12/16/02 - Re: Optimal methods for multimember elections: Hi Doug,
The optimal method may not be a method that you can sell to your contact pushing for districting nor to the public. What I am going to do here is to present a series of stages, each an improvement over the one before. It will be up to you to decide which stage to propose. Stage One: Going to single-seat districts can be regarded as an slight improvement over Plurality-at-Large. It is possible that a few new faces will be elected, depending on how the districts are arranged, but don't count on it. If your jurisdiction has a large faction that is able to currently elect every member, or at least a conclusive majority, it will be this same faction that will be gerrymandering the districts. Stage Two: Try to have the districts be two seat districts. This will be a big improvement over single-seat districts. Two-seat districts have been used in America for many years, Vermont and Washington states come to mind, so it is not something new I am asking you to try. Washington state runs two separate single-seat elections using two separate fields of candidates. At first you may think that the majority in a district will be able to elect both seats, this is not necessarily so. Not all people belong to one leading faction or the other, the voters will more likely be divided: 45% A, 40% B, and 15% independent voters, or otherwise known as `Swing Voters". These swing voters will give the election a measure of proportionality. I love these swing voters who will vote for the best A candidate with one vote and then vote for the best B candidate with their other vote. This can result in electing both an A candidate and a B candidate in the same district - much improved proportionality. Stage Three: Electing Two Seats from One Field of Candidates: Same number and size of districts as in Stage Two and the voter will still have two votes, but now the votes can be cast for any two candidates running in the district. Top two candidates are the winners. Vermont elects some of its House members this way. This stage has the same improvement of stage two plus this stage also allows the voter to elect the best two candidates in the district. In stage two the voter could only vote for one of the best if the best two were both in the same race. And, it follows that only one of the best could be elected, so, stage three is an improvement over stage two. Stage Four: The improvement in this stage is to give the voter only one vote in the two seat district. This one vote per voter will assures that a majority faction of fifty plus one will only be able to elect one seat, their fair share. The second seat will go to the next largest faction in the district. One vote per person is known as Single Non-Transferrable Vote (SNTV), which is regarded as a proportional representation method. It is also a step to the next stage. Stage Five: In this stage we allow the voter to rank his one vote, that is, he makes choices, one-two-three. We then eliminate the lowest candidate and transfer all his votes according to the next choices on the ballots he received. We keep eliminating each new lowest candidate until we only have two candidates remaining - these two are the winners. Doing this routine of runoffs allows the voters of the eliminated candidates to have a say in who the final two candidates are to be. A higher percentage of the votes will end up on the last two candidates. This is a method know as Bottoms Up (Alternative Vote/IRV for multi-seat elections). In the event one candidate has fifty percent of the vote in this two seat election, we can say he has his limit, his quota. The word `quota' means a proportional share of the whole. In the context of an election, that means total votes divided by the number of seats. This is not to say that candidates need a quota to be elected, most elected candidates will have less than a quota, but what about a candidate that has more than a quota, like sixty percent in a two seat election? Ten percent is regarded as being surplus and would be transferred in other methods to help another candidate. So, in the next stage I will make a change that will average all the votes, quota and surplus, of a faction in order to help another candidate of the faction. The history of elections shows that this is what factions want, and being as all factions together have the majority of the votes in any jurisdiction, factions have had some form of vote averaging installed into the rules of elections. Stage Six: In this stage I introduce my new elimination rule. Instead of merely eliminating the lowest candidate we are now going to eliminated the lowest candidate of the faction that has the lowest average votes per candidate. The use of this rule has the effect of averaging all the votes of a faction, including any surplus votes, and dividing them between all the candidates of the same faction. This action uses all the votes to protect all the candidates of a faction. This method of averaging the votes of a party or slate or faction or whatever does the best job of averaging, right down to as many decimal point as you care to use. Other ways of averaging votes are crude. Now we have improved the proportionality of the election as far as the two largest factions are concerned, but one measure of proportional representation is: `Can a quota of the voters in the entire jurisdiction elect one candidate?' The answer to that question is NO!, for any of these district stages so far, that's the trouble with districts, but if you suspect that I am going to turn that No into a Yes, you would be correct. An Yes answer will require some way in which the proportionality of a faction in the districts can be linked to the proportionality of the same faction in the entire jurisdiction. This can be done, it is done in Mixed Member Proportionality (MMP), but I am not suggesting MMP for your jurisdiction. What I am suggesting is one more change so that a quota will be able to elect one seat, I am suggesting the `Optimal Method' for you. Stage Seven: What we are going to do in this stage is to allow the voter to rank candidates and/or slates in any mix. This will allow us to construct a linkage between proportionality in the districts with the proportionality in the entire jurisdiction. Inturn, this will allow a quota of the voters to elect one seat in the entire jurisdiction. The voter in this stage can only rank slate candidates that are running in his district, but he can rank any slate that has at least one candidate running in any district in the entire jurisdiction. Independent candidates are treated the same as slates are treated. The voters can rank any independent candidate that is running anywhere in any district in the entire jurisdiction. Doing this is only fair because the slate candidates will be getting support from voters in other districts who have ranked their slates. Think of an independent candidate as being a small faction with only one candidate. After the casting of the ballots, all the data from all the districts is collected together and tallied as one big Bottoms Up election, using my new elimination rule of course. I call this policy `Districts Within Districts'. The voter gets his member-link in a small district, but with the proportionality that comes from the tally being conducted for the entire jurisdiction - the best of both worlds. Regards, Donald Davison -------------- Original Letter ------------- Date: Thu, 12 Dec 2002 18:35:17 -0800 From: "Douglas Greene"<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Optimal methods for multimember elections A local government here in NY is debating moving from at large elections to district based elections. I'm in touch with one of the parties pushing for districting. I need resources and suggestions on better methods. Please reply to me directly, or on list if it will further the knowledge base. Thanks! Doug ---- Regards, Donald Davison, host of New Democracy at http://www.mich.com/~donald Candidate Election Methods +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ | Q U O T A T I O N | | "Democracy is a beautiful thing, | | except that part about letting just any old yokel vote." | | - Age 10 - | +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+ Please be advised that sending email to me allows me to quote from it and/or forward the entire email to others. ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
