[EM] Proportional, Accountable, Local (PAL) representation: isn't this a big deal?

[Jameson Quinn]

2011/10/25 Andy Jennings <elections at jenningsstory.com>

>
>
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> 2011/10/25 Andy Jennings <elections at jenningsstory.com>
>>
>>> Hi Jameson,
>>>
>>> I looked over it.  I didn't see any technical problems immediately, but
>>> I'm going to try to re-read it a few more times and keep thinking it over.
>>>  My emotional response, though, is that it's probably beyond the complexity
>>> limit for actual implementation anytime soon.  The idea that "candidates
>>> from your district are in a bigger font and candidates outside your
>>> co-districts aren't listed at all but you can write them in" is a clever
>>> trick, but I don't know if people will go for it.
>>>
>>
>> (Note: I've renamed "co-district" as "super-district")
>>
>> The super-district idea and ballot design are not fundamental. For
>> simplicity, it would work fine if only the candidates from your local
>> district were available, as long as you could write-in candidates from other
>> districts.
>>
>>
>>> Clarification on terminology: When you say "Fair Representation", is that
>>> the same thing as "Fair Majority Voting"?
>>>
>>
>> Yes. Oops. I'd already fixed this error on the page.
>>
>>
>>> - I know "Fair Majority Voting" from here:
>>> http://mathaware.org/mam/08/EliminateGerrymandering.pdf
>>> - I know Balinski has a more complicated system that allows multiple
>>> winners per district.  I forget what it's called, biproportional
>>> apportionment, maybe?
>>>
>>
>> Don't know that one. Can you find a link?
>>
>
> Here are some references:
>
> Michel Balinski, “Apportionment : uni- and bi-dimensional,” in B. Simeone
> et F. Pukelsheim (Eds.), Mathematics
> and Democracy. Recent Advances in Voting Systems and Collective Choice,
> Springer, Berlin and Heidelberg, 2006,
> 43-53.
> (Paywalled: http://www.springerlink.com/content/g21l8t2t12p4n14l/)
>

At a quick read, this is basically just a prettier formalism for FMV. Yes,
it is good math; no, it is not a politically- or legally-significant
change.

Oh, wait... it also allows multi-member districts. But not post-hoc
overlapping districts as in PAL.

>
> Michel Balinski and Friedrich Pukelsheim, “Die Mathematik der doppelten
> Gerechtigkeit,” Spektrum der
> Wissenschaft, April 2007, 76-80.
> (In German:
> http://www.math.uni-augsburg.de/stochastik/pukelsheim/2007a.pdf)
>

I can't read German.

>
> Michel Balinski and Friedrich Pukelsheim, “Matrices and politics,” in E. P.
> Liski, J. Isotalo, S. Puntanen and G. P.
> H. Styan (Eds.), Festschrift for Tarmo Pukkila, Department of Mathematics,
> Statistics and Philosophy, University of
> Tampere, Finland, 2006, 233-242.
> (http://www.math.uni-augsburg.de/stochastik/pukelsheim/2006d.pdf)
>

This appears to use the prettier formalism to discuss a
multi-member-district FMV-like system in Zurich.

See also: S. Maier, P. Zachariassen, and M. Zachariasen, “Divisor-based
biproportional apportionment in electoral systems: A real-life benchmark
study,” *Management Science* 56, no. 2 (2010): 373–387.

This looks at algorithm performance and result quality (over several
measures) in the general problem of multi-member districts and global
proportionality, for various sources of real-world and simulated (including
deliberately pathological) data.

All of the above have the same problem I see with FMV: in the
single-member-district case, they could elect a minority candidate over the
majority candidate for that district. PAL resolves this problem by making
vote transfers explicit and, from the voter's point of view, optional and
thus intentional. Thus PAL elects winners as if it were a "single-member
biproportional" system, but it provides a much clearer rationale for the
"discordant" district-level results: the loser may have gotten more direct
votes, but the winner got a higher direct+transferred total; and all winners
reached the same overall quota.

This is the main idea of PAL.

JQ
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