[EM] Preferential Party List Method Proposal

[Dave Ketchum]

Why transfers?

At least, when I said do a CW type search for the strongest remaining  
candidate, I thought of this as adequate without transfers.  I do  
think of quitting if the remainder are too weak:
.     Anyway, quit after filling the limit of seats to fill.
.     Quit anyway if remainder are too weak to deserve a seat.

Dave Ketchum

On Aug 14, 2011, at 4:24 PM, Greg Nisbet wrote:

>
> 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>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> 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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