On Aug 26, 2008, at 0:46 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
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.
There are two approaches to locality. One may either allow it or
force it. The philosophy behind forcing is that voters would
otherwise easily vote for some central figures that on average live
in central locations. That would cause a bias that favours those
central regions. (It is however also possible to allow voters to vote
for anyone but still force the results to be geographically
proportional.)
Methods that measure the distance between voters and candidates in
detail could lead to some interesting consequences like strategic
house buying. :-)
Juho
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