On Jul 18, 2008, at 1:34 , James Gilmour wrote:
Juho > Sent: Thursday, July 17, 2008 9:18 PM
I think already the basic open list provides a quite strong link
between candidates and voters.
Yes, it is certainly much stronger than with closed-list. But see
next proviso.
Voters will decide which candidates
will be elected, not the party (this is an important detail).
This will be true only when there is no facility to cast a "party
vote" rather than a vote for a named candidate. Some (many?
most?) open-list systems allow the "party vote" option, when such
votes are allocated to candidates in the order the party ranked
the list. Experience shows that where this option is provided it
is used by large numbers of voters and so negates the purpose of
the open list..
I'm used to one where I can't vote for parties (and there is no party
preference order of the candidates). I don't know how common that is.
I know there are some methods that are more or less closed party
lists but where voters can also deviate from the given order and vote
for a candidate. The method may even require certain threshold amount
of votes to override the party list order.
It would be also possible to allow votes to a party but to determine
the winners using the open list style, i.e. without a party given
preference order.
(Extensions are needed to provide proportionality between different
subgroups of the party.)
Now you have made open-list party-list MUCH more complicated. The
most effective way of doing this is to allow transfers of votes
among candidates within each party's list. But then you are so
close to proper STV-PR that you might as well go all the way and
allow the voter full freedom to mark the preferences in any order
he or she wishes, not just within one party list. (But NO option
for "above-the-line" voting.)
The simplest tree based open method would be really simple. Just vote
for one of the candidates; the vote will be inherited by a small
group, by a bigger group, by a party, and by a party alliance. Voters
need not even know that the new system is somehow different from the
old one. The sub-groups and parties may be shown as nested in the
public posters that list all the candidates.
Combining the tree style open list and STV-PR voting styles may be
helpful to the voters since it allows a default inheritance order to
be used also for short votes (=> easy voting for maybe most voters).
Another benefit is that one need not list all the members of the
groups and the party (naming one's favourite candidate is enough).
(Actually in STV it is sufficient to list one's favourite candidates
starting from the best ones and continuing until one is certain that
some of them will be elected, and then a bit further to guarantee
that also the possible fractions of the vote will not be lost.)
One problem (based on your comment on party votes) is that if groups
and parties can be named (in order to determine some exceptional
order of inheritance), then the voters either can also vote for
parties without voting for a single candidate or else we need to ban
votes that vote for groups/parties only. Maybe votes to parties would
however be ok (based on the discussion above) as long as there is not
party given preference order of the candidates that would be followed.
Juho
James
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