On Aug 16, 2008, at 1:00 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Also, such a scheme would be, I think, highly susceptible to
agenda manipulation: who decides which issue is to be effectively
on the ballot, and who decides that the candidates associated
with X and not-X are sincere?
Citizens are free to form such lists. Each list may support and
oppose any topics, and the lists are supposed to collect similar
minded candidates together. Ballots may be just votes for
individual candidates (not for issues). I don't see any specific
problems in this case.
Does that mean that a single candidate can be a member of more than
one list? If so, how are ties handled? Depending on how that's
done, it could cause complex interactions depending on which party
a voter decides to support.
I was thinking about some very basic open lists where voters vote for
individual candidates (this should break any ties) and where the
candidates can belong only to one list. In addition to the basic
lists I was also thinking about trees that offer more detailed
grouping of the candidates.
It is also possible to extend the system to cover multiple dimensions
(in a way this is just an extension of the current typical case where
one candidate represents one party and one region at the same time
and the election method is still able to count the correct political
and regional proportionality). Allowing free membership in multiple
groups would also be possible in theory. But all this of course adds
complexity to the method (potentially more than what the achieved
benefits weigh).
If a single candidate can't be on more than one list, then agenda
manipulation still has some power. If a candidate has to commit to
a list that is based primarily on issue X, but where he also
supports Y, he has to make a choice (distinct from the choices
voters make) of X over Y. That could be technically solved by
making 2^n "lists" for n issues, but then you'd have to let
candidates be on multiple lists, and pure "party-neutral" PR
becomes much simpler.
Tree lists would help, but say that a voter likes Y, but not X any
more than the candidate in question does. Then he wouldn't want to
have his vote contribute to any of the other X-favoring candidates.
Yes, this is where I was thinking about the trees. It would be
possible to become a candidate of the green wing of the conservatives
or the conservative wing of the greens.
I find the trees natural in the sense that in the case that the voter
likes candidate X but doesn't like the group (or branch of the tree)
that this candidate belongs to then the voter can not do much about
this. If the voter votes for this particular candidate anyway and
this candidate gets elected he is likely to work (as indicated)
together with this group. The voter's vote will thus anyway benefit
this group since that is the way this candidate thinks deep in his mind.
If the voter doesn't like the idea of this candidate contributing to
this branch that he doesn't like then the voter might actually be
better off voting some other candidate of some other branch. The
branch structure is quite sufficient to indicate the preferences of
the _candidate_ and it has the good property that it clearly reveals
this to the potential voters (instead of allowing them to imagine,
and/or let the candidate fool them (in his marketing campaign) to
believe something else).
In the tree based structure the voter thus loses the option to donate
his vote (or the remaining fraction of his vote) to some other branch
of the tree (e.g. "my communist friend" > "my right wing party
member" > ...). This may be mostly noise and not very sensible as
discussed above, but of course the tee structure limits the ability
of the voter to express his _own_ preferences as freely as possible.
The three based structure may also limit voter's ability to set
preferences within the branch. The tree however offers the
possibility to make the tree more and more fine-grained as needed.
This way the voter either needs to accept the preference order (=
branch of the tree) of the candidate that he intends to vote or make
similar conclusions as described above an change the candidate.
Lastly, it is possible to combine trees and free STV style voting as
an exception to the tree-like structure ((maybe also intermediate
forms where the voter is allowed to indicate preferences between
candidates within a branch)). But I'm not sure if it is worth the
trouble. The complexity will increase and the probability of voter
getting something else that the voter thought he will get will
increase. Freedom of expression is good but at some level it may also
work against the interests of the voters. Maybe this is a bit like
the case with write-in candidates. They allow voters to express
themselves but with the cost of some added complexity, usually
without changing the outcome or the election, and with somewhat
increased risk of "lost votes".
The tree structure in a way offers the voters some basic structure
that they can grasp in the few minutes that a regular voter spends in
considering his voting behaviour, and then more or less forces them
to cast a meaningful vote that reflects the political thinking of the
candidates. No big harm done however whatever style and complexity is
used (maybe some lost voters), but trees seem to me like a quite
natural way to structure the complexities of the political world and
the potentially countless choices that the voter has, and limit the
required amount of analysis work that the voter needs to do before
voting. With straight forward inheritance rules like in the trees it
is also not easy to create traps (like in the Fiji case) where the
inheritance order would be something else than what the voter expects.
Juho
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