On Aug 21, 2008, at 2:23 , Raph Frank wrote:
On Wed, Aug 20, 2008 at 10:17 PM, Juho <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Also an STV election that has tens of candidates but allows also
shorter
votes may have problems.
The favourite party of the voter could have 20 candidates. Let's
say that
they are all about equally strong. Based on the size of the party
we expect
two of the candidates to be elected. In order to guarantee that
one's vote
will benefit the party and will not run out of candidates during the
counting process one would have to rank all those 20 candidates.
I think that in such a situation, voters would vote for the 2-3
candidates
who live near them, so they should be reasonably safe.
However, a district with 20 party members would mean that it had
probably around 50 seats and that is way to large.
Voters might be too lazy to do that. Some default (or explicit)
inheritance
to the party could help.
That is where I would use candidate lists. However, trees work
fine too.
Yes, this is where I see that STV and trees (or lists) can be
combined in a fruitful way. If the number of candidates is large then
short votes may lead to problems in STV. To guarantee proper
inheritance of the votes it would be useful to direct the voting
power of short votes to some branch of the tree. A bullet vote to
some candidate would automatically be counted for the local group of
this candidate and for the mother party too. Longer votes could be
counted e.g. for the group and party of the last listed candidate by
default. (There are also other alternative approaches but trees seem
most natural to me.)
The key point is to allow the voter directly vote their first few
votes as
that is where 80-90% of their voting power is.
The tail of the vote should be secured too since in elections that
have many candidates it may be difficult to predict which candidates
are likely to be elected (and thereby consume the voting power of the
vote).
Juho
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