Juho wrote:
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.
To a limit, yes. But say that you prefer women and leftists. Also assume
that there are some women who are leftists, some leftists that are not
women, and some that are both. Then you'd rank those who were both above
either of the two.
In my simulation, a voter who preferred women and leftists would rank
male leftists and right-wing women randomly with respect to each other.
In reality there could be different preferences among those. The point
is that no concatenation of two lists would produce the correct result.
If the list is by political ideology, then it could rank men on the left
ahead of women, and if it was by gender, then it could rank right-wing
women ahead of left-wing ones.
A tree could solve this, but it'd get increasingly more complex for
numerous opinions. The complexity is probably a true issue - that is,
not an artifact of the system - and one may wonder if voters would
compare candidates on all issues in order to figure out a true
consistent ballot (even for a party-neutral system). I have no data for
that, so my simulation assumes the voters do so, since that taxes the
proportional representation of the method more than if the voters didn't.
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.
What would the method look like, so that a voter could specify (for
instance) women ahead of men on both a local and national scale? The
only thing that seems to work is candidate ranking on both the local and
national level, which would take a lot of time and produce extremely
long ballot papers.
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