Discussion:
British Colombia considering change to STV
Graham Bignell
2009-04-29 13:27:25 UTC
Permalink
Here in Canada on our left coast BC is holding another referendum on
their election method, in 2005 58% voted for the change, and there is
another vote on May 12 of this year. (60% required).

The official description:
http://www.gov.bc.ca/referendum_info/first_past_the_post_bc_stv/
http://www.elections.bc.ca/index.php/ref2009/

Some campaign sites: (I haven't found one campaigning against the change yet.)
http://stv.ca/
http://www.fairvote.ca/en/bc-electoral-reform-referendum-set-for-may-12-2009

Notes one the last vote:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_electoral_reform_referendum,_2005

...
Graham
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Anthony O'Neal
2009-04-29 17:40:24 UTC
Permalink
How likely do you think it is to pass?

Graham Bignell wrote:
> Here in Canada on our left coast BC is holding another referendum on
> their election method, in 2005 58% voted for the change, and there is
> another vote on May 12 of this year. (60% required).
>
> The official description:
> http://www.gov.bc.ca/referendum_info/first_past_the_post_bc_stv/
> http://www.elections.bc.ca/index.php/ref2009/
>
> Some campaign sites: (I haven't found one campaigning against the change yet.)
> http://stv.ca/
> http://www.fairvote.ca/en/bc-electoral-reform-referendum-set-for-may-12-2009
>
> Notes one the last vote:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_electoral_reform_referendum,_2005
>
> ...
> Graham
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> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>

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Stéphane Rouillon
2009-04-29 18:07:51 UTC
Permalink
Data from 4 years ago indicated that 15% of the electorate was not reached by the pro-stv

reformist promoters. The conversion rate in favor of bc-stv was 33% but I do not know

if it was from people being against the reform or people having just no idea about the debate.

If we suppose that the better organized reform movement could reah 80% of those uninformed voters

and that the others do not change their opinions, the expected result obtained is:

(57,7% + 0,8 * 15% / 3) = 61,7% but it does not take in account the growth of the electorate

if more people express a preference than 4 years ago. With this taken in account:

(57,7% + 0,8 * 15% / (3*1,12) = 61,2%



With a 60% yes vote required, it seems a short win is the most probable result,

but we'll have to wait and see...



The numbers comes from private discussion I had with M. Blais that covered the assembly process

and followed the previous referendum. On another hand, D. Pilon, an political science professor who

lives in BC is not optimistic saying negative adds could lead to another less than 60% result.



I'll think I'll throw a party if they win...

> Date: Wed, 29 Apr 2009 12:40:24 -0500
> From: ***@gmail.com
> To: election-***@lists.electorama.com
> Subject: Re: [EM] British Colombia considering change to STV
>
> How likely do you think it is to pass?
>
> Graham Bignell wrote:
> > Here in Canada on our left coast BC is holding another referendum on
> > their election method, in 2005 58% voted for the change, and there is
> > another vote on May 12 of this year. (60% required).
> >
> > The official description:
> > http://www.gov.bc.ca/referendum_info/first_past_the_post_bc_stv/
> > http://www.elections.bc.ca/index.php/ref2009/
> >
> > Some campaign sites: (I haven't found one campaigning against the change yet.)
> > http://stv.ca/
> > http://www.fairvote.ca/en/bc-electoral-reform-referendum-set-for-may-12-2009
> >
> > Notes one the last vote:
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_electoral_reform_referendum,_2005
> >
> > ...
> > Graham
> > ----
> > Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
> >
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Kathy Dopp
2009-04-29 21:57:00 UTC
Permalink
>   1. British Colombia considering change to STV (Graham Bignell)

It wasn't hard to find a site campaigning against it:

http://www.nostv.org/count.html

People might also want to warn the BC government about the ugly mess
that they would get themselves into by adopting such a fundamentally
unfair, inequitable, complex and costly method for counting rank
choice votes. The web page to contact the BC government is:

http://www.gov.bc.ca/referendum_info/contact/
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Terry Bouricius
2009-04-29 23:10:46 UTC
Permalink
Kathy,

While there are serious disagreements on this list about the relative
merits of various single-winner voting methods, I think you will find that
most people who have studied the STV form of proportional representation
agree that it is a very fair and very good method, and arguably the best
in use anywhere today. I can't imagine any thoughtful reformer wanting to
throw a monkey wrench into one of the most promising election reform
movements in the world today. Go BC-STV!

Terry Bouricius


----- Original Message -----
From: "Kathy Dopp" <***@gmail.com>
To: <election-***@lists.electorama.com>
Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 5:57 PM
Subject: Re: [EM] British Colombia considering change to STV


> 1. British Colombia considering change to STV (Graham Bignell)

It wasn't hard to find a site campaigning against it:

http://www.nostv.org/count.html

People might also want to warn the BC government about the ugly mess
that they would get themselves into by adopting such a fundamentally
unfair, inequitable, complex and costly method for counting rank
choice votes. The web page to contact the BC government is:

http://www.gov.bc.ca/referendum_info/contact/
----
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Stéphane Rouillon
2009-04-30 00:25:20 UTC
Permalink
I deeply agree with Terry on this one!!!...
In fact, STV is in my humble opinion the best multiple-winner electoral
method
among all currently used actually in the countries of the world.

Stéphane Rouillon, ing., M.Sc.A., Ph.D.

Terry Bouricius a écrit :
> Kathy,
>
> While there are serious disagreements on this list about the relative
> merits of various single-winner voting methods, I think you will find that
> most people who have studied the STV form of proportional representation
> agree that it is a very fair and very good method, and arguably the best
> in use anywhere today. I can't imagine any thoughtful reformer wanting to
> throw a monkey wrench into one of the most promising election reform
> movements in the world today. Go BC-STV!
>
> Terry Bouricius
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kathy Dopp" <***@gmail.com>
> To: <election-***@lists.electorama.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 5:57 PM
> Subject: Re: [EM] British Colombia considering change to STV
>
>
>
>> 1. British Colombia considering change to STV (Graham Bignell)
>>
>
> It wasn't hard to find a site campaigning against it:
>
> http://www.nostv.org/count.html
>
> People might also want to warn the BC government about the ugly mess
> that they would get themselves into by adopting such a fundamentally
> unfair, inequitable, complex and costly method for counting rank
> choice votes. The web page to contact the BC government is:
>
> http://www.gov.bc.ca/referendum_info/contact/
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
>
>
Kathy Dopp
2009-04-30 02:18:47 UTC
Permalink
STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even worse.

It is unimaginable how anyone could support any method for counting
votes that is so fundamentally unfair in its treatment of ballots and
produces such undesirable results.

STV is nonmonotonic, counts the 2nd and 3rd choices only of some
voters in a timely fashion when it could help those choices win, does
not even count any of the 2nd or 3rd choices of a large group of
voters whose first choice loses, excludes some voters from the final
counting rounds, and is in all ways the worst imaginable voting system
that I've ever heard anyone propose.

STV is particularly bad because it takes votes away from some voters
who used to be able to cast votes for one candidate for each at-large
seat while it counts a variable number of rank choices of other voters
- some who get to vote for as many candidates as there are seats to
fill, some who do not.

Guys, how on earth can anyone who claims to support the principle of
fair and equitable treatment try to turn voting into such a patently
unfair gambling game instead where the winners may be opposed by a
majority of voters.

It truly shocks me that anyone could support such an insanely unfair,
inequitable, and undesirable method for counting votes.

Kathy

On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 5:10 PM, Terry Bouricius
<***@burlingtontelecom.net> wrote:
> Kathy,
>
> While there are serious disagreements on this list about the relative
> merits of various single-winner voting methods, I think you will find that
> most people who have studied the STV form of proportional representation
> agree that it is a very fair and very good method, and arguably the best
> in use anywhere today. I can't imagine any thoughtful reformer wanting to
> throw a monkey wrench into one of the most promising election reform
> movements in the world today. Go BC-STV!
>
> Terry Bouricius
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Kathy Dopp" <***@gmail.com>
> To: <election-***@lists.electorama.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 5:57 PM
> Subject: Re: [EM] British Colombia considering change to STV
>
>
>> 1. British Colombia considering change to STV (Graham Bignell)
>
> It wasn't hard to find a site campaigning against it:
>
> http://www.nostv.org/count.html
>
> People might also want to warn the BC government about the ugly mess
> that they would get themselves into by adopting such a fundamentally
> unfair, inequitable, complex and costly method for counting rank
> choice votes.  The web page to contact the BC government is:
>
> http://www.gov.bc.ca/referendum_info/contact/
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
>



--

Kathy Dopp

The material expressed herein is the informed product of the author's
fact-finding and investigative efforts. Dopp is a Mathematician,
Expert in election audit mathematics and procedures; in exit poll
discrepancy analysis; and can be reached at

P.O. Box 680192
Park City, UT 84068
phone 435-658-4657

http://utahcountvotes.org
http://electionmathematics.org
http://kathydopp.com/serendipity/

Post-Election Vote Count Audit
A Short Legislative & Administrative Proposal
http://electionmathematics.org//ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/Vote-Count-Audit-Bill-2009.pdf

History of Confidence Election Auditing Development & Overview of
Election Auditing Fundamentals
http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/paper-audits/History-of-Election-Auditing-Development.pdf

Voters Have Reason to Worry
http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf
----
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Raph Frank
2009-04-30 10:20:00 UTC
Permalink
On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 3:18 AM, Kathy Dopp <***@gmail.com> wrote:
> STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even worse.

I think that it has all the same flaws, but that the damage they do is
mitigated by the fact that it is a multi-seat method. OTOH, it has
large benefits over other PR methods.

It allows PR while at the same time keeping the power to decide which
candidates are elected in the hands of the voters, rather than in the
hands of the party leadership.

It also doesn't discriminate against independents. This gives party
members more freedom to vote against the party, as they can still be
re-elected if they get kicked out of the party.

Compare that to New Zealand, where if a person leaves their party,
they have to resign from parliament (Though most PR list countries
aren't quite that bad). Candidates represent the party, not the
public.

What is yoru view on something like CPO-STV? This method collapses to
a condorcet method in the single winner case. Ofc, it is super
complex to count.

Actually, what do you think of condorcet methods for single seat elections?

> It is unimaginable how anyone could support any method for counting
> votes that is so fundamentally unfair in its treatment of ballots and
> produces such undesirable results.

IRV can end up not picking the condorcet winner, but PR-STV tries to
form quotas worth of voters who all get a candidate that they like.
It isn't quite the same process.

If there are 5 seats, then only 1/6 of the voters don't get
represented and the person who represents them is likely one of their
first few choices.

> STV is nonmonotonic, counts the 2nd and 3rd choices only of some
> voters in a timely fashion when it could help those choices win, does
> not even count any of the 2nd or 3rd choices of a large group of
> voters whose first choice loses, excludes some voters from the final
> counting rounds, and is in all ways the worst imaginable voting system
> that I've ever heard anyone propose.

I think that the elimination process in PR-STV could be improved.
However, the non-monotonicity isn't as bad as you are making out.

> STV is particularly bad because it takes votes away from some voters
> who used to be able to cast votes for one candidate for each at-large
> seat while it counts a variable number of rank choices of other voters
> - some who get to vote for as many candidates as there are seats to
> fill, some who do not.

You only get 1 vote. The only time you get to vote for more than one
candidate is if your favourite doesn't win, or you vote for someone
who gets more votes than needed to get elected (and in the second
case, your vote is reduced in strength).

> Guys, how on earth can anyone who claims to support the principle of
> fair and equitable treatment try to turn voting into such a patently
> unfair gambling game instead where the winners may be opposed by a
> majority of voters.

The defects of PR-STV are not as important due to the multi-seat
nature of the method.
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Bob Richard
2009-04-30 14:12:32 UTC
Permalink
> ... where the winners may be opposed by a
> majority of voters.

Kathy, which would you rather have -- a legislature in which each segment of the population is represented in proportion to its size, or a legislature which represents only the winning segment? If you prefer the latter, then of course you will oppose STV (along with all other methods of proportional representation). If you prefer the former, then you have some homework to do. Allocating seats in proportion to votes means, by definition, that some winners will be opposed by a majority of voters.

--Bob Richard

Kathy Dopp wrote:
> STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even worse.
>
> It is unimaginable how anyone could support any method for counting
> votes that is so fundamentally unfair in its treatment of ballots and
> produces such undesirable results.
>
> STV is nonmonotonic, counts the 2nd and 3rd choices only of some
> voters in a timely fashion when it could help those choices win, does
> not even count any of the 2nd or 3rd choices of a large group of
> voters whose first choice loses, excludes some voters from the final
> counting rounds, and is in all ways the worst imaginable voting system
> that I've ever heard anyone propose.
>
> STV is particularly bad because it takes votes away from some voters
> who used to be able to cast votes for one candidate for each at-large
> seat while it counts a variable number of rank choices of other voters
> - some who get to vote for as many candidates as there are seats to
> fill, some who do not.
>
> Guys, how on earth can anyone who claims to support the principle of
> fair and equitable treatment try to turn voting into such a patently
> unfair gambling game instead where the winners may be opposed by a
> majority of voters.
>
> It truly shocks me that anyone could support such an insanely unfair,
> inequitable, and undesirable method for counting votes.
>
> Kathy
>
> On Wed, Apr 29, 2009 at 5:10 PM, Terry Bouricius
> <***@burlingtontelecom.net> wrote:
>
>> Kathy,
>>
>> While there are serious disagreements on this list about the relative
>> merits of various single-winner voting methods, I think you will find that
>> most people who have studied the STV form of proportional representation
>> agree that it is a very fair and very good method, and arguably the best
>> in use anywhere today. I can't imagine any thoughtful reformer wanting to
>> throw a monkey wrench into one of the most promising election reform
>> movements in the world today. Go BC-STV!
>>
>> Terry Bouricius
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Kathy Dopp" <***@gmail.com>
>> To: <election-***@lists.electorama.com>
>> Sent: Wednesday, April 29, 2009 5:57 PM
>> Subject: Re: [EM] British Colombia considering change to STV
>>
>>
>>
>>> 1. British Colombia considering change to STV (Graham Bignell)
>>>
>> It wasn't hard to find a site campaigning against it:
>>
>> http://www.nostv.org/count.html
>>
>> People might also want to warn the BC government about the ugly mess
>> that they would get themselves into by adopting such a fundamentally
>> unfair, inequitable, complex and costly method for counting rank
>> choice votes. The web page to contact the BC government is:
>>
>> http://www.gov.bc.ca/referendum_info/contact/
>> ----
>> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>
>

--
Bob Richard
Marin Ranked Voting
P.O. Box 235
Kentfield, CA 94914-0235
415-256-9393
http://www.marinrankedvoting.org

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Kristofer Munsterhjelm
2009-04-30 15:38:59 UTC
Permalink
Kathy Dopp wrote:
> STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even worse.
>
> It is unimaginable how anyone could support any method for counting
> votes that is so fundamentally unfair in its treatment of ballots and
> produces such undesirable results.

The reason is very simple: the Droop Proportionality Criterion. The DPC
ensures that a group of voters greater than p times (the number of
voters)/(the number of seats + 1) can get p representatives on the council.

As the number of seats increases, the actual result within each group
becomes less important, whereas that the DPC is held becomes more
important. Therefore, STV works well.

Other multiwinner methods fulfill the Droop Proportionality Criterion,
as well, but they're not very well known. Schulze's Schulze STV (reduces
to Schulze, which is Condorcet, when there's only one winner) as well as
QPQ also meet this criterion.

According to my tests, QPQ is better than STV, which in turn is better
than Condorcet modifications to STV. I haven't tested Schulze STV, since
it requires a lot of space for very large assemblies.

The precise scores are (lower is better):

Mean Median Method name
----------------------------------------------
0.1491 0.11647 QPQ(Sainte-Laguë, sequential)
0.15509 0.13423 QPQ(Sainte-Laguë, multiround)
0.20964 0.20585 STV
0.22939 0.21622 STV-ME (Plurality)

My simulation has somewhat of a small state bias, though: it counts
accuracy of small groups more than accuracy of large groups.

A smaller simulation (only assemblies of few seats, so that Schulze
resolves within reasonable time) gives these results:

Mean Median Method name
----------------------------------------------
0.12374 0.01416 QPQ(Sainte-Laguë, multiround)
0.12754 0.02213 QPQ(Sainte-Laguë, sequential)
0.14783 0.0316 Schulze STV
0.15264 0.04725 STV
0.15984 0.05199 STV-ME (Plurality)

> STV is nonmonotonic, counts the 2nd and 3rd choices only of some
> voters in a timely fashion when it could help those choices win, does
> not even count any of the 2nd or 3rd choices of a large group of
> voters whose first choice loses, excludes some voters from the final
> counting rounds, and is in all ways the worst imaginable voting system
> that I've ever heard anyone propose.

I'm not certain if it's possible to make a multiwinner method meet both
the Droop proportionality criterion and monotonicity. The party list
apportionment criterion most like monotonicity is this (quoting from
rangevoting.org):

Population-pair monotonicity: If population of state A increases but
state B decreases, then A should not lose seats while B stays the same
or gains seats. More generally, if A's percentage population change
exceeds B's, then A should not lose seats while B stays the same or
gains seats.

