[EM] Single/Multimember districts (was Re: In defence of IRV)

[robert bristow-johnson]

> On 11/18/2021 9:12 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
> 
>  
> On 16.11.2021 15:52, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> > Unfortunately it's top-two vote getters.  Each voter has two votes.
> 
> That's not a particularly good method, no; but if you succeed getting
> BTR-IRV enacted, and you decide to advocate for replacing the top-two
> method with STV, you could use the BTR version.
> 
> Every STV variant with the same surplus election mechanism passes Droop
> proportionality, so modifying the elimination mechanism (like BTR-IRV
> does) won't make it fail Droop. So getting BTR-IRV passed shouldn't
> hinder future adoption of STV.
> 

But Kristofer, there is a little bit of a problem using BTR for multimember STV.  Consider the 2009 election in Burlington.  Suppose we stopped at two candidates (because we have two seats) instead of one.  Then the Plurality candidate (Kurt Wright) and the Condorcet candidate (Andy Montroll) would be elected to the two available seats.  The Hare IRV winner (Bob Kiss), who was actually preferred by voters over the Plurality candidate (Wright), which is what was demonstrated in the IRV final round in 2009, that IRV winner would not have been elected in multi-winner BTR-STV.  Some people might say that Kiss should be in the top two (and elected in a two-winner contest).

And, again, I know this falls on some deaf ears, but I **refuse** to be constrained in using the label "STV" to mean *only* multi-winner elections.  "STV" is a **method** of conferring to voters a vote token and then transferring (with the voter's consent) the vote token from the voter's favorite candidate to the second-favorite candidate when the former is defeated.  "STV" and "multi-winner" are two orthogonal concepts ad "STV" should *not* be used to mean solely multi-winner elections in which a ranked ballot is used.

--

r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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