Re: [EM] Conceiving a Democratic Electoral Process
Mike Ossipoff: re: ...including ones whose proposals and procedures are democratic. (posted in response to: My comment was not referring to democracies, it was referring to parties) Parties are not democratic, either in relation to the entire electorate or in relation to their own membership. In terms of the entire electorate, they are but a subset of the people, organized to impose their will on the majority. In terms of their membership, they are oligarchic. They exhibit The Iron Rule of Oligarchy as described by Robert Michels. You can find his fascinating study of the issue, Political Parties, at: http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/michels/polipart.pdf This brief excerpt may excite your interest: It is indisputable that the oligarchical and bureaucratic tendency of party organization is a matter of technical and practical necessity. It is the inevitable product of the very principle of organization ... Its only result is, in fact, to strengthen the rule of the leaders, for it serves to conceal from the mass a danger which really threatens democracy. Political Parties, pp 27-28 re: It isn't the job of the electoral method to choose who will run, or to seek out candidates. We ourselves, the public, the voters, should be the ones to decide who our best advocates are. You are correct when you say, We ourselves, the public, the voters, should be the ones to decide who our best advocates are. You are wrong when you say it is not the job of the electoral method to ensure that happens. The electoral method must ensure that each and every one of us is able to participate in the electoral process, including the selection of candidates, to the full extent of our desire and ability. When the electoral method lets the parties pick the candidates the people will be allowed to choose from, it is not only undemocratic, it's dangerous. re: ...but which you feel are somehow like Stalin and Hitler. and you need to understand and admit that what you really are opposed to is is government itself. and Yeah, that's what the Democrats say too :-) And the Republicans too. and the various and sundry similar slurs strewn throughout your post. These slurs are tiresome, and the deliberate misconstructions of my comments are tedious. Until you demonstrate that you have the intellectual ability necessary to contribute and the common courtesy necessary to participate in 'Conceiving a Democratic Electoral Process', I shan't waste my time responding to your posts. Fred Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Conceiving a Democratic Electoral Process
Fred: On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 9:38 AM, Fred Gohlke fredgoh...@verizon.net wrote: You said: Mike Ossipoff: re: ...including ones whose proposals and procedures are democratic. (posted in response to: My comment was not referring to democracies, it was referring to parties) Parties are not democratic, either in relation to the entire electorate [endquote] It's ridiculous to suggest that a political party should represent the entire electorate. A political party is a collection of people who share some particular set or system of policy proposals. A party represents the views of its members. If the party is genuinely democratic among its membership (some are), and if its members care about the well being of the entire population, then that concern will be reflected in the party's platform. ...just as it is in the platform of an independent candidate who cares about the well being of the entire population. You continued: or in relation to their own membership. [endquote] A sloppy, overbroad generalization. Some parties choose their convention delegates by a democratic vote, and write their platforms via a democratic procedure at their convention, among their elected delegates. They likewise choose their candidates by democratic voting among their delegates. You continued: In terms of the entire electorate, they are but a subset of the people, organized to impose their will on the majority. [endquote] You don't listen very well, do you, Fred. Recommendation: More listening, less repetition of already-answered statements. Every independent candidate, and every party, has a set of policy proposals, usually referred to as a platform. Those proposals specify or imply certain laws, or certain kinds of laws, or laws that will achieve some specified effect. A law is an imposition of the public's collective will upon all individuals. In a dictatorship,an oligarchy, a plutocracy, etc., those laws might not represent the public will in a meaningful sense. But in a democracy they do. It's a matter of how we make the laws, or how we choose the people who make the laws, that determines whether