(end quote)

In the context of groups with solid support, this should mean "If more
people stop supporting group B, or switch their support from group A to
group B, then A should not get fewer seats in the assembly". The
rangevoting page then continues,

"Theorem (Balinski & Young): All 'divisor methods' (and, essentially,
only divisor methods) are both House and population-pair monotone; but
they all disobey quota.", and "Meanwhile, Hamilton satisfies quota but
disobeys both monotonicity properties. That leads to the question of
whether an apportionment method exists that satisfies all three
properties. The answer is "no" – the last two properties are
incompatible ..."

Quota is the same as Droop proportionality in this case.

It might not be applicable to ranked methods, but at least there's the
possibility. If the above can be generalized to ranked methods, then the
best we can do is to have it monotonic within groups.
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Jonathan Lundell
2009-04-30 16:44:30 UTC
Permalink
On Apr 30, 2009, at 8:38 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

> Kathy Dopp wrote:
>> STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even worse.
>> It is unimaginable how anyone could support any method for counting
>> votes that is so fundamentally unfair in its treatment of ballots and
>> produces such undesirable results.
>
> The reason is very simple: the Droop Proportionality Criterion. The
> DPC ensures that a group of voters greater than p times (the number
> of voters)/(the number of seats + 1) can get p representatives on
> the council.
>
> As the number of seats increases, the actual result within each
> group becomes less important, whereas that the DPC is held becomes
> more important. Therefore, STV works well.
>
> Other multiwinner methods fulfill the Droop Proportionality
> Criterion, as well, but they're not very well known. Schulze's
> Schulze STV (reduces to Schulze, which is Condorcet, when there's
> only one winner) as well as QPQ also meet this criterion.
>
> According to my tests, QPQ is better than STV, which in turn is
> better than Condorcet modifications to STV. I haven't tested Schulze
> STV, since it requires a lot of space for very large assemblies.
>
> The precise scores are (lower is better):

Remind us, please, what your scores are.

>
> Mean Median Method name
> ----------------------------------------------
> 0.1491 0.11647 QPQ(Sainte-Laguë, sequential)
> 0.15509 0.13423 QPQ(Sainte-Laguë, multiround)
> 0.20964 0.20585 STV
> 0.22939 0.21622 STV-ME (Plurality)
>
> My simulation has somewhat of a small state bias, though: it counts
> accuracy of small groups more than accuracy of large groups.
>
> A smaller simulation (only assemblies of few seats, so that Schulze
> resolves within reasonable time) gives these results:
>
> Mean Median Method name
> ----------------------------------------------
> 0.12374 0.01416 QPQ(Sainte-Laguë, multiround)
> 0.12754 0.02213 QPQ(Sainte-Laguë, sequential)
> 0.14783 0.0316 Schulze STV
> 0.15264 0.04725 STV
> 0.15984 0.05199 STV-ME (Plurality)
>
>> STV is nonmonotonic, counts the 2nd and 3rd choices only of some
>> voters in a timely fashion when it could help those choices win, does
>> not even count any of the 2nd or 3rd choices of a large group of
>> voters whose first choice loses, excludes some voters from the final
>> counting rounds, and is in all ways the worst imaginable voting
>> system
>> that I've ever heard anyone propose.
>
> I'm not certain if it's possible to make a multiwinner method meet
> both the Droop proportionality criterion and monotonicity. The party
> list apportionment criterion most like monotonicity is this (quoting
> from rangevoting.org):
>
> Population-pair monotonicity: If population of state A increases but
> state B decreases, then A should not lose seats while B stays the
> same or gains seats. More generally, if A's percentage population
> change exceeds B's, then A should not lose seats while B stays the
> same or gains seats.
>
> (end quote)
>
> In the context of groups with solid support, this should mean "If
> more people stop supporting group B, or switch their support from
> group A to group B, then A should not get fewer seats in the
> assembly".

There's a typo here, right? Should be "switch their support from group
B from group A".

> The rangevoting page then continues,
>
> "Theorem (Balinski & Young): All 'divisor methods' (and,
> essentially, only divisor methods) are both House and population-
> pair monotone; but they all disobey quota.", and "Meanwhile,
> Hamilton satisfies quota but disobeys both monotonicity properties.
> That leads to the question of whether an apportionment method exists
> that satisfies all three properties. The answer is "no" – the last
> two properties are incompatible ..."
>
> Quota is the same as Droop proportionality in this case.
>
> It might not be applicable to ranked methods, but at least there's
> the possibility. If the above can be generalized to ranked methods,
> then the best we can do is to have it monotonic within groups.
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for
> list info


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Kristofer Munsterhjelm
2009-04-30 17:53:14 UTC
Permalink
Jonathan Lundell wrote:
> On Apr 30, 2009, at 8:38 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>
>> Kathy Dopp wrote:
>>> STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even worse.
>>> It is unimaginable how anyone could support any method for counting
>>> votes that is so fundamentally unfair in its treatment of ballots and
>>> produces such undesirable results.
>>
>> The reason is very simple: the Droop Proportionality Criterion. The
>> DPC ensures that a group of voters greater than p times (the number of
>> voters)/(the number of seats + 1) can get p representatives on the
>> council.
>>
>> As the number of seats increases, the actual result within each group
>> becomes less important, whereas that the DPC is held becomes more
>> important. Therefore, STV works well.
>>
>> Other multiwinner methods fulfill the Droop Proportionality Criterion,
>> as well, but they're not very well known. Schulze's Schulze STV
>> (reduces to Schulze, which is Condorcet, when there's only one winner)
>> as well as QPQ also meet this criterion.
>>
>> According to my tests, QPQ is better than STV, which in turn is better
>> than Condorcet modifications to STV. I haven't tested Schulze STV,
>> since it requires a lot of space for very large assemblies.
>>
>> The precise scores are (lower is better):
>
> Remind us, please, what your scores are.

Each candidate and voter gets assigned a number of binary opinions or
issues ("yes" or "no" for each). Each voter ranks the candidates so that
those that agree with him on more issues get ranked above those that
agree with him on fewer.

An "opinion profile" with regards to a subset of the electorate is
simply a vector of k fractions (for k issues): the first is what
proportion of the set say "yes" for the first issue, the second is the
same for the second, and so on.

Then a method's raw (un-normalized) score is just the RMSE of the
opinion profile of the council elected by that method (provided the
ballots consistent with the ranking mentioned before) and the opinion
profile of the people. The more like the people the council is, the
lesser the RMSE, and the better the score.

In order to remove randomization effects (perhaps some opinion
configurations are harder to fulfill than others), I make a bunch of
random councils. The best one (most proportional) gets assigned score
zero, while the worst one (least proportional) gets assigned score one.
The normalized score is just the unnormalized score normalized between
those two extreme points.

I do this lots of times (1000 times for the Schulze STV one) with
different council, voter, and opinion numbers, and then the mean is
simply the mean of the normalized scores, and the median is similarly
the median. Most truly proportional rules have mean scores below 0.25.
0.3 to 0.4 have semiproportional rules (D'Hondt without Lists), 0.5 and
above is very majoritarian.

I think the small state bias arises from that the various opinions are
completely uncorrelated. I'm not sure, though. For that matter, I don't
know if the small state bias is real, but I'm guessing so from that
IRV-as-multiwinner (n winners, just pick the n last eliminated) and SNTV
gets quite good scores.

>> A smaller simulation (only assemblies of few seats, so that Schulze
>> resolves within reasonable time) gives these results:
>>
>> Mean Median Method name
>> ----------------------------------------------
>> 0.12374 0.01416 QPQ(Sainte-Laguë, multiround)
>> 0.12754 0.02213 QPQ(Sainte-Laguë, sequential)
>> 0.14783 0.0316 Schulze STV
>> 0.15264 0.04725 STV
>> 0.15984 0.05199 STV-ME (Plurality)

Note that these scores are lower. I think this is because I only checked
small councils (since otherwise, Schulze STV would take forever, being
exponential in the number of seats).

>> In the context of groups with solid support, this should mean "If more
>> people stop supporting group B, or switch their support from group A
>> to group B, then A should not get fewer seats in the assembly".
>
> There's a typo here, right? Should be "switch their support from group B
> from group A".

Yes. More accurately:

"If A gains more supporters (as a percentage of the population) than
does B, then A should not lose seats while B gains them or stays the
same". In the standard monotonicity case, B loses x while A gains that x.
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
2009-04-30 17:18:11 UTC
Permalink
At 10:18 PM 4/29/2009, Kathy Dopp wrote:
>STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even worse. It is
>unimaginable how anyone could support any method for counting votes
>that is so fundamentally unfair in its treatment of ballots and
>produces such undesirable results.

I don't think Ms. Dopp, who has put quite a bit of effort into
exposing the problems with IRV, has really studied the situation with
STV. Obviously, the problems of IRV are the same as single-winner
STV, they are the same method.

However, multiwinner STV, particularly forms that use fractional
votes to deal with reassignments, is quite good *with early choices,*
and only breaks down when there are too many candidates, such that
eliminations start before there is fair assessment.

I'm going to describe a variation of STV that isn't necessarily
what's being used, and, in fact, I don't think it's being used
anywhere in details. But the Droop quota variation may be in use, more or less.

That is, STV chooses winners according to a quota, and were it the
Hare quota, and if it were required that a candidate receive that
quota to be elected, it's clear that every STV winner is reasonably
fair, if certain conditions obtain. The conditions: lower rank votes
aren't coerced (as they are in Australia), and voters never choose a
lower ranked candidate when they won't be reasonably satisfied with
that candidate as a winner. Under these conditions, every winner is
reasonable as a representative. Every winner chosen before
eliminations begin is also *ideal* as a winner.

In the first round of counting, every candidate elected is the first
choice of a quota of voters. Only those candidates are eliminated
from the subsequent rounds (before eliminations begin) who are
already elected. Let's assume that a candidate got double the quota.
The Hare quota is 1/N * (total valid votes) with any choice shown. If
there are ten seats in an assembly to be elected, and a candidate
gets, as a first choice, one-tenth of the vote, that candidate is
obviously a good representative for one-tenth of the electorate.

But what if the candidate gets two-tenths of the vote? If the ballots
electing that candidate are eliminated, the *faction* "led" by this
candidate is under-represented. So the idea is to eliminate half the
votes and to then reassign the rest to lower ranked choices. How is
this done? Some places use methods like random elimination, and I
don't know the details. But the fairest method to me seems to be to
revalue the votes, all of them, and look at second-rank votes. In
this case, each ballot would then be worth one-half of a vote. So,
second round, if all these voters voted the same second rank, they
would then elect their second choice.

This then would proceed iteratively until all ballots have been
assigned to a winner, or eliminations would need to start. So far,
every choice has been clearly a good representative.

Problems begin with eliminations, where votes cast are set aside and
replaced with lower rank votes, not having been used to create a
winner. Further, the Hare quota isn't used, rather the Droop quota is
used. It's assumed that some ballots will not contain a countable
vote, and that some ballots will not end up choosing a
representative. Maybe the first vote is for some unpopular candidate,
and there were no second choice votes. That one ballot would prevent
the election of a full assembly, because a Hare quota couldn't be
found for the last seat. So the Droop quota is used, the fraction,
instead of being 1/N, is 1/(N-1). This, then, allows a supposedly
realistic compromise to be found. In addition, (I'm not sure about
actual practice), the quota may decline, being revised according to
the number of remaining seats and the number of "unexhausted" ballots.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) realized the problem and invented
what we now call Asset Voting to deal with it. Asset Voting doesn't
allow ballots to be exhausted, publishing a pamphlet in 1884. It's
not at all clear that Dodgson realized all the implications, he was
just thinking about politics being more or less the same as it was,
and that voters would vote in more or less the same way. He was
concerned that many or most voters don't really know much more about
the various candidates except to know who their favorite was.

So his idea was to assign an otherwise exhausted ballot to the
favorite, and this vote becomes, as it were, the "property" of the
favorite, to be reassigned at the discretion of that candidate. With
this fix, which converts a raw election method into an input stage
for a deliberative process, and with a Hare quota (to a slightly less
extent with the Droop Quota), totally fair method of choosing
winners, not subject to most of the normal election pathologies. But,
to my knowledge, it's never been tried.

The big secret: if this were done, all votes would count. No votes
would be wasted. Voters would still be able to use a preference list,
if they prefer to control vote transfers before their ballot is
eliminated from direct use. Many people, reading about this for the
first time, seem to think that this gives too much power to
politicians, but they, I'd say, haven't thought it all the way
through. We are electing representatives who will exercise power;
this allows someone trusted with a vote to have a say in who gets to
actually exercise the power, counting and using votes that would
otherwise be *eliminated.* Don't trust a candidate to recast the vote
in a good way? Why, then, would you trust that candidate to directly
exercise the power? It makes no sense to me, having thought about
this for many years.

Now, actual STV? It's probably reasonably fair up until the choice of
the last seat, where the IRV problems kick in fully. Before that,
it's quite possible that eliminations result in less than optimal
choices, but still reasonable ones, unless full ranking is coerced.

My biggest problem with premature election reform is that instead of,
say, forming a commission to study voting systems, and making sure
that this commission hears and considers evidence about all possible
systems, and then presents a full report, in detail, of all the
implications, there usually isn't any kind of comparative inquiry at
all, there is only the raw choice of the present method or a single
proposed reform; and even when there is a study group, as in
Colorado, the decisions are made without adequate back-and-forth with
experts, and, further, recommendations may be made based on political
expediency (which method might actually be accepted, due to all the
complex considerations?) instead of on an accurate comparison of
methods (which would then leave the matter of practical expedience to
the experts on that, the elected politicians who actually make the
final decision).

STV should be on the table, but there are other proportional
representation systems, including variations of STV in use,
reweighted range voting, and, indeed, Asset Voting. Systems have been
proposed in the past which also use a quota to elect, but which don't
reassign votes; instead, they reassign voting power in the assembly;
this was proposed for, I think, one or two cities in the U.S. in the
first part of the last century. This is fairer, in fact, than STV,
and far less complicated, but it bucks the idea that we should elect
peer assemblies, where every member has the same voting power as
every other one. Asset Voting solves this problem by creating a peer
assembly, as we are accustomed to seeing, but, still, with every
ballot (within certain limitations) having served to elect a seat.

It's even possible for it to be known what each individual ballot
did, if when votes are reassigned, it's done by precinct; at least
every voter who voted for only one would know, quite well, what their
ballot did. (Because the precinct counts wouldn't be exact, but
merely close, it would be more accurate to say, if a precinct's votes
were one-tenth of the quota for a candidate, that 90% of the voter's
vote elected Candidate X. The voter knows what precinct he or she
voted in. However, the candidate doesn't know exactly which voters
elected him or her.)

What's truly interesting to me about Asset Voting is that it can
shade, one small step at a time, into a hybrid direct/representative
democracy that retains the best features of both. Deliberative
assembly with identified representatives with special rights: the
right to introduce motions and to address, by right, the assembly --
always the bugaboo of direct democracy because scale makes large
assemblies bog down; it's not *voting* that's the problem, it's
deliberation. Extended penumbra around the assembly consisting of
those who received votes, they are known and identified, but who
reassigned those votes to create winners. These can be considered
"electors," and could have the right to vote directly. Because they
are known, and the votes they recast are known, it becomes possible
for their votes, should they choose to vote, to be counted, and the
votes of those they elected then would be adjusted down accordingly,
fractionally.

My opinion is that these votes would only rarely affect an outcome.
However, that they are there in theory would act as a restraint on
the assembly, and, in addition, rapid and efficient recall could
become possible, but even more than this, the penumbra acts as an
advisory body for the assembly, directly representing, by free
choice, the electorate, no compromises.

You want to become part of this advisory body? You can. Just declare
a candidacy and vote for yourself. (Now, there might be some
restrictions, and you might have to declare a second choice, for
various reasons that I won't go into, there might be some minimum
threshold below which votes would not be reported, it has to do with
voting security and the possibility of small-scale coercion. I
personally think that the coercion problem is vastly overblown under
most conditions; it's only a problem on a large scale, which doesn't
apply to the problem that a candidate, say a wife, who demands that
her husband vote for her, and she doesn't get any votes except her
own.... So it's possible that singletons would not be recognized, or
there are other solutions.... I can think of some, but ... way ahead
of necessity!)

The assembly size can be chosen to be the most efficient at providing
the combination of best process (too many cooks spoil the soup) and
full representation. The direct voting option means that making a
compromise on assigning a vote to create a seat is less important,
for any elector can still vote directly, if matters that much.

The basic problem with all election methods that resolve with a
single ballot is that *it's impossible for a single ballot to make
sound choices under all circumstances.* Further, fixed terms create a
gap between a representative assembly and the people it represents.
Asset voting, where every voter can vote for the representative most
trusted, without compromise, and where all the electors thereby
created, should minimize or even eliminate the gap. Again, because
votes can be amalgamated on a very small scale with Asset voting, I'd
expect campaigning for office, as such, to practically disappear.
Rather, someone just starts by registering as a candidate, and could
take as many election cycles as necessary to build voting power, with
no waste. When a candidate has reached the point where their voting
power is a significant fraction of that necessary to hold a seat,
they become, in effect, a lobbying representative to the holder of
the seat, with real and tangible voting power behind it. They not
only can deliver votes through influence, they directly deliver
votes, it's all out in the open.

The real importance, though, isn't in voting and votes, it is in
creating a broad network that *deliberates* and *advises*.



----
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Terry Bouricius
2009-04-30 19:48:14 UTC
Permalink
While Abd and I regularly bump heads on certain issues, I am quite
sympathetic to his core concept of Asset voting (essentially a super-proxy
system). But for near term adoption for North American governmental
legislative elections, STV is the best option out there.

