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

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Apr 28, 2010, at 11:29 AM, Raph Frank wrote:

> On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:52 PM, Jonathan Lundell <jlundell at pobox.com> wrote:
>> This is, I think, a decent general solution to ordering a set of STV
>> winners: re-count, with only the current winners eligible, for successively
>> smaller numbers of seats.
> 
> Yeah, it is reasonable.
> 
> The fundamental problem is that if you use PR-STV to elect N
> candidates from N+1 candidates, then one of the factions that was
> represented ends up not represented at all.  This isn't so big an
> issue when N is large, but it becomes a larger problem as N gets
> smaller.
> 
> For example, if the voters were arranged as a circle, and each
> candidate represents a 120 degree sector, then picking any 2 of them
> is not ideal.
> 
> Something like CPO-STV might help, but the problem seems fundamental.

Whether it's a problem depends on what the ordering is intended for. There's no guarantee in any group that you'll find a majority choice. It's just that successive counting is in some sense a defensible ordering, while order of election is IMO not.