On Aug 21, 2008, at 2:18 , Raph Frank wrote:
On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 10:15 PM, Juho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On Aug 18, 2008, at 12:00 , James Gilmour wrote:
I have to say I just do not understand the obsession with "lists".
Lists are indeed rather clumsy and maybe simplifying (trees would
be more
expressive though :-).
Yeah, if the choice is between lists and trees, then trees would be
better.
This is especially true if the candidates rather than the party get to
control how the trees are setup.
Yes, this needs careful planning. Parties may have the tendency to
offer the users only one list and maintain strict party control (all
to vote the same way etc.). If there is a need (hopefully not really
needed) to force the tree to have some more structure one could e.g.
allow candidates to freely form groupings (after being nominated) and/
or one could set a limit to the size of flat lists.
I wonder would parties assign some candidates to what are considered
'safe nodes' on the tree, in much the same way that they assign them
to safe seats under plurality.
I assume that in the very basic tree model nodes would not contain
candidates (they would be the leaves of the tree). In that case there
are not really any safe seats. The best one could do is to try to
arrange the sub-lists so that one of them contains only the favourite
candidate and numerous candidates that are not expected to get some
but not as many votes as the favourite candidate.
Juho
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