Propagation: Seeds & scions (77)

77 ideas sprouting »

1. One error in my original comment: in a 4-seat riding, the quota would be 20% + 1 vote, not 25%, which would be the quota for a 3-seat riding. I believe Dion is advocating using Droop.

   Seed planted by Chris — 15 February 2013 @ 02:57

2. An interesting property of using preferences like this is that you get a PR-ish election that always yields a valid result. Under standard List-PR with thresholds, if no party at all meets the threshold, the system fails. (I have no idea what jurisdictions actually do in such situations—do they specify an Emergency Backup Electoral System?)

   Seed planted by Vasi — 15 February 2013 @ 03:26

3. I had never even thought of the possibility of no party reaching a threshold, and I highly doubt it’s ever come close to happening. I suppose it’s theoretically possible in Turkey, which has a 10% threshold. In the 2002 election, only 2 parties crossed the threshold–one with 34.28% of the vote (winning 66% of seats) and one with 19.4% (winning 32% of the seats). 9 independents also got elected (I don’t know how).

   The ruling party won just 1.22% of the vote. Over 45% of the votes were cast for parties which did not pass the threshold.

   While it’s unlikely that no party would pass the threshold, it is quite possible for only a single party do so so, with far less than a majority of the vote.

   The only truly competitive parliamentary elections (outside dominant party systems, show elections, and severely gerrymandered countries like Singapore) I can think of which resulted in a single party winning all the seats were the 1987 New Brunswick elections, in which the Liberals won all 58 seats (FPTP) with 60.4% of the vote. I believe the backbenchers formed the ‘Opposition’ in the resulting parliament, asking questions without notice of the ministers during Question Period, and the second place PC Party were allowed to submit written questions.

   Seed planted by Chris — 15 February 2013 @ 07:07

4. One country I think a party-preferential system could gain traction in is Malta. They use STV, but almost all voters only vote for a single party (and generally, 98% vote for the two major parties). They have a lot of experience with STV, and seem to like it (the last election had a 93% turnout, without compulsory voting) so they may see no need to change, but it would make the counts go significantly faster to simply rank the parties and use OLPR to determine which candidates get elected. Their counts are particularly slow given that each party nominates more candidates than there are vacancies (as party ties are so strong almost no voters rank members of other parties). They could do national party vote, then distribute seats in the regional districts to parties based on candidate preferences in that district, removing the common plurality reversals that 5-member STV districts inflict on a two party system.

   It also could help minority parties by removing the need to rank them with single preferences. The only Maltese election in the last 50 years at which a third party candidate has legitimately threatened for a seat were the 2004 Euro elections, where the Green candidate won 9.3% of first preferences (with a 16.67% quota). The Nationalist candidate elected 4th (of 5) had no remaining Nationalists to transfer to, and almost all his voters exhausted. Had they transferred to the Green, he would have been elected; instead, the Green was the last excluded and a Labour candidate (the Nationalists’ hated rival) took the final seat without reaching a quota.

   I don’t know if voting by party would help the minor parties, but given the status quo it certainly couldn’t hurt them.

   Seed planted by Chris — 15 February 2013 @ 07:20

5. I think the “If No Party Reaches the Threshold” situation would vary by country.

   In Germany and New Zealand, all of the single member districts would send representatives. The one or three district threshold would probably also result in at least a few list seats being awarded. The resulting parliaments would probably try to make things work with the underhang.

   In Russia and Turkey I think I can be forgiven for thinking that the ruling party would try to grab all of the seats if they came in first or try to nullify the election.

   I would expect that most of the European countries in such a situation would rerun the election. I’m tempted to make a joke that if no party earned seats in Belgium, it would take six months and three formateurs before anyone tried to solve the problem.

   Seed planted by Mark R — 15 February 2013 @ 07:32

6. Six months would be amazingly fast for 21st century Belgium. Half the politicians would immediately suggest that the best way to solve the problem would be to divide the country in two, but then they’d spend a year arguing over who gets the area around Brussels and what language those people would be allowed to speak.

   The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe recommends a threshold no higher than 3%, and Turkey was sued for its high threshold in the ECHR–the court ruled the system was acceptable in Turkey, given its fractious party system, but that it likely would not be acceptable in most other countries in Europe.

   Seed planted by Chris — 15 February 2013 @ 07:50

7. I am tempted to put Malta outside the STV camp, given the rule that guarantees a seat plurality to the party with the most first-prefernece votes. This provision really changes the voter calculus about sincere voting for legislative candidates. There are probably deeper reasons for the entrenchment of two major parties–which in any case precedes the provision–and for so few votes straying across party lines, but this provision certainly reinforces these tendencies.

   It seems to me that something like the proposals being discussed in this thread indeed might make sense for Malta.

   Seed planted by MSS — 15 February 2013 @ 17:04

8. Given the sudden surge of interesting discussion here about thresholds, I have created a new “block” on the topic.

   See the “planted in” line at the top of the post; clicking the “Electoral Thresholds” link will collect several plantings going back to the early days of the blog that discuss issues of thresholds.

   Seed planted by MSS — 15 February 2013 @ 17:18

9. I think the main reason Malta has such a strong two party system is because society is pillarised. Each party is affiliated (with varying degrees of officiality) with a different newspaper, tv station, labor union, school system, and so on.

   Seed planted by Chris — 15 February 2013 @ 21:11

10. I’m tempted to call Malta an ‘additional member system’ in the vein of the devolved British systems. The list tier is compensatory, but not necessarily proportional, and no seats are awarded at all if the constituency results are ‘proportional’ enough. If the Japanese best loser system can be called a list, so too can Malta’s.

    As far as changing the vote calculus, I don’t think it does so any more than required full preferences or above the line votes do. Almost no voter would number every candidate in his party’s ticket order if he were able to vote with optional preferences below the line. This likely takes votes from strong minor party candidates, who might get a 1 from many voters if they did not have to full out all 80 preferences to do so, and it’s acutely unfair to ungrouped candidates, who can’t get any votes above the line. But no one is seriously suggesting that Aussie PR isn’t STV.

    The biggest flaw with Malta’s system is that it gives extra MHRs to certain constituencies despite them having roughly equal populations. It also may not reflect the party faithful’s choice of candidates, given that ‘best loser’ includes transfers. Having a national list, with bonus MHRs representing the entire country, would be fairer. I also think it would be fairer to determine the majority winner by casting a separate vote for one party; they could even just do an AV election to determine a majority. Alternately, they could assign seats nationally by party preferential voting rather than candidate based constituency voting.

    the current system encourages single party ballots bc it assumes no one will split ticket vote and implies that transfers are less valid votes than first prefs (arguably negating the ‘single’ part of STV. It’s also distorted by the fact that people can stand in two districts, with vacancies filled by count back. Candidates who win both districts choose the one they keep based on which count would advantage their party more, and their chosen candidate and patronage network within the party if their party would replace them in both.

    I do think MMP could be conducted with STV district seats, which could reduce if not eliminate overhangs. I would strongly advocate a second ballot for the list tier.

    Seed planted by Chris — 15 February 2013 @ 23:02

11. Even partial preference requirements distort the vote. Over 20% of Pauline Hanson’s valid first preferences at the 2011 NSW upper house election were below the line. Considering the fact that preferences are optional at the legislative assembly election, that her group was unnamed, and that her old party was ‘Pauline Hanson’s One Nation,’ it’s almost certain that if all the votes which just had a 1 for Pauline Hanson below the line had been counted as formal, she would have been elected.

    It’s also quite possible that many NSW voters think that just a 1 above the line will fully distribute their preferences, like at the Senate election, and are inadvertently exhausting their ballots.

