Raph Frank wrote:
On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 8:03 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
As for fairness, consider the case where more than "just enough" voters
voted for candidate X. With your "you either get full strength or no
strength" scheme, some voters are going to look at the result and say "hey,
my vote wasn't required yet I have no power. This means my vote was wasted,
so I'm going to be more careful later".
With a result like
A: 40%
B: 30%
C: 20%
D: 10%
Each voter for A could still be weighted as
(VA - VB)/VA = (40-30)/40 = 0.25
as only 75% of each of their votes was required to win the constituency.
Under plurality, you don't even need a majority, you just need to beat
the 2nd best candidate.
That could work, since additional votes for A increase the weighting,
meaning that a vote for A isn't wasted even if A wins.
I can see two points of view here. The first is that they got more than
their share by the extent that they were less than a majority, and the
second is that they got more than their share by the extent that they didn't
represent every voter. In either case, I think that there should be a
continuous function, but the point of view matters when considering how much
power should be retained in contrast to those who didn't get anything at all
(that is, whose candidate lost).
I don't think there is a really a way to square this. If a party had
51% of every constituency, they could guarantee that they win 100% of
the seats.
Let's look at that case, with two parties. Call them A and B. A wins 51%
of every constituency, and that this amounts to 51 votes (thousand
votes, whatever) out of 100. Then if there are as many top-up seats as
there are ordinary seats, nearly all of the latter should go to B. Since
there are two parties, by the reweighting above, the A voters would have
strength (51-49)/51 = about 0.04. If there are 90 constituencies and
thus 90 list seats, and all the A voters vote for A, nationally, as
well, they'll have 51 * 90 * 0.04 = 183.60 votes worth. Meanwhile, the B
voters have 49 * 90 = 4410 votes worth. The total is 183.60+4410 =
4593.60, so A gets round(p * 183.60/4593.60) and B gets round(p *
4410/4593.60) with p chosen so that the sum is 90. This turns out to be
p = 90, A gets 4 seats and B gets 86 seats.
In total, A has 94 seats and B has 90. 94 out of 180 is 51.1% which
isn't too bad, considering A had 51% support everywhere.
So reweighting seems to work, at least in this case. If there are fewer
top-up seats than constituency seats, the equation would have to be
adjusted.
I think maybe my issue is that constituencies which elect party
candidates are 'playing fair'. The candidate that they elected gets
added to the party total and thus has an effect on the national level
seats. A constituency which elects an independent elects an
independent, but that has no effect on the number of seats affecting
each party and yet they still get to decide how the party
proportionality is decided. This ensures national proportionality and
then they get to add their independent representative on top of that.
This shifts the legislature in the direction of the constituency in
question.
Instead of a party point of view, how about an opinion point of view?
The voters for independents also have opinions, and so their opinion
should affect the national level (as it would explicitly if this was a
national election). As mentioned earlier, the voters that vote for an
independent would probably vote for the party closest to the point of
view of that independent if they have to vote for a party. As such, the
shift in national influence is not an artifact, since the voters do have
the corresponding opinion. With a good normalization system (reweighting
or quota-based), the shift won't be very large if the independent
actually got elected, but it'll exist -- ideally to the extent that
there was a surplus.
Looking at it again, the point of view that it should be with respect to
100% is probably better than the one that it should be with respect to a
majority. Consider the case where's there unanimity towards which candidate
should win. Then I think the right way to treat that is as if no votes had
been cast at all, rather than to give those who unanimously decided to elect
the constituency candidate double power in contrast to those who did not
vote (or a hypothetical voter that'd only vote in the national election, if
that was possible).
Right, to allow them participate in the national vote would give them
double power.
However, it depends on how many additional seats are being used. If
1/3 of the seats were national seats, then their votes should still be
counted but at a reduced weighting.
The voters in each constituency elect 1 and 1/3 of the seats, that
means that if a district elects an independent locally, then their
votes should count but with a weight of 1/4 of the votes in other
constituencies.
Seems that we're converging on a reweighting, but from different directions.
If you run the national and local election as a single STV election, I think
you could get the result where many national candidates get a quota and
"outcrowd" the various regional candidates, even if those got close to a
quota. The problem here is that a "local plus national" election has a
subset constraint (on number of local and national candidates) which a plain
STV election doesn't have.
As long as the quota per seat is the same, then it should be OK. In
effect, you are just moving around votes.
Probably the easiest way to work it is to use the Hare quota
(technically slightly lower than the Hare quota) if you are using
PR-STV locally.
However, that is relatively minor as independents can be expected to
hit the quota in multi-seat constituencies and thus PR-STV + MMP for
rebalancing at the national level can be implemented without major
issues.
Or to put it differently, in a general case. Say that you have a situation
where there are n seats and n/3 top-up seats. In a district, less than 2/3
vote for any candidate (for example, there are ten nearly evenly matched
candidates). Nobody votes party-line. Who gets the seat? If the system can't
ensure that a candidate from the district in question gets the seat, then by
pigeonhole, either a national candidate or a candidate from another district
gets it, which is quite undesirable.
I would give it to the plurality winner (or other single seat rule
winner) for the district. If nobody has voted for a party, then there
is no issue with those voters getting more power than they are
entitled to.
I guess I should be more precise. What I meant was that the voters do
not vote strictly according to any party's wishes on the constituency
ballot. They do, however, vote for various (different) parties on the
list ballot. If no candidate has a 2/3 majority in the constituency,
that constituency still has to elect a candidate. Okay, that's fair
enough. But now you can't use quota-based adjustment, since neither of
the candidates met the quota, so it seems your adjustment must be based
on the votes cast, or on relative support. In ordinary STV, you could
just eliminate all the candidates, but the district constraint prevents
that.
Alternatively, independents might be allowed to register as mini-parties.
They could be allowed to appear on the party ballots in 2-3 nearby
constituencies. As long as their 'party' receives 1 seat's worth of
votes,
then they are entitled to be elected in their constituency.
That's interesting. What would happen if it got more than one seat's worth?
I assume that is possible, because otherwise, the "party" would have to be
limited to only one constituency, in which case the top-up aspect would fail
to work.
I guess the candidate could specify a party for overflow votes, i.e.
excess votes if he gets more than 1 seat's worth or all the votes if
he doesn't get enough for a seat. In principle, he might get elected
on his own party list as one of the top-up seats ... though that might
be going to far.
Anyway, I guess my concern is shown by the decoy list strategy.
Fundamentally, MMP allows an independent to get a seat while not
having enough votes to be entitled to that seat. This leads to
potential abuse or just unfairness.
Is that, in your opinion, a problem inherent to single-winner methods,
or just to MMP as it's usually employed? If the latter, then it seems
that the right way to compensate is to increase the representation of
everyone else. You can't rob the independent of his only seat (he would
then have no representation at all), so you're just left with increasing
the relative power of the others or of their voters.
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