On Sun, Dec 18, 2016 at 6:38 PM, Erik Moeller eloquence@gmail.com wrote:

Welcome Erik! [1]

I'll repeat what I wrote to Erik in another forum: thanks for this
comprehensive, contemporary survey of the current electoral reform
landscape. I believe electoral reform advocates have a similar problem
fighting anti-intellectualism as climate change alarmists have. Both
are ridiculously complex topics fraught with well-meaning infighting
with some unsatisfying solutions and dangers of unintended
consequences. This quote of yours really highlights the similarity:
"It’s easy to get lost in the arguments about which system produces
better outcomes, and to retreat again into the comfortable status quo
bias: if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it! But as reformers around the
world know all too well, the first-past-the-post system is broken, and
the careful exploration of new frontiers in American democracy is not
a journey without a destination — it’s a journey towards a more just
society."

With respect to STV/IRV/RCV, I'm a bit more bullish on Approval
Voting's prospects than he seems to be.  Living in a city that uses
IRV leaves me unconvinced about the merits of the system.  That said,
those of us that consider somethingelse>IRV>FPTP haven't had as much
success as IRV advocates have had pushing IRV.  It seems to me that
those of us who prefer somethingelse (e.g. Approval, Range, MAM,
Schulz) may need to figure out how we can be better allies with IRV
advocates like FairVote.

Another quote from your article that's worth repeating.  In what seems
to be a nod to the 2009 Burlington election and subsequent 2010
repeal[3], you note:

I'm eager to read what regular posters to this list think of Erik's writeup.

Rob
[1]: I know Erik well from other contexts, and have only just started
reading this list closely enough to notice that he subscribed and
posted.  Oops.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting_in_the_United_States#2009_Burlington_results
[3]: https://electology.org/blog/maine%E2%80%99s-ranked-choice-voting-%20it%E2%80%99s-not-plurality

Hi Rob--

Just a few brief comments.

It isn't that IRV isn't any good. I like IRV, though it's completely
different from the methods that I suggest. IRV isn't bad at all, but it
does have a few problems that make it entirely unsuitable for current
conditions:

1. Eliminating a compromise who has a majority over everyone:

When it eliminates a CW compromise that people were counting on, the
reaction is justifiable anger and disappointment. ...as in Burlington.
Obviously, if that's how you're going to react, then you shouldn't
advocate, propose or enact it.

So people should really understand & accept IRV's problem before they
propose it, promote it & vote to enact it. If you don't, then you've got no
one to blame for it but yourself.  ...well almost no one: You've got
FairVote's dishonest promotion of IRV. I've been told that Richie and his
organization assured people in Burlington that there'd be no spoiler
problem. ...and didn't mention IRV's big problem, the one that we've all
been explaining to Richie for the past 30 years.

And then, in Burlington's 2nd IRV election, the CW lost because the
Republicans didn't rank him in 1st place, over their favorite.  The
Republican was a spoiler. The people in Burlington feel that they were lied
to. And you know what? They're right.

Of course, if people figure out (with no help from Richie) how sincere
voting can elect their last choice, then many will bury their favorite to
protect Compromise. I suggest: Don't advocate, propose, promote, or vote
for the enactment of IRV you're going to react to it by burying your
favorite.

IRV is a fine method if people understand and accept the CW-elimination
problem, and have decided in advance that they aren't going to be
favorite-buriers when they have IRV.

These matters should always be explained, as part of any IRV proposal. From
what I heard, that isn't exactly how Richie promotes IRV.

Yes, IRV has a problem, but IRV's worst problem is Rob Richie, and
dishonest promotion of IRV.

In previous discussions here, I've talked about mitigations of IRV's
problem. I won't get into that here, in the interest of brevity.

But I'll just say that, if it appears like those mitigations aren't going
to help you, and that IRV's problem is going to dump on you, then you
definitely don't want IRV.

(If you don't know, and don't mind taking a chance, then there's nothing
wrong with a little gambling.)

2. Not Precinct-Summable:
If we had pubic ballot-imaging, then any voting system would be secure
against count-fraud. But we don't, and verifiable vote-count is something
that we'll probably never have. So, given the ridiculously questionable
vote-counting, the last thing that we need is a voting-system that makes
count-fraud even easiesr than it already is. That's what IRV would do,
because IRV isn't precinct-summable.

