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

[Raph Frank]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Peter Zbornik <pzbornik at gmail.com> wrote:
> Approval voting was used in the French presidential election, first round,
> where far-right nationalist Le Pen got to the second round.
> Le Pen was hardly a centrist.
> See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Effect_on_elections

No, they use top-2 runoff.

The point being made was that approval would have picked 2 other candidates.

> Quote:"one study [16] showed that approval voting would not have chosen the
> same two winners as plurality voting (Chirac and Le Pen) in France's
> presidential election of 2002 (first round) - it instead would have chosen
> Chirac and Jospin. To some, this seemed a more reasonable result[citation
> needed] since Le Pen was a radical who lost to Chirac by an enormous margin
> in the second round."

I am not sure if Jospin was more centerist than Le Pen.

In any case, I think that approval and condorcet are both very good
methods for finding candidates that are central within the party,
rather than once who represent only one wing.

You should pick whichever method of the 2 you think is more likely to
be accepted.

Also, condorcet has the advantage of only a single ballot being
required.  OTOH, it is potentially harder to hand count.

If you plan to convert the ballots into a computer file with a list of
all the rankings for processing, then this is less of an issue.

You just run the condorcet program on the same ballots as the PR-STV
program is run.

You can probably find open source programs to do both.