Re: [EM] Proportional, Accountable, Local (PAL) representation: isn't this a big deal?
Jameson Quinn wrote: 2011/10/25 Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_el...@lavabit.com mailto:km_el...@lavabit.com Jameson Quinn wrote: * A multimember-district system helps with the above problems, but doesn't actually solve them. Who wants a system where ballots are only a little bit too complex, where you only sort of know who your representative is, and which is only mostly proportional? Multimember systems have been used in the US, on a local scale. The lack of such systems in the current day might just as well be due to that there is no modern day League of Proportional Representation such as the one whose efforts helped get STV into New York, than that multimember systems themselves are too complex. Fair enough. But note also that this was just the lesser of my two stated hurdles to MMP. STV is not mixed member proportional. As for the complexity issue, STV seems to work where it has been implemented. I agree that complexity will put a bound on how large each district can be, but as long as you keep below that size, it should work. If you have a district size of 5 members and 10 parties, that would give a seemingly unmanagable number of 50 candidates. However, voters can chunk by considering these candidates in party order. First they can consider do I like party A more than party B, then which of A's members do I prefer?. They do not have to rank all 50 members either, and few would. To the extent that the voters chunk in this manner, it seems to be personalized enough that the system doesn't degrade into party list (except in places where full ranking is enforced), yet it makes the burden easier to the point that ranked multimember voting does work. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional, Accountable, Local (PAL) representation: isn't this a big deal?
Interesting, but not relevant to what Kristofer had actually written. Finland uses a party-list voting system - Kristopher was writing about STV, and specifically about 5-member districts. James -Original Message- From: election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com [mailto:election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com] On Behalf Of Juho Laatu Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2011 5:11 PM To: EM Subject: Re: [EM] Proportional, Accountable,Local (PAL) representation: isn't this a big deal? On 29.10.2011, at 16.58, James Gilmour wrote: Kristofer Munsterhjelm Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2011 9:14 AM STV is not mixed member proportional. As for the complexity issue, STV seems to work where it has been implemented. I agree that complexity will put a bound on how large each district can be, but as long as you keep below that size, it should work. If you have a district size of 5 members and 10 parties, that would give a seemingly unmanagable number of 50 candidates. I think that is most unlikely. The only party that would likely nominate five candidates would be one that had reason to believe it could win at least four of the five seats in the multi-member district. Parties that might have an expectation of winning two seats would likely nominate only three candidates. Parties that expected to win only one seat would nominate at most two candidates, and based on our experience here in Scotland, many would nominate only one. So the total number of candidates in a 5-member district would almost certainly be far short of 50I think a total of 20 would be much more likely. Here's some data from last parliamentary elections in Finland. The largest multi-member district had 35 representatives and 405 candidates. All the large parties had 35 candidates. The largest party got 11 representatives. The two smallest multi-member districts had 6 representatives and 94 or 108 candidates. One of the parties grew from 5 representatives to 39 representatives. So it needed lots of candidates too in order to not run out of candidates in some districts. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_parliamentary_election,_2011) If one has only one or two candidates more than the number of representatives that this party has or expects to get, then the decision on who will be elected will be mainly made by the party and not by the voters. Preliminaries could help a bit by allowing at least the party members to influence. If proportional results are counted separately at each district, then it would be good to have a large number of representatives per district to achieve accurate proportionality. In order to allow the voters to decide who will be elected there should be maybe twice as many candidates per each party as that party will get representatives. In that way no seats are safe. It is also good if there are such candidates that are not likely to be elected this time but that may gain popularity in these elections and become elected in the next elections. All this sums up to quite a large number of candidates. My favourite approach to implementing ranked style voting in this kind of environments would be to combine party affiliation and rankings somehow. The idea is that even a bullet vote or a short ranked vote would be counted for the party by default. If one looks this from the open list method point of view, this could mean just allowing the voter to rank few candidates instead of naming only one. Already ability to rank three candidates would make party internal proportionality in open list methods much better. Probably there is typically no very widespread need to rank candidates of different parties in this kind of elections, but it ok to support also this if the method and the requirement of simplicity of voting do allow that. From STV point of view the problem is how to allow better proportionality and voter decisions instead of party decisions in some nice way. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional, Accountable, Local (PAL) representation: isn't this a big deal?
