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<DIV><SPAN class=828061817-29102011><FONT color=#0000ff size=2
face=Arial>Interesting, but not relevant to what Kristofer had actually
written. Finland uses a party-list voting system - Kristopher
was writing about STV, and specifically about 5-member
districts.</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
<DIV><SPAN class=828061817-29102011><FONT color=#0000ff size=2
face=Arial>James</FONT></SPAN></DIV>
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<DIV dir=ltr lang=en-us class=OutlookMessageHeader align=left><FONT size=2
face=Tahoma>-----Original Message-----<BR><B>From:</B>
election-methods-bounces@lists.electorama.com
[mailto:election-methods-bounces@lists.electorama.com] <B>On Behalf Of
</B>Juho Laatu<BR><B>Sent:</B> Saturday, October 29, 2011 5:11
PM<BR><B>To:</B> EM<BR><B>Subject:</B> Re: [EM] Proportional,
Accountable,Local (PAL) representation: isn't this a big
deal?<BR><BR></FONT></DIV>
<DIV>On 29.10.2011, at 16.58, James Gilmour wrote:</DIV>
<DIV><BR class=Apple-interchange-newline>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">
<DIV>Kristofer Munsterhjelm > Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2011 9:14
AM<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">STV is not mixed member proportional. As for the
complexity issue, STV <BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">seems to work where it has been implemented. I
agree that complexity <BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">will put a bound on how large each district can
be, but as long as you <BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">keep below that size, it should
work.<BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite"><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">If you have a district size of 5 members and 10
parties, that would give <BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE type="cite">a seemingly unmanagable number of 50
candidates.<BR></BLOCKQUOTE><BR>I think that is most unlikely. The
only party that would likely nominate five candidates would be one that had
reason to believe it<BR>could win at least four of the five seats in the
multi-member district. Parties that might have an expectation of
winning two seats<BR>would likely nominate only three candidates.
Parties that expected to win only one seat would nominate at most two
candidates, and<BR>based on our experience here in Scotland, many would
nominate only one.<BR><BR>So the total number of candidates in a 5-member
district would almost certainly be far short of 50 I think
a total of 20 would be<BR>much more likely.<BR></DIV></BLOCKQUOTE>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Here's some data from last parliamentary elections in Finland.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>The largest multi-member district had 35 representatives and 405
candidates. All the large parties had 35 candidates. The largest party got 11
representatives.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV></DIV>The two smallest multi-member districts had 6
representatives and 94 or 108 candidates.
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>One of the parties grew from 5 representatives to 39 representatives. So
it needed lots of candidates too in order to not run out of candidates in some
districts.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>(see <A
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_parliamentary_election,_2011">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_parliamentary_election,_2011</A>)</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>If one has only one or two candidates more than the number of
representatives that this party has or expects to get, then the decision on
who will be elected will be mainly made by the party and not by the voters.
Preliminaries could help a bit by allowing at least the party members to
influence.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>If proportional results are counted separately at each district, then it
would be good to have a large number of representatives per district to
achieve accurate proportionality. In order to allow the voters to decide who
will be elected there should be maybe twice as many candidates per each party
as that party will get representatives. In that way no seats are "safe".</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>It is also good if there are such candidates that are not likely to be
elected this time but that may gain popularity in these elections and become
elected in the next elections. All this sums up to quite a large number of
candidates.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>My favourite approach to implementing ranked style voting in this kind of
environments would be to combine party affiliation and rankings somehow. The
idea is that even a bullet vote or a short ranked vote would be counted for
the party by default. If one looks this from the open list method point of
view, this could mean just allowing the voter to rank few candidates instead
of naming only one. Already ability to rank three candidates would make party
internal proportionality in open list methods much better. Probably there is
typically no very widespread need to rank candidates of different parties in
this kind of elections, but it ok to support also this if the method and the
requirement of simplicity of voting do allow that. From STV point of view the
problem is how to allow better proportionality and voter decisions instead of
party decisions in some nice way.</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV>Juho</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>
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