[EM] Using Schulze Election Method to elect a flexible amount of winners

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 10/05/2016 06:39 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
>  
> 
> it seems to me that *any* Condorcet-compliant method (Schulze, MinMax,
> Ranked-Pairs) can be extended from single-winner to multi-winner.
> 
> why not just run the procedure multiple times, each time removing from
> the list the candidate that was elected from the single-winner procedure
> and, at the same time, reducing the number of office seats available by
> one?  why can't we do that?  what is wrong with that?
> 
> seems to me that it would work.

I think I've mentioned this before, but suppose there are 51% Democrats
and 49% Republicans in district X, and everybody ranks their party's
candidates first. Then (assuming each party fields enough candidates),
any cloneproof Condorcet method will rank all the Democrats first, so
your assembly will be composed entirely of Democrats.

This doesn't seem entirely fair, so I'm not in favor of such an
extension of Condorcet methods. If your assembly is entirely
nonpartisan, it might work, but you're going to get an
overrepresentation of candidates near the median voter. This is what you
want for single-winner, but it does decrease variety (and thus the
benefit of debate) when you have multiple winners.