All the precinct's thousands of ballots (not just candidates' vote-totals)
have
to be sent in to central count headquarters, where all the sometimes
millions of ballots have to be counted in one big count, far away from the
people who voted and are interested in the count.  All the worse for an
extended rank-count.

There are plenty of methods that are precinct-summable: Approval, Score,
Bucklin, MAM, MDDA, MDDAsc, and many others.

3. But the real problem isn't the voting-system:
Without verifiable vote-counting, the voting system is irrelevant, as is
voting.

People can talk about voting-systems all they want, but no voting system is
going to help. First we have to have verifiable vote-counting. The reliable
way to achieve that, the only one that I've heard of is public
ballot-imaging.

People, including voting-system reform advocates, seem to be astonishingly
trusting in the matter of vote-counting.

Especially now, everyone is floundering around, saying, "What can we do?!"

Well, you could demand, with one consistent insistent voice, verifiable
vote-counting. Really verifiable, like public ballot-imaging. But that will
never happen, so you can kiss-goodbye your hopes for a chance for a better
voting-system to even do any good, if we could get one.

'The other thing to demand, of course, is honest, open, participatory,
agenda-free media. Another thing that we'll never have, ever.

Then why have I spent the last 3.5 to 4 months on voting-systems here?
Because it seems to me that maybe talking about, and maybe even locally
enacting, better voting-systems could show people what democracy would be
like if we ever get it.  Maybe that could make people willing to take the
first step, and demand verifiable vote-counting, & honest media.

By the way, you might say, "How could the mass-media be made  honest?" Of
course they can't. But local NPR FM stations could. They're a small, local
isolatable bit of the media. Tell your NPR station that they'll get no more
money from you if they don't ditch NPR, and start having local-origin
participatory & honest news & commentary.

If they don't, then quite contributing, & start boycotting their business
sponsors.

It's small but it's a start. And, because it's small, it's do-able.

By the way (I've already said this in one or two postings), have you ever
noticed how the sheep seem to be tailor-made for their herders? You'd swear
they were made for eachother. The public fit their owners the way a glove
fits a hand.

It is uncannily reminiscent of Huxley's Brave New World. But, in the
nonfictional world, it isn't done by drugs. It was done by evolution.
Evidently there was a time in our species' history during which complete
obedience & gullibility were adaptive.

If you're trying for change & improvement, you're up against millions of
years of evolution.

PT Barnum said that there's a sucker born every minute. That's an
understatement.

W.C. Fields said, "Never give a sucker an even break."  Well, that pretty
much naturally follows, doesn't it? What else an we expect?

Michael Ossipoff

On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 8:16 PM, Rob Lanphier robla@robla.net wrote:

On Fri, Dec 23, 2016 at 9:53 PM, Michael Ossipoff
email9648742@gmail.com wrote:

Michael,

Thanks for your detailed thoughts.

That's a good point, and I think anyone who's been paying attention to
the ballot scanner chaos in Michigan and some of the other disasters
of this election would take these concerns seriously.

I'm not familiar with the full set of rules governing ballot
initiatives, but would it be feasible to make IRV ballot initiatives
contingent on a third party voting equipment audit and overhaul?

== IRV vs. other methods ==

There seem to be a few competing reform efforts in the US right now:

1. the IRV->STV path, which appears to be Fairvote's main reform
   strategy, and which has plenty of precedent (positive and negative)
2. some limited advocacy for European-style PR models, mostly by academics
3. business-backed initiatives for nonpartisan blanket primaries
   ("jungle primaries")
4. some completely novel schemes, e.g. score runoff voting (which is a
   possible upgrade for 3)

Am I forgetting some?

A few comments on each of these reform projects.

