Tony Simmons writes:
'Perhaps the trick is to let the voters create their own districts.' [Rather than geography- or party- defined partitioning of the electorate] 'it might be better to think of "consituencies"'. 'The obvious way to allow voters to define their own constituencies is with something like STV, which allows voters to group themselves through the act of voting itself.' I think Tony's idea is good but the last quoted sentence misleadingly summarizes the proposal for implementing the idea. In fact, the potential 'constituencies' are actually defined not by the individual voters but by the individual CANDIDATES (i.e., by where THEY happen to live). Also, use of STV rather than some other method has nothing to do with the essence of the proposal. Any desired method for choosing multiple winners - my favorite would be PAV - could be used. Further, one could dispense with the proposed geographic criteria for shortening each voter's ballot. In my opinion these criteria are needlessly restrictive and overly elaborate. Why not instead use a single long ballot? - but one that lists all candidates by place of residence in a recognizable geographic order (e.g., by counties or by other recognized small zones, possibly even derived from a recent prior geography-based districting scheme). Then each voter could, to the extent desired, factor in candidates' geographic proximity. In particular, a voter who really wants a short proximity-based ballot (comprising just the nearby-residing candidates) could readily find the part(s) of the full ballot that really interest him. For that matter, as balloting gets computerized, a presented ballot could come with an indexing of the candidates in terms of place of residence, political party, and maybe also each of several other attributes of interest. Joe Weinstein Long Beach CA USA _________________________________________________________________ Send and receive Hotmail on your mobile device: http://mobile.msn.com
