Hi, Stephane Rouillon a écrit : > James Gilmour a écrit : -snip-
> > Computerisation, with electronic voting, may be the way > > forward, but there are still some problems to be overcome. > > But these problems relate to the voting method (electronic > > without an audit trail) and NOT to the voting system, > > ie STV-PR. Except that if the election will be counted by hand, then the choice of variation of STV-PR is constrained: It must forbid each voter from ranking candidates as equally preferred (except at the bottom "truncated" part of her ordering). Trying to handle indifference in a hand-count would be impractical. (Similarly, the variation of STV-PR that "fractionally transfers" each over-quota vote from winners would be impractical if the election were hand-counted.) Banning expressions of equally-preferred candidates in STV-PR isn't a serious problem, per se. But in Instant Runoff it can make a big difference, by forcing voters to rank a compromise over (rather than equal to) their favorite candidates in order to defeat a "greater evil." Since some of the people advocating Instant Runoff seem actually to be just trying to use it as a stepping stone to PR, they insist Instant Runoff be just like STV-PR, meaning they won't advocate the variation of Instant Runoff that allows the voter to express equal preference. To get them to change their mind on this would probably require some country to adopt a variation of STV-PR that allows equal preference. Which requires machine-counting. By the way, according to Gary Cox (professor of political science at UC San Diego), Australia's system is more like closed party list than STV PR, since most voters utilize the option of picking a party rather than tediously ranking many candidates. (Gary prefers closed party list because he says it reduces the incentives for similar candidates to compete against each other by promising pork to their constituency. Whether or not I'd agree with him that closed party list is better depends on whether there are significant barriers against new parties being able to compete successfully, if the elite in an old party go corrupt.) A PR variation that I think might work better than existing PRs would be to let each voter rank the *parties* in order of preference. These votes could be counted similarly to closed party list, by awarding seats to each party in proportion to the number of votes that rank the party highest. But it has a few advantages: (1) If there's a minimum threshold (5%, for example) that a party must meet to win any seats, voters who prefer tiny parties could rank them highest without wasting their votes, since sub-threshold parties could be deleted one at a time, smallest-first, with votes transferring to next choices as in STV. (2) The preference orders could simultaneously be tallied by a good Condorcetian method (e.g., MAM) to find the "most preferred" party, which could be rewarded with extra seats, and/or agenda control in the legislature, and/or major offices like prime minister. This second tally would require machine- counting to be practical, since if the rewards given to the "most preferred" party are significant, then many small centrist parties would compete to be that party. (3) Assuming the second advantage is implemented, with a large reward going to the "most preferred" party, the voters' relative preferences regarding the plausible compromises on important issues that lay ahead would be elicited. ---Steve (Steve Eppley [EMAIL PROTECTED]) ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info