Raph Frank wrote:
On 8/22/08, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
What I had in mind was something like this: Say there's a single-winner
election where the plurality winner has 35% support. Then those voters
effectively got 0.5 (+1) worth of the vote with only 0.35 mass. The total
voting power of the entire electorate should not be altered.
Well, they actually got 1 constituency's worth of voting power at
parliament for 35% of the vote in the constituency. This is just
fundamentally unfair and the problem cannot really be eliminated
while also allowing independents to run.
If there are no independents, then the problem pretty much goes
away.
Thus
pA (unscaled) = 0.35/0.5 = 0.7
pB (unscaled) = 1.3
For the sake of the example, consider the case of 1000 votes. Then the
scaling factor is x, so that 0.7 * x * 350 + 1.3 * x * 650 = 1000. x is then
about 0.918, so the voters for the winner now have voting power 0.6426 and
all the other voters have voting power 1.1934.
This would mean that if a candidate had 55% support, his voters would
have their voting power boosted (though, I guess in that case, there would
be no change). It still has the problem that the constituency gets a non-party
candidate and also its voters get to vote for a party.
In MMP, party voters also get to elect a candidate and also contribute
to the national level (to the extent that the total constituency result
is disproportionate). The reasoning would then go that even a voter that
elects a nominal independent may have a preference for a certain party
(the party that is closest to the views of the independent). Thus the
system should treat the vote as if it was a vote for the party in
question, if it has to treat the vote as a party vote in the first
place, and it should do so in order that all voters have equal power
(influencing both local and national levels).
As for fairness, consider the case where more than "just enough" voters
voted for candidate X. With your "you either get full strength or no
strength" scheme, some voters are going to look at the result and say
"hey, my vote wasn't required yet I have no power. This means my vote
was wasted, so I'm going to be more careful later". To some extent, this
unfairness observation would exist in all the cases where some voters'
votes were unneeded, but at least with continuous reweighting you get
the counter that your vote did in fact have an effect, in that all the
others who shared your preference for the independent got more of a say
in the national round. That's about the best you can do for the
single-seat local election, since you can't transfer votes when there's
only one seat.
I think fairer might be to just exclude the voters who voted for the
independent from consideration at the party level (if the independent
is elected for the constituency.)
They have already obtained 1 full seats worth of representation for
1/3 of a seat's worth of votes, there is no point in also giving them
more representation by including them in the party allocation. Voters
who voted for other independents or party members would still be included.
I can see two points of view here. The first is that they got more than
their share by the extent that they were less than a majority, and the
second is that they got more than their share by the extent that they
didn't represent every voter. In either case, I think that there should
be a continuous function, but the point of view matters when considering
how much power should be retained in contrast to those who didn't get
anything at all (that is, whose candidate lost).
Looking at it again, the point of view that it should be with respect to
100% is probably better than the one that it should be with respect to a
majority. Consider the case where's there unanimity towards which
candidate should win. Then I think the right way to treat that is as if
no votes had been cast at all, rather than to give those who unanimously
decided to elect the constituency candidate double power in contrast to
those who did not vote (or a hypothetical voter that'd only vote in the
national election, if that was possible).
Another option is to have a reasonable number of top up seats. If 1/3 of
the seats were top-up seats, then 2/3 of a constituency would be enough
to be entitled to a seat. This would mean that independents would be
able to archive a quota in 1 constituency. They would have to obtain 2/3
of the votes to be eligible for election.
If you run the national and local election as a single STV election, I
think you could get the result where many national candidates get a
quota and "outcrowd" the various regional candidates, even if those got
close to a quota. The problem here is that a "local plus national"
election has a subset constraint (on number of local and national
candidates) which a plain STV election doesn't have.
Or to put it differently, in a general case. Say that you have a
situation where there are n seats and n/3 top-up seats. In a district,
less than 2/3 vote for any candidate (for example, there are ten nearly
evenly matched candidates). Nobody votes party-line. Who gets the seat?
If the system can't ensure that a candidate from the district in
question gets the seat, then by pigeonhole, either a national candidate
or a candidate from another district gets it, which is quite undesirable.
Alternatively, independents might be allowed to register as mini-parties.
They could be allowed to appear on the party ballots in 2-3 nearby
constituencies. As long as their 'party' receives 1 seat's worth of votes,
then they are entitled to be elected in their constituency.
That's interesting. What would happen if it got more than one seat's
worth? I assume that is possible, because otherwise, the "party" would
have to be limited to only one constituency, in which case the top-up
aspect would fail to work.
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