[EM] General PR question (from Andy Jennings in 2011)

[Toby Pereira]

I suppose the way I see it is that if 1000 people vote for the party A candidates, and 500 people vote for the party B candidates, then the result A1, A2, B1 is proportional because effectively each candidate represents 500 voters. Why should a larger group have more candidates assigned to them? I'd argue that it's because it gives each individual the same amount of representation. I know the A voters actually have 2 candidates so in a sense have twice as much representation as the B voters, but it's shared with twice as many voters. So in terms of having their own unique representative, each voter has 1/500 of a candidate to themselves. If we look at it in terms of A voters having two candidates each and B voters having one candidate each, it just looks as though some people are getting a better deal than others for no particular reason.

By separating factions into the individuals that make the factions, I think it becomes easier to come up with a system that can cope with voters partially agreeing with each other. Obviously if voters don't have agreement with enough other voters (say, 1/s) then they will struggle to get a representative. And a single individual not getting a candidate elected will do less harm to my squared deviation measure than a large faction. So the method I've described does still reward voters for being in groups and works like other proportional methods, but just happens not to work on the level of factions. STV is the same. It works on the level of individual voters having a single vote that can be transferred from their first choice. And when A1, A2 and B1 are elected, it is because 500 people are assigned to each candidate, not because 1000 are assigned to A1 and to A2 and just 500 to B1. My method doesn't assign a voter to one particular candidate but rates
 their total representation from all elected candidates in a similar manner.

Toby


>________________________________
> From: Kathy Dopp kathy.dopp at gmail.com
>
>I think that's stretching it to claim every single voter should have
>proportional representation. E.g. How much is 0.0005 representation
>worth?  It seems to me that, in truth, we must be part of a larger
>group of size at least 1/s to effectively influence a legislature.
>However, I'll keep an open mind and reflect on it.
>
>
>
>
>
>Kathy Dopp
>
>
>
>
>    
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20140930/f7892313/attachment.htm>