=== The IRV->STV path ====

I am skeptical about this path not because of the Condorcet Winner
deficiencies of IRV, but because we've seen repeals of IRV and STV in
the past. I think those repeals have almost always been politically
motivated and used anti-intellectual arguments ("pinball voting",
"lottery voting"), so we should not overestimate the role that IRV's
failure to find the Condorcet Winner played in repeals. Jack Santucci
argues convincingly that repeals generally are the result of changing
party power constellations:

http://www.jacksantucci.com/docs/papers/repeal_dec2016.pdf

The story of IRV/STV's rejection suggests to me that simplicity is one
of the greatest virtues of voting system reform (which relates to your
point about voting security as well), and should lead us to question
whether this is really the best path, regardless of near-term
successes as in Maine.

At the same time, we should all be prepared to refute
anti-intellectual arguments, and be ready to speak to IRV/STV's
virtues relative to plurality.

=== European-style PR models ===

As a European, I love open list PR, but I understand the desire to
have local plurality winners that's a big part of US culture. One of
the most interesting proposals in this regard is Single Ballot Mixed
Member Proportional (SB-MMP), as explained here:

http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/HOC/Committee/421/ERRE/Brief/BR8397882/br-external/HutcheonDavidA-TomekJennifer-e.pdf

And here:

http://www.parl.gc.ca/Content/HOC/Committee/421/ERRE/Brief/BR8538777/br-external/SlavenRobert-e.pdf

This system is easy to summarize: You vote for your preferred local
candidate and party with the same vote. The plurality winner becomes a
district representative. The overall party % is used to draft
additional region-wide representatives, preferring the best-performing
runners-up. The end result is a proportional legislature or council in
which ever member has strong district ties, and where vigorous
district-level campaigns are the norm.

That last part, I think, is a pretty big deal. Imagine Green Party
candidates in every district really fighting hard to get the most
votes, because it may make the difference for them to get drafted to
the legislature. It would lead to a much richer, more diverse, more
competitive democracy. And it would instantly obsolete gerrymandering,
allowing districts to be drawn in a manner that reflects people's real
neighborhoods.

Legal scholar Allan Ides similarly has expressed strong support for a
(two vote) MMP style model for the California assembly, alongside
transition to a unicameral assembly. ICYMI, his "Approximating
Democracy" paper from 2011 is excellent, in my opinion:

http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=llr

Generally, I think for most reformers feel like MMP is a bridge too
far in America. However, I think when we consider it in combination
with other changes, it's perhaps not so crazy an idea.

=== Jungle primaries ===

The jungle primary (technical term: nonpartisan blanket primary -
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonpartisan_blanket_primary ),
implemented by ballot initiative in WA and CA, is a pretty big change
to elections and I don't think it's fully understood. It moves America
closer to the French model of two-round voting, except that in France,
every party still gets to hold its own primary, and both general
election rounds are a big deal with 80% turnout.

In the jungle primary as implemented in CA, you may get weird
intra-party spoiler effect, or you may end up with two candidates from
the same party in the final round.

It's overall an odd reform; I'm frankly surprised it was implemented
given the obvious adverse consequences for small parties (they don't
have much of a chance to get to the general ballot anymore) and the
seemingly insane decision to use plurality voting for the first round.
Oregon soundly rejected it, but it's backed by business interests who
want to see "less partisanship" so it will probably keep coming back
onto the ballot in other states.

=== Other reform initiatives ===

Range voting seems to have a lot of dedicated fans, and the Score
Runoff Voting proposal is pretty elaborate:

http://www.equal.vote/

Intuitively, I'm skeptical of the strategic voting properties in the
real-world, and the arguments on the site aren't wholly persuasive in
that regard. But some alternative-voting first-round (perhaps approval
rather than score) makes sense to me as an upgrade for jungle
primaries.

=== Centrists vs. partisans ===

A big distinction between many reform efforts seems to be whether they
want to elect centrists who appeal to everyone, or partisans who
appeal to a large faction while being very off-putting to others. It
doesn't make sense to me to aim for pure centrism in assemblies,
Congress, etc. -- you lose the ability to directly represent
specific concerns, and instead aim for some kind of prototype
politician-bot who can serve all constituencies. It's understandable
why business interests would want such a system, since it has a
consistent API for lobbyists.

But it's unlikely the general populace will be very satisfied with it
in the long run, since many concerns and ideas will never be directly
represented in such a system. And I doubt that it produces the best
politics, because it lacks the tension/disruption that makes
innovation possible.