And contrary to Abd's concern about "premature election reform" the BC-STV
plan was the result of one of the best deliberative processes I have ever
seen (the BC Citizens Assembly). By the way, Abd has an error or typo
where he miss-states the Droop quota as 1/(N-1), but I assume nearly
everybody on this list who read his message already noticed that.

Terry Bouricius

----- Original Message -----
From: "Abd ul-Rahman Lomax" <***@lomaxdesign.com>
To: <***@gmail.com>; "Terry Bouricius"
<***@burlingtontelecom.net>
Cc: <election-***@lists.electorama.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2009 1:18 PM
Subject: Re: [EM] British Colombia considering change to STV


At 10:18 PM 4/29/2009, Kathy Dopp wrote:
>STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even worse. It is
>unimaginable how anyone could support any method for counting votes
>that is so fundamentally unfair in its treatment of ballots and
>produces such undesirable results.

I don't think Ms. Dopp, who has put quite a bit of effort into
exposing the problems with IRV, has really studied the situation with
STV. Obviously, the problems of IRV are the same as single-winner
STV, they are the same method.

However, multiwinner STV, particularly forms that use fractional
votes to deal with reassignments, is quite good *with early choices,*
and only breaks down when there are too many candidates, such that
eliminations start before there is fair assessment.

I'm going to describe a variation of STV that isn't necessarily
what's being used, and, in fact, I don't think it's being used
anywhere in details. But the Droop quota variation may be in use, more or
less.

That is, STV chooses winners according to a quota, and were it the
Hare quota, and if it were required that a candidate receive that
quota to be elected, it's clear that every STV winner is reasonably
fair, if certain conditions obtain. The conditions: lower rank votes
aren't coerced (as they are in Australia), and voters never choose a
lower ranked candidate when they won't be reasonably satisfied with
that candidate as a winner. Under these conditions, every winner is
reasonable as a representative. Every winner chosen before
eliminations begin is also *ideal* as a winner.

In the first round of counting, every candidate elected is the first
choice of a quota of voters. Only those candidates are eliminated
from the subsequent rounds (before eliminations begin) who are
already elected. Let's assume that a candidate got double the quota.
The Hare quota is 1/N * (total valid votes) with any choice shown. If
there are ten seats in an assembly to be elected, and a candidate
gets, as a first choice, one-tenth of the vote, that candidate is
obviously a good representative for one-tenth of the electorate.

But what if the candidate gets two-tenths of the vote? If the ballots
electing that candidate are eliminated, the *faction* "led" by this
candidate is under-represented. So the idea is to eliminate half the
votes and to then reassign the rest to lower ranked choices. How is
this done? Some places use methods like random elimination, and I
don't know the details. But the fairest method to me seems to be to
revalue the votes, all of them, and look at second-rank votes. In
this case, each ballot would then be worth one-half of a vote. So,
second round, if all these voters voted the same second rank, they
would then elect their second choice.

This then would proceed iteratively until all ballots have been
assigned to a winner, or eliminations would need to start. So far,
every choice has been clearly a good representative.

Problems begin with eliminations, where votes cast are set aside and
replaced with lower rank votes, not having been used to create a
winner. Further, the Hare quota isn't used, rather the Droop quota is
used. It's assumed that some ballots will not contain a countable
vote, and that some ballots will not end up choosing a
representative. Maybe the first vote is for some unpopular candidate,
and there were no second choice votes. That one ballot would prevent
the election of a full assembly, because a Hare quota couldn't be
found for the last seat. So the Droop quota is used, the fraction,
instead of being 1/N, is 1/(N-1). This, then, allows a supposedly
realistic compromise to be found. In addition, (I'm not sure about
actual practice), the quota may decline, being revised according to
the number of remaining seats and the number of "unexhausted" ballots.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) realized the problem and invented
what we now call Asset Voting to deal with it. Asset Voting doesn't
allow ballots to be exhausted, publishing a pamphlet in 1884. It's
not at all clear that Dodgson realized all the implications, he was
just thinking about politics being more or less the same as it was,
and that voters would vote in more or less the same way. He was
concerned that many or most voters don't really know much more about
the various candidates except to know who their favorite was.

So his idea was to assign an otherwise exhausted ballot to the
favorite, and this vote becomes, as it were, the "property" of the
favorite, to be reassigned at the discretion of that candidate. With
this fix, which converts a raw election method into an input stage
for a deliberative process, and with a Hare quota (to a slightly less
extent with the Droop Quota), totally fair method of choosing
winners, not subject to most of the normal election pathologies. But,
to my knowledge, it's never been tried.

The big secret: if this were done, all votes would count. No votes
would be wasted. Voters would still be able to use a preference list,
if they prefer to control vote transfers before their ballot is
eliminated from direct use. Many people, reading about this for the
first time, seem to think that this gives too much power to
politicians, but they, I'd say, haven't thought it all the way
through. We are electing representatives who will exercise power;
this allows someone trusted with a vote to have a say in who gets to
actually exercise the power, counting and using votes that would
otherwise be *eliminated.* Don't trust a candidate to recast the vote
in a good way? Why, then, would you trust that candidate to directly
exercise the power? It makes no sense to me, having thought about
this for many years.

Now, actual STV? It's probably reasonably fair up until the choice of
the last seat, where the IRV problems kick in fully. Before that,
it's quite possible that eliminations result in less than optimal
choices, but still reasonable ones, unless full ranking is coerced.

My biggest problem with premature election reform is that instead of,
say, forming a commission to study voting systems, and making sure
that this commission hears and considers evidence about all possible
systems, and then presents a full report, in detail, of all the
implications, there usually isn't any kind of comparative inquiry at
all, there is only the raw choice of the present method or a single
proposed reform; and even when there is a study group, as in
Colorado, the decisions are made without adequate back-and-forth with
experts, and, further, recommendations may be made based on political
expediency (which method might actually be accepted, due to all the
complex considerations?) instead of on an accurate comparison of
methods (which would then leave the matter of practical expedience to
the experts on that, the elected politicians who actually make the
final decision).

STV should be on the table, but there are other proportional
representation systems, including variations of STV in use,
reweighted range voting, and, indeed, Asset Voting. Systems have been
proposed in the past which also use a quota to elect, but which don't
reassign votes; instead, they reassign voting power in the assembly;
this was proposed for, I think, one or two cities in the U.S. in the
first part of the last century. This is fairer, in fact, than STV,
and far less complicated, but it bucks the idea that we should elect
peer assemblies, where every member has the same voting power as
every other one. Asset Voting solves this problem by creating a peer
assembly, as we are accustomed to seeing, but, still, with every
ballot (within certain limitations) having served to elect a seat.

It's even possible for it to be known what each individual ballot
did, if when votes are reassigned, it's done by precinct; at least
every voter who voted for only one would know, quite well, what their
ballot did. (Because the precinct counts wouldn't be exact, but
merely close, it would be more accurate to say, if a precinct's votes
were one-tenth of the quota for a candidate, that 90% of the voter's
vote elected Candidate X. The voter knows what precinct he or she
voted in. However, the candidate doesn't know exactly which voters
elected him or her.)

What's truly interesting to me about Asset Voting is that it can
shade, one small step at a time, into a hybrid direct/representative
democracy that retains the best features of both. Deliberative
assembly with identified representatives with special rights: the
right to introduce motions and to address, by right, the assembly --
always the bugaboo of direct democracy because scale makes large
assemblies bog down; it's not *voting* that's the problem, it's
deliberation. Extended penumbra around the assembly consisting of
those who received votes, they are known and identified, but who
reassigned those votes to create winners. These can be considered
"electors," and could have the right to vote directly. Because they
are known, and the votes they recast are known, it becomes possible
for their votes, should they choose to vote, to be counted, and the
votes of those they elected then would be adjusted down accordingly,
fractionally.

My opinion is that these votes would only rarely affect an outcome.
However, that they are there in theory would act as a restraint on
the assembly, and, in addition, rapid and efficient recall could
become possible, but even more than this, the penumbra acts as an
advisory body for the assembly, directly representing, by free
choice, the electorate, no compromises.

You want to become part of this advisory body? You can. Just declare
a candidacy and vote for yourself. (Now, there might be some
restrictions, and you might have to declare a second choice, for
various reasons that I won't go into, there might be some minimum
threshold below which votes would not be reported, it has to do with
voting security and the possibility of small-scale coercion. I
personally think that the coercion problem is vastly overblown under
most conditions; it's only a problem on a large scale, which doesn't
apply to the problem that a candidate, say a wife, who demands that
her husband vote for her, and she doesn't get any votes except her
own.... So it's possible that singletons would not be recognized, or
there are other solutions.... I can think of some, but ... way ahead
of necessity!)

The assembly size can be chosen to be the most efficient at providing
the combination of best process (too many cooks spoil the soup) and
full representation. The direct voting option means that making a
compromise on assigning a vote to create a seat is less important,
for any elector can still vote directly, if matters that much.

The basic problem with all election methods that resolve with a
single ballot is that *it's impossible for a single ballot to make
sound choices under all circumstances.* Further, fixed terms create a
gap between a representative assembly and the people it represents.
Asset voting, where every voter can vote for the representative most
trusted, without compromise, and where all the electors thereby
created, should minimize or even eliminate the gap. Again, because
votes can be amalgamated on a very small scale with Asset voting, I'd
expect campaigning for office, as such, to practically disappear.
Rather, someone just starts by registering as a candidate, and could
take as many election cycles as necessary to build voting power, with
no waste. When a candidate has reached the point where their voting
power is a significant fraction of that necessary to hold a seat,
they become, in effect, a lobbying representative to the holder of
the seat, with real and tangible voting power behind it. They not
only can deliver votes through influence, they directly deliver
votes, it's all out in the open.

The real importance, though, isn't in voting and votes, it is in
creating a broad network that *deliberates* and *advises*.




----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
2009-05-01 00:45:26 UTC
Permalink
At 03:48 PM 4/30/2009, Terry Bouricius wrote:
>By the way, Abd has an error or typo
>where he miss-states the Droop quota as 1/(N-1), but I assume nearly
>everybody on this list who read his message already noticed that.

Of course Terry is correct, 1/(N+1). Look, he knows I'm quite less
than thrilled to see IRV being given too much of a pass in the U.S. A
few experiments, fine, but they aren't being looked at as
experiments! At least not enough!

With STV, for multiwinner, especially three or more seats being
elected per district, the more the better, it's a vast improvement.
(I've come to the conclusion that IRV actually isn't an improvement
in many places, it's a step backward from runoff voting, and
especially when write-ins are allowed in the runoff election, as with
the California default.

And if the runoff were, say, Approval or Bucklin, runoff voting would
be fabulous. Use Bucklin ballot with runoff voting, i.e., majority
required, at least in the primary, quite a good system and much
better than IRV. If everyone bullet votes, reduces to plurality....
then, in the runoff, with only two candidates on the ballot, voters
will know that, if they support a candidate who didn't make it on the
runoff ballot, they are playing a dangerous game if they don't add a
second choice vote! (Actually, IRV wouldn't be bad for the runoff,
either, I think offhand).

My comment about process wasn't about the BC process, but about what
has happened in the U.S. It looks like it may be changing.

I would support STV for multiwinner election, probably even if it's
just two seats. Asset is a tweak to it that could be added later.






----
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Juho Laatu
2009-04-30 15:18:25 UTC
Permalink
--- On Thu, 30/4/09, Raph Frank <***@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 3:18 AM,
> Kathy Dopp <***@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even
> worse.
>
> I think that it has all the same flaws, but that the damage
> they do is
> mitigated by the fact that it is a multi-seat method. 

Yes, some of the main problems of
IRV get smaller when the number of
seats increases.

> OTOH, it has
> large benefits over other PR methods.

Yes. But not necessarily superior in
all aspects.

The first problem in my mind is that
STV sets some practical limits to the
number of candidates. This means that
the voters will have less to say and
the parties will have more to say on
which candidates will be elected (bad
or good).

This limitation also favours districts
with few seats only, which then favours
large parties. In the BC proposal some
districts had only 2 seats. That may
eliminate the smallest groupings/parties
from those districts (= groups that may
get representatives in the largest
districts).

One could also develop rules that would
make the system more proportional at the
country level, balancing the bias towards
large parties that the small districts
lead to (=> allow also small groupings to
get their proportional share of the seats).
Full proportionality could mean in an n seat
representative body to guarantee one seat to
all groups that have 1/n (or 1/(n+1)) of the
votes (at national level).
(I don't however recommend any radical tricks
to BC at the moment since the change is already
significant from the current state and since
complexity of the new system already seems
to be one argument against it.)

Large number of candidates is problematic
in STV since ballots get larger and
ranking sufficient number of candidates
gets tedious. I understood that in BC the
proposal is to list all the candidates of
each party together (in the candidate lists).
That at least makes it easy to see which
candidates are "from the right parties".

There may be also different opinions on
how person centric vs. how ideology centric
the election in question should be. STV
represents the person centric viewpoint but
allows the voters to apply strict party
preference order as well. Methods that force
the candidates to clearly identify the
ideological grouping and subgroup that they
belong to may be more binding with respect
to how the candidate will behave after being
elected and during the campaign. These
differences are subtle, but they exist and
may have impact on how well the voters are
able to use their voting power efficiently.

>
> It allows PR while at the same time keeping the power to
> decide which
> candidates are elected in the hands of the voters, rather
> than in the
> hands of the party leadership.

Yes. Or at least voters can choose which
ones of those candidates that the party
did nominate will win..

>
> It also doesn't discriminate against independents. 

This depends also a lot on the nomination
rules (that need not be related to STV).

It may be easy or difficult for the
independents to become candidates. Since
STV elections typically don't have very
many candidates there may be a need to
not allow independents on the lists very
easily.

But once on the lists then independents
are quite equal with the candidates of the
well established parties.

> This gives party
> members more freedom to vote against the party, as they can
> still be
> re-elected if they get kicked out of the party.

Assuming that they will be on the
candidate list.

>
> Compare that to New Zealand, where if a person leaves their
> party,
> they have to resign from parliament  (Though most PR
> list countries
> aren't quite that bad).  Candidates represent the
> party, not the
> public.
>
> What is yoru view on something like CPO-STV?  This
> method collapses to
> a condorcet method in the single winner case.  Ofc, it
> is super
> complex to count.

Yes, it fixes some of the anomalies of
STV and could be claimed to yield the
ideal result. Unfortunately its complexity
makes it unsuitable for many environments
(and the small problems of STV may often
weigh much less).

(To me also open list (or tree) based
methods seem to offer interesting paths
forward. Here word "forward" should be read
as "if the target is to move towards a
proportional multi-party system".)

(Maybe I should still note that also single-
seat and few-seat districts can be forced to
be fully proportional if one strongly wants
to keep both features (and accept some other
anomalies).)

>
<clip>

Juho







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Raph Frank
2009-04-30 17:53:05 UTC
Permalink
On Thu, Apr 30, 2009 at 4:18 PM, Juho Laatu <***@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Yes. But not necessarily superior in
> all aspects.
>
> The first problem in my mind is that
> STV sets some practical limits to the
> number of candidates.

This is an issue for PR-STV. In fact, it is (IMO) the only major issue.

In Ireland, the constitution requires at least 3 per constituency and
over time the average number of seats per constituency is being
reduced. It is currently illegal (by statutory law) for
constituencies to have more than 5 seats. For the upcoming EU
elections, Ireland's 12 seats are being returned from all 3 seat
constituencies.

> That may
> eliminate the smallest groupings/parties
> from those districts (= groups that may
> get representatives in the largest
> districts).

Right, small constituency size means that small parties would find it
harder to be elected. The fewer seats, the more concentrated the
support that is required to be elected.

> One could also develop rules that would
> make the system more proportional at the
> country level

I think care needs to be taken here, as votes for a candidate are not
necessarily the same as votes for a party.
(The tree system can resolve this).

> There may be also different opinions on
> how person centric vs. how ideology centric
> the election in question should be. STV
> represents the person centric viewpoint but
> allows the voters to apply strict party
> preference order as well.

STV is actually neutral on this issue. The voter can vote by party if
they wish, or can vote by personality if they wish.

Party list systems aren't neutral at all.

> Methods that force
> the candidates to clearly identify the
> ideological grouping and subgroup that they
> belong to may be more binding with respect
> to how the candidate will behave after being
> elected and during the campaign.

True, PR-STV doesn't require that candidates are specific about where
they lie on the issues.

> Yes. Or at least voters can choose which
> ones of those candidates that the party
> did nominate will win..

They can also vote for independents. This is absolutely critical. It
allows candidates to leave the party and still be reelected.

> It may be easy or difficult for the
> independents to become candidates. Since
> STV elections typically don't have very
> many candidates there may be a need to
> not allow independents on the lists very
> easily.

I assume you mean that it would be very easy for independents to
clutter up the ballot, since there are so many candidates?

i.e. you meant "... Since STV elections typically can have many
candidates ... "?

... or did you mean that party list systems don't have many choices?

> But once on the lists then independents
> are quite equal with the candidates of the
> well established parties.

Right, but there are surplus transfer issues.

I would probably allow ranking of parties, so that if a candidate gets
a quota (or fails to be elected), votes that he held can be
reassigned.

> Assuming that they will be on the
> candidate list.

Well, yeah, they have to get on the ballot. However, I can't imagine
a ballot access rule which blocks sitting legislators from being
placed on the ballot.

