On Aug 22, 2008, at 12:36 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Juho wrote:
On Aug 18, 2008, at 12:10 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
The extreme would be a voting system where people just say how
much they agree with an opinion, for all relevant opinions, and
then the system picks the maximally representative assembly. Such
a method is not desirable, I think, because it would be very
vulnerable to strategy, and someone would have to say which
opinions were "relevant" and then redo the list when voters'
priorities change and other opinions become relevant. In a
simulation, one can do this easily because the voters vote
mechanically (and so the what the opinion "really is" doesn't
matter), but in the real world, not so much.
In principle STV allows (especially if ties are allowed) voters to
determine any sets of candidates (without requiring someone to fix
them beforehand). Voters may e.g. list all female candidates. It
is also possible that any number of such group definitions would
be available. Candidates could indicate themselves which opinions
they support, and voters could include references to those lists
in their ballot. Also opinions created by others than candidates
themselves could be available. The lists could freely overlap.
Someone could vote e.g. Women (1st priority), candidates that
indicate that they support election reform (2nd priority) and
candidates that were listed by the election reform society (3rd
priority). An STV like ballot would be derived from this information.
To a limit, yes. But say that you prefer women and leftists. Also
assume that there are some women who are leftists, some leftists
that are not women, and some that are both. Then you'd rank those
who were both above either of the two.
If we are taking about methods that rank the candidates the idea is
to define a grammar and terminology so that the most common voter
opinions (orderings or approximations of them) can be expressed using
short expressions. Bullet votes and tree inheritance is one (very
compact) option. Giving a complete ordering of the candidates is
another (complete) option.
In my simulation, a voter who preferred women and leftists would
rank male leftists and right-wing women randomly with respect to
each other. In reality there could be different preferences among
those. The point is that no concatenation of two lists would
produce the correct result. If the list is by political ideology,
then it could rank men on the left ahead of women, and if it was by
gender, then it could rank right-wing women ahead of left-wing ones.
A tree could solve this, but it'd get increasingly more complex for
numerous opinions. The complexity is probably a true issue - that
is, not an artifact of the system - and one may wonder if voters
would compare candidates on all issues in order to figure out a
true consistent ballot (even for a party-neutral system). I have no
data for that, so my simulation assumes the voters do so, since
that taxes the proportional representation of the method more than
if the voters didn't.
I like trees since I think they do simplify things. If many people
feel the same way they are expected to establish a party. If many
people within that party feel the same way they should establish a
subgroup. Most people support the ideology of some group (that they
feel most familiar with) (instead of creating an ideology of their
own) and therefore the one of those groupings that other citizens
have created might be just what they need. Bullet voting with tree
inheritance does not give full ordering of the candidates but may be
accurate (to the level of groupings, but not to the level of detailed
candidate ordering). Probably the interest to give a more detailed
ordering will in most cases appear within the tree structure, nearest
group first etc. Typical voters could thus quite often be happy with
ranking few candidates of their closest group and leaving the rest
for the default inheritance order to handle.
That sounds like MMP. I think MMP can work if done right (with
STV instead of FPTP as base, and reweighting to avoid lista
civetta). Using party list here is probably better than the party-
neutral version where you'd rank representatives for local,
regional, and national levels, and then it keeps the reweighting
at each stage; simply because there would be an immense number of
candidates at the national level, and ranking them all would be
Herculean.
MMP style is also one option, although I was still thinking of
methods where all representatives are of the same type. The method
would in that case have to force the districts to elect so that
also election wide balance is maintained.
What would the method look like, so that a voter could specify (for
instance) women ahead of men on both a local and national scale?
The only thing that seems to work is candidate ranking on both the
local and national level, which would take a lot of time and
produce extremely long ballot papers.
Trying to guarantee proportionality for women at national level may
be tricky if there is no "woman party" that the candidates and voters
could name (well, the sex of a candidate is typically known, but that
is a special case). If some voter ranks all women in his/her vote in
his/her own district first we can not tell if his/her intention was
to vote for these candidates because they are women or for some other
reason.
In order to guarantee proportionality (of any imaginable grouping) at
national level we may need to allow the voters to rank all candidates
nation wide (as you noted). The next question then is if we allow the
voters of one district to have a say on which candidates will be
elected in the other districts. If we allow that then we could simply
arrange a national level STV election with some further tricks. The
trick could be e.g. to refuse to nominate any candidates from some
district after the agreed number of candidates has been elected from
that district. (This was just one quickly drafted option.)
Originally I was thinking about some simpler and more district
oriented methods. E.g. a tree based method (proportionality
guaranteed to named groupings of one tree only) could work simply so
that first all the (district level) votes in the trees are counted
nation wide to fix the number of seats for each branch at national
level (one could also stop counting national proportionality at some
granularity level (=forget national proportionality in the smallest
branches)). Then one could again e.g. elect candidates in the order
of strength nationally (this is the simplest but not necessarily the
most accurate way) and skip those candidates that can not be elected
(=district already full).
It is possible to extend this process to cover also other than (tree
based) political proportionality and (district based) regional
proportionality. One could e.g. maintain proportionality of men and
women (either based on their proportion among the citizens or based
on how people voted), or one could do the same for age groups etc.
There could also be additional yes/no questions in the election, or
in principle even another tree of opinions (on some other question
that is orthogonal to the regular political/ideological questions of
the first tree).
Juho
P.S. One approach to determining which party/group will get the vote
of one voter who ranks multiple candidates by default in the nation
level tree based proportionality calculations is to give the vote to
the smallest group that contains all the ranked candidates.
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