At the same time, in the American presidential system, positions like
Governor or President are arguably least suited for strong
partisanship, because these figures have to be able to speak to
everyone, and help bridge divides in Congress or a state legislature.
So this is where you might actually bias in favor of a system that
elects centrists.

Hence my personal bias, so far, based on everything I've read about
reform in the US and voting systems elsewhere:

1. Transition to unicameral legislatures for the reasons outlined by Allan Ides,
2. Transition to SB-MMP or another MMP variant to elect members of
   these legislatures, as also well-argued by Ides; possibly extended to
   city councils, as well;
3. Replace the first-round voting system in jungle primaries and limit
   it to unique offices like governor, president.

Regarding 3), the use of approval voting, for example, would mean that
the two candidates advancing into the final round would both be people
with wide appeal (although they might still be from the same party,
which is a bit bizarre for an office like governor).

Note that none of the above includes reference to IRV or STV. We may
be able to do away entirely with any notion of ranking, or even
scoring, by focusing on "single X" and "multiple X" methods. This is
not a criticism of Fairvote's efforts, but simply a hypothesis that a
reform platform more closely in line with the above steps would
produce better long term outcomes. It's simple for voters, yields
proportional representative bodies, and balances centrism with
partisanship.

If you've made it this far, thank you -- would appreciate anyone
poking holes in the above logic.

Warmly,

Erik

Erik--

Maybe IRvists' desire to enact IRV could be a motivation for them to demand
verifiable vote-counting. So far as I'm aware, nothing less than public
ballot-imaging will do.

I probably already defined that in my other post, and so I'll just describe
it very briefly. It seems to me that I read that vote-counting used to be a
public event, with people, and party-representatives in particular,
observing the count, but I don' t know for sure if that's so. But it's a
good idea.

Nowadays, it should be public ballot-imaging:

Whether the voting is by marking a paper, or by touchscreen, there should
be a paper ballot (maybe coming out of the touchscreen voting machine). The
voter looks at it, and puts it in a slot in a locked ballot-box.

On count-day, each ballot, one at a time, is placed on a table,
sequentially stamped. Above the table is a frame on which are mounted
digital cameras belong to & operated by, political parties across the
political spectrum. I'll call them "observer parties" (OPs).

Each OP thus has its own images of all the ballots at the precinct (and
therefore at all the precincts), and can scan them into a computer program,
and do their own count.

OP representatives ride with the ballot-boxes to & from secure storage.

Secure storage is in a windowless reinforced concrete building or room, and
includes locks, cameras, & alarms owned & operated by each of the OPs.

Attempted count fraud or ballot-tampering would be treated as the serious
felony that it is, and would result in mandatory life imprisonment without
possibility of parole, in a maximum-security facility.

I suppose that that could be part of an IRV initiative, but maybe it should
be established before IRV is even considered.

Of course there's no democracy at all, without verified vote-counting, and
I don't know of any way to achieve it without public ballot-imaging.

European-style PR would be great. But, for the U.S., that, and any reform
at all, is really all science-fiction.

I don't want to try to discourage anyone who is trying for improvement, but
I'm just saying don't count on success.

A runoff with Score would fail FBV. I strongly recommend against runoffs
with Score or Approval.

Michael Ossipoff

To all:
“I believe electoral reform advocates have a similar problem fighting anti-intellectualism as climate
change alarmists have. Both are ridiculously complex topics,…”

This quote touches on, it seems to me, what is fundamentally wrong with the Election Methods group
desire for “something else” to IRV (ordered choice being a necessary but not sufficient condition of
electoral logic).
And the “something else” seems too much like a renaming and rehashing of long discredited or
limited options, such as: cumulative voting; points systems.

Climate study is a holistic problem, too complex to solve adequately, given the current state of
knowledge. (I have never dared pronounce on it, tho I reviewed it, in one of my Commentaries
series books.) But from a practical point of view, it doesn’t matter, because the prudent thing,
to do, is to heed the ominous threat of the Greenhouse Effect.

The main problem of climate change is not the climate but human improvidence.
(The same reckless complacency says “Nuclear power is fine! (Allegedly) no-one was killed -
when the wind blew the fallout fromThree-mile  Island  away from ten nearby American cities.)

