Joe Weinstein wrote and Alex responded: >>usual PR presumes that voters want to be proportionally >>represented ONLY according to political party, not other criteria, >>including geographic proximity. > >Good point about geographical concerns. In a bicameral state legislature >it would be reasonable to elect one house by PR and the other with single- >member districts. We can debate which house of the legislature should be >elected by PR, but I think the basic idea is reasonable.
This is a reasonable way to do things. You could even guarantee proportionality across the state as a whole by having the PR house simply balance the total representatives in both houses to match total proportionality of the votes. So if a state is split fifty-fifty between Democrats and Republicans in overall voting, but Gerrymandering has made the single-district legislature 70% Democrats, then the Republicans will get 70% of the seats in the PR house to compensate. This is roughly how Germany does things, right? This approach forces us to use a party list version of PR in the other house. This isn't really a flaw, except it can raise some interesting/confounding implementation questions. If you use open list PR, then do you allow candidates to run in the general list and in individual districts? If not, it creates a tricky strategic question for the candidates. If you use closed list, do you have the voters vote for lists at all, or do you just use the results of the district elections to find proportionality? I'd suggest open list, and letting candidates run for both houses. If they win their district election, they are withdrawn from the general race. This way the parties have as little control over the candidates as possible, thus diffusing the potential for extreme party discipline in the legislature. This class of methods is still somewhat vulnerable to Gerrymandering, however. The party in control of districting can engineer a small but consistent majority in one house, thus virtually insuring at least a split of the government. For this reason I consider this only a partial solution. >Also, I think PR >should stick to districts of 5 or 6 members, rather than operating state- >wide, to keep the district sizes half-way reasonable. Whether this is necessary really depends on the election method. If the election is done using open party list, then voting is very simple no matter how many candidates there are. There's a balance that needs to be struck between simplicity and proportionality. The smaller the district, the less proportional it becomes. Five or six seats seems like the bare minimum to insure good proportionality. Looking at Malta's elections shows what a dismal failure proportionality can be with less seats per district than that. On the other hand, Australia has 15-seat districts with 5 parties where 95% of voters just use the shorthand method and vote a party line, since voting for all the candidates is such a pain in the butt. The voting method figures prominently here. In closed list, the number of seats in the district is totally irrelevant. In open list, a large district is still very manageable. In PAV, on the other hand, large districts get unwieldy pretty quickly. In STV (or proportional Condorcet Voting if that works) they gets unwieldy even faster, since you have to actually order the candidates, not just check them off. >>Also by the way, we would get much better 'PR' using PAV applied to >>individual candidates, not parties. > >I agree that PAV would provide excellent proportionality while keeping the >scrutiny on individual candidates. However, as I understand it, PAV >requires keeping 2^n tallies when there are n candidates. In CA there are >normally 7 parties on the ballot. If we had 5-member districts that could >lead to 35 candidates, or 2^35 = 34 billion tallies. The Florida fiasco >shows that ballot counting matters, and should be a criterion when >evaluating election methods of an sort. > >(IF I MISUNDERSTAND THE IMPLEMENTATION OF PAV KINDLY CORRECT ME AND I WILL >WITHDRAW MY CRITICISM.) Your criticism is accurate. Any non-summable system, such as STV or PAV, gets huge numbers of tallies with large numbers of candidates. Yet Australia uses 15-member districts with STV... and those who don't vote a party line have to rank around 75 candidates! The number of possible ballots is 75 factorial, which is a bigger number than any computer could handle, really. If anyone has information on how Australia tallies these elections, it could be interesting. Presumably they count the votes the same way a person would... only considering the top vote at any given time. PAV cannot be simplified this way, since it considers all the votes of any ballot at once. Furthermore, all the ballots need to be considered at once to evaluate a potential slate of elected candidates. So a fairly powerful computer is needed to tally the results. Still, 34 billion (34 thousand million) ballot counts is not an impossibly large number. But in a 75 candidate district, you get around, oh, 38 septillion (38 thousand million million million) ballot counts, which _is_ more or less an impossibly large number. If you want to simplify PAV implementation, you could restrict the voters to voting for candidates on one party list only. Their votes would be counted as single votes for their party in a closed party list election, and the group of candidates from each party list chosen to fill the seats assigned to the party would be determined by PAV elections within the party list. This is a sort of open list/PAV hybrid. The advantages it has over PAV are simplicity for the voter and for the counting of results, and that Webster's allocation method can be used for the party lists if desired. One last note on this subject. From the voter's perspective, there are lots of clever methods we can dream up to make voting in large-candidate districts easier. I posted a while back about a scheme where STV voters could vote for candidates and lists of candidates in any mix. If you have touch-screen ballots (growing in popularity in places like Florida) then PAV could be easily implemented... for example, "touch this box to highlight the following ten candidates, and touch any candidate to highlight or un-highlight him/her." >To keep the counting simple while keeping the scrutiny on individuals, I >am intrigued by Cumulative Voting. STV, with n! tallies, is clearly out >of the question. Some party list systems may also have potential. If the most simple system is called for, then I would go for open party list. I think this does better on proportionality than cumulative voting, and it is even easier for the voter (just vote for your favorite candidate). -Adam
