Well, in the J.Quinn example, the 2 "independent" voters could equally well be interpreted as trying to elect Al, but at the same time they do not want A-party to have too much control of parliament. This often arises in parliamentary elections and is a conflict which has nothing necessarily to do with the voting system, it has to do with the nature of parliamentary government. Under this interpretation you could claim the voting system was doing the right thing.
But Quinn makes the larger point that by manipulating who was a member of what party, the candidates could aim to manipulate the election. And I guess the same point could be made about the party-list systems in use by many countries right now. Quinn then mutters about using correlations to cause a psuedo-party structure without actually having parties, but I think that is a bad idea and it too presumably could be manipulated. In particular, with my scheme all candidates from a 51%-top-rated party could each choose to be in their "own" party-of-one, and then they'd win 100% of the seats! Oops. A variant intended to overcome that objection is to demand the ratings ballots be like in "Asset voting" instead of range voting -- that is, all the scores are >=0 and SUM to 100. A party's share then instead is the sum of all the votes its candidates receive. Parties splitting up, or merging, will not work to increase their share. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step) and math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/works.html ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
