At 02:05 PM 5/20/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote:
I was talking about SPA, not SAV. SPA (summable proportional
approval) is a summable method which, with very high probability,
corresponds to Sequential Proportional Approval, first proposed by
Thiele (c.1890). This in turn corresponds, with high probability, to
the following simple procedure, which I think is easy enough for
anybody to understand:
1. Collect approval ballots
2. Count the ballots and elect the approval winner
3. Select a droop quota of ballots which approve the approval winner
and discard them. First discard ballots which only approve
already-elected candidates; then randomly select the rest. If there
are not enough ballots, discard all available.
4. If the council is not full, repeat from step 2.
Yeah, and to avoid the random selection problem, which could wreak
havoc with auditing, you'd keep all the ballots and just devalue them
proportionally to give them the proper remaining vote strength. I.e.,
if there are N ballots, with quota Q, the ballots would now be worth
(N-Q)/N, but not less than zero.
That's more complicated, to be sure, it requires maintaining sets of
devalued ballots. This could be done centrally, in fact, by
categorizing ballots into vote combinations, but that's also a lot of
data to transmit. Ultimately, with computers for analysis, and public
ballot data -- another reform I'm very interested in -- the analysis
could be done easily.
Asset has other values that would make it superior, with what is now
being called SAV to determine the votes held by the candidates. SAV
woudl determine winners but only those who win with a direct quota. I
called it FAAV, Fractional Approval Asset Voting.
With Asset, the fractional approval does not create a problem with
voting power, it's safe to vote with complete sincerity, and
vote-for-one works fine. In fact, I only suggest fractional approval
to avoid discarding ballots, and because some people object to the
idea of transferring all their voting power to one person, though, in
fact, that's what's going to happen in the Assembly!
(Unless this becomes direct/asset democracy, which allows the
"electors" to continue to exercise voting power when they so choose,
seats are only elected for representation in deliberation and default
voting power.)
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