http://www.environ.ie/elections/howelect.html Ireland's STV algorithm that elects members to the European Parliament calculates the transfer value for the transferring of papers away from winners, as the smaller of 1, and the surplus divided by the wieght of the transferrable papers. This way of calculating the transfer value of course results in less wasted votes. In my opinion this is the less usual way, and this way is also better. My opinion is that the wastage of votes is much too high still even after the Irish fix, and it should be increased so much that there would be a resulting increased wasting of votes in the transferring away from losers, but that may require pulling the transfer value out of STV altogether which is not something that people have an imagination for. It is worth noting that the page makes it clear that the transfer value is clipped back to 1 (and if that were not done, then some quite alarming examples can be constructed showing that the transfer value should not exceed 1). [The Multiwinner Approval Vote of Mike Ossipoff has the defect that the transfer value can rise much above 1, which would doubtless prevent the method becoming much favoured.] The Australian Senate uses the larger denominator. Ref (5) of Appendix A of: http://www.aec.gov.au/pubs/electoral_systems.htm Few would copy the Australians without careful checking. ----------------- A numerical check on the howelect.html page that shows a 1994 election in Ireland for people to stand for the European Parliament http://www.election.demon.co.uk/ep1994.html The quota is 139,967, and Rev. I.R.K. Paisley exceeded the quota in the first stage with a surplus of 23,279. There were 17 candidates. The sum of the papers transferred away is only 22273. Maybe the candidate's transfer value was 1, and there were 1006 (=23,279- 22,273) votes that had a 1st preference for that candidate and no 2nd preference. By simply using ordinary STV there seemingly would have been a difficult to argue for wastage of 0.087% of the popular vote. 75+524+39+219+55+5+25+306+36+44+10+56+16082+4717+80 = 22273 Here is an article by James Connelly that describes the smaller denominator transfer value but which fails to mention that it is truncated back to 1 if it exceeds that: http://www.solent.ac.uk/socsci/jc/voting/stv.html -------------------- The LWVWA has a significant PDF document on voting systems and social aims and methods. The report has comments on the Limited Vote and so on. The report takes a rather 'high altitude' view. An Evaluation of Major Election Methods And Selected State Election Laws, Fall 2000, By The League of Women Voters of Washington Education Fund http://www.lwvwa.org/election/ http://www.lwvwa.org/election/emstudy.pdf The CVD might have tweaked the STV method renamed it, given it a brandname. As far as I can tell, the Choice Vote method is tweaked (? data?) and the CVD is dominated by men. If all possible interests of election method selectors who select STV variants are partitioned, then they could be classified like this: * STV variants that male councillors favour * STV variants that are not favoured by male councillors Then a next step here is to note that councillors that are not male councillors tend to be women councillors. It just seems to be that the brick layers that created the Choice Vote have some freedom to tweak the method. It can be speculated that the criteria might be the production of a Choice Vote method that they favour, i.e. one that is just what is needed. Above in this text there is described two different ways to calculate the transfer value. Another tweak option is Hare vs. Droop, and another is that quotas that vary with stages, and there is sure to be more. They are political in that the name of the candidate and party is not actually written into the counting method. I have never actually seen the wording of a CVD Choice Vote method. A real need is for some group to post in the Choice Method. At the least, we want to see if it changes over the years. Maybe the use of a fairer Irish method that wastes less of the intent of voters is opposed unacceptable to one of, but not both of, the CVD and the Women's League of Washington. Probably most subscribers will have a lot of trouble sustaining an interest in this. Can the women plainly rule out tweaking for a purpose of favouring women?. --------------------------- The report takes a bit of small stand against the tweaking of vote data. Methods seem to be safe. [This is maybe more advanced than the LWV women felt competent to set restrictions onto] "Safeguards from Fraud There seems to be a very strong public trust in the veracity of our election system. Yet there are remarkably few investigations made which could provide assurance that security of the ballot box is as solid as most voters would like to believe. The trend from poll voting to mail voting removes more of the process from public view. The need for knowledgeable observers is great." Jimmy Carter once said he must have seen all possible types of electoral fraud in his own state of Georgia. ['seen them all' or something]. They must be strongly stressed to get high tech and shift the fraud into the method. Old attempts to write fraudulent vote mis-counting hardware wasn't a huge success in USA. No comment on the CVD (minimal interest). A danger could be that after electoral reformers move in and the possibilities for altering STV become restricted. Do women regard it more in their interests to waste votes transferred away from winners?, or from losers?. The latter option seems right. Just what data indicates for unusual/new/female candidates is not known. It would vary from place to place, and there might not be enough interest. I'd prefer to carefully avoid use of real data, but we should know if the bias directions indicated by self-interest of minor groups, and by strict mathematical principle, agree or diverge. --------------------------- Correction I withdraw my allegation that the Washington Women's League is intending to violate Article 25 (b) on the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. I have no evidence for this new stand, and nearly entirely none for the original allegation that was in the subject field of a message I sent to this EM list.
