On Aug 18, 2008, at 12:10 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
The extreme would be a voting system where people just say how much
they agree with an opinion, for all relevant opinions, and then the
system picks the maximally representative assembly. Such a method
is not desirable, I think, because it would be very vulnerable to
strategy, and someone would have to say which opinions were
"relevant" and then redo the list when voters' priorities change
and other opinions become relevant. In a simulation, one can do
this easily because the voters vote mechanically (and so the what
the opinion "really is" doesn't matter), but in the real world, not
so much.
In principle STV allows (especially if ties are allowed) voters to
determine any sets of candidates (without requiring someone to fix
them beforehand). Voters may e.g. list all female candidates. It is
also possible that any number of such group definitions would be
available. Candidates could indicate themselves which opinions they
support, and voters could include references to those lists in their
ballot. Also opinions created by others than candidates themselves
could be available. The lists could freely overlap. Someone could
vote e.g. Women (1st priority), candidates that indicate that they
support election reform (2nd priority) and candidates that were
listed by the election reform society (3rd priority). An STV like
ballot would be derived from this information.
Another option is to allow a voter vote for local candidates and
then
as their last choice, vote for a national list.
This is maybe yet one step more complex since now candidates can
belong to different orthogonal groupings (several local parties;
one party covers all local regions). Or maybe you meant to allow
voting only individuals locally, not to support all local
candidates of all parties as a group.
The local count would be standard PR-STV, but with the same quota
nationwide (and a rule that you must reach the quota to get
elected).
Ok. National level proportionality could influence the election of
the last candidates in the districts.
Unallocated seats would then be assigned using d'Hondt or similar
method based on the amount of votes transferred to the national
list.
Also, it could be in effect an open list. The person elected
would be
from the district that transferred the most votes to the party's
national
list.
Maybe all districts would be guaranteed their fixed number of
seats (typically based on the number of citizens of each
district). The extra seats would be first allocated to parties and
then to districts (using some appropriate algorithm).
That sounds like MMP. I think MMP can work if done right (with STV
instead of FPTP as base, and reweighting to avoid lista civetta).
Using party list here is probably better than the party-neutral
version where you'd rank representatives for local, regional, and
national levels, and then it keeps the reweighting at each stage;
simply because there would be an immense number of candidates at
the national level, and ranking them all would be Herculean.
MMP style is also one option, although I was still thinking of
methods where all representatives are of the same type. The method
would in that case have to force the districts to elect so that also
election wide balance is maintained.
Juho
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