On Sep 15, 2009, at 4:01 PM, James Gilmour wrote:
Setting a candidate's keep value to zero should only increase
the vote totals of all the other candidates. Thus, all
elected candidates would stay elected and Meek's method never
changes the keep values to eliminate an elected candidate.
The first statement seems logical, but I don't know about the second
statement. I don't understand how an elected candidate could
be eliminated - sounds like a contradiction of terms.
The problem would be that setting an eliminated candidate's
keep value back to 1 could bring an elected candidate below
the quota. One option would be to set all "running"
candidates at the highest possible keep value such that all
elected candidates have more than a quota worth of votes.
I don't know what any of this means as I am not sufficiently
familiar with the inner workings of Meek STV.
In fact, a special provision must be made to ensure that previously
elected candidates remain elected in a countback. There are at least a
couple of ways to accomplish this. It ends up being a subtle problem.
(It's also worth noting that additional candidates might choose not to
stand, or be ineligible to stand, in the countback, and would need to
be marked as withdrawn as well.)
New Zealand apparently uses AV/IRV for "single-member vacancies",
hardly ideal, for reasons that have already been adduced.
http://www.legislation.govt.nz/regulation/public/2001/0145/latest/DLM57125.html
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
