On Aug 15, 2008, at 20:05 , James Gilmour wrote:
Juho > Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 5:24 PM
If you have some issue X, wouldn't it also be natural to have one
list "for X" and one list "against X"? I.e. lists but not "party
lists". You may need to arrange the candidates anyway according to
their opinions in some "lists" to make it clear to the voters who are
"against" and who are "for".
Such formal "issue lists" are both undesirable and unnecessary.
Some issues divide on party lines, some issues divide within
parties, and some issues run across some or all parties. In fact,
in deciding their reactions to the candidates who have offered
themselves for election, voters can and do take many more factors
into account: party, issue X, sex, race, language, locality,
issue Y, etc, etc. Different voters will weight these factors
and these combinations of factors differently. Of course, that
depends on having a voting system that is sufficiently sensitive to
allow the voters to express their views in this way. But
preferential voting provides a workable compromise, where each
voter consciously or unconsciously condenses his or her n-dimensional
assessment of the candidates into one dimension to put the
candidates into a personal order of preference.
I understood that in this case the parties were irrelevant and
therefore basic lists may be sufficient to put in place a structure
that covers all the relevant questions.
In theory, if there are more than one issue, e.g. X and Y, then there
could be more lists, e.g. for "X and Y", "X and not Y", "not X and Y"
and "not X and not Y".
I mentioned also the tree option to cover more complex structures.
(And it is possible to extend from that, but that will get more
complex then, maybe deleting the basic simplicity of voting in list
and tree based methods.)
One thing worth noting when comparing list based and STV style
methods is that although the voters have all kind of opinions the
candidates represent a more limited set of opinions. One candidate
could be said to have opinions X and Y in that order of importance.
As a result that candidate could represent "section Y of party X".
Probably also the voter has some order of importance in her opinions,
and could therefore vote either "section Y of party X" or "section X
of party Y". Very complex preferences will be lost in the rounding
errors in any method.
Lists and trees are not quite as flexible as STV but on the other
hand in them voting is much simpler.
There can be also some benefits in forcing the candidates to declare
their association and priorities. If they are not declared that opens
some doors to more vague marketing, promises in all directions and
possibility that the candidate will promote different things after
being elected than what the voter expected.
STV-PR gives the voters some flexibility
that the list (or tree) based methods do not give but here I didn't
see anything special that would speak against the use of lists.
STV-PR does not provide "some" flexibility - STV-PR provides
complete flexibility for each voter to express her or his personal
preferences among all the candidates on whatever basis that
individual voter chooses. Your preferences and mine may be identical,
but it is probably that we have placed the candidates in that
common order for quite different reasons.
STV-PR is more flexible than list based methods ("some" or more than
"some"). Sometimes that flexibility may also bring problems like long
votes and need to analyze all the candidates. If there are very many
candidates it could be useful to allow also inheritance by default
(for short votes) (to parties or to candidate's own favourites
(includes also risks like in Fiji)) or group names in votes, e.g.
MyCandidate>MyParty. (Hybrid methods between lists and STV are thus
also possible.)
(Lists may also be more practical in some cases, e.g. if the number
of candidates is high.)
The largest STV-PR election I know of had 450 candidates for 120
places, but I would not recommend such a high district magnitude!
What was the number of districts here? Was this a single district
with 120 seats or are the 120 places a sum of smaller districts?
To allow for diversity in representation you also need a reasonable
minimum, so that the larger parties will be "forced" to nominate
at least two candidates each, so that the voters get some choice
within parties as well as between them.
Are there problems with having too few candidates somewhere? At least
in list based elections it seems that parties prefer nominating many
candidates rather than one or few. In STV there might be some risk of
vote splitting when parties nominate multiple candidates (since
voters could either forget to rank their own party candidates or rank
candidates of other parties instead of them). Maybe also the single-
member tradition has some psychological influence here.
For public elections,
however, there is practical trade-off because electors, especially
those brought up with decades of single-member districts (UK,
USA), will want a guaranteed level of local representation. Where
you can strike the balance in that trade-off will almost
certainly vary from country to country.
Yes, there is a trade-off between locality of the representatives and
accuracy of proportional representation (it is also possible to have
both, but that means some other "rounding errors" like not electing
the most popular candidates in each district). If the number of seats
in each district is higher than one then the idea of one
representative who knows that she represents all the local voters is
already gone (there will be uncertainty on who represents whom) => it
is then easier to go for higher seat numbers per district too.
Juho
James Gilmour
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