I just wanted to point out that actually one can come from open lists towards STV, and from STV towards a party based system with multiple candidates and end up pretty much at the same point. Juho On 29.10.2011, at 20.21, James Gilmour wrote: Interesting, but not relevant to what Kristofer had actually written. Finland uses a party-list voting system - Kristopher was writing about STV, and specifically about 5-member districts. James -Original Message- From: election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com [mailto:election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com] On Behalf Of Juho Laatu Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2011 5:11 PM To: EM Subject: Re: [EM] Proportional, Accountable,Local (PAL) representation: isn't this a big deal? On 29.10.2011, at 16.58, James Gilmour wrote: Kristofer Munsterhjelm Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2011 9:14 AM STV is not mixed member proportional. As for the complexity issue, STV seems to work where it has been implemented. I agree that complexity will put a bound on how large each district can be, but as long as you keep below that size, it should work. If you have a district size of 5 members and 10 parties, that would give a seemingly unmanagable number of 50 candidates. I think that is most unlikely. The only party that would likely nominate five candidates would be one that had reason to believe it could win at least four of the five seats in the multi-member district. Parties that might have an expectation of winning two seats would likely nominate only three candidates. Parties that expected to win only one seat would nominate at most two candidates, and based on our experience here in Scotland, many would nominate only one. So the total number of candidates in a 5-member district would almost certainly be far short of 50I think a total of 20 would be much more likely. Here's some data from last parliamentary elections in Finland. The largest multi-member district had 35 representatives and 405 candidates. All the large parties had 35 candidates. The largest party got 11 representatives. The two smallest multi-member districts had 6 representatives and 94 or 108 candidates. One of the parties grew from 5 representatives to 39 representatives. So it needed lots of candidates too in order to not run out of candidates in some districts. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_parliamentary_election,_2011) If one has only one or two candidates more than the number of representatives that this party has or expects to get, then the decision on who will be elected will be mainly made by the party and not by the voters. Preliminaries could help a bit by allowing at least the party members to influence. If proportional results are counted separately at each district, then it would be good to have a large number of representatives per district to achieve accurate proportionality. In order to allow the voters to decide who will be elected there should be maybe twice as many candidates per each party as that party will get representatives. In that way no seats are safe. It is also good if there are such candidates that are not likely to be elected this time but that may gain popularity in these elections and become elected in the next elections. All this sums up to quite a large number of candidates. My favourite approach to implementing ranked style voting in this kind of environments would be to combine party affiliation and rankings somehow. The idea is that even a bullet vote or a short ranked vote would be counted for the party by default. If one looks this from the open list method point of view, this could mean just allowing the voter to rank few candidates instead of naming only one. Already ability to rank three candidates would make party internal proportionality in open list methods much better. Probably there is typically no very widespread need to rank candidates of different parties in this kind of elections, but it ok to support also this if the method and the requirement of simplicity of voting do allow that. From STV point of view the problem is how to allow better proportionality and voter decisions instead of party decisions in some nice way. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional, Accountable, Local (PAL) representation: isn't this a big deal?