    Seed planted by Chris — 15 February 2013 @ 23:18

12. That sounds more like the problem is the election system for the Senate. By requiring the ranking of all candidates or, effectively, choosing to vote for a straight party ticket, people begin to think that is the only way it works.

    I see no valid reasons why voters should not be validly able to select only a subset of candidates in an STV election. Frankly to me, it is less democratic to make someone choose between to candidates that they have no great support for then to let them partially abstain. Except in systems where a voter just checks off one box, there should be a middle ground between a completed ballot and an informal ballot.

    Seed planted by Mark R — 16 February 2013 @ 07:36

13. In all STV systems outside of Australia that I know of, marking a only a single preference is a perfectly valid vote. Voters may show any number of preferences they choose; though in Minneapolis, Minn., voters are limited to a maximum of 3 preferences (for 2 or 3 vacancies), a feature not found in any other STV system I’m aware of. In most of these systems, that single preference does not even have to be the numeral ’1′–a tick or cross would suffice.

    In Australia, there are a mix of rules. The ACT has optional preferential voting (meaning that marking only 1 preference is permitted), though the ballot paper instructs voters to mark at least 5. However, in the ACT, preferences must be expressed with numerals–a tick or cross only is an informal vote.

    Western Australia and South Australia are the opposite extreme–voters must mark every candidate for their vote to be formal (if the last square only is blank, it’s considered a last-ranked preference). Voters in WA do have the advantage of a group ticket.

    In three states, ‘partial preferential’ voting is used. You must express a set minimum for the vote to be formal: 5 preferences (for 5 vacancies) in Victoria and Tasmania, and 15 preferences (for 21 vacancies) in NSW. If you show fewer preferences, your vote is informal.

    The Senate vote can also be described as ‘partial preferential.’ A voter is required to mark 90% of the candidates. His paper is considered to be formal unless there are more than 3 mistakes (typically, skipped numbers). If a 4th mistake is found, this means the paper is exhausted from this point out. It may be permitted for a voter to use the ‘Langer method’ to cast a single preference vote (for instance, 1-2-2-2-2-6-7-8-9-10 in a 10 candidate field), but these may be counted as completely informal as well (do any Australian readers know)?

    I completely agree that voters shouldn’t be forced to submit preferences to have a formal vote. My original suggestion is that if Malta’s system distorts the vote calculus, so to do group voting tickets.

    Seed planted by Chris — 16 February 2013 @ 08:41

14. MPV was introduced in the federal house to cure the co-ordination problems of the Coalition. Somehow it then became fixed in stone to require more than one preference, even though the idea is unknown outside Australia and that was extended to the state houses, the senate and the legislative councils.

    STV for the Tasmanian assembly is older than the introduction of MPV by almost a generation and Tasmania has only ever required a single preference as far as I know.

    From the time of the Labor split in 1955-6 the Coalition depended on DLP preferences to retain government. The ALP picked up a mythology that it was adversely effected by MPV which lasted until the appearance of the Democrats and Greens in the 1980s.

    I would only ever require a single preference and I would also end the practice of legislation specifying what is and is not a formal vote. It seems to me that if you can identify a clear intent of the elector that intent should be binding on the count.

    Seed planted by Alan — 16 February 2013 @ 11:53

15. No, TAS has always required partial preferences for a formal vote, at least since the intro of statewide Hare-Clark in 1909. From 1909 to at least 1949, 3 prefs were required (half the number of vacancies). I believed it was increased to a minimum of ‘m’ prefs (where m=magnitude) with the increase to 7 seat divisions, and therefore reduced to the current rule (a minimum of 5 valid preferences) with the reduction to 5 seat divisions a few years back.

    Hare-Clark today is used to describe systems without party lists and with Robson rotation, but historically the meaning of Hare-Clark has been different; typically, it means ‘the present Tassie HoA election system,’ including when that system used Hare quotas and random sample transfers from 1896 to 1902. For most of Aussie history prior to 1983, ‘Hare-Clark’ was essentially a synonym for ‘STV,’ to politicians and the public at the very least if not to the academy.

    The original Senate system introduced in 1948 was called ‘modified Hare-Clark,’ the modifications being full preference requirements (which was fiercely debated against the traditional Tassie 3 pref rule) and the use of random sampling rather than Gregory fractional surplus distribution. The Electoral Council of Australia calls the SALC system ‘modified Hare Clark’ to this day bc they essentially use Senate rules, though it calls the Senate rules the ‘Senate System’. It doesn’t seem that using ‘Hare Clark’ to refer only to the Robson system became standard until the 80s or early 90s.

    Seed planted by Chris — 16 February 2013 @ 12:26

16. As for definition of formality, it varies by jurisdiction in Australia.

    For instance, a vote of 1-3-4-5-6-blank in a 6 candidate race is treated as a bullet 1 in the ACT, as 1-2-3-4-5-6 in the Senate, and as informal in the rest of the states. I would argue it just as easily could have been intended as 1-3-4-5-6-2 and the voter left the intended 2 blank on accident.

    The clearly defined rules, while occasionally disenfranchising a voter entirely or causing his prefs to be misinterpreted, mean it’s fair. A voter casting a ballot needs to double check to make sure his intention is clear, and probably ought to read the formality guidelines beforehand.

    The federal formality guidelines’ principles are a good read, particularly the command to ‘err in favor of the franchise.’

    An optical scan system like that used in Cambridge and Minneapolis (the US’ only 2 STV jurisdictions) inform a voter if he’s cast the same preference twice or skipped a preference. It does have the problem of allowing a voter to mark a candidate with two prefs (something not possible on Australian ballots), but the Cambridge scanners even catch that and informs the voter iirc.

    The clear formality rules are a vast improvement over the haggling sometimes seen at US counts, like the ‘hanging chads’ of Florida 2000, the months long recount in Minnesota Senate 2006, or the write-in arguments at Alaska Senate 2010, where writing ‘Lisa Murkowski’ but failing to darken the circle to the right was ruled informal, while ‘Lisa M.’ and ‘Senator Lisa’ with the circle darkened were ruled formal.

    Seed planted by Chris — 16 February 2013 @ 13:27

17. I stand corrected, Tasmania requires as many preferences as there are vacancies to be filled, the same rule as the NSW legislative council.

    The trouble with statutory formality rules is that are subject to heavy manipulation. The various chad disputes in the US, contrary to your claim, were the courts interpreting statutory requirements. In 2004 the Coalition proposed that a series of numbers, where X stands in the place of one, should be informal, even in contests where there were only 2 candidates and the X could have no other meaning. In Queensland, which has OPV, the Coalition recently revived this idea so that an X instead of 1, with no other numbers, would be an informal vote.

    If there are to be statutory rules there needs to be an overriding constitutional provision that the clear intent of the elector is to prevail. Which section has the command ‘to err in favour of the franchise’? Searching the text of the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1902 for ‘franchise’ gives only one occurrence which is a reference to the repeal of the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902.

    Seed planted by Alan — 16 February 2013 @ 21:56

18. Correction, Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918

    Seed planted by Alan — 16 February 2013 @ 21:58

19. NSW Leg Council requires minimum 15 preferences for 21 seats. 1978-91 it was 10 preferences for 15 seats. For some reason the constant is about 68%.
    I think the Island of Man may have required DM preferences when they introduced STV-PR but most constituencies had only 2′or 3 seats (interesting parallel to Nauru).

