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

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 06/26/2012 04:34 PM, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
> Kristofer:
> You said:
> Similarly, if you pick two states/parties j and k, Webster minimizes the
> absolute value of S_j/P_j - S_k/P_k, i.e. the difference between "seats
> per population" (share of influence per person) of state j and k.
> [endquote]
> Of course you can't mean that. You're referring to Webster's transfer
> property:
> If, starting with the Webster allocation, one state gives a seat to
> another state, then that will increase the difference between their s/p.
> It certainly will never decrease it.
> That pair difference minimization only applies to two states during a
> transfer of a seat.

The RangeVoting page says what you quoted me as saying. I'll quote more 
literally.

Under "Pairwise optimality properties", 
http://rangevoting.org/Apportion.html :

"Let S_k be the number of seats for state k and P_k be its population.

For all j,k, Adams minimizes |S_j - S_k P_j/P_k|.
Dean minimizes |P_j/S_j - P_k/S_k|
Huntington-Hill minimizes |S_j P_k/(S_k P_j) - 1|
Webster minimizes |S_j/P_j - S_k/P_k|
(...)".

Seems pretty unambiguous to me!

By the way, according to the same RangeVoting page, the method you 
wished to see (that minimizes max s/p) is Jefferson (D'Hondt). See the 
global properties list, #4. Unfortunately, Jefferson is biased in favor 
of large parties.