Election research, unlike climate research, is not the study of a complex whole.
On the contrary, it is an analytic subject, much more akin to mechanics,
based on simple first principles. (I developed a theoretical analogy between motion and choice,
in a chapter, Relativity of Choice, in my free e-book: Science is Ethics as Electics.)
Electoral complexity is essentially the result of indefinite refinement.

An ounce of practise is worth a ton of precept:
Someone from the Science Fiction awards asked this group for advice
on proportional representation of the votes. I didn’t notice anyone else
reply.
I recommended Meek method STV (with its downloadable computer count). No
response received.

From
Richard Lung.

On 24/12/2016 01:16, Rob Lanphier wrote:

--
Richard Lung.
http://www.voting.ukscientists.com
Democracy Science series 3 free e-books in pdf:
https://plus.google.com/106191200795605365085
E-books in epub format:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/democracyscience

On Tue, Dec 27, 2016 at 11:24 AM, Michael Ossipoff
email9648742@gmail.com wrote:

Are you aware of any country using this approach? One challenge with
any public dataset like this is whether it can be de-anonymized by
correlating it with other data, such as camera footage of lines at the
polling place on different days. What do you mean by "sequentially
stamped" in this context, and could it be used for timing/count-based
de-anonymization attacks (against individuals or groups of voters)?

Well, it still is science-reality in America's last PR (Single
Transferable Vote) holdout: Cambridge, Massachusetts. But yeah, we're
a long way from PR reforms in the US -- it's not even seriously under
consideration anywhere, as far as I know. But organizing the
best-available knowledge seems like an important thing to be doing.

What's FBV? Favorite Betrayal Something? How would approval->runoff fail it?

FYI, I've been adding lots of stuff to my primer over the last few
days, and appreciate help getting the word out if folks find it useful
& accurate:
https://medium.com/@xirzon/the-global-fight-for-electoral-justice-a-primer-834ad8cb3b75

Cheers,

Erik

On 12/27/2016 09:38 AM, Erik Moeller wrote:

One note here: any such ballot images should either have very tightly
regulated access, or be an aggregate that's large enough that
vote-buying becomes impractical.

Suppose there are 9 nobodies running in addition to the serious
contenders. Then if the full preferences are public, a vote-buyer could
tell a vote-seller to vote these in a particular order first on his
ballot to prove that he voted as instructed. There are 362880 possible
ways to rank these 9 first, so that could work as a fingerprint. But an
aggregate (summable) image would not be susceptible to that kind of attack.

I gave it a quick read (I didn't look through the details of the data
points), and it seems like Jack is suggesting that a PR system is
unstable if/when the second largest party can't influence legislation,
or, to quote the paper, "permissive voting rules like RCV are stable
when the second-largest party shares power with the first on
the most salient dimension of conflict."

I live in Norway, and although it is parliamentary, there are no snap
elections. Legislative terms are fixed, and thus the electoral dynamics
should be within the scope of the paper, but the description doesn't
seem to match my experience.

The largest party here is the Labor party, and the second largest is the
Conservative party (see e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_parliamentary_election,_2013 ).
It's very uncommon for both of these parties to be in power at any given
time. What tends to happen is either:

• One of the two parties form a coalition towards the center and rule as
  a majority bloc, or

• a minority government forms and has to seek support on a case-by-case
  basis.

The model of the paper seems to suggest that, say, if the Conservatives
are in power, Labor should say that "we don't have a say anyway as we're
not in power, and if we repeal PR, all the minor parties will go away
and we'll get an increased seat share, so let's repeal PR". But trying
to repeal PR would be unheard-of.

So there has to be some additional assumption that holds for American
congressional/presidential politics but not parliamentary ones with
fixed terms; or that holds for STV-type PR but not party list PR. Or
perhaps the argument mainly holds for a transition period between
two-party and multiparty rule?

One could argue that the coalitions shift pretty often so that in the
longer term, Labor knows that it will regain power at some point. But
that leads to a continuity argument: how long an "often" is good enough
to keep PR? It's hard to tell. Also of note is that Norway, IIRC, used
to have single member districts up until the 1920s.