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 17 February 2013 @ 01:51

20. Err, 72% (rounded down), not 68%.
    No, I don’t know why either.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 17 February 2013 @ 02:41

21. I don’t think the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 says that, but the AEC’s ballot formality guidelines (http://www.aec.gov.au/Elections/candidates/files/ballot-paper-formality-guidelines-2012.pdf), which the returning officers are actually relying on (rather than trying to personally interpret the Electoral Act), lays out certain principles, which I assume are based on the law.

    It says ROs should ask three questions: “Is the ballot paper authentic? Does the ballot paper identify the voter? Does the ballot paper contain a lawful numbering sequence?”

    With regard to the third, it lays out five “overarching principles”:
    1. Start from the assumption that the voter has intended to vote formally
    2. Establish the intention of the voter and give effect to this intention
    3. Err in favour of the franchise (specifically, “doubtful question of form should wherever possible, be resolved in
    the voter’s favour”
    4. Only have regard to what is written on the ballot paper
    5. The ballot paper should be construed as a whole

    Seed planted by Chris — 17 February 2013 @ 05:36

22. When the issue goes before a court of disputed returns, AEC guidelines do not override the Act, which contains no such provision. The guidelines are better than the act, but that, sadly does not help in judicial proceedings.

    Seed planted by Alan — 17 February 2013 @ 11:39

23. Some of the rulings used seem a bit ridiculous–specifically, a paper marked “X-2-3-4-5″ is ruled informal, while “One-2-Third-4th-5″ is acceptable, as is “I-II-3-4-V.” That, however, is a result of the Electoral Act, as far as I’m aware, because it specifically states that ticks and crosses are unacceptable (except a single tick or cross above the line), while it only specifies that a voter use “numbers,” not cardinal numbers using what are usually called “Arabic numerals” in English.

    What a returning officer would do if the ballot used the numerals normally used in the Arabic language (which the Arabs call ‘Hindi numerals,’ though they are not the numerals used in the Hindi language), I don’t know, nor if the voter wrote out something like “Uno-Dos-Tres”. There is no requirement in the law that I know of for the ballot to be cast in English.

    One thing I don’t think is specified in the act but is ruled informal is that if an elector crosses out any of the names on the ballot (even if it were the last preference), the ballot is informal. If someone decides to add Donald Duck as an additional preference after the last preference, that counts as formal; I highly doubt that’s in the law either, but that’s a specific example used in the guidelines.

    At times the decision on whether to accept a vote in the Senate is made by a computer at Center Senate Scrutiny and not by any human being (other than the human’s data entry).

    Seed planted by Chris — 17 February 2013 @ 17:56

24. The Act, at s 240 is clear that you write numbers, which is why X is an impermissible vote if it cannot be deciphered from the rest of the ballot-paper. The principle of erring in favour of the franchise comes from an old case, Bernard v Kean, which was decided in 1920 before most of the Act assumed its current form. There is a brief and fairly opaque section on informal ballot papers, s268, but it does not cover the field, include the fundamental principle of erring in favour of the franchise, or reflect the judicial history from Bernard v Kean to Mitchell v Bailey. The formality rules belong in the act or (ideally) in the constitution, not in AEC guidance.

    Seed planted by Alan — 18 February 2013 @ 08:35

25. Historians of the year 3000 (that’s 8800 for you, MSS) will deduce that Bernard v Kean was an alternative rendering of this: http://www.tinyurl.com/aqgr336.

    It’s like the fact that Holder and Hall are also adjoining suburbs in Canberra. Whatever deities patronise psephology have a sense of humour.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 18 February 2013 @ 08:51

26. err, wait, no, that’s more like 6774 in the Hebrew calendar. Forgot we’re already in 2013. I should be on the 1922 Committee.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 18 February 2013 @ 08:55

27. BOT, surely two highly relevant considerations in ascertaining (how to give effect to) the voter’s intention would, or should, be:

    (1) Is it unambiguous? Eg, apparently a number of US votes rejected as “overvotes” have, say, Gore’s circle punched AND a write-in vote for Gore. Assuming the voter did not mean to vote for Gores pere et fils at once, this is only a single vote, yet voting machines will often disallow this as an attempted overvote.
    By contrast, in Australian referenda some outrage is at times stoked by the Electoral Commission’s ruling that a tick counts as a “yes” vote but a cross makes the ballot void for ambiguity. (You are supposed to write either “yes” or “no” in a square). The AEC’s reasoning is that in many contexts – filling out Australian tax returns, say, or British ballot-papers – an X can signify approval.
    My litmus would be: if we selected a panel of a dozen citizens, showed them “irregular” ballots, anonymised the candidates’ names, and offered them free gift vouchers if (but only if) they unanimously agree which candidate the ballot was meant for, would they all vote for the same interpretation?

    (2) Is it a form of vote permitted by that electoral system? An attempt to rank candidates is permitted (or required) when choosing Australian parliamentarians but not US city councillors (in an at-large MNTV election). Conversely, giving equal first preference to two or more candidates at once is permitted (or required) in MNTV elections but not in any AV or STV elections I know of. (In theory, it could be done, but it hasn’t).

    So the voter’s intention is “put Liberal first, then National second, then leave all the don’t knows blank, and finally put Labor and Greens last”, this may be clearly indicated but it can’t be translated into the type of vote that the Australian electoral system can process.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 18 February 2013 @ 09:05

28. Florida law made clear intent the standard, but somehow the US Supreme Court forgot to apply that standard in Bush v Gore. Mitchell v Bailey followed Bernard v Kean in saying you have to look at the ballot-paper as a whole, which is another way of stating Tom’s principle 1. I cannot imagine the reasoning by which a write-in vote would cancel out a regular vote.

    I rather like the idea of dumping reserved ballots before a citizen jury.

    In Mitchell v Bailey a number of ballot papers were contested by scrutineers for one side or the other. There were reserved, initially for decision by the Divisional Returning Officer for the district, and then by the Australian Electoral officer for Victoria. These ballots ended up before the Court of Disputed Returns.

    The decision was:

    8.78 The final decision by the court was made on 2 July 2008, with the court ruling that the final margin in favour of Ms Fran Bailey was 27 votes.

    8.79 In coming to this view, the court conducted a review of 643 ‘reserved’ ballot papers that had been set aside during the recount when scrutineers challenged the decisions of the Divisional Returning Officer. As a result of the court’s review of these ballot papers, the Court reversed 154 of the decisions made by the Australian Electoral Officer during the recount in respect of the 643 ballot papers on which it ruled.

    That is obviously an uncomfortably high number of papers where the court made a different decision from the electoral commission. The present AEC guidance is a result of trying to provide a better definition of informality to fix this problem.

    Seed planted by Alan — 18 February 2013 @ 12:15

29. @ Tom, 27–Before Australia adopted the current system of electing the Senate, voters did mark their ballots with multiple ones. It was effectively an AV block vote and usually resulted in one party taking every seat up for election. At one point, the Australian Senate was 33-3 in favor of Labor. Unsurprisingly the system was changed not so long after to an STV system.

    Seed planted by Mark R — 18 February 2013 @ 14:41

30. Actually, Mark, I thought the old block vote still involved ranking only a single 1, but with the ballot counting for the 2nd choice if 1 had already been elected. The Psephos numbers for old Senate counts seem to indicate only one preference per voter at a time.

    In Hendersonville, NC, USA, they filled 2 council vacancies in a single ballot election. Voters ranked two candidates equally, then could rank another four 2-5 if they wished. A candidate needed 1/3 of the vote to get elected. Luckily, two got it on Count 1, because it seems this system could have allowed more than 3 candidates over the quota.