or not we have a democracy. You called it a slur, when I said that what you really oppose is government itself. No, it isn't a slur; it's just a fact. You keep ranting about imposition of some people's will upon others. That's what government does. It's called laws. If you don't like that, you're an anarchist. I don't criticize you for being an anarchist. But at least have enough honesty to say so. You quote some author, probably the one from whom you got your ideas. Sorry, but the fact that someone said it in a book doesn't make it so. Quoting the author whom you're repeating doesn't help toward justifying what you're saying. You said: In terms of their membership, they are oligarchic. They exhibit The Iron Rule of Oligarchy as described by Robert Michels. You can find his fascinating study of the issue, Political Parties [endquote] Any set of people fully have a right to meet, and find out if they have the same policy goals. And, if they do, then they have a right to work together to publicize their proposals, and to iron out the differences among their individual policy details, by compromising, /or by discussing which policy details are best.They do that so that they can work together, combining their resources and voices. So that they can show the rest of the public that there is a large set of people who agree on certain policies, as specified in their platform. That isn't bad, Fred. re: It isn't the job of the electoral method to choose who will run, or to seek out candidates. We ourselves, the public, the voters, should be the ones to decide who our best advocates are. You are correct when you say, We ourselves, the public, the voters, should be the ones to decide who our best advocates are. You are wrong when you say it is not the job of the electoral method to ensure that happens. The electoral method must ensure that each and every one of us is able to participate in the electoral process, including the selection of candidates, to the full extent of our desire and ability. No one is preventing you from choosing for yourself which candidate(s) you like best. Well, of course maybe the media make that difficult for you if they systematically promote one policy system and exclude mention of anything else. Media distortion and deception are detrimental to your ability to make good choices. That's why I've suggested that it would be better if, in some way, media availability were in proportion to public support, so that the various policy positions would gradually reach their rightful equilibrium media share. But, as for the electoral system itself, its job is to give you a fair chance to express what you like /or want, and fairly take it into account in the social choices that it makes. If it does that well, then it will also show you what others
[EM] Census re-districting instead of PR for allocating seats to districts.
I haven't been following this discussion closely, but I've long thought that the best way of allocating seats to multi-member districts is to just say that subject to every district having at least one seat we do the allocation after the votes have been cast, based on the numbers of people who actually vote. (Then within each district I favour STV-PR rather than any list system..) Competition between districts should help motivate an overall high turnout. But maybe there would be added incentives for skulduggery. :( Chris Benham Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Census re-districting instead of PR for allocating seats to districts.
I'd be happy to try that somewhere. Only those votes count that are cast. This approach could be seen as less fair than the traditional population based allocation, since those people that didn't vote in some district will not be represented at all. In allocation between parties also non-voters will be represented (we may assume that their opinions will follow the opinions of those who voted). But as said, this is also a valid approach, and worth a try. We could as well think that those people who don't vote do not want to have a representative either. Juho On 1.7.2012, at 22.32, C.Benham wrote: I haven't been following this discussion closely, but I've long thought that the best way of allocating seats to multi-member districts is to just say that subject to every district having at least one seat we do the allocation after the votes have been cast, based on the numbers of people who actually vote. (Then within each district I favour STV-PR rather than any list system..) Competition between districts should help motivate an overall high turnout. But maybe there would be added incentives for skulduggery. :( Chris Benham Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Census re-districting instead of PR for allocating seats to districts.
