I could see a kind of proxy front end to STV elections. I'm not sure I'm
convinced it would be a good idea, or even practical to implement, but
suppose that any person or group (including parties) could register an
STV ranking, and a voter could select that ranking instead of ranking
individual candidates. The logistical difficulty would be in determining
how a voter specified their proxy, along with the possibility of
ambiguity deliberate or accidental ("Siera Club", "John Smith").
There's another difficulty with that idea, and one that Juho has shown
earlier, as related to the inheritance order of candidates in the
electoral system of Fiji. Candidates may put preferences in different
orders than you do, or come to an agreement with other candidates to
support each other.
To some extent, that could be fixed by publishing the ranking
beforehand, but one should still be aware of the difficulty.
I think that the simplest way of adding proxying to STV, user interface
wise, would be to have a delegation mark, where your stated preference
ordering overrides that of the candidate. For instance
A > B* > C (rest left blank)
with * as the delegation mark, and B having the preference ordering B >
E > F > C, would give
A > B > E > F > C
by substitution, whereas
A > C > B*
would give
A > C > B > E > F
since the A > C preference that the voter manually stated overrode the F
> C preference of candidate B.
Paradoxical preferences could be resolved by highest ranked first. If
A > B* > C*
and B prefers D to E, but C prefers E to D, then the final ordering
prefers D to E since B is ranked above C. An even more sophisticated
version could run a single-winner social order election for equal-ranked
candidates, so that
A > B* = C*
gives A > (result of social ordering, according to single-winner method,
for those candidates for which B and C gave any preference)
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