On Nov 2, 2009, at 9:54 AM, James Gilmour wrote:
robert bristow-johnson > Sent: Monday, November 02, 2009 5:44 PM
whose *ballot* gets their vote transferred? it shouldn't matter in
which order the counting is. if my ballot is needed to give the
candidate what he needs, and your ballot isn't needed, then you got
to influence the election of your next choice, but I did not. that
can't be fair.
Opinions differ on the importance of this feature - as can be seen
from the continued acceptance in some jurisdictions of STV
rules that treat ballots differently in this way.
But if this feature is important in your assessment of "fairness",
then you could use either the WIGM (Weighted inclusive Gregory
Method) version of STV-PR as implemented for the Scottish Local
Government elections or Meek STV. In both of these STV-PR versions
ALL of the candidate's ballots are transferred when any transfer of
votes has to be made. Then there is no discrimination of the kind
you describe between these voters.
While Meek is preferable in this regard, even the random-transfer
mechanism used by Cambridge MA is "fair" in the sense that all voters
are treated equally--each has the same chance of having their ballot
chosen for transfer, and with a sufficiently large election, the
distribution is quite good.
Still, I don't think anybody implementing STV these days is likely to
use that particular mechanism.
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