    Seed planted by Chris — 18 February 2013 @ 17:06

31. Actually, several of the new ‘instant runoff’ systems adopted in the US (almost all of rhem since Gore-Bush) have used multi-seat non-proportional counting rules. If I recall, Aspen used a contingent vote variant to fill multiple seats (with a runoff count rather than excluding one by one), though Aspen abandoned ranked voting after a single election.

    I don’t know who came up with ‘Instant Runoff,’ but really bothers me. It’s far from instant (though the use of optical scanners certainly helps), and traditionally it’s not a runoff but a single-ballot exhaustive vote; I don’t know if the contingent vote variants adopted by many US jurisdictions have been more inspired by the words ‘instant runoff’ than the proper mechanics of AV. Almost none of them, except Minneapolis, have discovered STV, and instead have crafted their own non proportional ways of using ranked ballots for multiple vacancies.

    Seed planted by Chris — 18 February 2013 @ 17:19

32. Chris: according to Wikipedia, Minneapolis also has only single-member districts.

    Seed planted by JD — 18 February 2013 @ 18:33

33. Chris, the term, “instant runoff,” has been adopted by US reformers because it is generally considered an alternative to two-round majority (not to plurality). So it is “instant” in the sense of not requiring voters to come back to the polls weeks or months later–when, in many municipalities’ experience, the turnout will tend to be lower.

    I agree with you on the problem that it obscures the important distinction between whether sequential elimination/vote-transferring is used, or whether all but the top two are eliminated and then all eliminated candidates’ votes are transferred. The former would be the alternative vote, the latter would be either the “supplementary vote” or the “contingent vote”, depending on other details of the system.

    I think applications of “instant runoff” in the US have been overwhelmingly in single-winner races (mayor, mainly) and have tended to use sequential-elimination methods, though often with no more than three preference ranks permitted.

    Seed planted by MSS — 18 February 2013 @ 19:10

34. Language and re-inventing the wheel bedevils electoral reform. Apart from IRV, which is unfortunate for the reasons upthread, there is AMS for the UK, presumably because some media minion in Blair’s office didn’t want UK Labour accused of introducing a German system. We will be kind and not mention ‘choice voting’, although it’s better than most of the noms de scrutin.

    We should, on the other hand, applaud the expression ‘Australian ballot’ for reasons too obvious for me to repeat here.

    Seed planted by Alan — 18 February 2013 @ 20:13

35. Yes, that is indeed the case, MSS. I have seen several contingent vote variants used, though, and wondered whether the ‘IRV’ name led them to use contingent vote rather than alternative vote to enact a ‘runoff.’

    JD, Minneapolis uses AV (with max 3 prefs) for single winner races and STV for multi seat races (also with 3 prefs max, though no minimum pref requirements, and using Weighted Inclusive Gregory surplus transfers).

    The city council is still single seat wards. The parks board, though, has six single seat wards and 3 citywide at large seats. Those citywide seats are now chosen by STV. The Board of Estimate and Taxation has 2 of its 6 seats directly elected citywide at large (the other 4 are the mayor, the parks board president, and2 city councilors chosen by city council). Those two seats are chosen by STV.

    So Mpls has 2 STV elections every 4 years, returning a total of 5 proportionally elected officials. Adding Cambridge’s 15 elected officials, that makes 20 officials elected by PR in the USA of the tens of thousands we have.

    Seed planted by Chris — 18 February 2013 @ 20:21

36. Does anyone know of any jurisdictions where the voter has a choice whether they vote 1, 1, 1, 2, 3… (or 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4…, etc) instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… etc, and have all of these choices processed according to the counting rules as valid votes?

    I don’t know of any – with the caveat that the US at county and municipal level seems a vast laboratory of different systems. Instead, either “give 1 or more candidates undifferentiated ticks” or “number 1 or more candidates sequentially, with no numbers skipped or repeated” seem to be the only two options for multi-seat non-list systems (or for single-seat non-plurality systems, ie IRO-AV or Approval).

    Do actually existing Borda systems (Nauru, Slovakia, Austrian intra-list, etc) allow multiple equal preferences? It seems to me they could cope with it more easily (conceptually speaking) than STV/ IRO-AV could.

    The simplest solution (to avoid throwing out the ballot as invalid ab initio or exhausted from that point) would be to say that, if two or more of the equally-ranked candidates are still in the count, the ballot goes to whichever of them is listed lowest (closest to the bottom right-hand corner) of that particular ballot-paper. This would help cancel out the effects of donkey-voting top-to-bottom in each column and left-to-right across columns. There are other, more complex alternatives.

    As I’ve noted elsewhere, “ticks” and “numbers” are defined by function rather than form. Ticks (or punched holes) in first-, second-, third-, etc preference columns on the punchcard function as ranked numerical preferences. Whereas “Number five candidates 1 to 5″ functions as ticks in Queensland’s MNTV local council elections.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 19 February 2013 @ 02:44

37. Cumulative vote can give effect to that. In a 5-vacancy election, the instruction would be “You have 5 votes. You may give them all to one candidate, or may split them amongst different candidates as you wish.”

    So a voter could vote (with the equivalent in Australian style ranking):

    5 votes to candidate A (a bullet vote)
    4 to A and 1 to B (1-2)
    3 to A and 2 to B (1-2, but giving more weight to 2 than above)
    3 to A, 1 to B, and 1 to C (1-2-2)
    2 to A, 1 to B, 1 to C, and 1 to D (1-2-2-2)
    2 to A, 2 to B, and 1 to C (1-1-2)
    1 each to A, B, C, D and E (1-1-1-1-1)

    Of course, this is counted as a plurality election, not using a preferential ballot. This system is used in several jurisdictions in Texas, usually as a settlement following a vote dilution lawsuit.

    I recently thought of the possibility of allowing voters to rank preferences equally in STV or AV by allowing a vote to be “temporarily exhausted.” For instance, in a race involving Greens, Labor, Liberals, and One Nation, the voter could rank the candidates 1 Greens, 2 Labor, 2 Liberals, and 4 One Nation. If the Greens candidate is excluded, and both Labor and Liberal are still live, that vote is set aside as “temporarily exhausted.” However, if one of those two is next excluded (say Labor), such that the remaining candidates are Liberal and One Nation, the vote would become live again as a preference could be determined, and count as a vote for Liberal. Alternately, rather than rendering votes informal, any system which already uses fractional transfers could take a ballot cast 1-2-2-4 and transfer half a ballot paper to each second preference, and there would be no need for “temporary exhaustion.”

    Of course, most voters who cast a 1-2-2-4 ballot have either made a mistake (meaning no one can tell who the vote was intended for), or were intending to cast a Langer vote in a system where plumping 1 was prohibited.

    Seed planted by Chris — 19 February 2013 @ 04:23

38. “We will be kind and not mention ‘choice voting’, although it’s better than most of the noms de scrutin.”

    I find FairVote’s use of this one to refer to STV to be bewildering. Are not ALL voting systems “choice voting?” Is that not the very definition of “voting”?

    Minneapolis at least uses “ranked choice voting” to refer to their system. They used IRV initially, then changed it so that voters would not expect instant results (whether the use of STV as well had part of it, I don’t know). That’s also the name that Alameda County, California (home of Berkeley and Oakland) uses.

    St. Paul (next door to Minneapolis), which uses AV, simply says “ranked voting.” Cambridge (a Boston suburb), which has used STV since 1941, simply calls it “proportional representation,” as most do in Australia, though their system is non-partisan.