> (To me also open list (or tree) based
> methods seem to offer interesting paths
> forward. Here word "forward" should be read
> as "if the target is to move towards a
> proportional multi-party system".)

I think the tree method is superior to even open party lists systems.

However, PR-STV gives even more freedom to the voters, they aren't
locked into voting according to the tree inheritance system.

OTOH, it gives up national level proportionality. A candidate based
list system (each candidate submits a ranking) also allows national
level proportionality.

I think a mix of 5+ seater PR-STV seats and a quality national level
system (say candidate list or tree list) might be a good compromise.

> (Maybe I should still note that also single-
> seat and few-seat districts can be forced to
> be fully proportional if one strongly wants
> to keep both features (and accept some other
> anomalies).)

Right, but they all fundamentally assume that a vote for a candidate
is also a vote for the party.
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Juho Laatu
2009-05-02 22:33:05 UTC
Permalink
--- On Thu, 30/4/09, Raph Frank <***@gmail.com> wrote:

> In Ireland, the constitution requires at least 3 per
> constituency and
> over time the average number of seats per constituency is
> being
> reduced. It is currently illegal (by statutory law)
> for
> constituencies to have more than 5 seats. For the
> upcoming EU
> elections, Ireland's 12 seats are being returned from all 3
> seat
> constituencies.

It practice that seems to set the limits
to max 4 and min 2 parties/groupings per
constituency represented in the Dail.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_30th_D%C3%A1il>

> > One could also develop rules that would
> > make the system more proportional at the
> > country level
>
> I think care needs to be taken here, as votes for a
> candidate are not
> necessarily the same as votes for a party.
> (The tree system can resolve this).

Yes, some tricks needed here.

> > There may be also different opinions on
> > how person centric vs. how ideology centric
> > the election in question should be. STV
> > represents the person centric viewpoint but
> > allows the voters to apply strict party
> > preference order as well.
>
> STV is actually neutral on this issue. The voter can
> vote by party if
> they wish, or can vote by personality if they wish.

Yes, in the sense that the only problem is
complexity in the case that there are many
candidates.

> Party list systems aren't neutral at all.

Yes. Or one could say that they may
allow votes to individuals but they do
not allow voters to define any arbitrary
inheritance order of the vote (unlike in
STV).

> > It may be easy or difficult for the
> > independents to become candidates. Since
> > STV elections typically don't have very
> > many candidates there may be a need to
> > not allow independents on the lists very
> > easily.
>
> I assume you mean that it would be very easy for
> independents to
> clutter up the ballot, since there are so many candidates?

Yes. One could try to limit the number of
candidates to keep voting easy from the
voter point of view and to keep the size
of the ballots sheets manageable. And of
course to keep the "irrelevant" candidates
out (= individuals that want to be on the
list but that don't have any realistic
chances of being elected now or in the next
elections) (this last reason applies to all
methods, not only STV).

The rules could include allowing current
representatives to participate (as you
mentioned), allowing parties to nominate
candidates based on their earlier success
in the elections and allowing any party or
individual in if they collect some
sufficient number of supporter names.
Also money has been used somewhere.

(One additional point is that in elections
where the votes to an individual will be
always (or by default) votes to the party
the parties may benefit of naming numerous
candidates while in STV nomination of
numerous candidates might mean that the
party will have weaker chances of getting
maximum number of their candidates elected.)

> i.e. you meant "... Since STV elections typically can have
> many
> candidates ... "?
>
> ... or did you mean that party list systems don't have many
> choices?

I don't know what is a typical number of
candidates in one constituency in the
Irish Dail elections. In Finnish open
list elections I'm used to have some 150
candidates.

(In the Finnish model one benefit is that
voters have great freedom of picking any
candidate that they like (not the one that
the party recommends). One problem is that
the system is not proportional within
parties since within each party and
district the system elects simply those
candidates with most votes.)

> > But once on the lists then independents
> > are quite equal with the candidates of the
> > well established parties.
>
> Right, but there are surplus transfer issues.

Are there some specific independent candidate
related surplus transfer issues (more than that
they don't have any fellow party members to
transfer votes to)?

> I would probably allow ranking of parties, so that if a
> candidate gets
> a quota (or fails to be elected), votes that he held
> can be
> reassigned.

Could you tell a bit more about the
intended technique?

> > (To me also open list (or tree) based
> > methods seem to offer interesting paths
> > forward. Here word "forward" should be read
> > as "if the target is to move towards a
> > proportional multi-party system".)
>
> I think the tree method is superior to even open party
> lists systems.

Yes, I agree. In addition to providing
more exact proportionality I find also
the property that the voters can steer
the internal evolution of the party
interesting.

(Ability to influence => more interest
=> more direct citizen driven democracy.
This line of development may be beneficial
in typical stable democracies that may
already have some flavour of stagnation
and excessive control of the party inner
circles and external interest groups in
them.)

> However, PR-STV gives even more freedom to the voters, they
> aren't
> locked into voting according to the tree inheritance
> system.

Yes.

It is also possible to develop systems
that mix both styles. That could mean
e.g. default inheritance order (tree or
even candidate specific) for short
(exhausted) votes but allowing voters to
define their own order / deviate from
the default order if they so wish.

> OTOH, it gives up national level proportionality. A
> candidate based
> list system (each candidate submits a ranking) also allows
> national
> level proportionality.
>
> I think a mix of 5+ seater PR-STV seats and a quality
> national level
> system (say candidate list or tree list) might be a good
> compromise.

How exactly did you assume the STV and
tree/list inheritance (and national level
proportionality?) to be combined here?

There are multiple options. There could be
separate ballot entries for personal and
party votes, or maybe parties/branches
could be named as candidates in the ballot,
or maybe each candidate would just have a
link to some party/branch. The calculation
process could also be implemented in many
ways.

Juho





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James Gilmour
2009-05-02 23:03:44 UTC
Permalink
Juho Laatu > Sent: Saturday, May 02, 2009 11:33 PM

> > In Ireland, the constitution requires at least 3 per constituency and
> > over time the average number of seats per constituency is being
> > reduced. It is currently illegal (by statutory law) for
> > constituencies to have more than 5 seats. For the upcoming EU
> > elections, Ireland's 12 seats are being returned from all 3
> > seat constituencies.
>
> It practice that seems to set the limits
> to max 4 and min 2 parties/groupings per
> constituency represented in the Dáil.
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_30th_D%C3%A1il>

When the Dáil was created, Ireland elected 120 members from 26 constituencies (electoral districts) returning from 4 to 8 (YES, 8)
members (average district magnitude was 4.62). Ireland's politicians divided the larger constituencies (especially in 1973)
because they thought it would favour their re-election, so that the Dáil now has 166 members elected form 42 constituencies (average
DM = 3.95).


> > > One could also develop rules that would
> > > make the system more proportional at the
> > > country level
> >
> > I think care needs to be taken here, as votes for a
> > candidate are not necessarily the same as votes for a party.
> > (The tree system can resolve this).

This issue has been raised again in Malta, and there was an interesting paper on possible solutions in the January 2009 issue of
Voting matters:
http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE26/I26P1.pdf


> Yes. One could try to limit the number of
> candidates to keep voting easy from the
> voter point of view and to keep the size
> of the ballots sheets manageable.

But be aware that in Malta, where they fill casual vacancies by counting the original ballots again, it is not uncommon for the two
main parties to nominate up to 12 candidates for some of the 5-member electoral districts. Another feature of election law in Malta
that results in longer lists of candidates is that they allow one person to be nominated in several electoral districts. If elected
in more than one district, that candidate can decide which district to represent, when there would be an instant by-election to fill
the casual vacancy so caused (when the ballots would be counted again).


> > I think a mix of 5+ seater PR-STV seats and a quality national level
> > system (say candidate list or tree list) might be a good compromise.

See also the article in Voting matters, linked above.

James

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Anthony O'Neal
2009-05-02 23:13:17 UTC
Permalink
It is a rather huge problem. It effects the proportionately
surprisingly little though - all the major parties still win a roughly
fair number of seats. Districting tends to produce much more
proportional results than the seat size would suggest, as random
political differences in geography give some smaller parties too much
support in some areas to make up for their unfair lack of support in
other other areas. This is clear just looking at single-member
districts. Event though the threshold is technically 50%, it's rather
obviously much fairer than a party list system with a 50% threshold. As
the number of seats gets larger, this effects seems to be exponential.

However, IMHO, the minimum seats per district should be around five, or
at least the average amount of seats should be five or seven. The fact
that Irelands average number of seats has dwindled so dramatically over
the years makes it clear that the big parties just can't be trusted when
it comes to proportionality.

The minimum number of seats in BC-STV is two, the maximum seven.
There's really nothing from keeping them from making nearly every
district a two or three seater. Clearly, as the situation in Ireland
shows, this is much better than single-member districts, but the article
should have been amended to state that the average number of seats per a
district should be around five, which would leave room for two-seaters
in rural districts but keep the big parties from colluding and
implementing a seat number to their favor.

Juho Laatu wrote:
> --- On Thu, 30/4/09, Raph Frank <***@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> In Ireland, the constitution requires at least 3 per
>> constituency and
>> over time the average number of seats per constituency is
>> being
>> reduced. It is currently illegal (by statutory law)
>> for
>> constituencies to have more than 5 seats. For the
>> upcoming EU
>> elections, Ireland's 12 seats are being returned from all 3
>> seat
>> constituencies.
>>
>
> It practice that seems to set the limits
> to max 4 and min 2 parties/groupings per
> constituency represented in the Dail.
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_30th_D%C3%A1il>
>
>
>>> One could also develop rules that would
>>> make the system more proportional at the
>>> country level
>>>
>> I think care needs to be taken here, as votes for a
>> candidate are not
>> necessarily the same as votes for a party.
>> (The tree system can resolve this).
>>
>
> Yes, some tricks needed here.
>
>
>>> There may be also different opinions on
>>> how person centric vs. how ideology centric
>>> the election in question should be. STV
>>> represents the person centric viewpoint but
>>> allows the voters to apply strict party
>>> preference order as well.
>>>
>> STV is actually neutral on this issue. The voter can
>> vote by party if
>> they wish, or can vote by personality if they wish.
>>
>
> Yes, in the sense that the only problem is
> complexity in the case that there are many
> candidates.
>
>
>> Party list systems aren't neutral at all.
>>
>
> Yes. Or one could say that they may
> allow votes to individuals but they do
> not allow voters to define any arbitrary
> inheritance order of the vote (unlike in
> STV).
>
>
>>> It may be easy or difficult for the
>>> independents to become candidates. Since
>>> STV elections typically don't have very
>>> many candidates there may be a need to
>>> not allow independents on the lists very
>>> easily.
>>>
>> I assume you mean that it would be very easy for
>> independents to
>> clutter up the ballot, since there are so many candidates?
>>
>
> Yes. One could try to limit the number of
> candidates to keep voting easy from the
> voter point of view and to keep the size
> of the ballots sheets manageable. And of
> course to keep the "irrelevant" candidates
> out (= individuals that want to be on the
> list but that don't have any realistic
> chances of being elected now or in the next
> elections) (this last reason applies to all
> methods, not only STV).
>
> The rules could include allowing current
> representatives to participate (as you
> mentioned), allowing parties to nominate
> candidates based on their earlier success
> in the elections and allowing any party or
> individual in if they collect some
> sufficient number of supporter names.
> Also money has been used somewhere.
>
> (One additional point is that in elections
> where the votes to an individual will be
> always (or by default) votes to the party
> the parties may benefit of naming numerous
> candidates while in STV nomination of
> numerous candidates might mean that the
> party will have weaker chances of getting
> maximum number of their candidates elected.)
>
>
>> i.e. you meant "... Since STV elections typically can have
>> many
>> candidates ... "?
>>
>> ... or did you mean that party list systems don't have many
>> choices?
>>
>
> I don't know what is a typical number of
> candidates in one constituency in the
> Irish Dail elections. In Finnish open
> list elections I'm used to have some 150
> candidates.
>
> (In the Finnish model one benefit is that
> voters have great freedom of picking any
> candidate that they like (not the one that
> the party recommends). One problem is that
> the system is not proportional within
> parties since within each party and
> district the system elects simply those
> candidates with most votes.)
>
>
>>> But once on the lists then independents
>>> are quite equal with the candidates of the
>>> well established parties.
>>>
>> Right, but there are surplus transfer issues.
>>
>
> Are there some specific independent candidate
> related surplus transfer issues (more than that
> they don't have any fellow party members to
> transfer votes to)?
>
>
>> I would probably allow ranking of parties, so that if a
>> candidate gets
>> a quota (or fails to be elected), votes that he held
>> can be
>> reassigned.
>>
>
> Could you tell a bit more about the
> intended technique?
>
>
>>> (To me also open list (or tree) based
>>> methods seem to offer interesting paths
>>> forward. Here word "forward" should be read
>>> as "if the target is to move towards a
>>> proportional multi-party system".)
>>>
>> I think the tree method is superior to even open party
>> lists systems.
>>
>
> Yes, I agree. In addition to providing
> more exact proportionality I find also
> the property that the voters can steer
> the internal evolution of the party
> interesting.
>
> (Ability to influence => more interest
> => more direct citizen driven democracy.
> This line of development may be beneficial
> in typical stable democracies that may
> already have some flavour of stagnation
> and excessive control of the party inner
> circles and external interest groups in
> them.)
>
>
>> However, PR-STV gives even more freedom to the voters, they
>> aren't
>> locked into voting according to the tree inheritance
>> system.
>>
>
> Yes.
>
> It is also possible to develop systems
> that mix both styles. That could mean
> e.g. default inheritance order (tree or
> even candidate specific) for short
> (exhausted) votes but allowing voters to
> define their own order / deviate from
> the default order if they so wish.
>
>
>> OTOH, it gives up national level proportionality. A
>> candidate based
>> list system (each candidate submits a ranking) also allows
>> national
>> level proportionality.
>>
>> I think a mix of 5+ seater PR-STV seats and a quality
>> national level
>> system (say candidate list or tree list) might be a good
>> compromise.
>>
>
> How exactly did you assume the STV and
> tree/list inheritance (and national level
> proportionality?) to be combined here?
>
> There are multiple options. There could be
> separate ballot entries for personal and
> party votes, or maybe parties/branches
> could be named as candidates in the ballot,
> or maybe each candidate would just have a
> link to some party/branch. The calculation
> process could also be implemented in many
> ways.
>
> Juho
>
>
>
>
>
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>

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Raph Frank
2009-05-03 01:00:41 UTC
Permalink
On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 12:13 AM, Anthony O'Neal <***@gmail.com> wrote:
> It is a rather huge problem.  It effects the proportionately surprisingly
> little though - all the major parties still win a roughly fair number of
> seats.  Districting tends to produce much more proportional results than the
> seat size would suggest, as random political differences in geography give
> some smaller parties too much support in some areas to make up for their
> unfair lack of support in other other areas.

This isn't entirely unreasonable. If you look at the seat percentage
to first preference vote percentage, it isn't as bad as would be
expected for small parties. However, even then, the larger parties
get a boost purely due to being larger parties.

However, that doesn't mean that single seaters will give the same
number of parties as a PR system.

Local variation might be able to take a party with 5% support
nationwide up to 15-20% in certain areas, but it isn't going to be
able to take it to 50%.

Single seat districts tend towards a 2 party system with 3rd parties
getting almost no vote.

> This is clear just looking at
> single-member districts.  Event though the threshold is technically 50%,
> it's rather obviously much fairer than a party list system with a 50%
> threshold.  As the number of seats gets larger, this effects seems to be
> exponential.

You mean increased seats per district increases fairness? I agree.

>
> However, IMHO, the minimum seats per district should be around five, or at
> least the average amount of seats should be five or seven.  The fact that
> Irelands average number of seats has dwindled so dramatically over the years
> makes it clear that the big parties just can't be trusted when it comes to
> proportionality.

Yup. It is mainly FF as they are mostly in power, but I doubt FG
would consider it a major problem.

I would make the rule an average of 5+ with a minimum of 3. I think
this would keep abuse low.

> The minimum number of seats in BC-STV is two, the maximum seven.  There's
> really nothing from keeping them from making nearly every district a two or
> three seater.

Ironically, with 2 parties and 3 seat districts, you are almost back
to single seaters.

This assumes each party wins at least 1 per district.

>  Clearly, as the situation in Ireland shows, this is much
> better than single-member districts, but the article should have been
> amended to state that the average number of seats per a district should be
> around five, which would leave room for two-seaters in rural districts but
> keep the big parties from colluding and implementing a seat number to their
> favor.

I agree, there is always going to be some demand for small districts,
but that shouldn't be allowed to derail a reasonable average.
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Raph Frank
2009-05-03 00:51:12 UTC
Permalink
On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Juho Laatu <***@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> It practice that seems to set the limits
> to max 4 and min 2 parties/groupings per
> constituency represented in the Dail.
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_30th_D%C3%A1il>\

The small constituency sizes do hurt the smaller parties. This is one
of the big issues I would have.

>> Party list systems aren't neutral at all.
>
> Yes. Or one could say that they may
> allow votes to individuals but they do
> not allow voters to define any arbitrary
> inheritance order of the vote (unlike in
> STV).

Well, the assume that the party is primary. The inheritance ordering
is decided by the party rather than the voter.

The tree system is a possible compromise as it allows the candidates
some say in what branch of the tree they are in. At least that the
candidate will be closer to the voter than the party leadership.