On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 3:32 PM, C.Benham cbenha...@yahoo.com.au wrote: I haven't been following this discussion closely, but I've long thought that the best way of allocating seats to multi-member districts is to just say that subject to every district having at least one seat we do the allocation after the votes have been cast, based on the numbers of people who actually vote. [endquote] Nothing wrong with that. But the present way, district seat allocation by population, is fine too, and I feel that the important thing is the voting system. Or, in PR, the PR system and method. So the seat allocation to districts is secondary to the method that chooses candidates or (in PR) allocates seats to parties. You continued: (Then within each district I favour STV-PR rather than any list system..) STV systems usually use small districts, tending to defeat the purpose of PR. Of course it's possible to have districts of any size, including single-member districts, and still have a proportional allocation, by means of a topping-up system: Seats are allocated in districts, among district candidates, or party lists in the districts. But a national at-large PR allocation is done too, and, for each party, the number of seats it has won in the districts is augmented enough to bring it up to its national allocation result. When I read about the German system, Germany was using single-member districtss, each choosing a local candidate. Then the parties' national totals are topped up, to bring them up the the result of a national at-large list-PR allocation. Multimember districts are more common, it seems to me, in topping-up systems. There's no reason why, STV, voting for and electing candidates, couldn't be used in each multimember district, with the parties afterwards topped-up according to a national at-large list-PR allocation. I've read of a European system in which an independent can run in party list PR as if s/he were a party. A one-person party. In that way, party list PR, or a topping-up system can be fair to independents. Mike Ossipoff Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Sainte-Lague vs d'Hondt for party list PR
I always advocatred SL (Sainte-Lague) over dH (d'Hondt) for party list PR, because, if you're using PR it's because you want proportionality, and if you want proportionality, then you want SL. Then, more recently, I said that, since I don't think that we need PR anyway (though I have nothing against PR), d'Hondt would be fine, especially since it guarantees a seat majority to a vote majority. But now I feel that I was mistaken to say that. For two reasons: 1. For fair inclusion, there should be no threshold. d'Hondt will disproportionately exclude small parties. That matters, because PR can only be justified, in comparison to a good single-winner method, if there's no significant split-vote problem. You shouldn't have to worry that you need to vote for a compromise because your favorite party might not have enough votes to win a seat. That problem is, of course, worse in d'Hondt than in Sainte-Lague. 2. In PR, the idea is that you don't have to compromise in your voting, because you can just elect representatives (members of parliament congress-members, etc.) of your party to parliament or congress, and _they_ can do the compromising, when necessary--but only when necessary. But how true is that in d'Hondt? Not very. Say your favorite party is significantly smaller than the ones that are in major contention in parliamentary voting. If you vote for your party, and it's a small party, d'Hondt will give it _significantly_ less representation per person, as compared to the larger parties. So your favorite party won;t have many seats with which to support coalitions. If compromising, coalition-support, are necessary, then you'd do better, in the d'Hondt PR election, to give your vote to a big party, so that you can thereby add more seats to the coalition that you want to support. That's no good. d'Hondt fails FBC, if FBC were extended to PR methods. No, to fulfill the purpose of PR, Sainte-Lague, virtually free of size-bias, is the method to choose. SL also puts every party as close as possible to its correct proportional share. Yes, SL isn't _entirely_ unbiased. Its unbias depends on the assumption (at least in the regions of interest) of a uniform probability distribution for parties, with respect to the scale of party vote totals. That assumption isn't really correct. There are more likely to be more small parties than large. The distribution-curve is most likely a decreasing function. From that, one would expect Sainte-Lague/Webster to be _very slightly_ large-biased. That's probably true of Largest-Remainder too. Both of those methods are strictly unbiased only if that probability-distribution is flat, within the areas of interest. But that bias isn't enough to matter, and doesn't bother me at all. For example, even when that probability distribution is assumed flat, for the vote or population range between each pair of consecutive whole numbers of quotas (whole number values of the quotient of votes or population by whatever divisor is being tried) Hill's method is significantly small-biased, where, under that assumption, Webster (Sainte-Lague) is completely unbiased. But, even so, Hill is only as biased as follows: Consider a small party whose quotient, by the final divisor, is equally likely to be anywhere between 1 and 2. And consider a large party whose quotient is equally likely to be anywhere between 53 and 54. The small party's expected s/v is only 1.057 times greater than the large party's expected s/v. And that's with Hill's blatant small-bias. So Websters particularly slight large-bias wouldn't matter at all. There are seat allocation method that have been proposed, by Warren Smith and me, that seek more perfect unbias, without the assumption stated above.. But they're more complicated, /or without precedent. I cl;aim that SL is quite good enough, and should be the only method used for allocation of seats to fixed districts; or for allocation of seats to parties in list-PR. Well, maybe later, at some point, people might be interested in considering those more perfectly unbaised methods. Anyway, I emphasize that, in the United States, the voting system is incomparably more important than the apportionment method. However, it's also true that apportionment has been very fiercely fought, and demonstrating that Hill is biased, even in the amount that I stated above, and showing where a large state loses a seat because of Hill, might show the people in that large state that Hill is unfair. And that will show people that our current ways of doing things can be wrong. And that will make people more willing to look at the wrongness of Plurality. So I feel that Hill's small bias should be publicized, especially when it can be shown to have recently taken a seat away that a large state should have. Hill's method, currently used for U.S. House of Representatives apportionment, is usually known by the (incorrect) name of Equal Proportions. Mike Ossipoff Election-Methods mailing
Re: [EM] Census re-districting instead of PR for allocating seats to districts.