    Seed planted by Chris — 19 February 2013 @ 04:30

39. Regarding Tom’s post, I have thought that compiling an encyclopedia (or wiki) of the sub-national voting systems in the US would be a worthy undertaking, though it would probably be outdated the second it was printed. Many cities with home rule charters have few limits on the systems they select, and new jurisdictions with elected leadership (from cities to water conservation districts) are created all the time. Given how few of us vote compared to the rest of the world, I find our obsession with electing almost every possible office (president, senator, US Rep, state rep, state senator, county judge, sheriff, tax assessor collector, county commissioner, mayor, alderman, …) to be bewildering.

    There is actually a town in Vermont that elects its dog catcher! (I don’t know if the phrase “he couldn’t even get elected dog catcher” is used outside the United States)

    Seed planted by Chris — 19 February 2013 @ 04:46

40. Thanks for the correction about the Australian Senate of old.

    I too find the idea of how many different officers that are elected in the States bewildering. Off the top of my head, I can vote for: President, 2 Senators, 1 Congressman, 1 State Senator, 1 1 State Assemblyman, 1 County Legislator, Numerous State and County Judges, 1 Town Supervisor, 1 Town Councilman (several towns near me have their councils elected at-large), 5 members of the local School Board, the annual school budget, the Fire Chief, the annual Fire Budget, Library Trustees, the Library Budget, and if lived a few miles in almost any direction, the Mayor and Trustees of a Village (all elected at-large in staggered terms).

    They are simply enough elected by first past the post in single seats or in blocks. They are all gerrymandered and all badly imbalanced (the region has 9 Republican State Senators and 4 Democratic Congressman out of 5).

    I understand why most people feel there are too many votes to matter and might care even less if voting systems were more complicated. (Not that I would agree with them on the later, at least)

    Seed planted by Mark R — 19 February 2013 @ 07:21

41. I vote 41 federal officials (38 electors for president and vice president, 2 Senators, and 1 US Rep), all of whom are Republicans (though the Texas electors failed to elect a Republican president).

    I vote for 93 judges (18 statewide, 13 multi-county, 60 countywide, and 2 sub-county justices of the peace). The 60 countywide judges are Democrats, and the other 33 are Republicans.

    I vote for 9 statewide non-judicial officers, all of whom are Republicans.

    I vote for 2 state legislators representing a portion of my county, both of whom are Republicans, and one member of the State Board of Education representing a multi-county district of 1.7 millon people, who is a Republican.

    I vote for 7 countywide officials (County Judge, County Tax Assessor-Collector, County Treasurer, County Clerk, Sheriff, District Attorney, District Clerk), all of whom are Democrats, and a County Commissioner and Constable from part of the county, both of whom are Republicans.

    Excluding the electoral college electors for the indirect election of President and Vice President, I directly vote for a total of 117 officials on a partisan basis, all of them in single-seat plurality elections. The presidential election is the 118th election, and if I include the 38 electors as partisan officials, that makes 155 partisan officials.

    I also elect 6 trustees of 3 different school boards (community college district, independent school district, and school transportation district), one mayor, and 5 city council members (all of them citywide in single-member places). I will lose 4 council members starting in June as we move to single-member wards. Those elections are all non-partisan on a two-round majority basis, all in single-member seats. I don’t elect members for any special districts (such as hospital boards or water boards), which are appointed for me, but some people in Texas do have direct elections for those boards.

    Therefore, excluding presidential electors, and including the 4 councillors I’m about to lose, I vote for 129 elected officials, and if we include 38 presidential electors, that goes up to 167 total elected officials.

    This is in a state that loves to brag about “small government.”

    Seed planted by Chris — 19 February 2013 @ 09:35

42. Isn’t everything supposed to be bigger in Texas?

    Seed planted by Mark R — 19 February 2013 @ 09:49

43. Does anyone know of any jurisdictions where the voter has a choice whether they vote 1, 1, 1, 2, 3… (or 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 4…, etc) instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5… etc, and have all of these choices processed according to the counting rules as valid votes?

    I don’t know that you’d call it a “jurisdiction”, but the Debian project allows this. For example, a recent issue for the Technical Committee included: “I vote C [AB] F.” This means “Option C is preferred, followed by options A and B which are tied, and coming up last is Further discussion (aka: none of the above).”

    Debian uses Condorcet voting (Schulze variant, with some special provisions related to ‘Further discussion’). In this system, each ranked ballot is decomposed into a set of pairwise preferences as the initial step in the decision algorithm. For example, the vote “A F B” would turn into { A > F, A > B, F > B } . Equal preferences just mean there’s no pairwise preference between some options, so “A [FB]” would turn into { A > F, A > B } .

    More details on Debian voting are on their voting sub-site. A number of other projects use Condorcet voting, and presumably at least most of them allow equal preferences. I think some of them (including Wikimedia) even have multiple winners.

    Seed planted by Vasi — 19 February 2013 @ 10:30

44. I have never understood the concept of judges elected in partisan elections…

    Seed planted by JD — 19 February 2013 @ 12:49

45. I think equal preferences should be encouraged in STV or IRV/AV elections. Limit the number of columns to 3. In a typical 4-way race between a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian and Green, your average Democrat voter might have the following vote: 1. Dem, 2. Grn & Lib, 3. Rep, while your average Republican voter might have the following vote: 1. Rep, 2. Grn & Lib, 3. Dem. They’d figure that they’d put the candidate they like the least as their last preference.

    Seed planted by Derek — 19 February 2013 @ 16:04

46. I have never understood the concept either, JD, but we’ve done it that way since 1845 and aren’t likely to change anytime soon.

    At the very least we don’t elect US Supreme Court Justices in partisan elections.

    Seed planted by Chris — 19 February 2013 @ 16:55

47. I agree completely, Chris, on the use of “choice voting”: yes, all democratic voting is supposedly about choice.

    A related anecdote: In 2001, I was a facilitator for a discussion in our local League of Women Voters chapter about electoral systems. One of the women said “choice voting” sound like something to do with abortion.

    For the record, the women (and a few men) of the chapter chose MMP as their preferred model for multi-member bodies.

    Seed planted by MSS — 19 February 2013 @ 18:01

48. There are transaction costs to electoral refinements. I am not sure that making the ballot an exercise in symbolic logic would be a source of unalloyed joy to all electors.

    Seed planted by Alan — 19 February 2013 @ 18:22

49. MSS, I find that interesting that they preferred MMP–did they specify open list? I would think that most Americans would strongly oppose party lists as undemocratic, given our tradition of primaries. I suppose a primary could determine the list, though the only place I’ve heard of that does so is Israel, and I’m not particularly enamored of their format. I would suggest using STV in primaries, with the list order consisting of the order in which the candidates attain a quota, but if we’re going to use STV primaries, why not just have STV general elections?

    STV also has the advantage of being easily adaptable (if not even better) in non-partisan elections; list systems almost by definition are partisan (one could have “non-partisan lists,” but that’s blurring the line and possibly the law in many jurisdictions).
    –
    Alan, I think that’s one overlooked aspect of psephology: a ballot that is a joy to all electors (or at the very least, as painless as possible). The Schutze/Minimax style systems, and even things like Meek’s method for STV, may be the systems which fulfill the most voting system criteria (criterions?), or those seen as most desirable, and perhaps the “fairest,” but I think a general theorem could probably be stated that “the more voting system criteria an election system fulfills, the more bewildering the ballot paper and counting process must be.”

    I think it’s fine for small elections in organizations of dedicated members, especially when they tend to be better-educated than the general public. I think when you’re getting to a polity level, though, the costs start to outweigh the benefits; this is compounded in polities with compulsory voting, where the average voter may not particularly care about how “fair” the election is so long as he can make as few marks on the ballot paper as possible. A voting system which the general public cannot engage in will almost certainly end up with undemocratic results, even if in an ideal world it is “fairer.”

