[EM] Preferential Party List Method Proposal

[Greg Nisbet]

>
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2011 09:31:55 +0100
> From: "James Gilmour" <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk>
> To: <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
> Subject: Re: [EM] Preferential Party List Method Proposal
> Message-ID: <E31F77F9E803443CA831CC02610CD525 at u2amd>
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> Greg Nisbet   Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 4:31 AM
> My system does not have voters voting for candidates at all. In fact,
> candidates needn't even exist (theoretically of course) for my
> method to be well-defined. Instead people simply vote for parties, with
> parties that can't get any seats dropped from the lowest
> weight first. Making the system more candidate-centric could be done, but
> my algorithm (or class of algorithms) is supposed to be a
> minimal, easily analyzable change from non-preferential party list methods.
>
> But this is not what the majority of electors want, at least not in
> polities like USA, Canada and UK.  Electors in some continental
> European countries do seem to be happy with party list PR without any voter
> choice of candidates, but I would suggest, that would
> not be acceptable in our political culture.   For the UK, that opinion is
> based on various public opinion polls; for the USA and
> Canada it is based on my reading of local media and blogs.
>
> James Gilmour
>
>
> I'm for candidate-centric voting methods as much as anyone else is, and
indeed, my proposal can be modified to allow that. Parties could have an
"internal ballot pool" that initially consists of just the ballots of the
voters with that party as their first preference. As parties get eliminated
and votes are transferred, the internal ballot pool will grow. If party are
allowed to have a maximum size and transfers are allowed, then this could
get more complicated because a party's internal ballot pool could contain
ballots with fractional weights. Nevertheless, the method I propose can be
modified to meet your criticism.

My method can be modified fairly trivially to allow parties with a maximum
size, e.g. an independent candidate would be a party with a maximum size of
one, and simply allow surpluses to be transferred. Even the relatively naive
Gregory transfer method might work well, I'm not sure how to adapt Meek or a
more complicated transfer rule to this method or if the benefits are worth
the cost. Allowing transfers might place some kind of restriction on what
sorts of classical allocation methods that the Preferential Party List
Method could use, but I doubt these would be particularly severe.

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