Juho wrote:
On Aug 22, 2008, at 12:36 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Juho wrote:
On Aug 18, 2008, at 12:10 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
If we are taking about methods that rank the candidates the idea is to
define a grammar and terminology so that the most common voter opinions
(orderings or approximations of them) can be expressed using short
expressions. Bullet votes and tree inheritance is one (very compact)
option. Giving a complete ordering of the candidates is another
(complete) option.
That's a good point. Voters probably wouldn't like to rank tens of
candidates from tens of parties, so to the extent that it would not
confuse the voters or make the ballot papers too long, there should be
shortcuts for the most common patterns of voting.
Those shortcuts could be party list, party tree, a ranked ballot on
parties rather than candidates, or something similar, with an override
space for the first few preferences (since that's where most of the
strength lies).
However, the way the ballot's formatted is going to have some influence
on the voters simply by what it shows to be the path of least
resistance. The STV ballots in Australia (that are used as a curious
form of party list by most voters) provide a good, if extreme, example
of this. In my opinion, parties shouldn't be given a boost or gain an
advantage "for free" just because they are parties - this is part of the
reason that I prefer party-neutral multiwinner methods. Thus one would
have to be careful when designing the ballot format so that, on one
hand, the ballots are not too arduous to complete, but on the other,
they don't obstruct voters that want to submit "personal votes".
How such a ballot would be constructed, I don't know. The parameters
required (how susceptible the voters are to shortcuts, etc) can't be
arrived at by mere deduction; they depend on the nature of the voters.
For small districts, a ranked ballot like the one used in Ireland is
probably sufficient. You pay for it by not being able to ensure national
proportionality by party. The next step up (in fidelity and complexity)
is the "you have two votes" form that accompany systems which try to
correct the disproportionality on the national level.
If the various formats (list, tree, truncated personal vote) should be
shortcuts rather than the only way to vote, then one needs to use a
method, or one of a class, that can understand all the formats. I think
that party-neutral multiwinner systems make up that class of methods.
The exception is correcting party disproportionality, which it can't do
by itself.
On the other hand, if you want list (or tree or whatnot) to be the only
way to fill out the ballot, then you don't need anything as complex as
PR-STV.
> In order to guarantee proportionality (of any imaginable grouping) at
national level we may need to allow the voters to rank all candidates
nation wide (as you noted). The next question then is if we allow the
voters of one district to have a say on which candidates will be elected
in the other districts. If we allow that then we could simply arrange a
national level STV election with some further tricks. The trick could be
e.g. to refuse to nominate any candidates from some district after the
agreed number of candidates has been elected from that district. (This
was just one quickly drafted option.)
Another trick related to one that I've referred to before is this: give
each voter an additional fractional vote where the candidates are ranked
in order of distance from the voter. "Continuous" districting, if you
want. The fraction depends on how much you want locality to matter.
You'd also have to link the two votes' weight somehow, otherwise it just
becomes minisum distance, which isn't what we want.
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
