On Feb 8, 2012, at 3:29 PM, Juho Laatu wrote:
On 8.2.2012, at 16.18, David L Wetzell wrote:
...
At any rate, this is why I've argued that ascertaining the best
single-winner election rule is nowhere near as important as
pitching the importance of mixing the use of single-winner and
multi-winner election rules, with the latter replacing the former
more so in "more local" elections that are not competitive often in
single-winner elections.
I disagree:
. We have single-winner purposes such as mayor or governor, unless
we redesign the goals.
. And purposes such as legislator which can be packaged as single-
winner or multi-winner, with the PR backers promoting multi-winner.
I think I agree when I say that the first decision (in the USA) is
whether to make the current two-party system work better or whether
to aim at a multi-party system. After that has been agreed, it is
easier to pick the used election methods. Now, in addition to
technical problems one has also a mixture of political higher level
targets injected in the discussion, and that does not make it any
easier.
At the top level there is the presidential system that is tailored
for the two-party approach. If one would give up the two-party
approach at that level one might move also e.g. away from the single-
party government approach towards multi-party govennments.
Presidency is important, done in its own way. It might continue as
such handled here with minor changes per single-winner, or major
changes in government that would fit multi-winner.
At the lower levels one might consider also two-party oriented
methods that are allow also third parties to take part in the
competition. I mean that if one wants to stay in the two-party
model, one may not need full multi-winner methods at the lower
levels. It would be enough to e.g. guarantee that also third parties
can survive and get their candidates elected, and that some third
party may also one day replace one of the major parties as one of
the two leading parties in some states, and maybe at national level
too. I think this more lmited approac to multiple parties is quite
different from typical multi-party requirements that typically
include requirements like proportional represnetation.
Here, such as Condorcet for single-winner, and PR by whatever method
does well for multi-winner. Likely Condorcet best for presidential.
Note that, unlike with TPTP, or even IRV, Condorcet voters can back,
besides the "better" of the two-parties, those for whatever issues
this voter considers important - and get their backing noted in the
vote counts (the big difference between IRV and Condorcet).
Dave Ketchum
Of course one may also adopt different models in the two layers, two-
party system for the rop level and proportonal representation for
some state level representative bodies. Above I also made the
assumption that the strict tw-party approach where there are two
fixed parties and that's it, is not considered acceptable /
sufficient.
The message I'm trying to carry with this, is simply that after one
names the targets, it is much easier to discuss what the best
methods to implement those targets would be. Is it a two-party
system, a flexible two-party system, or a proportional system, and
are the targets different at different levels and in different bodies.
Juho
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