At 07:09 PM 2/6/2007, James Gilmour wrote: >That of course, is the whole point of STV-PR - to give the voters what >THEY want - which may not be what the parties want. But then, >elections are for electors.
Right. Asset Voting gives full freedom to the voters, and freedom is power. Voters can choose to essentially vote for a party by voting for a party leader or the candidate recommended by the party. Or they can vote for a collection of party leaders, distributing the power. This represents trusting the party more than the individual candidate. Their choice. Or they can vote for an independent whom they trust. Asset Voting does not attack the party system. Parties will still be quite useful for campaigns and the like. But currently, one *must* have a party endorsement to have a shot at winning, exceptions are rare. Under Asset, it costs almost nothing to try (compared to present costs) and it does no damage. If you don't get enough votes, you simply become an elector in the next stage. You might still get elected if you can gather votes from other candidates who either were not elected, or, in multiwinner were elected but have extra votes to distribute. Being a member of a party might make that easier. It's been pointed out that an Asset ballot could have ranks that would be used until and unless they are exhausted, in which case the vote would revert to the candidate(s) ranked in first place. Once again, we wee maximum freedom being accorded to voters. It is maximally simple if it is just plain Fractional Approval Asset Voting, the ballot is just like a plurality ballot and it does no harm to vote it that way. But overvotes are also harmless, they merely distribute the revoting power (the election is then like Approval). If the ranks are added, it gets a little more complicated. Some voters might become confused. I'm generally skeptical of the confusion argument, it is overused, but there is some merit to it. Even quite intelligent people can get confused by a ballot, maybe they had something for breakfast that disagreed with them or they are distracted for some reason. I personally would prefer to *not* have the ranks, though maybe I might use *one* additional rank. Sometimes. I just don't know if it is worth it. But if enough people thought it *was* worth it, i.e., they wanted the power to directly assign revotes, it could be done. And this leads me to a new consideration. Asset can be used for proportional representation with floating, virtual districts; the result is that the voters know who, exactly, was elected with their votes. The candidates don't know the individual voters, but they do know the precincts that elected them and the proportion of the vote they received in that precinct. It seems to me that this virtual districting could also be done automatically with STV. Call it auto-districting. When the election is done, the votes that elected the candidate are assigned by precinct, and the precincts amalgamated to form a close match to the actual quota in total. The remaining votes then go to the next rank down. This would not be in any way binding on the candidates, for a candidate could represent the interests of someone who was not a voter in a precinct that elected the candidate, but it would create an effective districting in the assembly. I'd think that *most* winners would have reasonably tight districts if the algorithm were good. Because it is really only advisory (it has no effect on votes in the assembly except as the winner chooses to make it so), the algorithm doesn't have to be perfect. I prefer the transfer to be done by a human. It creates a chain of responsibility. The voter knows who got the voter(s) votes and knows what was done with them. The candidate knows what precincts provided the votes for his or her election, and, as well, what other candidates, if any, were involved in gathering those votes. Would this make candidates beholden to those who elected them? Certainly it would, in some ways. First of all, shouldn't candidates be beholden to the voters? I.e., have a sense of responsibility to them and an understanding that if they violate the trust, they will lose support. But a candidate who is elected, say, by vote redistribution by a party leader holding excess votes, can certainly attempt to directly serve his or her district well enough that next election, the candidate gets those votes directly. This is one huge advantage to having precinct assignments. The candidate can directly communicate with a defined constituency. Now, a party leader could gum this up by assigning precincts randomly, so these new winners had scattered constituencies. But if I saw a leader doing that, I'd consider it a betrayal of trust. The leader would be making it difficult, not only for the winner created, but for the voters. And, again, the district assignment isn't binding on anyone. A member might decide to serve some different district, primarily, might pass off remote precincts to another member. I am a firm believer in democracy, that, given the right conditions -- and this is crucial -- freedom of thought and action are conducive to the best decision-making. Under the wrong conditions, too much power is quite dangerous; the classical distrust of "mob rule" is not silly. Mob rule, however, typically only comes into being when public institutions have massively broken down, most commonly through violent revolution or civil war, but also under some other conditions as well, such as class or racial divisions exploited by leaders with the power to inflame mobs. These latter conditions (Ruanda comes to mind) are facilitated by flawed electoral systems which give centralized power to party leaders and which encourage factionalism. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
