexible and powerful than any 
single-ballot voting system, and that's why complex voting systems 
are *never* used for elections within deliberative bodies. Voting Yes 
or No on motions, repeated, can handle vast amounts of information, 
and can use polling, when appropriate, to develop the options more 
efficiently, without getting stuck in some unanticipated quirk of a 
voting system.