<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div>Why transfers?</div><div><br></div><div>At least, when I said do a CW type search for the strongest remaining candidate, I thought of this as adequate without transfers. I do think of quitting if the remainder are too weak:</div><div>. Anyway, quit after filling the limit of seats to fill.</div><div>. Quit anyway if remainder are too weak to deserve a seat.</div><div><br></div><div>Dave Ketchum</div><br><div><div>On Aug 14, 2011, at 4:24 PM, Greg Nisbet wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div class="h5"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br> Message: 2<br> Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2011 09:31:55 +0100<br> From: "James Gilmour" <<a href="mailto:jgilmour@globalnet.co.uk" target="_blank">jgilmour@globalnet.co.uk</a>><br> To: <<a href="mailto:election-methods@lists.electorama.com" target="_blank">election-methods@lists.electorama.com</a>><br> Subject: Re: [EM] Preferential Party List Method Proposal<br> Message-ID: <E31F77F9E803443CA831CC02610CD525@u2amd><br> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"<br> <br> Greg Nisbet Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 4:31 AM<br> My system does not have voters voting for candidates at all. In fact, candidates needn't even exist (theoretically of course) for my<br> method to be well-defined. Instead people simply vote for parties, with parties that can't get any seats dropped from the lowest<br> weight first. Making the system more candidate-centric could be done, but my algorithm (or class of algorithms) is supposed to be a<br> minimal, easily analyzable change from non-preferential party list methods.<br> <br> But this is not what the majority of electors want, at least not in polities like USA, Canada and UK. Electors in some continental<br> European countries do seem to be happy with party list PR without any voter choice of candidates, but I would suggest, that would<br> not be acceptable in our political culture. For the UK, that opinion is based on various public opinion polls; for the USA and<br> Canada it is based on my reading of local media and blogs.<br> <br> James Gilmour<br> <br> <br></blockquote><div>I'm for candidate-centric voting methods as much as anyone else is, and indeed, my proposal can be modified to allow that. Parties could have an "internal ballot pool" that initially consists of just the ballots of the voters with that party as their first preference. As parties get eliminated and votes are transferred, the internal ballot pool will grow. If party are allowed to have a maximum size and transfers are allowed, then this could get more complicated because a party's internal ballot pool could contain ballots with fractional weights. Nevertheless, the method I propose can be modified to meet your criticism.</div> <div><br></div><div>My method can be modified fairly trivially to allow parties with a maximum size, e.g. an independent candidate would be a party with a maximum size of one, and simply allow surpluses to be transferred. Even the relatively naive Gregory transfer method might work well, I'm not sure how to adapt Meek or a more complicated transfer rule to this method or if the benefits are worth the cost. Allowing transfers might place some kind of restriction on what sorts of classical allocation methods that the Preferential Party List Method could use, but I doubt these would be particularly severe. </div> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> -------------- next part --------------</blockquote></div></div></div></div></blockquote></div></body></html>