[EM] Interactive Representation

[capologist]

Juno wrote:

> Since you are building this on the single-seat district tradition, three or four seats and 10 candidates is plenty. I'm used to numbers like 6 seats with 108 candidates, and 35 seats with 405 candidates, and at least eight parties in the parliament. (In that situation even ranking all of the candidates, or even all of the candidates of one's favourite party may be too tedious. One may however allow all votes (also short ones) to be counted for the party.)
> 
> What would be a good (non-limiting) number of candidates? Maybe something like (P * K1) * (S * K2), where P = current number of parties with representatives, K1 = 1.5 or 2, S = number of seats, K2 = 1.

I don't think ballot access rules are essential to the method. The community can make it as open or as exclusive as it sees fit.  Note that the typical voter will not rank all candidates, but only his top few choices, either because he's confident that at least one of those few will be seated, or because there is no other candidate he'd want voting on his behalf in the legislature.

For number of seats, I think four is good.  At S=4, any voting block bigger than 20% is guaranteed a representative, and a much smaller block will usually suffice.  In America I believe the four most significant political "voices" would be conservative Christian, conservative libertarian, liberal, and centrist.

If the number of seats and candidates do get so large that the Schulze Method on the candidate sets becomes computationally difficult, I'm not married to that seating process. IRV-style successive elimination of candidates is good enough for government work.