On 2.7.2012, at 1.05, Michael Ossipoff wrote: There's no reason why, STV, voting for and electing candidates, couldn't be used in each multimember district, with the parties afterwards topped-up according to a national at-large list-PR allocation. STV ballots may rank candidates of multiple parties. Would the national party vote maybe go to the party of the first candidate, or would the candidate maybe indicate his favourite party separately? You probably also assume that (most) candidates are associated with some country wide party. Many STV proponents like also the idea that candidates could be totally free of party connections. They could be so also in this model, but they would not get (easily) any top-up seats. STV systems usually use small districts, tending to defeat the purpose of PR. One hybrid PR oriented approach would be to use STV within the parties. The voters would be able to rank candidates of one party only (a simplification to keep the method manageable). Seats would be allocated to the parties using some list style method. STV would be used to allocate seats within each party. The voter's could safely rank few candidates only since also an exhausted vote would go to the correct party. This approach would allow also large district sizes and large nuber of candidates (thanks to easy inheritance). Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Sainte-Lague vs d'Hondt for party list PR
On 2.7.2012, at 1.51, Michael Ossipoff wrote: I always advocatred SL (Sainte-Lague) over dH (d'Hondt) for party list PR, because, if you're using PR it's because you want proportionality, and if you want proportionality, then you want SL. Then, more recently, I said that, since I don't think that we need PR anyway (though I have nothing against PR), d'Hondt would be fine, especially since it guarantees a seat majority to a vote majority. But now I feel that I was mistaken to say that. For two reasons: 1. For fair inclusion, there should be no threshold. d'Hondt will disproportionately exclude small parties. That matters, because PR can only be justified, in comparison to a good single-winner method, if there's no significant split-vote problem. You shouldn't have to worry that you need to vote for a compromise because your favorite party might not have enough votes to win a seat. That problem is, of course, worse in d'Hondt than in Sainte-Lague. 2. In PR, the idea is that you don't have to compromise in your voting, because you can just elect representatives (members of parliament congress-members, etc.) of your party to parliament or congress, and _they_ can do the compromising, when necessary--but only when necessary. But how true is that in d'Hondt? Not very. Say your favorite party is significantly smaller than the ones that are in major contention in parliamentary voting. If you vote for your party, and it's a small party, d'Hondt will give it _significantly_ less representation per person, as compared to the larger parties. D'Hondt favours large parties. But if you assume that PR will be calculated at national level, D'Hondt favours large parties only in the allocation of the last fractional seats (the last possible seat for each party). If the results are counted separately for each district, the bias in favour of large parties becomes bigger. If you want to get rid of the problem of voting for a party that will not get any representatives, you could allow the vote to be inherited by some other party one way or another (e.g. second preference in the ballot, or tree structure of the parties). But for most purposes already methods that guarantee a small party its first seat if it gets 1/N of the total votes (where N is th number of seats) may be good enough (people may not fear too much losing their vote when they vote for the small parties). Most real life electoral systems have higher bias anyway for various other reasons like thresholds or not counting PR at national level. So your favorite party won;t have many seats with which to support coalitions. If compromising, coalition-support, are necessary, then you'd do better, in the d'Hondt PR election, to give your vote to a big party, so that you can thereby add more seats to the coalition that you want to support. That's no good. d'Hondt fails FBC, if FBC were extended to PR methods. What would that extended definition say? Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Sainte-Lague vs d'Hondt for party list PR
