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

[Jameson Quinn]

2010/4/28 Juho <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk>

> On Apr 28, 2010, at 9:19 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I have some catching up to do here.
> I need to think more about some of the different methods and the proposals
> I have gotten.
> Some of the methods are new to me.
> As I am a layman it takes time to understand them.
>
> Condorcet methods have not been used in politics yet, I think.
> Are there by any chance other methods to elect centrist presidents?
>
>
> The most common single-winner methods (plurality, top-two runoff, IRV) are
> known not to be "centrist oriented". For example in the quite common set-up
> where we have two extremists and one centrist with slightly less support
> they all elect one of the "extremists".
>

That's with honest votes. Of course, voters can strategize to counteract the
system's tendency. In the US-2000 election, some Gore ("center-left") voters
had a slogan that "a vote for Nader ("left") is a vote for Bush (we all know
how he turned out)." This slogan encapsulates the perverse strategy
incentives of an "extremist oriented" system like Plurality, or, to a
slightly lesser extent, IRV.


>
> Approval and Condorcet are more centrist oriented. They are both also old
> and well tested methods although they have not been widely used in public
> political elections.
>
> One problem with Approval (that was not mentioned yet) is the limited
> expressive power of the Approval vote and resulting problems in choosing the
> right strategy, e.g. when there are three leading candidates and one should
> approve either one or two of them. That is problematic e.g when left wing
> has 2 candidates and is is bigger than right wing that has 1 candidate. (In
> Approval voters are generally assumed to vote strategically and not just
> sincerely list candidates that they consider "approvable".)
>

This is exactly the problem that Bucklin is intended to solve. Bucklin is
essentially multi-round approval using one ballot. It's not as theoretically
clean as many methods, so there are some desirable criteria that it doesn't
strictly satisfy; but it's a simple, practical method, both for voting and
for counting. (Of course, as always, I'm referring to the
equal-rankings-allowed versions of Bucklin.)

Of course, the issue with Bucklin is that it uses a different (simpler)
balloting style than STV or Condorcet. So if you used Bucklin for the
single-winner method, you'd either need to take two ballots, take a combined
ballot (with some ficticious "cutoff" candidates - possibly hard to
understand), or use a proportional method like RBV which is based on Bucklin
ballots.

JQ
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