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

[Peter Zbornik]

Dear Andrew Myers,

this method looks interesting, as it is proportional, Condorcet and non
STV-like.
You write on your web-page, that: "the correctness of the algorithm depends
on a currently unproved conjecture: that if improvement of a committee is
possible, it can be done by replacing one member at a time".
It would be very difficult to gain support for a method, which relies on an
unproven conjecture.
I see this as the biggest problem in your proposed method.

I guess that from the presentation every voter votes for M candidates, where
M is the number of seats, and that the voter uses range-like voting for each
of the candidates voted for on the ballot.
I don't understand the two modes - combined weights and best candidate and
why two modes are needed.

You write on your web page, that: "The factor (*k*+1) may be surprising in
the condition for proportional validity, but it actually agrees with
proportional representation election methods developed elsewhere; it is
analogous to the Droop
quota<http://www.encyclopedia4u.com/d/droop-quota.html> used
by many STV election methods"
It could be nice, if you could show a proof on how the method achieves
proportionality, what advantages it has to standard STV and how it tackles
strategic-voting/vote management (for instance - give zero weight to the
strongest competitors).
I assume it is not used for elections anywhere, so some alpha testing could
be appropriate.

Best regards
Peter Zborník



2010/5/4 Andrew Myers <andru at cs.cornell.edu>

> If you are looking for a proportional Condorcet method, I will also
> recommend the proportional election method that I developed. It is not
> STV-like, but it achieves proportionality when there are blocs of voters. It
> has the added advantage that it is already built into a running Internet
> voting system, CIVS. This algorithm has been used for many online polls and
> has been a success. The code of CIVS is publicly available. For more
> information about the method, see:
>
> http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/proportional.html
>
> By the way, CIVS has recently acquired support for internationalization. It
> would be easy to construct a Czech instance if someone were willing to
> translate approximately 250 sentences from English to Czech. There is, for
> example, a Hungarian version (see
> http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs-test/index.html.hu, translated by
> Árpád Magosányi). I am in the market for help translating to other
> languages.
>
> Cheers,
>
> -- Andrew
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
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