This is the first of a short series of posts on Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), inspired by the resurgence of interest in RCV in the US over the last few years. Only a small minority of recent adoptions use ranked voting for PR, but to the extent that voters become familiar with ranking candidates, it […]
The STV election-counting software droop (see under PR Resources) was originally written in Python 2, which has over the years become obsolescent. I’ve moved it to Python 3 (3.6 or better, to be exact). It took about a day, mostly mechanical (helped a lot by 2to3). If you’re moving to Python 3 yourself, do look […]
Munroe’s cartoons always make a certain nerdy sense, and this one is for voting nerds. Title text: “The weirdest quirk of the Borda count is that Jean-Charles de Borda automatically gets one point; luckily this has no consequences except in cases of extremely low turnout.”
At long last, the Droop STV counter, along with its wiki, has been moved from Google Code (long ago closed down) to GitHub. It needs updating and retesting, but at least it’s now accessible. See the Droop page for links.
Our front page features a quote from Ernest Naville, “In a democratic government the right of decision belongs to the majority, but the right of representation belongs to all.” Who is Ernest Naville, and where does the quote come from? Naville was born in 1816 in Geneva, Switzerland, and most of his writings are theological […]
Matthew Yglesias has a nice PR post on his Think Progress blog. It’s basic stuff, but the basic stuff bears repeating. Washington, D.C. is currently mired in some controversy over the need for post-census redrawing of our Ward boundaries. I’ve also been reading some analysis of the new congressional district plan out of Democratic-controlled Illinois, […]
I’ve posted a new page in the PR Basics section: Semi-Proportional Electoral Methods. Semi-proportional methods, such as the limited or single non-transferable vote (SNTV) or cumulative voting, sometimes proposed to encourage minority representation, have the serious flaw that they achieve proportionality only when groups of voters can cooperate to implement voting strategies. To the extent […]
Proportional representation systems fall into one of two groups: List PR and STV PR, each with a range of variations. List PR and STV PR have distinctive advantages and disadvantages. Here, I describe List-STV PR a novel hybrid of List PR and STV PR that combines the best features of each. STV PR gives voters, […]
Allan Ides’ paper (see the previous post) includes a discussion of the pros & cons of single-member plurality elections vs proportional representation. In that discussion, Ides replies to the frequently heard objection that, under PR, a voter has no single elected representative to turn to for constituent services. On the other hand, it is worth […]
Allan Ides, of the Loyola Law School Los Angeles, has a new paper making a case for a unicameral California legislature elected using mixed-member proportional representation. We’ll have more to say about the proposal later, but for now, here’s a summary and a link to a downloadable copy of the paper. The State of California […]
