Hi James,
On Aug 25, 2004, at 4:20 AM, James Gilmour wrote:
One part of a "smaller" solution would be to make the list order irrelevant, but that would not
please the party managers. Even if you did that and allowed voters to mark several candidates
within a given party list, you would not achieve PR within the parties. To achieve that, you need
preferential AND transferable voting within the parties. But if you do that, why not go all the way
and allow the voters complete freedom to express preferences across all candidates? Which will
bring you back to STV-PR.
James
This actually brings up my earlier question, which Toplak was alluding to. With STV-PR, is there any way to preserve 'weak' locality? That is, say I have district magnitude of 20, so I can conceptually identify 20 subdistricts which have been combined into a single district for PR purposes. Now, for the extreme cases where one party wins all the seats, it would make sense (at least to me) to have each of those candidates from a particular subdistrict. That of course would be relatively easy to enforce.
But, with PR, it can get quite complicated. Has anyone thought about the 'fairest' way to maximize locality while preserving PR? Or, is there a really strong argument that one should ignore locality completely? Or is it just too hard?
Thanks, - Ernie P.
P.S. Does STV-PR actually allow voting for predefined lists as well as individual candidates? I had trouble understanding the existing articles on this point.
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