[EM] Winners or representation?

[Richard Lung]

I can't help but think that this group is absorbed in determining election winners, rather than representatives of the people, as in a democracy.
It's the tradition, begun by Hare and Mill, and Wells, and Hoag and Hallett, that was nearly ended, in the US, by The Machine, Tammany Hall, and the rest of the city party monopolists. This political destruction of election progress was academic cue for a mote-in-your-eye critique.
However, this was a stimulus of sorts. I admit the criticism of premature exclusion and consequent lack of monotonocity, in STV, did set me thinking, resulting in Binomial STV. It took me another 14 years to get to FAB STV: Four Averages Binomial SIngle Transferable Vote.
Two or three years later, someone asked: Can't you do a hand count?
I had second thoughts, and realised I could. I would have to take Meek method and throw out the baby of post-election transfers, and the bath-water of quota reduction with exhausted preferences. But I retain the key Meek concept of the keep value, and indeed extend it, the Binomial STV way. That is to say with keep values for all candidates; in deficit, as well as surplus, of a quota. And keep values for a rational exclusion count, as well as a rational election count.
The count of usually later preference abstentions should make the election count weigh more than the exclusion count. But I do not know whether that will generally be the case, in real elections. It may be necessary to use standard significance tests, to determine which candidates come significantly close to a quota or not.

Regards,
Richard Lung.