    As for the “temporary exhaustion for equal preferences” suggestion, it probably isn’t ideal, but it would be fairer than permanent exhaustion or outright informality. It could be one of those cases where the ballot paper suggests one thing but the formality rules are more lenient (such as the ACT’s “mark at least [m] preferences”, while counting bullet votes as formal). I remember seeing an Antony Green blog post on “progressive informality,” where a bullet vote is counted as formal until it would need to be transferred (meaning a bullet Labor or Coalition vote in a HoR election would be formal), but then you get into complicated questions of what constitutes a “majority” and whether the entire count process should be restarted with those ballots ruled informal.

    Seed planted by Chris — 19 February 2013 @ 21:21

50. Vasi @43, I’m more than happy to include the Debians and other voluntary associations as “societies” for the purpose of electoral system head-counts. The prevalence of ranked-choice voting systems (not only PR-STV and IRO-AV but also Condorcet and Borda) goes up sharply when we include not only territorial governments with seats at the UN but also societies that need to attract members voluntarily. (Curiously, use of MMP by voluntary associations seems to round down to nil.)

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 20 February 2013 @ 02:45

51. Chris @37, I take your point about cumulative voting allowing either ranked or equal preferences (interpreting “ranking” broadly to mean all systems that Douglas Rae (1971) famously called “ordinal”). I hadn’t thought of that but since I did stipulatively say that formal ticks are not inherently incapable of indicating functional rankings, I acknowledge.

    I assume the “Peoria” version of CumulatiV would allow this even more so. If you tick, say, three candidates, they each automatically get 0.333 vote. You don’t need to hope the total number of seats is a multiple of three.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 20 February 2013 @ 02:54

52. … After all, under standard Borda, a first preference for one of four candidates is counted as giving him or her a pre-set three points out of a possible maximum six, so the reverse should apply under Cumulative: if a voter gives Candidate ABC three of his or her points (out of a maximum six) – and gives no other candidate more than two points – then the voter has shown an unambiguous first preference for Candidate ABC.

    I did once, years ago, on a now-buried listserv, get some hard-core Approval/ Condorcet supporters to concede that STV/AV might – just might – be tolerable if it allowed a voter to give multiple simultaneous preferences. (When I say “hard core”, I mean, these guys liked Condorcet best of all but preferred MNTV over STV because MNTV’s closer to Approval… yes, of course they were Californians. How’d you guess?!). The mechanics we hammered out were that if a voter gave, say, three candidates a simultaneous 1, this would count as one whole vote for each of them. But only the highest could be declared elected right away (even if this put all three over the quota). The other two had first claim on the highest one’s surplus, as basically a “1.3rd” and a “1.7th” preference, before any candidate numbered 2, 3, etc. Ultimately, no advantage would be gained by voting 1, 1, 1 as opposed to 1, 2, 2, just as if one uses d’Hondt highest averages to allocate left-over seats, it makes no difference whether you use the Hare or the Droop quota for the initial allocation.[*]

    [*] Unless, like the Dutch, you use ‘the quota” as the threshold, but that’s contingent.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 20 February 2013 @ 03:34

53. Wouldn’t giving the three equal first preferences each a whole vote violate the ‘single’ part of STV, and advantage these voters over voters who vote 1-2-3? It also seems like it would be a nightmare for determining who gets excluded.

    I could see that working perhaps in a SMD (though the uneven weight between voters is disturbing), but you still have problems with whom to exclude. One could use a variant like Coombs I guess (if no candidate has a majority of highest remaining preferences, the candidate with the most last preference votes is excluded, even if he’s in first for first prefs as well).

    Seed planted by Chris — 20 February 2013 @ 16:01

54. Multiple first preferences, or multiple preferences of any sort could be equated as a voluntary semi-abstention. Perhaps the counting rules could state that if candidates are equally ranked with a voter’s highest remaining preference, the voter is stating that he doesn’t care which one wins. If all but one are eliminated, the vote now counts in that candidates column.

    Seed planted by Mark R — 20 February 2013 @ 17:45

55. I think the biggest issue with the approval/range voting obsessions is that even American electoral reformers are fixated on single winner elections. This may have been a result of Bush-Gore and the drive for picking a majority winner; I’m too young to remember anything before the 2000 elections clearly, but I haven’t seen much evidence of converted electoral reform efforts from before that (except local semi-proportional fixes bc of voting rights lawsuits).

    It’s somewhat understandable given that most elections in the States now are single winner (even when electing multiple members to the same office, such a numbered posts in citywide council elections), and the few multi winner races are by plurality (for m vacancies, each voter may vote for up to m candidates, and the top m are elected).

    This one-sightedness leads our reformers to come up with more and more convoluted ways of electing a single winner ‘fairly’ when multi winner proportional elections are fairer almost by definition.

    I see no need to have single winner races except for executive positions and very remote and large areas (it’s understandable, for instance, that Alaska is one SMD and Hawaii two SMDs rather than those three seats being elected in a giant three member seat). Beyond AK and HI, and perhaps places like Montana and West Texas, we should be trying to steer the conversation away from single winner (unless talking purely theoretically).

    Seed planted by Chris — 20 February 2013 @ 19:20

56. Chris, thanks for the question on the LWV study. I just looked back at the files I had (from January-February, 2001) and it seems that “list PR” was presented only as closed list. I did not design the program; I was just the chapter’s “Resource”. I probably mentioned open/closed at some point in my discussions with the members, but it was not a central item of their ranking of systems.

    So it appears they preferred MMP over either STV or pure PR with closed lists. I assume (but do not specifically recall after all these years) that they liked MMP for the same reason that it is one of the most common reform options in other FPTP jurisdictions: it preserves the “one member elected from your area” of FPTP while greatly opening up representation to minorities of various kinds.

    STV is a little harder to sell, and in any case, my job was not to express opinions but just to present options and facilitate a matching of their preferred criteria to the options.

    Seed planted by MSS — 20 February 2013 @ 19:22

57. Re the “STV with mutliple preferences allowed” model I described @52 – I should clarify that, if and once the highest of the three reached quota and was elected, the other two would see their votes drop accordingly.

    So, assuming a 5-seat race with 999 voters and quota of 167 votes, if the Purple Party runs three candidates and most of its 400+ supporters vote 1, 1, 1 (or X, X, X [*]) for all three, their respective totals on the first count may be (say) 411, 403 and 397 votes, but as soon as the first one is elected (candidates would have to be declared elected maximum one per stage of the count, even if several are temporarily over quota), the totals for the other two would drop 167 votes each, to 236 and 230 respectively. Then, once the second was elected in his or her turn, the third would be left with 63 votes only.

    Giving a lot of candidates the same preference would be like declaring that henceforth every US dollar is worth one zillion quatloos. It’s an accounting device but it doesn’t change the relative value of what’s there, and eventually mathematical gravity will catch up. Such a preferencing strategy does – I was told by these online Approvalistas – make it more likely that a candidate you do support will keep out one you hate, although it means you’re sitting out the question of which of the supported candidates you actually like.

    (I actually have some time for Approval. It’s about my fourth-favourite voting system – or, as Approvalistas would say, it’s one of the three to six I would tick.)

    [*] I think an X in an election (if there are no numbers, or at least no 1) is pretty clearly a tick or first preference. In a referendum, though, it’s murkier, especially if the ballot only has crosses and no ticks for all propositions. Note that “crossing out” very definitely denotes disapproval…

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 21 February 2013 @ 01:49

58. @Tom

    You are not allowed to have a fourth preference for Approval voting. You can only list it as one of 4 equal first preferences.

