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

[Raph Frank]

On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 12:08 AM, Juho <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> (I note that Raph Frank proposed also an approach where the election of the
> last representative would be free of these sex related requirements. That is
> one way of relieving the proportionality related problems since at least the
> last choice that often distorts proportionality the most can be done quite
> freely. I'm not sure how big the improvement would be. There may be also
> other more sophisticated approaches as noted above.)

The approach is to add 1 to the requirements, so the freedom can be
given in the last step.

I was thinking of quotas and ensuring that it is actually worth voting
for candidates.

If a candidate gets in with 60% of a quota due to gender restrictions,
then the principle of PR-STV would seem to require an adjustment to
the quota.  The quota would in effect be to low for all the other
candidates.

Maybe there should be a different quota for men and women.

You could initially set it to the same for each.  If there ends up
being more men than women, then the quota for women could be
decreased, and the one for men increased (or vice versa).

This could be done iteratively (maybe like Meek's method) until the
balance requirement is just barely met.

My thinking was that by keeping at least 2 of each gender in the
competition, it means that each remaining candidate has competition,
so it is still worth voting for that candidate.  This saves the need
to run the election multiple times.

However, it would be possible for problems to still occur.  For
example, one gender might win all the seats with eliminations being
required.