On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 7:34 PM, Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: On 2.7.2012, at 1.51, Michael Ossipoff wrote: I always advocatred SL (Sainte-Lague) over dH (d'Hondt) for party list PR, because, if you're using PR it's because you want proportionality, and if you want proportionality, then you want SL. Then, more recently, I said that, since I don't think that we need PR anyway (though I have nothing against PR), d'Hondt would be fine, especially since it guarantees a seat majority to a vote majority. But now I feel that I was mistaken to say that. For two reasons: 1. For fair inclusion, there should be no threshold. d'Hondt will disproportionately exclude small parties. That matters, because PR can only be justified, in comparison to a good single-winner method, if there's no significant split-vote problem. You shouldn't have to worry that you need to vote for a compromise because your favorite party might not have enough votes to win a seat. That problem is, of course, worse in d'Hondt than in Sainte-Lague. 2. In PR, the idea is that you don't have to compromise in your voting, because you can just elect representatives (members of parliament congress-members, etc.) of your party to parliament or congress, and _they_ can do the compromising, when necessary--but only when necessary. But how true is that in d'Hondt? Not very. Say your favorite party is significantly smaller than the ones that are in major contention in parliamentary voting. If you vote for your party, and it's a small party, d'Hondt will give it _significantly_ less representation per person, as compared to the larger parties. D'Hondt favours large parties. But if you assume that PR will be calculated at national level, D'Hondt favours large parties only in the allocation of the last fractional seats (the last possible seat for each party). Word it how you want. Referring to the small party and the big party that I referred to in my previous posting: Say there's a small party whose final quotient (quotient by the final divisor, the divisor that results in the desired number of seats) is equally likely to be anywhere between 1 and 2 (and certain to be in that range). Suppose there's large party whose final quotient is equally likely to be anywhere between 53 and 54 (and certain to be in that range). The large party's expected s/v is about 1.5 times greater than the small party's expected s/v. That's _big_ bias in favor of large parties, and against small parties. You said: If the results are counted separately for each district, the bias in favour of large parties becomes bigger. [endquote] No, the factor by which the large party's expected s/v is greater than that of the small party is greater when there can be a large factor by which the parties' final quotients can differ from eachother--That's when there are a lot of seats to allocate. I'm only talking about when we compare a final quota of 1 to 2, to a a final quota of A to B, consecutive integers much greater than 2. That is a big bias problem at _national_ level, where there are a lot of seats in the allocation. But yes, in small districts, the smallest parties might not get a seat at all. But that isn't usually what is meant when bias is spoken of. The small parties' greater difficulty of winning any seats in a small district is a whole other problem, having less to do with d'Hondt's bias, and much to do with the large number of votes needed to get a final quotient qualifying for even one seat--due to the smaller number of seats. You know what I'm talking about. If there are only 3 seats in the district, then a party with only 5 or 10 percent of the vote in that district isn't going to do well. That isn't a bias problem. It's a small district problem. It will be a problem in SL too, in that small district. Yes, even in that small district, d'Hondt's bias will of course make things worse for small parties. But d'Hond't effect will be less in the small district, even as the small district problem makes things worse, in its own way, for small parties. You said: If you want to get rid of the problem of voting for a party that will not get any representatives, you could allow the vote to be inherited by some other party one way or another (e.g. second preference in the ballot, or tree structure of the parties). [endquote] Yes, I like those solutions. I guess their disadvantage is that they complicate the electoral law being proposed, and they don't have precedent. But yes, I'm for those improvements. You said: But for most purposes already methods that guarantee a small party its first seat if it gets 1/N of the total votes (where N is th number of seats) may be good enough (people may not fear too much losing their vote when they vote for the small parties). [endquote] I didn't know that. Guaranteeing a seat for a Hare quota, no matter what the party's divisor-quotient is, would help avoid the split vote
Re: [EM] Census re-districting instead of PR for allocating seats to districts.
