[EM] Census re-districting instead of PR for allocating seats to districts.

[Michael Ossipoff]

Quoting me:

On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 6:59 PM, Juho Laatu <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> On 2.7.2012, at 1.05, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
>
> > There's no reason why, STV, voting for and electing candidates, couldn't
> be used in each multimember district, with the parties afterwards topped-up
> according to a national at-large list-PR allocation.
>
> Juho:
>
>
You said:


>
> STV ballots may rank candidates of multiple parties.


[endquote]

Yes, and so STV can therefore elect a set of winners consisting of
independents and candidates officially associated with various different
parties.



> Would the national party vote maybe go to the party of the first candidate


No. In the district STV elections, each party gets a certain number of
seats nationwide, counting the district-elected candidates officially
associated with that party.

The nationwide list PR allocation is by parties. if your party deserves
more seats, according to that national list PR allocation, than it got
nationwide in all of the districts, then your party is topped up to its
national allocation, by being given enough at-large seats to accomplish
that purpose.

What about independents? Say you're an independent who didn't get elected
in your district's STV election. But maybe they like you nationwide, and
you might win a seat in the national list-PR allocation.



 You asked:


> , or would the candidate maybe indicate his favourite party separately?
>

[endquote]

Yes. A candidate can be officially designated as a candidate of one party.
That requires that s/he 1) choose to be a candidate of that party; and 2)
that s/he qualifies as such just as s/he would have to in any other list PR
system. (That party's voters elected hir to their list in a primary. Or
that party's democratically elected central committee, or
other democratically-elected delegate-body, has chosen hir as a candidate
for their list).


>
> You probably also assume that (most) candidates are associated with some
> country wide party.


No. Maybe most, maybe all, or maybe just a small minority. It could be any
of those. The unelected candidates getting a party's nationwide list-PR
seats would of course have to qualify as that party's list candidates just
as they would in any party list PR system, as I described above.



> Many STV proponents like also the idea that candidates could be totally
> free of party connections.


Fine. They could in the system that I describe too. They of course wouldn't
be the candidates on a party's list, for filling its national list PR
topping up seats.

But if your independent that you vote for locally doesn't win a district
seat, s/he might still win an at-large seat in the national list PR
allocation, because, as I said, there's no reason why an independent
shouldn't be able to run as a 1-candidate "party". So, if you really want
to elect hir, then vote for hir in your district STV election, and also in
the national PR allocation election. We're assuming that s/he's a candidate
in your district, which is why you can vote for hir in your district STV
election.

What I'm suggesting isn't some new, complicated or arbitrary hybrid: It' s
nothing other than the usual topping-up system used with multimember
districts using list P'R locally and also used with Germany's single-member
districts. There's no reason why it couldn't just as well be used when the
multimember district seats are elected by STV instead of local district
list PR.

You continued:


> They could be so also in this model, but they would not get (easily) any
> top-up seats.
>

[endquote]

They couldn't get them via a party's national list. But they could get them
if they run as an independent in the national list PR election, in addition
to running in their own district's STV election.   ...but of course only if
they qualify for a seat in that national allocation by the same standards
by which a party would qualify for a seat. I read about a woman who ran as
an independent in a European PR election, as if she were a party. To win,
she merely had to get the number of votes that a party would need.


>
> > STV systems usually use small districts, tending to defeat the purpose
> of PR.
>
> One hybrid PR oriented approach would be to use STV within the parties.
> The voters would be able to rank candidates of one party only (a
> simplification to keep the method manageable). Seats would be allocated to
> the parties using some list style method. STV would be used to allocate
> seats within each party.


Sure. That's a fine open list system. But the existing open list systems
(including the one in Finland) are fine already, and there's no need to
make them fancier by using rankings and an STV count in each party, to
determine which candidates, in which order, will fill the seats won by that
party in the list PR allocation.

The use of STV for that internal purpose, in an open list election, would
be fine. It would be fancy and luxurious. But the other open list systems
are already fine.





> The voter's could safely rank few candidates only since also an exhausted
> vote would go to the correct party. This approach would allow also large
> district sizes and large nuber of candidates (thanks to easy inheritance).
>
> [endquote]
>
>
>
Yes.

Mike Ossipoff
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