I think a candidate list system is better though as it allows more
general inheritance ordering. Ofc, it is always going to be a
tradeoff between precision and complexity (both for the count and for
the voter).

Closed party list
Open party list
Tree based lists
Candidate list
PR-STV

All, except PR-STV could be handled at the national level.

Party list would allow a much smaller ballot.

The 3 middle options would use the same "pick one candidate" ballot.

> Yes. One could try to limit the number of
> candidates to keep voting easy from the
> voter point of view and to keep the size
> of the ballots sheets manageable.

I think a reasonable compromise here would be to allow candidates to
register as official write-in candidates. They could be given a code,
and included on a list in the polling station.

In most cases, all of them combined wouldn't achieve enough votes to
get a seat and they could be eliminated as a bloc.

> And of
> course to keep the "irrelevant" candidates
> out
<snip>
> Also money has been used somewhere.

In Ireland, you have to pay a deposit to be on the ballot, if you
don't get at least 25% (I think) of a quota, you lose your deposit.

> ... the parties may benefit of naming numerous
> candidates while in STV nomination of
> numerous candidates might mean that the
> party will have weaker chances of getting
> maximum number of their candidates elected.

This is due to the fact that voters tend not to fill out their ballot fully.

Also, candidate based voters will vote first choice for a popular
local and then vote 2nd choice for another party.

Running fewer candidates can help to lock down the vote for the party.

Basically, surplus/elimination transfers don't ever 100% go to the same party.

> I don't know what is a typical number of
> candidates in one constituency in the
> Irish Dail elections.

It is around 10 - 20.

> In Finnish open
> list elections I'm used to have some 150
> candidates.

OTOH, you only have to pick one of them, rather than provide a ranking
for say 10 of them.

> One problem is that
> the system is not proportional within
> parties since within each party and
> district the system elects simply those
> candidates with most votes.)

Right, the open list system is PR at the party level and then
multi-seat plurality for candidate selection internally.

Maybe they use use Asset Voting for internal party transfers, or maybe
just allow the party to decide on internal rules.

>> Right, but there are surplus transfer issues.
>
> Are there some specific independent candidate
> related surplus transfer issues

I meant with party list systems.

An independent can be expected to get around 1 seat's worth of a vote
(or he should be forming a party).

If I vote for him and he doesn't get elected, I have thrown my vote away.

Similarly, if I vote for him and he gets elected with 1.5 seats worth,
then my vote is only worth 0.67 of a vote.

OTOH, if I vote for a party which gets many votes, then my vote will
have a weight of pretty close to 1.

This also applies with threshold based party list systems. If I vote
for a party which gets 4.9% of the vote in a system with a 5%
threshold, then I am throwing my vote away.

This creates a disincentive to vote for parties that are close to the
threshold.

In the extreme case, you could have 19 parties with 4.9% of the vote
and 1 party with 6.9% of the vote, and the 6.9% party gets all the
seats in the legislature.

To fix this, at minimum, wasted votes should be reassigned. I would
also allow surplus transfers for independents (maybe including a rule
that such transfers have to go to parties).

> Could you tell a bit more about the
> intended technique?

Each voter can rank 2 parties.
A party which runs only 1 candidates is considered an independent candidate.

I might vote something like:
1) Independent
2) Party X

The idea would be to pick a party for your 2nd rank that you are
reasonably sure will get a few seats.

1) Count all the first choices
2) Assign seats using d'Hondt
3) Any party or independent that doesn't get a seat is eliminated
4) Any independent who gets a seat has his surplus transferred
(assuming the 2nd choice wasn't eliminated)
5) Assign remaining seats between the parties using Sainte-Laguë, but
all get at least 1 seat

As long as each voter votes for a party that will easily meet the
threshold as their 2nd choice, then everyone is fully represented.

The surplus transfer step is perhaps an unnecessary complexity as it
requires reweighting, but I think the elimination transfers are
important.

> Yes, I agree. In addition to providing
> more exact proportionality I find also
> the property that the voters can steer
> the internal evolution of the party
> interesting.

Candidate list and PR-STV also somewhat allow that, but they are less
transparent.

Also, candidates might form the tree based on geography rather than
ideology. Ofc, that would depend on what issues the voters think are
important.

I am not sure if wings would be willing to name themselves.

> It is also possible to develop systems
> that mix both styles. That could mean
> e.g. default inheritance order (tree or
> even candidate specific) for short
> (exhausted) votes but allowing voters to
> define their own order / deviate from
> the default order if they so wish.

I agree with that.

In Australia, they have the 'above-the-line' system. It is PR-STV,
but you must either vote for all the candidates (and there can be
100+) or just pick a party's list.

A better plan would be to allow the voters to pick a party's list and
but if they also rank some candidates, then that overrides the list.

> How exactly did you assume the STV and
> tree/list inheritance (and national level
> proportionality?) to be combined here?

I didn't mean combine them at all. The only connection would be that
they are held on the same day.

There would be a national list PR election to fill half of the seats
and then the other half would be returned from 5+ seater local
constituencies.

I am not a big fan of MMP like methods that can be abused (as seen in
Italy) or require that a vote for a candidate is assumed to be a vote
for his party (the standard fix for the abuse).
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Kristofer Munsterhjelm
2009-05-03 09:37:46 UTC
Permalink
Raph Frank wrote:
> On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 11:33 PM, Juho Laatu <***@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>> It practice that seems to set the limits
>> to max 4 and min 2 parties/groupings per
>> constituency represented in the Dail.
>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_30th_D%C3%A1il>\
>
> The small constituency sizes do hurt the smaller parties. This is one
> of the big issues I would have.

I think Schulze's MMP idea would work well here. Use STV (or some other
neutral method) for district seats, then "top up" by nationwide MMP. His
concept includes ways of fixing the decoy list problem (basically,
downweighting votes for a party if it got more top-up seats than it
deserves).

Because the base method is STV, one doesn't need to have very many
top-up seats, so the complaint that the system elects representatives
one didn't want ("I voted for party X but only got the party elite!") is
weakened.

It's kind of a hack, and it only ensures party proportionality, but
people probably aren't going to want to rank 10+ candidates required to
get proportionality the direct way.

So, a proposal might be: have an average of >5 seats, with a minimum of
2 or 3, (and perhaps also a maximum of 10 or 11, so people won't get
exhausted trying to vote in the megadistricts). If needed, have a
commission redistrict, or do it algorithmically; or just use the natural
first-level borders ("counties"). Then, for the next level up from the
districts (may be national, or may be an intermediate level like
raions), add a small fraction of top-up seats, perhaps a tenth of the
number of seats encompassed by that particular intermediate-level district.

>>> Party list systems aren't neutral at all.
>> Yes. Or one could say that they may
>> allow votes to individuals but they do
>> not allow voters to define any arbitrary
>> inheritance order of the vote (unlike in
>> STV).
>
> Well, the assume that the party is primary. The inheritance ordering
> is decided by the party rather than the voter.
>
> The tree system is a possible compromise as it allows the candidates
> some say in what branch of the tree they are in. At least that the
> candidate will be closer to the voter than the party leadership.
>
> I think a candidate list system is better though as it allows more
> general inheritance ordering. Ofc, it is always going to be a
> tradeoff between precision and complexity (both for the count and for
> the voter).
>
> Closed party list
> Open party list
> Tree based lists
> Candidate list
> PR-STV
>
> All, except PR-STV could be handled at the national level.

How about this? A voter picks a party, and also, if he wants to, ranks
their candidates as in a single-winner system. For each district, the
party runs the method (probably some sort of Condorcet method), and the
winners get the seats.

For instance, consider a county that gave three seats to the yellow
party. The voters voted so that the social ordering within the party is:

Y1 > Y2 > Y3 > Y4 > Y5.

Then Y1, Y2, and Y3 are the party representatives for that district.

There are two problems with this idea. First, strategic voters may vote
for a party they don't support, just so that their ranked vote can move
a disliked candidate first (same problem as in an open primary, but
weaker). Perhaps there would be a way of making a method that ensures
that if some voter votes for a party, he gives them more power than he
can take away by the ranking.
Second, it's not proportional within the party. If the Y party gets ten
seats, those will all consist of ten Y-centrists (assuming there are
that many centrists). One could use STV, but at that point, why not skip
the middleman and use STV-MMP? One could also argue that parties are
coherent units anyway (and that ordinary open list and closed list is
even worse), but however you put it, it would reduce proportionality.

The system above could be implemented fairly easily: a voter picks a
party's ballot paper, marks the candidates if he wants, and then puts
the paper in an envelope (to conceal it) before dropping the envelope in
the ballot box. This, by its nature, makes it impossible to rank the
candidates of any other party than the one the voter's voting for.

(Also, the within-district ranked votes are summable if one uses a
system like Condorcet.)

>> And of
>> course to keep the "irrelevant" candidates
>> out
> <snip>
>> Also money has been used somewhere.
>
> In Ireland, you have to pay a deposit to be on the ballot, if you
> don't get at least 25% (I think) of a quota, you lose your deposit.

That seems reasonable. The lower the percentage, the more people are
encouraged to run, so set it just at the level where having more
candidates would clutter the ballot unduly.

>> In Finnish open
>> list elections I'm used to have some 150
>> candidates.
>
> OTOH, you only have to pick one of them, rather than provide a ranking
> for say 10 of them.

The system above would let voters bullet vote, rank, truncate, whatnot
as they see fit.

> This also applies with threshold based party list systems. If I vote
> for a party which gets 4.9% of the vote in a system with a 5%
> threshold, then I am throwing my vote away.
>
> This creates a disincentive to vote for parties that are close to the
> threshold.

No, it creates a disicentive to vote for parties that are below the
threshold, not just close to it. It's like the spoiler effect, but
lessened: "Do I vote for X, who is above the threshold, and thus my vote
may count, or do I vote for Y, who is not, thus perhaps making X's
opposition stronger?".

If you want to reduce this further, you could say that there's a
disincentive to vote for X when the number of votes for X is just above
the amount required to have an integer number of seats (including 0).
When the party has a large surplus, your vote may give it another seat,
but when it doesn't, the chances are less. However, if the barrier is
sufficiently low, people vote anyway (as they do in party list PR).

> In the extreme case, you could have 19 parties with 4.9% of the vote
> and 1 party with 6.9% of the vote, and the 6.9% party gets all the
> seats in the legislature.

Yes, and the Wikipedia article about election thresholds mention this.
It states that in Russia in 1995, the 5% threshold made 45% of the
population unrepresented (meaning there were many small parties indeed).

> To fix this, at minimum, wasted votes should be reassigned. I would
> also allow surplus transfers for independents (maybe including a rule
> that such transfers have to go to parties).

Another possible way would be to use a multiwinner method. People rank
parties. The voter's ballot is altered so that each party is replaced by
a clone set of size equal to the number of candidates that party fields.
After counting, one runs a multiwinner system with number of winners
equal to the size of the assembly. Each party then gets as many
candidates as there are members of its clone set in the outcome.

If you're using a divisor method, my "Webster-flavored multiwinner
method" may be suitable (unless it is flawed; I am not certain if it is).

>> It is also possible to develop systems
>> that mix both styles. That could mean
>> e.g. default inheritance order (tree or
>> even candidate specific) for short
>> (exhausted) votes but allowing voters to
>> define their own order / deviate from
>> the default order if they so wish.
>
> I agree with that.
>
> In Australia, they have the 'above-the-line' system. It is PR-STV,
> but you must either vote for all the candidates (and there can be
> 100+) or just pick a party's list.

Above the line, along with the requirement to rank everybody, changes it
from true PR to party list. It would be better if they permitted truncation.

> There would be a national list PR election to fill half of the seats
> and then the other half would be returned from 5+ seater local
> constituencies.
>
> I am not a big fan of MMP like methods that can be abused (as seen in
> Italy) or require that a vote for a candidate is assumed to be a vote
> for his party (the standard fix for the abuse).

Schulze's STV-MMP tries to fix this issue without linking candidate
votes to party votes.
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Raph Frank
2009-05-03 17:16:24 UTC
Permalink
On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<km-***@broadpark.no> wrote:
> I think Schulze's MMP idea would work well here. Use STV (or some other
> neutral method) for district seats, then "top up" by nationwide MMP. His
> concept includes ways of fixing the decoy list problem (basically,
> downweighting votes for a party if it got more top-up seats than it
> deserves).

Do you have a link to that?

> It's kind of a hack, and it only ensures party proportionality, but people
> probably aren't going to want to rank 10+ candidates required to get
> proportionality the direct way.

One option would be to allow people to to rank 2-3 candidates and then
their 4th choice would be a party list.

This would balance control and convenience.

> So, a proposal might be: have an average of >5 seats, with a minimum of 2 or
> 3, (and perhaps also a maximum of 10 or 11, so people won't get exhausted
> trying to vote in the megadistricts).

I don't think a max is really required, as there is an incentive for
those in power to make them as small as possible.

Ofc, Australia went the other way, and used massive ones and the above
the line system to introduce de-facto party list.


> If needed, have a commission
> redistrict, or do it algorithmically; or just use the natural first-level
> borders ("counties"). Then, for the next level up from the districts (may be
> national, or may be an intermediate level like raions), add a small fraction
> of top-up seats, perhaps a tenth of the number of seats encompassed by that
> particular intermediate-level district.

Some counties in Ireland would barely be entitled to even 1 seat.

> How about this? A voter picks a party, and also, if he wants to, ranks their
> candidates as in a single-winner system.

Again, this fundamentally assumes that a party vote is a personal
vote. It is perfectly possible for a voter to like a specific
candidate, but not like the rest of the party.

> For each district, the party runs
> the method (probably some sort of Condorcet method), and the winners get the
> seats.

So you are picking centerists from each party rather ?

> There are two problems with this idea. First, strategic voters may vote for
> a party they don't support, just so that their ranked vote can move a
> disliked candidate first (same problem as in an open primary, but weaker).

This effect could be reduced by the party only running centerists, but
that forces a requirement for a party primary.


> One could use STV, but at that point, why not skip the
> middleman and use STV-MMP?

It has a slight advantage that the ballots are less complex.

> The system above could be implemented fairly easily: a voter picks a party's
> ballot paper, marks the candidates if he wants, and then puts the paper in
> an envelope (to conceal it) before dropping the envelope in the ballot box.
> This, by its nature, makes it impossible to rank the candidates of any other
> party than the one the voter's voting for.

Right, however, all the ballots would need to be the same colour/size
and somehow, the voter would need to take a ballot in such a way that
the polling station workers don't know which party's ballot he picked.

> That seems reasonable. The lower the percentage, the more people are
> encouraged to run, so set it just at the level where having more candidates
> would clutter the ballot unduly.

In principle, if there was 10 seats, you might auction 20 slots on the ballots.

Ofc, that allows people to buy the election.

> No, it creates a disicentive to vote for parties that are below the
> threshold, not just close to it.

Right, sorry, I meant parties that are close to the threshold or below it.

If the threshold is 5% and the party got 6% in the last election, then
there is a risk by voting for them.

> Another possible way would be to use a multiwinner method.

Right, but that adds complexity. Allowing 2 ranks is sufficient to
remove the risk that your vote is wasted for voting for a small party
(assuming your 2nd choice is a large party).

> Above the line, along with the requirement to rank everybody, changes it
> from true PR to party list. It would be better if they permitted truncation.

Right, or allowed you pick a party list and your ranks override.
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James Gilmour
2009-05-03 11:04:48 UTC
Permalink
Raph Frank > Sent: Sunday, May 03, 2009 1:51 AM
> I think a candidate list system is better though as it allows
> more general inheritance ordering. Ofc, it is always going
> to be a tradeoff between precision and complexity (both for
> the count and for the voter).
>
> Closed party list
> Open party list
> Tree based lists
> Candidate list
> PR-STV
>
> All, except PR-STV could be handled at the national level.
> Party list would allow a much smaller ballot.
> The 3 middle options would use the same "pick one candidate" ballot.

This analysis is simplistic and completely ignores the fundamental philosophical divide between voting systems designed to deliver
PR of registered political PARTIES and voting systems designed to deliver PR of what the VOTERS want (as expressed by the voters'
responses to the candidates who have offered themselves for election). This is a matter of fundamental political philosophy - which
route you take determines the relationships between the elected members and the voters, between the elected members and their
parties, and between the elected members in the parliament and the executive (government). Where should power lie - in the parties
or with the voters? To whom should the elected members be really accountable - to the their parties or to their voters?

In some political cultures, having the political system centred around the political parties is not an issue (or does not appear to
be an issue) and party list PR systems are common such countries. But other political cultures do not want the political system
centred on the political parties, although the parties are an essential part of the political system. Some such countries do not
like party list PR (even if an unrepresentative government has forced it on them!!).

So the questions that must be answered first are not about the "degree of proportionality" or "the complexity of the ballot", or
even "the size of the districts", but about what the voting system is intended to achieve in terms of "representation". Some will
be happy to go the party list route, but many others are not. Lumping all the multi-member voting system together as though there
were all just different flavours of ice-cream is a flawed approach and it is unhelpful in the debate about how best to go forward in
different political cultures.

James Gilmour


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Raph Frank
2009-05-03 17:20:51 UTC
Permalink
2009/5/3 James Gilmour <***@globalnet.co.uk>:
> So the questions that must be answered first are not about the "degree of proportionality" or "the complexity of the ballot", or
> even "the size of the districts", but about what the voting system is intended to achieve in terms of "representation".  Some will
> be happy to go the party list route, but many others are not.