Quoting me: On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 6:59 PM, Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: On 2.7.2012, at 1.05, Michael Ossipoff wrote: There's no reason why, STV, voting for and electing candidates, couldn't be used in each multimember district, with the parties afterwards topped-up according to a national at-large list-PR allocation. Juho: You said: STV ballots may rank candidates of multiple parties. [endquote] Yes, and so STV can therefore elect a set of winners consisting of independents and candidates officially associated with various different parties. Would the national party vote maybe go to the party of the first candidate No. In the district STV elections, each party gets a certain number of seats nationwide, counting the district-elected candidates officially associated with that party. The nationwide list PR allocation is by parties. if your party deserves more seats, according to that national list PR allocation, than it got nationwide in all of the districts, then your party is topped up to its national allocation, by being given enough at-large seats to accomplish that purpose. What about independents? Say you're an independent who didn't get elected in your district's STV election. But maybe they like you nationwide, and you might win a seat in the national list-PR allocation. You asked: , or would the candidate maybe indicate his favourite party separately? [endquote] Yes. A candidate can be officially designated as a candidate of one party. That requires that s/he 1) choose to be a candidate of that party; and 2) that s/he qualifies as such just as s/he would have to in any other list PR system. (That party's voters elected hir to their list in a primary. Or that party's democratically elected central committee, or other democratically-elected delegate-body, has chosen hir as a candidate for their list). You probably also assume that (most) candidates are associated with some country wide party. No. Maybe most, maybe all, or maybe just a small minority. It could be any of those. The unelected candidates getting a party's nationwide list-PR seats would of course have to qualify as that party's list candidates just as they would in any party list PR system, as I described above. Many STV proponents like also the idea that candidates could be totally free of party connections. Fine. They could in the system that I describe too. They of course wouldn't be the candidates on a party's list, for filling its national list PR topping up seats. But if your independent that you vote for locally doesn't win a district seat, s/he might still win an at-large seat in the national list PR allocation, because, as I said, there's no reason why an independent shouldn't be able to run as a 1-candidate party. So, if you really want to elect hir, then vote for hir in your district STV election, and also in the national PR allocation election. We're assuming that s/he's a candidate in your district, which is why you can vote for hir in your district STV election. What I'm suggesting isn't some new, complicated or arbitrary hybrid: It' s nothing other than the usual topping-up system used with multimember districts using list P'R locally and also used with Germany's single-member districts. There's no reason why it couldn't just as well be used when the multimember district seats are elected by STV instead of local district list PR. You continued: They could be so also in this model, but they would not get (easily) any top-up seats. [endquote] They couldn't get them via a party's national list. But they could get them if they run as an independent in the national list PR election, in addition to running in their own district's STV election. ...but of course only if they qualify for a seat in that national allocation by the same standards by which a party would qualify for a seat. I read about a woman who ran as an independent in a European PR election, as if she were a party. To win, she merely had to get the number of votes that a party would need. STV systems usually use small districts, tending to defeat the purpose of PR. One hybrid PR oriented approach would be to use STV within the parties. The voters would be able to rank candidates of one party only (a simplification to keep the method manageable). Seats would be allocated to the parties using some list style method. STV would be used to allocate seats within each party. Sure. That's a fine open list system. But the existing open list systems (including the one in Finland) are fine already, and there's no need to make them fancier by using rankings and an STV count in each party, to determine which candidates, in which order, will fill the seats won by that party in the list PR allocation. The use of STV for that internal purpose, in an open list election, would be fine. It would be fancy and luxurious. But the other open list systems are already fine. The voter's could
