Peter Zborník wrote: > I would like to ask you if you could help finding > some short and to the point arguments (preferably > with some real-life examples). We need to explain > why a political party would benefit from electing > their representatives to the different party > councils proportionally instead of using the > winner-takes-it-all methods (block-voting) which > are in use today.
> Such power arguments could be a help when I try to > sell the idea of proportional elections in the > Czech Green party. I suggest trying an argument like this -- with adjustments that reflect the nature of your sub-groups: "The members of our Green Party have different priorities. Some members are in the party to reduce greenhouse gases, others want to protect forests, others want to promote the use of solar panels, others want to promote election reform, and so on. [Obviously I don't know which sub-groups are dominant in the Czech Green Party.] If non-proportional methods are used, only the agenda of the most numerous members will be promoted, and other not-as-popular agendas will be neglected." "As a simple example, if 60 percent of the members want to reduce greenhouse gases, and the other 40 percent want to promote forest conservation, traditional voting methods would elect only greenhouse-gas-issue members to the council. The forest conservationists would get no representation in the council. In contrast, a proportional voting method would ensure that both greenhouse-gas-issue members and forest conservationists are elected to the council. In this case, because of the 60-versus-40 imbalance, more council members would be of the greenhouse-gas-issue type, and fewer council members would be forest conservationists. This result reflects the diverse priorities of the voters, instead of giving the majority an overwhelming win, which would result in a very narrow agenda that ignores what many Green Party members want." The method you have in mind proposing, namely the Schulze proportional method, may not correctly fill the council with smaller sub-groups -- such as members who comprise 15 percent of the Green Party -- so I don't suggest saying that those smaller sub-groups will get representation. I presume that the Schulze proportional method at least gives representation for both a majority group and an opposition group (which is often a virtual coalition), so that's what I suggest focusing on. As I've said before, it's difficult to get proportional representation for more than the two main sub-groups (the opposition side of which is often a virtual coalition) if the voters do not indicate on their ballot which sub-group best represents them. Yes, their highest-ranked choice appears to help elect someone of their specific small-subgroup type, but strategic voting methods and method-design flaws can override the ability to produce "full" proportionality. (Although I have not yet seen a description of the Schulze proportional method, I'm confident that it has to be much better than your current approach of using single-mark ballots.) As for real-life examples, if you should want a testimonial about the proportional benefits of VoteFair representation ranking, remember there is one on the testimonials page of the VoteFair.org site. Richard Fobes ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