There are some voters who vote based on party loyalty and some who
vote based on their favourite candidate (and many voters fall
somewhere in the middle). A method like PR-STV allows both groups to
vote the way the want. Formal party based systems only cater for one
of the groups.

> Lumping all the multi-member voting system together as though there
> were all just different flavours of ice-cream is a flawed approach and it is unhelpful in the debate about how best to go forward in
> different political cultures.

I don't think they are all the same. I have repeatability said that I
don't like party centric methods.

However, PR-STV seems like a reasonably compromise as it lets each
voter decide for themselves.
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Kathy Dopp
2009-05-03 19:22:22 UTC
Permalink
I don't think that IRV/STV is even worth wasting time discussing
unless you fully support the following:

1. treating voters' ballots inequitably by counting 2nd and 3rd
choices of only some voters, counting the 2nd and 3rd choices of even
fewer cvoters in a timely fashion when those candidates are still in
the running, and not counting the 2nd or 3rd choices of a large group
of voters whose 1st choice loses the election (I.e. unless you like
highly unfair methods for counting votes)

2. helping voting vendors sell an all-new round of costly voting
equipment and raising election costs,

3. eviscerating public transparency and accuracy of the electoral process,

4. turning the act of voting into a gambling game due to IRV/STV's
nonmonotonicity,

5. implementing a complex method that does *not* solve the spoiler
problem, and does *not* elect majority winners and is more likely to
elect extremist candidates.

Unless you support all the above features of IRV/STV then discussing
it or promoting it is a hopeless waste of time.

Why not discuss a different voting method that is fair, equitable,
simpler, monotonic, less costly, solves the spoiler problem, finds
majority winners, etc. instead?

Kathy
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Juho Laatu
2009-05-05 06:06:08 UTC
Permalink
--- On Sun, 3/5/09, James Gilmour <***@globalnet.co.uk> wrote:

> This issue has been raised again in Malta, and there was an
> interesting paper on possible solutions in the January 2009
> issue of
> Voting matters:   
>   http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE26/I26P1.pdf

Interesting paper that contains some
very reasonable proposals on how to
combine party proportionality and the
long tradition of STV in Malta. The
results are relevant also outside
the Maltese context.

One interesting point was the two
heuristic criteria (page 5) to keep
the number of seats / voting power
of different parties in correct
proportion with respect to each
others. Another simple approach to
maintaining such proportions would
be to use fractional seats / voting
power. On top of the seats that the
parties will get one could give each
one of them one fractional vote
(smaller than one vote), to be used
e.g. by the chairman of the group.
These fractions would be allocated
so that the strength of the parties
will exactly correspond to the
received votes.

Just an idea. Integers are nicer in
real world but in some cases they may
not maintain all proportions right.

Juho






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Juho Laatu
2009-05-05 06:06:19 UTC
Permalink
Some systems use explicit thresholds
that cut out the smallest parties.
Many systems use districts. Use of
districts also tends to cut out the
smallest parties.

Districts also tend to favour local
groups. A "pro district X" group with
10% nation wide support might easily
get seats (probably in district X) but
a "pro country" group might not get
any seats since its support is not
focused on any particular district.

There may be cases where some country
has good reasons to cut out small
parties (although they have more
support than worth one seat) to keep
the political life of the country
stable enough, but I think there are
nowadays more countries where the
democratic systems has more problems
with too few and too stagnant parties
and political set-up.

So, in most cases I wouldn't have
anything against offering the voters
full proportionality.

(That is not to say that countries
that *want* a two party system should
not use it. But if one allows multiple
parties then groupings of size 1/n
(local or evenly spread) could well
be allowed to get one of the n seats.)

Juho


--- On Sun, 3/5/09, Anthony O'Neal <***@gmail.com> wrote:

> It is a rather huge problem.  It
> effects the proportionately
> surprisingly little though - all the major parties still
> win a roughly
> fair number of seats.  Districting tends to produce
> much more
> proportional results than the seat size would suggest, as
> random
> political differences in geography give some smaller
> parties too much
> support in some areas to make up for their unfair lack of
> support in
> other other areas.  This is clear just looking at
> single-member
> districts.  Event though the threshold is technically
> 50%, it's rather
> obviously much fairer than a party list system with a 50%
> threshold.  As
> the number of seats gets larger, this effects seems to be
> exponential.
>
> However, IMHO, the minimum seats per district should be
> around five, or
> at least the average amount of seats should be five or
> seven.  The fact
> that Irelands average number of seats has dwindled so
> dramatically over
> the years makes it clear that the big parties just can't be
> trusted when
> it comes to proportionality.
>
> The minimum number of seats in BC-STV is two, the maximum
> seven. 
> There's really nothing from keeping them from making nearly
> every
> district a two or three seater.  Clearly, as the
> situation in Ireland
> shows, this is much better than single-member districts,
> but the article
> should have been amended to state that the average number
> of seats per a
> district should be around five, which would leave room for
> two-seaters
> in rural districts but keep the big parties from colluding
> and
> implementing a seat number to their favor.
>
> Juho Laatu wrote:
> > --- On Thu, 30/4/09, Raph Frank <***@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> >   
> >> In Ireland, the constitution requires at least 3
> per
> >> constituency and
> >> over time the average number of seats per
> constituency is
> >> being
> >> reduced.  It is currently illegal (by
> statutory law)
> >> for
> >> constituencies to have more than 5 seats. 
> For the
> >> upcoming EU
> >> elections, Ireland's 12 seats are being returned
> from all 3
> >> seat
> >> constituencies.
> >>     
> >
> > It practice that seems to set the limits
> > to max 4 and min 2 parties/groupings per
> > constituency represented in the Dail.
> > <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Members_of_the_30th_D%C3%A1il>
> >
> >   
> >>> One could also develop rules that would
> >>> make the system more proportional at the
> >>> country level
> >>>       
> >> I think care needs to be taken here, as votes for
> a
> >> candidate are not
> >> necessarily the same as votes for a party.
> >> (The tree system can resolve this).
> >>     
> >
> > Yes, some tricks needed here.
> >
> >   
> >>> There may be also different opinions on
> >>> how person centric vs. how ideology centric
> >>> the election in question should be. STV
> >>> represents the person centric viewpoint but
> >>> allows the voters to apply strict party
> >>> preference order as well.
> >>>       
> >> STV is actually neutral on this issue.  The
> voter can
> >> vote by party if
> >> they wish, or can vote by personality if they
> wish.
> >>     
> >
> > Yes, in the sense that the only problem is
> > complexity in the case that there are many
> > candidates.
> >
> >   
> >> Party list systems aren't neutral at all.
> >>     
> >
> > Yes. Or one could say that they may
> > allow votes to individuals but they do
> > not allow voters to define any arbitrary
> > inheritance order of the vote (unlike in
> > STV).
> >
> >   
> >>> It may be easy or difficult for the
> >>> independents to become candidates. Since
> >>> STV elections typically don't have very
> >>> many candidates there may be a need to
> >>> not allow independents on the lists very
> >>> easily.
> >>>       
> >> I assume you mean that it would be very easy for
> >> independents to
> >> clutter up the ballot, since there are so many
> candidates?
> >>     
> >
> > Yes. One could try to limit the number of
> > candidates to keep voting easy from the
> > voter point of view and to keep the size
> > of the ballots sheets manageable. And of
> > course to keep the "irrelevant" candidates
> > out (= individuals that want to be on the
> > list but that don't have any realistic
> > chances of being elected now or in the next
> > elections) (this last reason applies to all
> > methods, not only STV).
> >
> > The rules could include allowing current
> > representatives to participate (as you
> > mentioned), allowing parties to nominate
> > candidates based on their earlier success
> > in the elections and allowing any party or
> > individual in if they collect some
> > sufficient number of supporter names.
> > Also money has been used somewhere.
> >
> > (One additional point is that in elections
> > where the votes to an individual will be
> > always (or by default) votes to the party
> > the parties may benefit of naming numerous
> > candidates while in STV nomination of
> > numerous candidates might mean that the
> > party will have weaker chances of getting
> > maximum number of their candidates elected.)
> >
> >   
> >> i.e. you meant "... Since STV elections typically
> can have
> >> many
> >> candidates ... "?
> >>
> >> ... or did you mean that party list systems don't
> have many
> >> choices?
> >>     
> >
> > I don't know what is a typical number of
> > candidates in one constituency in the
> > Irish Dail elections. In Finnish open
> > list elections I'm used to have some 150
> > candidates.
> >
> > (In the Finnish model one benefit is that
> > voters have great freedom of picking any
> > candidate that they like (not the one that
> > the party recommends). One problem is that
> > the system is not proportional within
> > parties since within each party and
> > district the system elects simply those
> > candidates with most votes.)
> >
> >   
> >>> But once on the lists then independents
> >>> are quite equal with the candidates of the
> >>> well established parties.
> >>>       
> >> Right, but there are surplus transfer issues.
> >>     
> >
> > Are there some specific independent candidate
> > related surplus transfer issues (more than that
> > they don't have any fellow party members to
> > transfer votes to)?
> >
> >   
> >> I would probably allow ranking of parties, so that
> if a
> >> candidate gets
> >> a quota (or fails to be elected), votes that he
> held
> >> can be
> >> reassigned.
> >>     
> >
> > Could you tell a bit more about the
> > intended technique?
> >
> >   
> >>> (To me also open list (or tree) based
> >>> methods seem to offer interesting paths
> >>> forward. Here word "forward" should be read
> >>> as "if the target is to move towards a
> >>> proportional multi-party system".)
> >>>       
> >> I think the tree method is superior to even open
> party
> >> lists systems.
> >>     
> >
> > Yes, I agree. In addition to providing
> > more exact proportionality I find also
> > the property that the voters can steer
> > the internal evolution of the party
> > interesting.
> >
> > (Ability to influence => more interest
> > => more direct citizen driven democracy.
> > This line of development may be beneficial
> > in typical stable democracies that may
> > already have some flavour of stagnation
> > and excessive control of the party inner
> > circles and external interest groups in
> > them.)
> >
> >   
> >> However, PR-STV gives even more freedom to the
> voters, they
> >> aren't
> >> locked into voting according to the tree
> inheritance
> >> system.
> >>     
> >
> > Yes.
> >
> > It is also possible to develop systems
> > that mix both styles. That could mean
> > e.g. default inheritance order (tree or
> > even candidate specific) for short
> > (exhausted) votes but allowing voters to
> > define their own order / deviate from
> > the default order if they so wish.
> >
> >   
> >> OTOH, it gives up national level
> proportionality.  A
> >> candidate based
> >> list system (each candidate submits a ranking)
> also allows
> >> national
> >> level proportionality.
> >>
> >> I think a mix of 5+ seater PR-STV seats and a
> quality
> >> national level
> >> system (say candidate list or tree list) might be
> a good
> >> compromise.
> >>     
> >
> > How exactly did you assume the STV and
> > tree/list inheritance (and national level
> > proportionality?) to be combined here?
> >
> > There are multiple options. There could be
> > separate ballot entries for personal and
> > party votes, or maybe parties/branches
> > could be named as candidates in the ballot,
> > or maybe each candidate would just have a
> > link to some party/branch. The calculation
> > process could also be implemented in many
> > ways.
> >
> > Juho
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >       
> > ----
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> >   
>
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Juho Laatu
2009-05-05 06:06:29 UTC
Permalink
--- On Sun, 3/5/09, Raph Frank <***@gmail.com> wrote:

> I think a candidate list system is better though as it
> allows more
> general inheritance ordering.  Ofc, it is always going
> to be a
> tradeoff between precision and complexity (both for the
> count and for
> the voter).
>
> Closed party list
> Open party list
> Tree based lists
> Candidate list
> PR-STV

Yes. In the above list the order of
inheritance moves from a party centric
model to a vote centric model. Party,
candidate and voter impact is different
in each case (and may vary also within
the categories).

> Party list would allow a much smaller ballot.

In some sense I'd be happy with a
system where "lazy" voters may just
point out one candidate (or even party)
while voters with more specific needs
could cast more detailed votes (e.g.
rank the candidates within a grouping
or just pick some random individuals).

> > Yes. One could try to limit the number of
> > candidates to keep voting easy from the
> > voter point of view and to keep the size
> > of the ballots sheets manageable.
>
> I think a reasonable compromise here would be to allow
> candidates to
> register as official write-in candidates.  They could
> be given a code,
> and included on a list in the polling station.

One related topic:
When the number of candidates grows it
is possible to switch to codes only. In
the Finnish open list system ballots are
very simple. One just writes the number
of the candidate on a sheet of paper. It
would be possible to do also rankings,
maybe including party/group codes this
way. Maybe with some fixed small number
of slots in the ballot would be enough.
One has to write the numbers but on the
other hand there is no limit to the
number of candidates. Ballots are
simple.

> Also, candidates might form the tree based on geography
> rather than
> ideology.  Ofc, that would depend on what issues the
> voters think are
> important.

I tend to see geographical districts
as one form of proportionality. In
addition to ideological proportionality
requirements there may be regional
proportionality requirements. In a way
people living in district X are forced to
vote for the district X candidates.
(Typically the proportions are determined
based on number of citizens, not voters.)

(There could be also other simultaneous
proportionality requirements like sex,
ethnicity, age, religion or occupation
related. They could be mandated opinions
(like in the regional case) or voluntary
(like in the ideological case). And it is
possible to force many proportionalities
to be exact at the same time (unlike in
typical current systems where the
regional proportionality is exact and the
ideological proportionality is less exact
because ideological allocation is counted
separately at each district).)

Juho





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Juho Laatu
2009-05-05 06:08:36 UTC
Permalink
In order to be a bit more concrete
and to complement my other mails I
draft here one approach to combining
STV like and shorter open list/tree
style ballots. The point is to see
what could be done when the number
of candidates grows large in STV
(and to try to take in what is good
in trees).

Let's assume a simple hierarchical
system with only two levels. The
parties, groups and candidates are
named as follows.

P1
G11
C111
C112
C113
G12
C121
C122
P2
G21
C211
etc.

Each voter casts one ranked ballot
that may contain any of the above
named items.

Candidates have a default tree-like
order of inheritance. Vote C121 will
be counted as a vote to candidate
C121, group G12 and party P1. This
vote has the same meaning as vote
C121>G12>P1>ANYONE.

Vote C121>C211 is the same as vote
C121>C211>G21>P2>ANYONE. Note that
I assumed that the last ranked
candidate determines the order of
inheritance (unlike in the Maltese
proposals where the first preference
determined the party). If the voter
would like the first preference to
determine the order of inheritance
she could vote e.g. C121>C211>G12.

If one wants to determine one's
preference order within a group
one could vote C111>C118>C113. This
kind of votes may be quite typical.
Such votes may be easy to count in
some methods since it is clear that
they will support G11 and P1 in any
case.

We may allow also not giving any
support to the party of the last
ranked candidate. In this case the
vote could be C211>G21>P2>C111>ANYONE.

A bullet vote with no inheritance
could with this ballot style be e.g.
C555>ANYONE. Vote C555>C666>ANYONE
would be a traditional STV vote that
may become exhausted after C555 and
C666 have been eliminated (or elected).

Also votes where a group or a party
is ranked first are possible, e.g.
G12>G14.

The examples above show what kind of
votes would be possible in general.
Any parties and groups and candidates
can thus be ranked. In addition there
are some simple default inheritance
rules (last ranked candidate followed
by her group and party) that the voter
may overrun if she so wants.

I hope the intention and meaning of
this kind of votes is clear. From a
traditional STV point of view the
group and party names are actually
just abbreviations of candidates
in those groupings. Vote C111>G11>P1
does thus mean:
C111>
C112=C113=...=C119>
C121=C122=...=C131=...=C199

>From a tree voting point of view the
idea is that voters can cast short
votes, and that they are offered a
basic structure where they can easily
see the affiliations of each candidate.
(Votes that list candidates from
different branches do break the idea
of seeing easily the power balance
between different branches a bit but
also parts of this benefit(?) can be
maintained.)

This approach may easily get too
complex for such traditional STV
ballot style where all candidates
are explicitly listed. In this case
we would need rows and columns also
for the groups and parties. One
easy approach would be to use code
numbers. A vote could be simple a
list of (maybe hand written) codes,
e.g. "13 63 23" where numbers could
refer also to groupings.

One could have large posters of
candidates instead of listing them
all in the ballot sheets.
02: P1
03: G11
04: C111
05: C112
etc.
(maybe using some nicer graphics :-)

I'll skip the more detailed analysis
of the possible seat allocation
methods for now.

Juho






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Raph Frank
2009-05-05 09:00:05 UTC
Permalink
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 7:08 AM, Juho Laatu <***@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Candidates have a default tree-like
> order of inheritance. Vote C121 will
> be counted as a vote to candidate
> C121, group G12 and party P1. This
> vote has the same meaning as vote
> C121>G12>P1>ANYONE.

One slight issue here is that you need to use an equal ranking version
of PR-STV.

There is no 'standard' version.

My preference is to use a different method of counting for election
and elimination.

Election: Vote is shared between all candidates at current rank
Elimination: Vote is given to each candidate at current rank at full strength

But, (ahem), I digress.

> Vote C121>C211 is the same as vote
> C121>C211>G21>P2>ANYONE. Note that
> I assumed that the last ranked
> candidate determines the order of
> inheritance (unlike in the Maltese
> proposals where the first preference
> determined the party). If the voter
> would like the first preference to
> determine the order of inheritance
> she could vote e.g. C121>C211>G12.

It might be better to just have a default + override method.

