--- On Wed, 6/5/09, Raph Frank <raph...@gmail.com> wrote: > > The vote could be e.g. C999>C888>C111. > > Pairs of candidates like C999 and C888 > > might be rare enough to allow some vote > > buyer to mark numerous ballots. > > Ofc, a law banning vote buying might be enough in 99% of > cases anyway.
Yes, that may be enough in most societies. Societies are different. In some societies the moral deterrent is enough. Somewhere else "only fools don't cheat". Coercion is somewhat more difficult to defend against than vote buying because often it takes place behind closed doors. Also privacy problems have somewhat different characteristics. But in general, one need not defend more than what is necessary in the society in question. > > Number of candidates and size of > > districts whose results will be reported > > are also important (and existence of > > "hopeless" candidates too). > > Maybe, hopeless candidates could be removed before > announcing the results. > > Ofc, then you can't use the ballot imaging idea ... or you > need some > way of covering the selections. Removing hopeless candidates has problems too. Maybe they themselves want publicity since they want to grow to strong candidates. It is possible to set stricter limits on who can become a candidate. And one could also give up all kind of ballot imaging. In STV like methods this is unfortunately not as easy as e.g. in Condorcet style methods where the ballots can often be summed up to a matrix. Of course also here one must be careful with the level of verifiability that the society needs (i.e. can you trust that the votes will be counted right or do you need special arrangements to guarantee that). > > One could name also "orthogonal" > > groups that consist of candidates of > > different branches, e.g. "candidates of > > town X" or "all female candidates". > > An easy way of achieving this is to allow people to be part > of more > than 1 group. Yes. But I'd like to keep the primary tree hierarchy as clean and simple as possible to make it easy for all voters to understand the basic structure of the political space and to make voting easy (and to some extent to tie the candidates to something concrete, to avoid vote fishing with artificial additional lists). I.e. careful consideration needed to determine how easy it will be to add more groupings and candidates. > > I noted earlier that the seat allocation > > rules may also observe votes that will > > be inherited by a certain group. This > > may make the treatment of named and > > non-named groupings somewhat different. > > What are unnamed groups? If we have lots of votes where some set of candidates (e.g. C1, C2, C3) are the first three candidates then it could have been beneficial for these three candidates to name themselves as a group or a party (if the seat allocation rules give some reason to this). The number of different subsets of candidates is huge, so we can afford to check only some of them (in this case the named ones) during the seat allocation process. A related point: You mentioned that votes 10: A=B can be seen as two sets of votes, 5: A>B and 5: B>A. If the quota is 8 then we neither A nor B can be elected yet. But if A and B form a party of two candidates, then the seat allocation algorithm could see that together they actually have more than one quota of votes, and as a result one of them can be elected. (The A=B voters might vote for the party code.) Unnamed groupings would not be handled the same way (since there are too many of them to check all of them). (This is why I earlier commented that it would be possible to see both A and B to have full support of all the 10 votes.) It is another question if one should flip a coin and decide between A and B right away or to wait for some others to be eliminated (and votes transferred) before doing so. I note that your interest to keep the elimination rules different from the election rules are related. Note that the hierarchy allows also conclusions like vote C111>G11=G12 to contribute to the total sum of party P1 support - although the vote contains also strict preferences, not only ties between all the listed codes. (I used term "direct inheritance" in some of the earlier mails to describe this kind of votes.) > I know in Ireland, a switch to any form of national list > would be > promoted on the fact that it would help to weak local > "parish pump" > politics. Would use of larger districts alleviate the problem? I guess also here we need a balance between guaranteeing nation wide local representation and keeping the thoughts on nation wide questions. (One radical approach (not necessarily a good one) would be to allow voters to vote any candidate in the whole country but still use a seat allocation algorithm that forces regional proportionality.) > > Candidates C3 and C4 might not have any > > codes of their own. > > This would allow candidates to add names of people who had > trouble > with ballot access. Yes. There have to be some rules that set limits to who can nominate candidates and how many candidates (and groupings) one can nominate. My rough thinking is that there should maybe be a reasonable chance of each nominated candidate to become elected either in these or in the next elections. Additional rules are needed for use of orthogonal groupings, number of hierarchical levels etc. The system may also force use of levels (some parties might prefer to use closed lists or not to create any divisions within the party). Rules could allow any group of nominated candidates to declare themselves as a grouping (no permission needed from the party) etc. This battle is a bit like the battle of constituency sizes. Maybe we just need some common agreement on what the target levels are and then monitor and adjust the rules as needed. Juho ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info