2011/10/25 Andy Jennings electi...@jenningsstory.com On Tue, Oct 25, 2011 at 11:56 AM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: 2011/10/25 Andy Jennings electi...@jenningsstory.com Hi Jameson, I looked over it. I didn't see any technical problems immediately, but I'm going to try to re-read it a few more times and keep thinking it over. My emotional response, though, is that it's probably beyond the complexity limit for actual implementation anytime soon. The idea that candidates from your district are in a bigger font and candidates outside your co-districts aren't listed at all but you can write them in is a clever trick, but I don't know if people will go for it. (Note: I've renamed co-district as super-district) The super-district idea and ballot design are not fundamental. For simplicity, it would work fine if only the candidates from your local district were available, as long as you could write-in candidates from other districts. Clarification on terminology: When you say Fair Representation, is that the same thing as Fair Majority Voting? Yes. Oops. I'd already fixed this error on the page. - I know Fair Majority Voting from here: http://mathaware.org/mam/08/EliminateGerrymandering.pdf - I know Balinski has a more complicated system that allows multiple winners per district. I forget what it's called, biproportional apportionment, maybe? Don't know that one. Can you find a link? Here are some references: Michel Balinski, “Apportionment : uni- and bi-dimensional,” in B. Simeone et F. Pukelsheim (Eds.), Mathematics and Democracy. Recent Advances in Voting Systems and Collective Choice, Springer, Berlin and Heidelberg, 2006, 43-53. (Paywalled: http://www.springerlink.com/content/g21l8t2t12p4n14l/) At a quick read, this is basically just a prettier formalism for FMV. Yes, it is good math; no, it is not a politically- or legally-significant change. Oh, wait... it also allows multi-member districts. But not post-hoc overlapping districts as in PAL. Michel Balinski and Friedrich Pukelsheim, “Die Mathematik der doppelten Gerechtigkeit,” Spektrum der Wissenschaft, April 2007, 76-80. (In German: http://www.math.uni-augsburg.de/stochastik/pukelsheim/2007a.pdf) I can't read German. Michel Balinski and Friedrich Pukelsheim, “Matrices and politics,” in E. P. Liski, J. Isotalo, S. Puntanen and G. P. H. Styan (Eds.), Festschrift for Tarmo Pukkila, Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Philosophy, University of Tampere, Finland, 2006, 233-242. (http://www.math.uni-augsburg.de/stochastik/pukelsheim/2006d.pdf) This appears to use the prettier formalism to discuss a multi-member-district FMV-like system in Zurich. See also: S. Maier, P. Zachariassen, and M. Zachariasen, “Divisor-based biproportional apportionment in electoral systems: A real-life benchmark study,” *Management Science* 56, no. 2 (2010): 373–387. This looks at algorithm performance and result quality (over several measures) in the general problem of multi-member districts and global proportionality, for various sources of real-world and simulated (including deliberately pathological) data. All of the above have the same problem I see with FMV: in the single-member-district case, they could elect a minority candidate over the majority candidate for that district. PAL resolves this problem by making vote transfers explicit and, from the voter's point of view, optional and thus intentional. Thus PAL elects winners as if it were a single-member biproportional system, but it provides a much clearer rationale for the discordant district-level results: the loser may have gotten more direct votes, but the winner got a higher direct+transferred total; and all winners reached the same overall quota. This is the main idea of PAL. JQ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional, Accountable, Local (PAL) representation: isn't this a big deal?
OK, I'm turning into a bit of a spammer on this issue, but... Here's some discussion of PAL representation's legality in the UShttp://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/PAL_representation#Note_on_legality_in_US. A state could pass a law to use FMV (a true proportional system) until the anti-PR federal law is repealed, then automatically switch to PAL representation (an easy and smooth transition; FMV was a major inspiration for PAL). Basically, I think it's an important fact that FMV is the only known proportional system *compatible with current US federal law*. (There are no US constitutional barriers to PR, just federal law). Jameson Quinn Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional, Accountable, Local (PAL) representation: isn't this a big deal?
From: Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com Here's some discussion of PAL representation's legality in the UShttp://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/PAL_representation#Note_on_legality_in_US. A state could pass a law to use FMV (a true proportional system) until the anti-PR federal law is repealed, then automatically switch to PAL representation (an easy and smooth transition; FMV was a major inspiration for PAL). Basically, I think it's an important fact that FMV is the only known proportional system *compatible with current US federal law*. (There are no US constitutional barriers to PR, just federal law). Jameson, I believe the federal law applies only to federal elections. Thus a state could allocate its state legislative seats proportionately in any fair way that did not violate other laws. In general, Congress only passes electoral laws pertaining to federal elections. Isn't that so? I did not realize that Jefferson supported a proportional system of electing representatives. Kathy Dopp http://electionmathematics.org Town of Colonie, NY 12304 One of the best ways to keep any conversation civil is to support the discussion with true facts. Renewable energy is homeland security. Fundamentals of Verifiable Elections http://kathydopp.com/wordpress/?p=174 View some of my research on my SSRN Author page: http://ssrn.com/author=1451051 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
