Why transfers?
At least, when I said do a CW type search for the strongest remaining
candidate, I thought of this as adequate without transfers. I do
think of quitting if the remainder are too weak:
. Anyway, quit after filling the limit of seats to fill.
. Quit anyway if remainder are too weak to deserve a seat.
Dave Ketchum
On Aug 14, 2011, at 4:24 PM, Greg Nisbet wrote:
Message: 2
Date: Sun, 14 Aug 2011 09:31:55 +0100
From: "James Gilmour" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [EM] Preferential Party List Method Proposal
Message-ID: <E31F77F9E803443CA831CC02610CD525@u2amd>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
Greg Nisbet Sent: Sunday, August 14, 2011 4:31 AM
My system does not have voters voting for candidates at all. In
fact, candidates needn't even exist (theoretically of course) for my
method to be well-defined. Instead people simply vote for parties,
with parties that can't get any seats dropped from the lowest
weight first. Making the system more candidate-centric could be
done, but my algorithm (or class of algorithms) is supposed to be a
minimal, easily analyzable change from non-preferential party list
methods.
But this is not what the majority of electors want, at least not in
polities like USA, Canada and UK. Electors in some continental
European countries do seem to be happy with party list PR without
any voter choice of candidates, but I would suggest, that would
not be acceptable in our political culture. For the UK, that
opinion is based on various public opinion polls; for the USA and
Canada it is based on my reading of local media and blogs.
James Gilmour
I'm for candidate-centric voting methods as much as anyone else is,
and indeed, my proposal can be modified to allow that. Parties could
have an "internal ballot pool" that initially consists of just the
ballots of the voters with that party as their first preference. As
parties get eliminated and votes are transferred, the internal
ballot pool will grow. If party are allowed to have a maximum size
and transfers are allowed, then this could get more complicated
because a party's internal ballot pool could contain ballots with
fractional weights. Nevertheless, the method I propose can be
modified to meet your criticism.
My method can be modified fairly trivially to allow parties with a
maximum size, e.g. an independent candidate would be a party with a
maximum size of one, and simply allow surpluses to be transferred.
Even the relatively naive Gregory transfer method might work well,
I'm not sure how to adapt Meek or a more complicated transfer rule
to this method or if the benefits are worth the cost. Allowing
transfers might place some kind of restriction on what sorts of
classical allocation methods that the Preferential Party List Method
could use, but I doubt these would be particularly severe.
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