> We may allow also not giving any
> support to the party of the last
> ranked candidate. In this case the
> vote could be C211>G21>P2>C111>ANYONE.

I guess it depends on what the rules are.

So the 'ANYONE' choice allows voters to force their rankings to end?

> A bullet vote with no inheritance
> could with this ballot style be e.g.
> C555>ANYONE. Vote C555>C666>ANYONE
> would be a traditional STV vote that
> may become exhausted after C555 and
> C666 have been eliminated (or elected).

It depends on what is the most convenient. Do we automatically assume
that the voters want to expand their vote to include the tree or do we
assume that the would rather bullet vote unless told otherwise.

Also, there is an issue with inheritance between parties. If the
votes are being combined using a PR-STV method, then you might want
your vote

C111

expanded to

C111>G11>P1>PX>PY...

Where party X and Y are parties picked by P1.

> The examples above show what kind of
> votes would be possible in general.

I think this is a a reasonable system. It combines the
convenience/info of a tree system (for those who want that) with the
precision of PR-STV (for those that want that).

> From a
> traditional STV point of view the
> group and party names are actually
> just abbreviations of candidates
> in those groupings.

Right.

> This approach may easily get too
> complex for such traditional STV
> ballot style where all candidates
> are explicitly listed.

It depends on how many candidates are running.

It still suffers from the counting problem if the plan is to have
national level elections.

It would in fact be more complex than PR-STV ballots as there are
additional choices.

I think Adb Lomax's ballot imaging system could resolve this though.

> vote could be simple a
> list of (maybe hand written) codes,
> e.g. "13 63 23" where numbers could
> refer also to groupings.

It might be easier to have the parties allowed to register codes.

In Ireland, all the parties have a 2-3 letter code.

FF -> Fianna Fail
FG -> Fine Gael
Lab -> Labour
GR -> Green Party
SF -> Sine Fein
PD -> Progressive Democrats (dead)

That still runs into the problem of the sub-groups. Ideally, they
should also be simple codes, like

FF-So might be the socialist wing of FF
etc.

Ofc, the exact code matters less if your poster suggestion is used.

> One could have large posters of
> candidates instead of listing them
> all in the ballot sheets.

Right, these could in included in each of the polling booths (with
each party verifying that they are correct in the morning of the
election)
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Juho Laatu
2009-05-05 18:11:52 UTC
Permalink
--- On Tue, 5/5/09, Raph Frank <***@gmail.com> wrote:

> My preference is to use a different method of counting for
> election
> and elimination.
>
> Election: Vote is shared between all candidates at current
> rank
> Elimination: Vote is given to each candidate at current
> rank at full strength

Why only fraction of the vote in the
election case? Doesn't a vote to a
party mean that any candidate of the
party may use it at full strength?
Naturally once someone uses it it is
not available to others at full
strength anymore.

Related observation:
If there are many votes with "direct
inheritance" (e.g. bullet vote C111)
then the counting process may use the
knowledge that this vote will be in
any case inherited by G11 and P1.
We can sum up this kind of votes to P1
from the beginning and allocate seats
to P1 (in top down style as in list
based methods).

> > Vote C121>C211 is the same as vote
> > C121>C211>G21>P2>ANYONE. Note that
> > I assumed that the last ranked
> > candidate determines the order of
> > inheritance (unlike in the Maltese
> > proposals where the first preference
> > determined the party). If the voter
> > would like the first preference to
> > determine the order of inheritance
> > she could vote e.g. C121>C211>G12.
>
> It might be better to just have a default + override
> method.

That was my intention. => By default the
vote will be inherited along the given
tree hierarchy. All voting patterns are
still possible (=override the default).
Simplest syntax for most common votes,
complex syntax for the more uncommon
voting patterns.

> So the  'ANYONE' choice allows voters to force their
> rankings to end?

Yes, that was just my style of indicating
that "no inheritance" means the same as
"inherited by all". Just a natural way
of expressing how some intermediate levels
are skipped. Also other syntaxes could be
used (any good proposals?).

> > A bullet vote with no inheritance
> > could with this ballot style be e.g.
> > C555>ANYONE. Vote C555>C666>ANYONE
> > would be a traditional STV vote that
> > may become exhausted after C555 and
> > C666 have been eliminated (or elected).
>
> It depends on what is the most convenient.  Do we
> automatically assume
> that the voters want to expand their vote to include the
> tree or do we
> assume that the would rather bullet vote unless told
> otherwise.

The basic idea was to develop a syntax
that makes the most voting convenient.
I assumed that political tree-like
thinking is common. For some voters even
bullet votes (with default inheritance)
may be sufficient. Many others might be
happy with ranking some of some of the
closest candidates, e.g. C113>C119>C112,
and leave the remaining fragments of the
vote to their favourite group and party
(G11, P1).

> Also, there is an issue with inheritance between
> parties.  If the
> votes are being combined using a PR-STV method, then you
> might want
> your vote
>
> C111
>
> expanded to
>
> C111>G11>P1>PX>PY...
>
> Where party X and Y are parties picked by P1.

The "tree assumption" includes also option
to use also party coalitions/alliances, e.g.
A1, P12, G123, C1234. This makes it possible
to group parties (e.g. the left wing). Full
ordering as in your example (P1>PX>PY
instead of P1>PX=PY) would require the voter
to write the inheritance order explicitly in
the ballot. Giving the remaining fragments
to the alliance would be easy (even bullet
voting would do that).

> > This approach may easily get too
> > complex for such traditional STV
> > ballot style where all candidates
> > are explicitly listed.
>
> It depends on how many candidates are running.

Yes. My assumption was to prepare for
expanding the number of candidates and
groupings. With less than 10 candidates
the voters may be required to rank so
many of them that the vote will be
"complete enough". If one's favourite
party has 10 subgroups with 10 candidates
each, then listing all of them (or all
relevant of them) to guarantee that the
vote stays within the correct party will
be tedious.

> It still suffers from the counting problem if the plan is
> to have
> national level elections.
>
> It would in fact be more complex than PR-STV ballots as
> there are
> additional choices.

What is the problem that makes this
too complex? The numerous ties do add
complexity but maybe computers can
handle the counting process.

Btw, one way that this approach might
somewhat simplify things is that the
votes could be shorter than in STV.
(There might be such shortening needs
also to keep the votes unidentifiable
(to avoid vote buying and coercion).
Maybe limiting the number of entries
in the ballot could be used in some
cases for this reason.)

> > vote could be simple a
> > list of (maybe hand written) codes,
> > e.g. "13 63 23" where numbers could
> > refer also to groupings.
>
> It might be easier to have the parties allowed to register
> codes.

One factor that influences this choice
is difference between manually written
codes vs. use of voting machines.
Simple (handwritten) numbers may be
easy to read without errors and quick
to write. Mnemonic names are easier to
check after one has filled the ballot.

Juho






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Raph Frank
2009-05-05 18:38:25 UTC
Permalink
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Juho Laatu <***@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Why only fraction of the vote in the
> election case? Doesn't a vote to a
> party mean that any candidate of the
> party may use it at full strength?
> Naturally once someone uses it it is
> not available to others at full
> strength anymore.

It is the standard proposal.

A=B>C

gets effectively converted into

0.5: A>B>C
0.5: B>A>C

IIRC, the reason is that it means that if you vote

A>B>C

and

A=B>C

and A and B are elected, you want the same percentage of your vote to pass to C.

> Btw, one way that this approach might
> somewhat simplify things is that the
> votes could be shorter than in STV.
> (There might be such shortening needs
> also to keep the votes unidentifiable
> (to avoid vote buying and coercion).
> Maybe limiting the number of entries
> in the ballot could be used in some
> cases for this reason.)

Right, but it depends on how many choices there are.

With 100 candidates and PR-STV, you can have potentially 100! different votes.

With 100 candidates, 30 groups and 10 parties and 4 ranks allowed, you
are still looking at around 400 million different combination. (even
if this is still much lower).

Ofc, if most people just pick a candidate and use his list, then there
would be much fewer possibilities.

> One factor that influences this choice
> is difference between manually written
> codes vs. use of voting machines.
> Simple (handwritten) numbers may be
> easy to read without errors and quick
> to write. Mnemonic names are easier to
> check after one has filled the ballot.

True, it is greatly simplified if there is only 1 number/letter per box.

To combine national level candidate based PR with lots of choices is
going to require computer assistance for the count.
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Dan Bishop
2009-05-06 00:24:10 UTC
Permalink
Raph Frank wrote:
> On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 7:11 PM, Juho Laatu <***@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> Why only fraction of the vote in the
>> election case? Doesn't a vote to a
>> party mean that any candidate of the
>> party may use it at full strength?
>> Naturally once someone uses it it is
>> not available to others at full
>> strength anymore.
>>
>
> It is the standard proposal.
>
> A=B>C
>
> gets effectively converted into
>
> 0.5: A>B>C
> 0.5: B>A>C
>
> IIRC, the reason is that it means that if you vote
>
> A>B>C
>
> and
>
> A=B>C
>
> and A and B are elected, you want the same percentage of your vote to pass to C.
>
>
The one thing you haven't mentioned is surpluses. The
symmetric-completion-compatible way of dealing with them is weight the
ballot by the average of the retention fraction for the top-ranked
candidates. For example, given the ballots:

4: A>B
3: A=B
5: C=D

and a quota of 4 votes, we'd have

A elected with 5.5 votes (excess of 1.5) -> retention fraction = 1.5/5.5
= 3/11
B, C, D not met quota -> retention fraction = 1

So the A=B ballots would be weighted by (3/11+1)/2 = 7/11, so the
re-weighted ballots would be:

4*3/11: (A>)B
3*7/11: B
5: C=D

3: B
5: C=D

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Raph Frank
2009-05-06 01:45:14 UTC
Permalink
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 1:24 AM, Dan Bishop <***@gmail.com> wrote:
> The one thing you haven't mentioned is surpluses.  The
> symmetric-completion-compatible way of dealing with them is weight the
> ballot by the average of the retention fraction for the top-ranked
> candidates.  For example, given the ballots:
>
> 4: A>B
> 3: A=B
> 5: C=D
>
> and a quota of 4 votes, we'd have
>
> A elected with 5.5 votes (excess of 1.5) -> retention fraction = 1.5/5.5 =
> 3/11
> B, C, D not met quota -> retention fraction = 1

Right, assuming that voting strength is shared for the election step

4: A>B -> A(4)
3: A=B -> A(1.5) and B(1.5)
5: C=D -> C(2.5) D(2.5)

A: 5.5
B: 1.5
C: 2.5
D: 2.5

> So the A=B ballots would be weighted by (3/11+1)/2 = 7/11, so the
> re-weighted ballots would be:
>
> 4*3/11: (A>)B
> 3*7/11: B
> 5: C=D
>
> 3: B
> 5: C=D

That is kinda what I said:

3) A=B

is replaced by

1.5) A>B
1.5) B<A

1.5*3/11: (A>)B
1.5: B(>A)

gives

7/11*3: B

Ofc, your way works for more than 2 without an explosion of options.

Also, averaging the keep values doesn't keep the A total equal to the
quota. Under Meek, the ballot isn't deweighted, some of the vote
strength is kept and the rest is passed to the next ranking.

However, in this case, it is some kept and the rest passed to the equal ranking.

Effectively with equal ranks,

1/N of the vote strength goes to each of the N equal choices

they keep part of it based on their keep factor

the rest goes to the remaining candidates at that level.

I think this gets applied recursively.

For example, assuming that the keep factors were

A: 0.1
B: 0.3
C: 0.7
D: 1

and the ballot was

(A=B=C)>D

How much vote weight goes to each candidate?

Clearly in 'round 1', they get

A:
Keeps: 0.1*0.33 = 0.033
Passes to 'next' rank: 0.297

Pass gets split in 2 and passed to
0.1485: B>C>D
0.1485: C>B>D

and so on
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Juho Laatu
2009-05-05 22:25:36 UTC
Permalink
--- On Tue, 5/5/09, Raph Frank <***@gmail.com> wrote:

> > Btw, one way that this approach might
> > somewhat simplify things is that the
> > votes could be shorter than in STV.
> > (There might be such shortening needs
> > also to keep the votes unidentifiable
> > (to avoid vote buying and coercion).
> > Maybe limiting the number of entries
> > in the ballot could be used in some
> > cases for this reason.)
>
> Right, but it depends on how many choices there are.
>
> With 100 candidates and PR-STV, you can have potentially
> 100! different votes.
>
> With 100 candidates, 30 groups and 10 parties and 4 ranks
> allowed, you
> are still looking at around 400 million different
> combination. (even
> if this is still much lower).
>
> Ofc, if most people just pick a candidate and use his list,
> then there
> would be much fewer possibilities.

Yes. One may need to go to quite low
numbers if one wants to be sure that
there will be no problems. On the other
hand in most problem cases the vote
must contain also the intended voting
pattern, which means that the part that
identifies the vote will be smaller. If
the vote would e.g. allow only three
codes, then one could try to mark a vote
to candidate C111 by ranking also two
candidates that certainly will not win.
The vote could be e.g. C999>C888>C111.
Pairs of candidates like C999 and C888
might be rare enough to allow some vote
buyer to mark numerous ballots.

The default inheritance rules will help
since also short votes will carry lots
of inheritance information in them.

Number of candidates and size of
districts whose results will be reported
are also important (and existence of
"hopeless" candidates too). I remember
one example from open list elections. A
voter was happy that she voted for her
friend as she said to her since the
results of different voting stations
were published (to her surprise) and
there was only one vote to the candidate
in question from the local voting
station. (=> Also voter privacy needs to
be protected.)

- - -

Some more observations.

- -

Widespread use of the default
inheritance paths means that parties
may nominate more candidates than
before (in STV) and still keep most
of the voting power within the party.
It may also be beneficial to nominate
numerous candidates (like in open
lists today).

- -

The named parties and groups are in
a special position when compared to
groupings that might exist as a result
of many people voting them. E.g. votes
C1>C2>C3>C4 and C2>C3>C1>C5 generate a
group C1+C2+C3 that gets at least two
votes. The tree structure sets some
limits on what kind of groupings may
exist. We may however relax the rules
a bit. One could name also "orthogonal"
groups that consist of candidates of
different branches, e.g. "candidates of
town X" or "all female candidates".
This would make it easier for the
voters (there may be many such voters)
to vote for these groups.

I noted earlier that the seat allocation
rules may also observe votes that will
be inherited by a certain group. This
may make the treatment of named and
non-named groupings somewhat different.

This kind of additional named groupings
will assist the voters. But on the other
hand they will also corrupt the basic
idea of the tree structure (to offer a
clean understandable structure of the
political world to the voters). If the
additional groups are listed only at
some special secondary place they might
not be too confusing.

Actually there could in principle be also
alternative complete hierarchies. If the
primary hierarchy is a typical political
party structure the alternative hierarchy
could be e.g. a geographical structure.
A vote to the candidates of town X could
be inherited by candidates of the
surrounding district. (A candidate could
have a code in more than one hierarchy.)

- -

One of my key points in this discussion
is to demonstrate that there is a space
and continuum of methods between open
lists / trees and STV.

The maximum number of codes per ballot
may vary for various reasons. Value 1
means actually just a basic tree method
(if there is only one hierarchy). Also
small values thus work quite well.
Larger values allow more personalized
votes (a la STV).

The space could cover also closed lists.
It would be a quite straight forward
extension to use one code to refer to
a list of candidate instead of only one.
01: C1
02: C2>C3>C4
A vote to 02 would have a mandatory
order of inheritance. Code 02 could
represent a party that wants to decide
itself which of its candidates will be
elected. (Voters might or might not
agree with this approach.)

This structure could also allow
candidate defined inheritance orders.
Code 02 above could be seen as a vote
to C2 with inheritance as planned by
C2. C2 could have also a different code
that would not include the inheritance
order (to allow voters to either vote
as recommended by C2 or to create their
own order of inheritance). These tricks
may again confuse the voters by giving
lots of new thoughts and patterns to the
voters (instead of relying on the basic
tree structure).

Candidates C3 and C4 might not have any
codes of their own.

- -

This is enough for now. Maybe I'll one
day get also to the alternative seat
allocation methods. :-)

Juho





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Raph Frank
2009-05-05 22:56:34 UTC
Permalink
On Tue, May 5, 2009 at 11:25 PM, Juho Laatu <***@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> The vote could be e.g. C999>C888>C111.
> Pairs of candidates like C999 and C888
> might be rare enough to allow some vote
> buyer to mark numerous ballots.

Ofc, a law banning vote buying might be enough in 99% of cases anyway.
>
> Number of candidates and size of
> districts whose results will be reported
> are also important (and existence of
> "hopeless" candidates too).

Maybe, hopeless candidates could be removed before announcing the results.

Ofc, then you can't use the ballot imaging idea ... or you need some
way of covering the selections.

> Widespread use of the default
> inheritance paths means that parties
> may nominate more candidates than
> before (in STV) and still keep most
> of the voting power within the party.
> It may also be beneficial to nominate
> numerous candidates (like in open
> lists today).

Also, if byelections are determined by looking at the votes in the
election, this also encourages a surplus of candidates.

> One could name also "orthogonal"
> groups that consist of candidates of
> different branches, e.g. "candidates of
> town X" or "all female candidates".

An easy way of achieving this is to allow people to be part of more
than 1 group.

> I noted earlier that the seat allocation
> rules may also observe votes that will
> be inherited by a certain group. This
> may make the treatment of named and
> non-named groupings somewhat different.

