On Sep 3, 2008, at 10:02 PM, Stéphane Rouillon wrote:
STV-PR suffers from three principal problems that are exacerbated when trying to push the proportionality limit. They are all caused by the large number of candidates: 1) A pre-selection occurs within each party, in order for the star candidate of each party to get elected, that star often tries to kill concurrency having bad collegues running with him or none at all in order to increase its own election probability;
That assumes a rather high degree of agenda manipulation by the parties. Why need we assume that parties would be the exclusive gatekeepers to an STV ballot? For that matter, behavior like that seems like a good way to guarantee the formation of new parties that don't kill their good candidates.
2) It is hard to make fair debates when the number of candidates is huge and they are not even the same for several parties: in the end the candidates having the most means (money and visibility) have the opporunity of getting heard and the others may simply not;
In an STV election, though, candidates need not appeal to the entire electorate. Sure, if we insist on running American-style campaigns, money will play an undue role, and STV is not a magic bullet to fix that problem.
3) voters complain about the large number of names on the ballot adding several undesirable behaviours like random completion or following a party pre-selection.
It's an issue. On the other hand, I recently voted in a FPTP election with 135 gubernatorial candidates.
Equivalent virtual districts have no such problems: they allow comparing all candidates with every party proposing a unique candidacy per district. The result is you can obtain PR results like using only one district for STV-PR, without the previous problems.
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