On Aug 16, 2008, at 10:08 PM, Juho wrote:
I was thinking of the regular political parties that otherwise exist
in the country but that are not relevant in these school elections.
But you
cannot have "lists" without some comparable formal procedures. And
in any event, "basic lists" are never sufficient, if you believe
that the essence of representative democracy is allowing the voters
to select their representatives as freely as possible.
It is a positive target to allow voters to select their
representatives as freely as possible. There are however also other
criteria (e.g. simplicity, clarity), and in these school elections
also simple lists might well be sufficient. (I don't see lists as a
necessity in these school elections but as an option that would
probably work well enough.)
Lists of
any kind will always be constraining. And they are unnecessary (as
well as, in my view, undesirable).
Constraining in the sense of not being most flexible, yes. Why do
you see lists as undesirable?
What problem are they solving? My local school board and city council
elections under STV would have five seats open, and based on the
experience of the last few years, maybe ten candidates. If candidates
want to run as slates, and encourage a particular ranking, they're
free to do that; they do that now with FPTP elections. Voters have
unconstrained choice (within the set of candidates, anyway).
Interposing lists between the voters and the candidates seems like an
extra and unnecessary layer of complication.
I can see that direct ranking would be burdensome if California (say)
were to use at-large STV for the entire state assembly, and have 80
open seats and hundreds of candidates on a single ballot. But STV
proposals are typically more modest than that, with districts having
on the order of 5-9 seats.
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