    Seed planted by Alan — 21 February 2013 @ 02:12

59. I’ve never actually voted with a tick or x before. At high school student elections, we used optical scan cards. At university, we do online voting, by clicking as many boxes as one has votes (I guess checking the box makes a tick on the screen, so I should say I’ve never made a ‘written’ tick or x). At all polity-level elections I’ve voted for save two, I used a touchscreen during early voting; one of the remainder was a party presidential caucus, where I signed in on the list of the candidate of choice (the only PR election I’ve ever voted in, though with an almost obscene 15% threshold), and at the final one, I used an optical scan card on election day (thankfully, only three races on the ballot; some of our elections have over 60 contests, making it far easier to just mark the “straight ticket” and vote for all of the candidates of one party).

    The optical scan ballots seem to be an almost exclusively American obsession (far better than punch cards with hanging chads). They don’t lend themselves well to STV, though both jurisdictions in the US which use STV do use scan cards. In Cambridge, voters get a matrix of 400 or so bubbles, with candidates in the rows and preferences in the columns, and have to darken one bubble per preference. Are there any jurisdictions in Australia (or Eire or Malta) which use anything other than ‘write one or more numbers by hand’ for STV elections

    Seed planted by Chris — 21 February 2013 @ 06:55

60. The ACT has electronic voting for some electors. The AEC and NSW use OCR to scan hand written ballots (there is extensive cross-checking with a physical count) and then the captured data is processed eelctronically to priduce a result.

    There was a famous occasion in NSW when, after the scanning was done, the electoral commissioner pressed the big red button to initiate the electronic count and nothing happened. The program executed correctly on the second try.

    Seed planted by Alan — 21 February 2013 @ 09:07

61. Chris@59, thanks, duly noted. I use “tick” as a synecdoche for all methods of indicating simultaneous, equally-weighted support for two or more candidates (or unique support for a single candidate only). Lazy and inaccurate at times, l admit, but “crossing” is ambiguous (in pre-MMP NZ, you struck out the names of all candidates except the one you liked, and this was often described as “crossing off” or “crossing out” the disapproved names), while “darken a circle” or “punch out a chad” is tedious if repeated. But our Grand Wiki will clarify all these provisos, and more…

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 21 February 2013 @ 09:16

62. Elections ACT imposed three conditions of tender: (1) successful tenderers had to be prepared to offer all intellectual property tot he electoral commission; (2) the software could not be platform-dependent; (3) the software and hardware tenders could not be awarded tot he same or related tenderers.

    A number of US election management companies attempted to meet these conditions and could not. Their attempts to have the conditions of tender amended were unsuccessful.

    Elections ACT then published the operating code and invited public to find if there were any ways that the program could execute incorrectly.

    Private administration of elections isnot only dubious in terms of security, transparency and accuracy. You get an inferior service at considerably higher cost.

    Seed planted by Alan — 21 February 2013 @ 09:49

63. Back around 1991 or so, Australia Post introduced standard sized and positioned squares on envelopes so that handwritten postcodes (basically, 4-digit zip codes) could be machine-read. I wondered then why that couldn’t be adapted to reading numbers handwritten in squares on ballot-papers, eg, so all the “1234″ votes get sorted into one pile, the “1243″ votes into another, and so forth. Count the piles, enter the numbers for each permutation into a spreadsheet, know your new Senators in time for the 9 o’clock news. I assume I was being way too optimistic here…?

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 21 February 2013 @ 13:36

64. That’s roughly the process for the Senate and NSW legislative council scrutinies. I don’t know about the South Australian legislative council.

    Seed planted by Alan — 21 February 2013 @ 14:01

65. Cambridge MA finishes the count on election day because of the scan cards (excluding ballots with write in candidates,

    Seed planted by Chris — 21 February 2013 @ 20:23

66. …which are entered the next day, and postal ballots, which have 10 days to arrive). These hardly ever effect the final count, so most candidates know if they’ve been elected that night or the next morning.

    Seed planted by Chris — 21 February 2013 @ 20:25

67. It seems odd that the NSW Legislative Council scrutiny takes 3 weeks when they use optical character recognition. It it because they process all 4 million ballot papers at a central count center?

    The US Postal Service also uses optical character recognition, though without standard positioned squares for zip codes. I would think such a technology would be easily adaptable to handwritten ranked votes. The problem would be making the technology cheap enough for multiple counting machines to be used. Variations of the “darken the circle” machines used in most of the US are cheap enough that many schools have them to make it easier for teachers to grade quizzes and tests.

    In Texas, any voting system (meaning machine/computer) used must be capable of informing a voter if they’ve overvoted or undervoted in any race. I know in Minnesota, they’ve handcounted ranked ballots because the approved systems just tally the number of votes cast per race, and “first choice” and “second choice” are configured as separate races. Therefore the first preference results are known on election night, as are the total number of second preferences received by each candidate, but not which first preferences flowed to which candidate.

    It seems the simplest solution might be to move to postal ballots and put the postal service in charge of running the counts. They already have the character recognition technology in their sorting centers, after all.

    Seed planted by Chris — 22 February 2013 @ 07:41

68. I believe the Australian delay is attributed to several things. As you said, the centralized count does slow things down. The very liberal postal voting laws in Australia probably mean that any sort of proportional counting would be difficult to achieve with eligible postal ballots still to arrive. There is also a degree of manual scrutiny, as I understand things, to ensure that the machines are reading what is actually written on the ballots and will count the votes accurately.

    And also, unlike the U.S. and to a lesser degree Canada and the U.K., the various election agencies have little interest or mandate to produce “immediate” results. There is no fundamental right to be entertained by results on election night nor any right for a fast count to be desired over an accurate count.

    Seed planted by Mark R — 22 February 2013 @ 07:57

69. If the “‘count” is run by telling a computer, eg, “We have 1000 ballot-papers filled out for ABCD, 7000 for ABDC, 300 for ACBD…” etc, presumably one could press a button and generate a provisional result on election night even if there are still votes being flown in from Afghanistan or faxed in from Antarctica. On the other hand, counts have been manual for decades which may had entrenched an understandable reluctance to start too soon if you may have to scrub everything and re-start when the plane from Basra or Australia House, London gets in.

    With IRO-AV, one can at least start and proceed as long as any outstanding latecomer ballots arn’t numerous enough to change the order of elimination. With PR-STV, by contrast, you can’t because even if the order of elimination doesn’t change, the mere fact that late-arriving votes exist may change the size of the quota, the size of a candidate’s surplus, and therefore the transfer value of his or her ballots, and everything that flows from it.

    Australian election nights are usually pretty entertaining, still. Because small rural polling booths phone their results in first, there is invariably an early “swing” pf 20-30% to the National Party around a quarter past six that evening – but political gravity eventually catches up with it. The guest commentators on TV are usually retired (or pushed) former politicians who can sometimes barely conceal their schadenfreude when a victorious rival within their own party leads it to an electoral drubbing. Antony Green, he of ABC website fame, is usually on the ABC.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 22 February 2013 @ 09:38

70. Reflecting on the “equal first preferences” rule, it actually sounds relatively similar to a “party-preferential” system using OLPR like Dion proposes (“I’ll take any New Democrat over a Liberal, and any Liberal over a Conservative”), though not as sophisticated/complicated (probably for the best, as I think any counting system allowing equal first preferences is bound to have lots of errors in the tabulation). A closed list system (essentially, group voting tickets) also has a similar effect, though without the ability to give members of a party equal preference as Dion’s system would allow.

