At 07:18 AM 3/6/2006, Raphael Ryan wrote: >If the number of votes needed to be elected is constant, then it >follows automatically. > >A candidate who gets 10% of this value every election will win the >seat every 10th election. Someone who gets 25% of this value will >win the election every 4th election. > >The question comes down to how constant that threshold is. It isn't >perfectly constant so the system isn't perfectly proportional.
It will never be "perfectly proportional." The quantization noise, very likely, would be too great. And it should be realized that there is a severe risk. There is quite often a significant minority in favor of actions that would endanger the community. While there would be little harm in a few representatives in a large parliament being elected through this scheme, there would arise a risk that more than just a few would be elected. There are other complications: candidates don't run again for various reasons. The transfer of votes mechanism was passed over with what look to me like major unsolved problems. *However*, while the method is interesting, delta-sigma communication works when the update frequency is high. Delta-sigma with an update frequency of a year would not track the electorate very well. Indeed, what this system would do is to influence present assemblies by how the electorate felt years earlier. Further, since the goal seems to be proportional representation, and there is already an excellent method on the table that *quickly* creates proportional representation without lost votes, and it does so almost immediately (and without party-list), the idea seems a purely abstract exercise in possibilities, something that we should certainly do, but not likely to be very fruitful in terms of ever seeing the light of day. (The method is Asset Voting, and I've proposed a simple variant that uses existing ballots, FAAV, Fractional Approval Asset Voting. It is really a form of secret-ballot delegable proxy to create an "electoral college" and, when used for an assembly with substantial numbers of members, will use votes efficiently. It likewise considers "excess votes," i.e., votes that a candidate receives that are above the quota, which the candidate may reassign, and, likewise candidates not receiving the quota may negotiate with others to create additional winners. Wasted votes would, I think, be rare, and the one responsible for the waste easily identified (the candidate who received votes and who refused to reassign them) so that voters can respond appropriately the next election. Asset Voting was invented by Warren Smith, and in it voters may assign fractional votes of any value to any candidate. I simplified that in FAAV by using a standard ballot and dividing any multiple votes. The effect is that the voter is either directly attempting to elect a representative, or is dividing his or her votes among a committee. Only one total vote is cast. (An even simpler method would only allow one vote, but I dislike discarding ballots with overvotes, which is what happens and will happen. The down side is that FAAV would be more complex to count. That really should not be an issue in modern circumstances, and it could be done without computers without difficulty, but if it is an issue, single-undivided-vote Asset Voting would work almost as well.) (To count fractional votesquickly by hand, given that the fractions would all be of the form 1/N, one simply tallies the fractions separately, so that for a single candidate, there would be M lists, M being the number of candidates, a tally would be kept of votes which were 1/1; 1/2; 1/3; ... 1/M. Then, when counting is done, the fractions are added to yield the reported vote. The total of all reported votes should exactly equal the number of votes cast aside from blanks, within roundoff error. If not, there is an anomaly.) ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
