> From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax > Sent: 17 April 2007 17:15 > I didn't claim that this information was "what STV-PR is all about." > It is primarily a method for creating a proportional representation > assembly. The information I'm talking about is not directly relevant > to that goal. But, I assert, it should still be made available. If it > is determined that public funding shouldn't be spent on that, then > ways could be provided for private funding (such as through > nonprofits or media) to cover the costs of counting. If nobody is > sufficiently interested to count all the votes, that's another > matter..... but I think there would be interest.
You may be interested to know that in our elections on 3 May, electors will complete conventional ballot papers (real paper) with an old fashioned stubby pencil (chained to the polling booth) or vote by post. The ballot papers for the Local Government STV elections (and for the Scottish Parliament elections that are being held on the same day - MMP voting system!!) will be scanned and data files created by intelligent optical character recognition software. The ballot data will then be counted electronically. So the full ballot data will be readily available in an electronic format and COULD be published in a suitably anonymised form, i.e. removing all references to the ballot paper number from the file of ballot data. With thousands of voters in every one of the 353 elections and only small numbers of candidates in each of the 353 wards (local government electoral district), the chances of identifying any voter from a "unique" sequence of preferences are probably so small that they can be safely set aside in the greater public interest of making the full ballot data available at ward level. This was done with the full STV-PR ballot data for three constituencies in Ireland in 2002. Unfortunately, our government (= "Scottish Executive") has followed the conventional approach to paper records relating to elections and so the Election Rules specifically prohibit the release or publication of any of the electronic information although all the electronic information has to be retained for four years (until the next election). However, following some agitation on this issue, the government has agreed to carry out a consultation on this after the elections are over. So we may yet see the full STV ballot data from all our 2007 local government elections. Then we might have independent validation of the results and lots of interesting (and amusing) political and sociological analysis of the preference patterns. James Gilmour ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info