What are unnamed groups?

> Actually there could in principle be also
> alternative complete hierarchies.

As always, it is about balancing precision and complexity.

I know in Ireland, a switch to any form of national list would be
promoted on the fact that it would help to weak local "parish pump"
politics.

> Candidates C3 and C4 might not have any
> codes of their own.

This would allow candidates to add names of people who had trouble
with ballot access.
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Juho Laatu
2009-05-06 06:12:07 UTC
Permalink
--- On Wed, 6/5/09, Raph Frank <***@gmail.com> wrote:

> > The vote could be e.g. C999>C888>C111.
> > Pairs of candidates like C999 and C888
> > might be rare enough to allow some vote
> > buyer to mark numerous ballots.
>
> Ofc, a law banning vote buying might be enough in 99% of
> cases anyway.

Yes, that may be enough in most societies.
Societies are different. In some societies
the moral deterrent is enough. Somewhere
else "only fools don't cheat". Coercion
is somewhat more difficult to defend
against than vote buying because often it
takes place behind closed doors. Also
privacy problems have somewhat different
characteristics. But in general, one need
not defend more than what is necessary in
the society in question.

> > Number of candidates and size of
> > districts whose results will be reported
> > are also important (and existence of
> > "hopeless" candidates too).
>
> Maybe, hopeless candidates could be removed before
> announcing the results.
>
> Ofc, then you can't use the ballot imaging idea ... or you
> need some
> way of covering the selections.

Removing hopeless candidates has
problems too. Maybe they themselves want
publicity since they want to grow to
strong candidates. It is possible to set
stricter limits on who can become a
candidate. And one could also give up
all kind of ballot imaging. In STV like
methods this is unfortunately not as
easy as e.g. in Condorcet style methods
where the ballots can often be summed
up to a matrix. Of course also here one
must be careful with the level of
verifiability that the society needs
(i.e. can you trust that the votes will
be counted right or do you need special
arrangements to guarantee that).

> > One could name also "orthogonal"
> > groups that consist of candidates of
> > different branches, e.g. "candidates of
> > town X" or "all female candidates".
>
> An easy way of achieving this is to allow people to be part
> of more
> than 1 group.

Yes. But I'd like to keep the primary
tree hierarchy as clean and simple as
possible to make it easy for all voters
to understand the basic structure of
the political space and to make voting
easy (and to some extent to tie the
candidates to something concrete, to
avoid vote fishing with artificial
additional lists). I.e. careful
consideration needed to determine how
easy it will be to add more groupings
and candidates.

> > I noted earlier that the seat allocation
> > rules may also observe votes that will
> > be inherited by a certain group. This
> > may make the treatment of named and
> > non-named groupings somewhat different.
>
> What are unnamed groups?

If we have lots of votes where some set
of candidates (e.g. C1, C2, C3) are the
first three candidates then it could
have been beneficial for these three
candidates to name themselves as a
group or a party (if the seat allocation
rules give some reason to this). The
number of different subsets of candidates
is huge, so we can afford to check only
some of them (in this case the named
ones) during the seat allocation process.

A related point:
You mentioned that votes 10: A=B can be
seen as two sets of votes, 5: A>B and
5: B>A. If the quota is 8 then we neither
A nor B can be elected yet. But if A and B
form a party of two candidates, then the
seat allocation algorithm could see that
together they actually have more than one
quota of votes, and as a result one of them
can be elected. (The A=B voters might vote
for the party code.) Unnamed groupings
would not be handled the same way (since
there are too many of them to check all of
them). (This is why I earlier commented
that it would be possible to see both A
and B to have full support of all the 10
votes.) It is another question if one
should flip a coin and decide between A
and B right away or to wait for some others
to be eliminated (and votes transferred)
before doing so. I note that your interest
to keep the elimination rules different
from the election rules are related. Note
that the hierarchy allows also conclusions
like vote C111>G11=G12 to contribute to the
total sum of party P1 support - although the
vote contains also strict preferences, not
only ties between all the listed codes.
(I used term "direct inheritance" in some of
the earlier mails to describe this kind of
votes.)

> I know in Ireland, a switch to any form of national list
> would be
> promoted on the fact that it would help to weak local
> "parish pump"
> politics.

Would use of larger districts alleviate
the problem? I guess also here we need a
balance between guaranteeing nation wide
local representation and keeping the
thoughts on nation wide questions.

(One radical approach (not necessarily
a good one) would be to allow voters to
vote any candidate in the whole country
but still use a seat allocation
algorithm that forces regional
proportionality.)

> > Candidates C3 and C4 might not have any
> > codes of their own.
>
> This would allow candidates to add names of people who had
> trouble
> with ballot access.

Yes. There have to be some rules that set
limits to who can nominate candidates and
how many candidates (and groupings) one
can nominate. My rough thinking is that
there should maybe be a reasonable chance
of each nominated candidate to become
elected either in these or in the next
elections. Additional rules are needed for
use of orthogonal groupings, number of
hierarchical levels etc. The system may
also force use of levels (some parties
might prefer to use closed lists or not
to create any divisions within the party).
Rules could allow any group of nominated
candidates to declare themselves as a
grouping (no permission needed from the
party) etc. This battle is a bit like the
battle of constituency sizes. Maybe we
just need some common agreement on what the
target levels are and then monitor and
adjust the rules as needed.

Juho






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Raph Frank
2009-05-06 10:06:09 UTC
Permalink
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 7:12 AM, Juho Laatu <***@yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> A related point:
> You mentioned that votes 10: A=B can be
> seen as two sets of votes, 5: A>B and
> 5: B>A. If the quota is 8 then we neither
> A nor B can be elected yet.

This isn't an issue, as soon as one or other of them is eliminated,
then the other will be elected.

The election and elimination vote would be something like:

Election:
5: A>B
5: B>A

A: 5
B: 5
=> neither elected

Elimination
10: A=B
A: 10
B: 10

This means that they get full strength to protect against elimination,
but the election step requires that the candidate wins even if the
vote is shared.

> It is another question if one
> should flip a coin and decide between A
> and B right away or to wait for some others
> to be eliminated

My method would be to wait.

> Would use of larger districts alleviate
> the problem? I guess also here we need a
> balance between guaranteeing nation wide
> local representation and keeping the
> thoughts on nation wide questions.

The larger the constituencies the weaker the local link, but only up to a point.

A candidate could run as a local candidate, even if his 'local' area
is only part of the constituency.

Again, the larger constituencies allow voters who want to vote local
to do so, without requiring all the other voters to do so.

> (One radical approach (not necessarily
> a good one) would be to allow voters to
> vote any candidate in the whole country
> but still use a seat allocation
> algorithm that forces regional
> proportionality.)

I am not sure what you mean here. If I vote for someone who lives
'far away', where do they count as being elected from?
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Kristofer Munsterhjelm
2009-05-06 11:44:01 UTC
Permalink
>> Ofc, then you can't use the ballot imaging idea ... or you
>> > need some
>> > way of covering the selections.
>
> Removing hopeless candidates has
> problems too. Maybe they themselves want
> publicity since they want to grow to
> strong candidates. It is possible to set
> stricter limits on who can become a
> candidate. And one could also give up
> all kind of ballot imaging. In STV like
> methods this is unfortunately not as
> easy as e.g. in Condorcet style methods
> where the ballots can often be summed
> up to a matrix. Of course also here one
> must be careful with the level of
> verifiability that the society needs
> (i.e. can you trust that the votes will
> be counted right or do you need special
> arrangements to guarantee that).

I may have suggested this before, but the balloting results could be
censored. Turn the rank ballot data into a tree. At any time the leaf
with the least value has less than, say, 10 ballots, snip the branch there.

For instance,

100: A > B > C > D > E
1: A > C > B > D > E (vote-seller)
1: A > C > E > B > D (vote-seller)
100: A > C > D > B > E

The tree is

201: A
100: A > B
100: A > B > C > D > E
101: A > C
It would now be
100: A > C > D > B > E
1: A > C > B > D > E
1: A > C > E > B > D
but because of the rule, is instead
100: A > C > D > B > E
2: A > C > *** (elided)

There's still some information leakage. For instance, if there had been
just one vote-seller, the elided information:
100: A > C > D > B > E
1: A > C > ***

would have been just as good a proof to the vote-buyer - or nearly so,
since it could have been just an individualist voting A > C > then some
other order.

>> I know in Ireland, a switch to any form of national list
>> would be
>> promoted on the fact that it would help to weak local
>> "parish pump"
>> politics.
>
> Would use of larger districts alleviate
> the problem? I guess also here we need a
> balance between guaranteeing nation wide
> local representation and keeping the
> thoughts on nation wide questions.
>
> (One radical approach (not necessarily
> a good one) would be to allow voters to
> vote any candidate in the whole country
> but still use a seat allocation
> algorithm that forces regional
> proportionality.)

Another approach, which would be party-based, would be where the voters
vote for local candidates, and the system completes the ballot by
ranking all other candidates of that party ahead of the rest. So if X1,
X2, X3 are local candidates for X, and there are 100 X candidates globally,

X2 > X1 > X3

expands to

X2 > X1 > X3 > X4 > ... > X100 > (rest equal-ranked).

Perhaps also,

X2 > X1 > A1 > X3

gets resolved to

X2 > X1 > A1 > ... > A50 > X3 > ... > X100 (but it's uncertain if that
would be a good thing).

If you do something like this, it would be relatively easy to have
"fluid districts", where everybody that's within a certain distance of
the polling place gets on the local ballot, unless that would clutter it
unduly.
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Raph Frank
2009-05-06 12:30:09 UTC
Permalink
On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 12:44 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<km-***@broadpark.no> wrote:
> There's still some information leakage. For instance, if there had been just
> one vote-seller, the elided information:
> 100: A > C > D > B > E
> 1: A > C > ***

You could require that each row has at least 50 votes.

If there is only 1 vote seller, then it isn't really that big an issue.

The row with the fewest votes would be combined with another row. I
am not sure how to do that fairly.

Would it be acceptable with the above to just convert it to

101: A>C>D>B>E

In effect, your vote is added to the row which matches the N highest
ranks, where N is the highest possible.

Alternatively, the rule could be that there will be a guaranteed slot
for bullet voting for each candidate, all other rows require at least
100 votes to be activated.

Thus the above would be converted to

100: A>C>D>B>E
1: A


> Another approach, which would be party-based, would be where the voters vote
> for local candidates, and the system completes the ballot by ranking all
> other candidates of that party ahead of the rest.

Right, this is party list with override, but restricted to local candidates.

> If you do something like this, it would be relatively easy to have "fluid
> districts", where everybody that's within a certain distance of the polling
> place gets on the local ballot, unless that would clutter it unduly.

Right, assuming the problem of recording so many ballots is resolved.

In principle, each candidate could be given a code, but there is also
a method to get ballot access on a polling station by polling station
basis.
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Graham Bignell
2009-05-07 15:09:34 UTC
Permalink
This is one of the more amusing editorials about the proposal...
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/05/07/national-post-editorial-board-first-egghead-past-the-post-wins-b-c-s-referendum.aspx

"One sign that a society is running out of real problems is that bored
upper-middle-class types start inventing phony ones. Thus do we
periodically get initiatives aimed at replacing our perfectly
functional first-past-the-post electoral system with some hybrid
alternative that few understand or support. In Ontario, this
alternative — soundly rejected at the polls in 2007 — was called
mixed-member proportional representation. In British Columbia, it’s
called the “Single Transferable Vote.”"

...
Graham
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Raph Frank
2009-05-07 15:18:51 UTC
Permalink
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Graham Bignell <***@gmail.com> wrote:
> ... soundly rejected at the polls in 2007 ....

Huh, didn't it get majority support (within a few percent of the
supermajority required)? :)

Many parties would like to be "soundly rejected" like that.
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Graham Bignell
2009-05-07 15:29:07 UTC
Permalink
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 11:18 AM, Raph Frank <***@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Graham Bignell <***@gmail.com> wrote:
>> ... soundly rejected at the polls in 2007 ....
> Huh, didn't it get majority support (within a few percent of the
> supermajority required)? :)
> Many parties would like to be "soundly rejected" like that.

I think it was 36.8 for, 63.2 against. This is a good collection of
people's thoughts around the issue at the time:
http://www.cbc.ca/ontariovotes2007//MT/2007/09/how_do_you_feel_about_a_new_vo.html

...
Graham
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Jonathan Lundell
2009-05-07 15:35:22 UTC
Permalink
On May 7, 2009, at 8:18 AM, Raph Frank wrote:

> On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 4:09 PM, Graham Bignell <***@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> ... soundly rejected at the polls in 2007 ....
>
> Huh, didn't it get majority support (within a few percent of the
> supermajority required)? :)
>
> Many parties would like to be "soundly rejected" like that.

There's a confusion here between BC and Ontario.
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Graham Bignell
2009-05-07 15:37:39 UTC
Permalink
On Thu, May 7, 2009 at 11:35 AM, Jonathan Lundell <***@pobox.com> wrote:

> There's a confusion here between BC and Ontario.

Ack, sorry, the editorial also mentions Ontario's "MMP" choice.

...
Graham
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James Gilmour
2009-05-09 10:19:58 UTC
Permalink
Graham Bignell > Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 4:10 PM
> This is one of the more amusing editorials about the proposal...
>
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/05/07/national-post-editorial-board-first-egghead-past-the-post-wi
ns-b-c-s-referendum.aspx
>
> "One sign that a society is running out of real problems is
> that bored upper-middle-class types start inventing phony
> ones. Thus do we periodically get initiatives aimed at
> replacing our perfectly functional first-past-the-post
> electoral system with some hybrid alternative that few
> understand or support. In Ontario, this alternative — soundly
> rejected at the polls in 2007 — was called mixed-member
> proportional representation. In British Columbia, it’s called
> the “Single Transferable Vote.”"

It may be amusing to those not directly involved, but the sneering "intellectual" who wrote that editorial could hardly have got it
more wrong. Far from being a phony problem, reform of a defective voting system is fundamental to the health of representative
democracy. The voting system defines and determines the relationship between the voters and the elected representatives. That in
turn, determines the relationship between the elected members and their parties, and it also determines the relationship between the
elected members in the assembly (city council, state legislature, parliament) and the executive (government).

The voting system determines the balance of power and accountability of the elected members as between the voters and the political
parties that nominate most of the candidates. Some voting systems make the elected members much more accountable to their parties
than to their voters. Some other voting systems shift that balance, to a greater or lesser extent, in favour of the voters.
Correcting that balance is a real problem for society, not a phony one. Those who pretend otherwise have often got partisan reasons
for opposing reform and trying to obscure this reality.

If it were not so serious, it would certainly be amusing to see first-past-the-post described as "perfectly functional". I can only
presume that the writer of that editorial had not looked at the results of the FPTP elections in British Columbia or Canada over the
years. BC, the other Canadian Provinces and Canada federally, all operate what is supposed to be (claimed to be) a "representative
democracy". So the first requirement of the voting system is to ensure that the various elected assemblies are properly
representative of those who voted. On that, FPTP signally fails to deliver. And of course, in partisan elections, FPTP also makes
the elected members much more accountable to their parties than to the local voters.

James Gilmour

No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG - www.avg.com
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James Gilmour
2009-05-10 23:06:09 UTC
Permalink
Apologies if you have already seen this message, but it appears to have got the website but has not been posted out - at least it
never came to me, nor did Kristofer's message that followed it on a completely different topic.
JG



Graham Bignell > Sent: Thursday, May 07, 2009 4:10 PM
> This is one of the more amusing editorials about the proposal...
>
http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/05/07/national-post-editorial-board-first-egghead-past-the-post-wi
ns-b-c-s-referendum.aspx
>
> "One sign that a society is running out of real problems is
> that bored upper-middle-class types start inventing phony
> ones. Thus do we periodically get initiatives aimed at
> replacing our perfectly functional first-past-the-post
> electoral system with some hybrid alternative that few
> understand or support. In Ontario, this alternative - soundly
> rejected at the polls in 2007 - was called mixed-member
> proportional representation. In British Columbia, it's called
> the "Single Transferable Vote.""

It may be amusing to those not directly involved, but the sneering "intellectual" who wrote that editorial could hardly have got it
more wrong. Far from being a phony problem, reform of a defective voting system is fundamental to the health of representative
democracy. The voting system defines and determines the relationship between the voters and the elected representatives. That in
turn, determines the relationship between the elected members and their parties, and it also determines the relationship between the
elected members in the assembly (city council, state legislature, parliament) and the executive (government).

The voting system determines the balance of power and accountability of the elected members as between the voters and the political
parties that nominate most of the candidates. Some voting systems make the elected members much more accountable to their parties
than to their voters. Some other voting systems shift that balance, to a greater or lesser extent, in favour of the voters.
Correcting that balance is a real problem for society, not a phony one. Those who pretend otherwise have often got partisan reasons
for opposing reform and trying to obscure this reality.

If it were not so serious, it would certainly be amusing to see first-past-the-post described as "perfectly functional". I can only
presume that the writer of that editorial had not looked at the results of the FPTP elections in British Columbia or Canada over the
years. BC, the other Canadian Provinces and Canada federally, all operate what is supposed to be (claimed to be) a "representative
democracy". So the first requirement of the voting system is to ensure that the various elected assemblies are properly
representative of those who voted. On that, FPTP signally fails to deliver. And of course, in partisan elections, FPTP also makes
the elected members much more accountable to their parties than to the local voters.

James Gilmour



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