[EM] proportional constraints - help needed

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 02/06/2013 08:56 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>
>
> 2013/2/6 Peter Zbornik <pzbornik at gmail.com <mailto:pzbornik at gmail.com>>
>
>     Jameson,
>
>     I am not sure if we understand each other here.
>     I am looking for an election system, where the quoted-in seat gives
>     (or moves toward) a proportional distribution of the quoted-in gender.
>     If we fix the seats which will be quoted-in at no. 2 and 5, the
>     quoted-in gender will in some cases not be proportionally distributed,
>     for instance when the same group of voters get both quoted-in
>     candidates at places 2 and 5.
>
>
> OK. I was responding to your initial statement of the problem, without
> this additional proportionally-quoting-in constraint.
>
> The issue with this constraint is that it is only meaningful if the
> electorate is meaningfully separable into parties. If, on the other
> hand, the electorate is in a 2D issue space, it's hard to see exactly
> what this constraint even means. Thus I suspect no non-partisan system
> can be made to fit this constraint. I could easily see how to meet this
> constraint with a party list system (preferably open, because closed
> list systems are bad), and possibly I could work it out with a
> pseudo-list system like PAL, but with STV it looks to me like an
> impossible task.

With a council size of 5, it might be possible to do an election between 
all consistent sets. The general idea would be something to the effect 
of that you first use a proportional ordering, setting constraints at 
different places (force woman at position one, position two, etc). Then 
you find all the sets the proportional ordering produces, and you hold a 
supermajority election to decide which to use.

The supermajority election could be a parliamentary procedures one if 
the number of members is small, otherwise it would have to be by means 
of an election method (or Asset/liquid democracy). I say it'd have to be 
supermajority so that the majority can't force disproportionality on the 
minority. However, a consensus election might on the other hand give 
undue power to the minority. So that leads to another problem, which is 
similar to the question of how to get a proportionally represented 
council if the only thing you can do is ask the voters to rank the 
different councils.

Simmons had some ideas relating to lotteries in that respect, if I'm not 
mistaken. I don't remember the details, though. Could they be applied here?