    Actually, for all intents and purposes, the NSW Legislative Council already is party preferential. Only 2.5% of voters voted below the line, and the vast majority of BTL votes were 1 preferences for the top candidate in a group, and most of those were probably voters ranking the candidates of one party straight down the paper, which is the same as marking only 1 for one party ATL). No ungrouped candidate has ever been elected, nor has any candidate ever upset the party’s ticket order and been elected. It would not have a significant impact to abolish BTL voting and make the ballots follow the same format as the assembly papers.

    Doing so might encourage more voters to transfer preferences (though I understand the plumping rate in assembly races is quite high), and eliminate confusion thinking that one can only mark 1 party above the line, or that a 1 vote fully distributes preferences. It would also reduce informality due to voters screwing up below the line.

    Of course, voters screwing up below the line was probably the only thing that saved NSW and Australia from Pauline Hanson’s triumphant return. Had all the BTL ballots with just a 1 next to her been ruled formal, I think she would have passed a quota. Only she and John Hatton, the other independent with a “Group J” ticket above the line, received any significant portion of their votes below the line.

    There is also the issue of needing to hold a referendum to eliminate below the line voting.

    Seed planted by Chris — 22 February 2013 @ 12:00

71. Without really intending to, NSW has ended up with a constitution that is arguably superior to the federal constitution.

    The electoral cycle is 8/4 rather than 6/3. The legislative council has a higher effective number of parties than the senate. Ditto the legislative assembly and the house of representatives. The independence of the courts and monitory institutions like the electoral commission, the ombudsman, the auditor-general and the anticorruption commission is better protected than their federal counterparts and there is no federal anticorruption commission.

    Now if we could just get multimember districts in the assembly…

    Seed planted by Alan — 23 February 2013 @ 07:24

72. I would say the equal preferences rule as proposed would not distort the final result (in terms of allocating greater voting power to any faction that voted 1, 1, 1 instead of 1, 2, 3) any more than using divisors 1, 3, 5… in St-Lague makes a difference from using 0.5, 1.5, 2.5. However, in my experience the proposal does tend to frighten the horses when first put on the table. My main reservation is that it would make counting more complex.

    Re “No ungrouped candidate has ever been elected, nor has any candidate ever upset the party’s ticket order and been elected” (Chris @69) -

    1. Someone or other noted that while some Independents had been elected to the Australian Senate a few times from the “Ungrouped” column at the end in the 34 years before ticket-voting was introduced in 1984 (Townley, Sid Negus), none has in the 29 years since. (Fielding, Woods/ Dunn, Xenophon and Chamarette were head of minor-party multi-candidate teams and so “deserved” their own column). The only case where order of election did not follow order on the party ticket was in Tasmania (surprise!) in the 1960s (Senator Archer) and even then it didn’t change which candidates got in, just the order in which they reached the quota.

    2. Don’t forget that below-the-line votes can change the result among parties if the election is close. Antony Green has nominated a few cases. The BTL voters might not succeed in replacing ALP #2 with ALP #3 but they can and do replace him or with with Green #1.

    3. One might say that the same result can be accomplished with preferential voting among tickets. But sometimes minor parties want to pick and choose among candidates of the major parties. Eg, in 2010 the Sex Party (a front for the porn industry) and the Greens put Senator Stephen Conroy last even though he was high on the Labor ticket (which they otherwise favoured), because they opposed his plans for a heavy-handed internet filter. (I have some vague idea that Labor did the same with Neville Bonner, Australia’s first Aboriginal Senator, in preference to other candidates on the Qld Liberal/ National ticket… Alan?). If parties are required to preference an allied party’s candidates in the same order the latter lists them, the former may be more reluctant to preference the latter at all. If they are allowed to vary the order, it raises the question of why the parties can but the voters can’t.

    4. Originally the NSW upper house filled casual vacancies by taking the last-eliminated candidate from the same team as the vacating MLC. This was changed, in either 1984 or 1991 (in conjunction with either the 4-year terms referendum or the 8-year terms one, I forget which) to Senate-style party appointment. One advantage of the “last running-mate out gets the vacancy” rule is that, even with very rigidly stage-managed party tickets deciding who gets in at the general election, voters would retain some control over who fills vacancies. Even if only 5-20% of voters number candidates below the line, this would often be enough to make a real difference in filling a vacancy: ie, it wouldn’t change which of the party’s candidates come first, second and third, but it may make a difference (once the quotas are deducted and the party’s “remainder” is depleted to single-digits percentage) who comes fifth or sixth.

    Seed planted by Tom Round — 25 February 2013 @ 02:38

73. “If parties are required to preference an allied party’s candidates in the same order the latter lists them, the former may be more reluctant to preference the latter at all. If they are allowed to vary the order, it raises the question of why the parties can but the voters can’t.”

    I was suggesting that the voters choose which parties they prefer, and get all those candidates in the order they appear on the ballot paper. This is how ranking multiple parties above the line works in NSW now, and what Bob Brown has been suggesting for the Commonwealth Senate. So parties don’t preference allied parties’ candidates at all, voters do, but both lose the ability to alter that order (as parties had before 2003 and as voters still do). Some voters might dislike losing this ability, and it might make them less likely to rank a second or third party, but as I pointed out, only a very small percentage of the already small percentage of voters who vote below the line choose to do so as it is.

    Seed planted by Chris — 25 February 2013 @ 03:17

74. I ran 2 student representative council elections at a Sydney university in the 1980s where the council was wise or foolish enough to let me write my own rules.

    I set up a unified ballot with no division between above-the-line and below-the-line where. Both tickets and individual candidates appeared in random order. This meant that ticket candidates effectively appeared twice on the ballot, so I specified they could only receive a vote once.

    The electorate seemed quite happy with it. The SRC almost had hysterics because they ‘knew’ there had to be a split between ATL and BTL voting.

    Seed planted by Alan — 25 February 2013 @ 03:56

75. They use tickets for student elections? That seems bizarre to me. Are they affiliated with political parties, or just groups of like-minded friends?

    Of course, at my university a student was disqualified from the student body president election last year for using photographs of student assembly candidates which “implied they were endorsing him,” which was a violation of the rules. He then proceeded to sue the university, claiming such a restriction was a violation of his free speech rights and that it could “irreparably harm his chances of one day becoming president of the United States.” As one might expect, he was subsequently pilloried in the campus paper.

    Seed planted by Chris — 25 February 2013 @ 06:39

76. They are like-minded tickets. Official party-affiliated tickets are pretty much unknown. That you find very few cross-party tickets or that many people go from student politics to ‘real’ politics is purely the operation of chance and circumstance.

    Seed planted by Alan — 25 February 2013 @ 06:49

77. The advantage of simply prohibiting reversed pluralities is that you immediately remove a mountain of perverse incentives from politicians about gaining advantages through manipulation of the electoral code.

    Contemporary bills of rights are very explicit about the nature and conduct of elections, e.g. Kenya:

    Article 81 General principles for the electoral system
    The electoral system must comply with the following principles:
    (a) freedom of citizens to exercise their political rights under Article 38;
    (b) not more than two-thirds of the members of elective public bodies must be of the same gender;
    (c) fair representation of persons with disabilities;
    (d) universal suffrage based on the aspiration for fair representation and equality of vote; and
    (e) free and fair elections, which are:
    (i) by secret ballot;
    (ii) free from violence, intimidation, improper influence or corruption;
    (iii) conducted by an independent body;
    (iv) transparent; and
    (v) administered in an impartial, neutral, efficient, accurate and accountable manner.

    It would be a fairly simple step to add that electoral results do not stand when they are reversed pluralities.

    Seed planted by Alan — 25 February 2013 @ 08:39

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