The paper also seems to assume that IRV will lead to STV all else equal
(i.e. in the absence of game-theoretical incentives to block PR), since
it uses the term RCV for both STV-type PR and for IRV as a single-winner
proposal. But IRV is not, in itself, very proportional. Consider
Australia: the IRV House of Representative is two-and-a-half party,
while the STV Senate is somewhat closer to multiparty. So the
introduction of IRV may not necessarily give more power to smaller
parties who could push harder for PR.

(I just stumbled across a possible explanation for European introduction
of PR - that it was a reaction to the increasing popularity of socialist
parties, where the old parties came to the conclusion that it's better
to be a smaller fish in a proportional pond than to be wiped out
entirely if the socialists were to gain enough support to become the
majority party. See e.g.
http://web.stanford.edu/~jrodden/wp/rodden_jan10_workshop_final.docx . I
don't know if this is the true reason, but if so, the US would be
different since there was no such great threat of socialist majority.)

MMP pays for this accuracy of district representatives by a greater
distance to the regional representatives. To use a metaphor, while STV
evenly spreads the distance from voters to representatives throughout
the district, MMP moves some of the distance away from the district
level (thus the district representatives seem more representative) onto
the regional level (where they seem less so).

If having local winners is more important, then shuffling the inaccuracy
over to top-up representatives might be a good idea, though. In any
event, it is better both locally and regionally than a nonproportional
method.

I'd probably prefer something closer to biproportional SNTV/party list,
myself, if local winners are important. Something like:

• Each voter votes for a candidate which also has a party assigned.
• The method uses party list PR to determine how many seats each party
  should get.
• The method then reweights the parties (how many votes count as one
  unweighted vote), reducing the weight of parties with too many seats and
  increasing the weight of parties with too few seats, until the number of
  seats per party matches the party list outcome.

A benefit to this method is that if party Y has too few seats, the
reweighting will make Y gain seats first where Y was close to winning
anyway. But the reweighting might be too complex to explain, or more
complex than MMP, and might also face criticism of the sort that
"candidate X got the most votes but didn't get a seat!"

The single-winner method could also be upgraded from Plurality to some
other method without making the MMP method fail, as long as that other
method is, in some extended way, monotone.

One problem with both Approval and Range/Score in a runoff is that
cloning pays. Suppose every party fields two identical candidates rather
than one, and every voter ranks/rates them adjacent to each other. Then
the two runoff spots will be occupied by the two clones from the party
that won, which in essence bypasses the whole runoff.

I tend to think of it like this:

• If you have only one winner, the best you can do is to have the winner
  represent the people to the greatest degree possible.

• If you have many winners, it's better to have the compromise-seeking
  happen out in the open than in the minds of the candidates. (This also
  serves as protection against corruption by power, lobbying, etc.)

So you should have different winners with differing positions, but these
winners should be centrist candidates with respect to the dimensions
that don't fit due to too few seats.

Or, if there's only one dimension in opinion space, then a single-winner
method should find the candidate closest to the median voter, and a
two-winner method should find the candidates nearest to the voters at
the 33. and 67. percentiles.

On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 3:50 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
km_elmet@t-online.de wrote:

Thank you for sharing your experiences from Norway, this is the kind
of thing that makes this mailing list very valuable. :) I found this
paper (link is to preprint) which gives some insights on the political
differences:
https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/1efd4512-5bc9-4e89-9e04-9fe6ab26be8d.pdf

What it suggests is that Norway is overall a much more collaborative
government, with ad hoc parliamentary majorities and lots of minority
gov'ts. One could argue that this is parliamentary democracy done
right, without obsessive focus on majority rule. Certainly its ranking
along many dimensions (e.g., #1 in HDI, #6 in GDP per capita, #4 in UN
World Happiness ranking) supports the idea that this approach produces
positive policy outcomes.

People will quickly point out the relatively small size, the country's
oil richness and high ethnic homogeneity as contributors, though there
are plenty of examples of unstable governments under conditions
favoring stability. So while there are certainly challenges with
"scaling Norway", I do think it's an interesting model.

If you have the time, I'd appreciate any insights you have on the
experience with Norway's political life: has the system failed/broken
down in ways that you think may be generalizable to its political
system?

That's an interesting find, and shows how PR can be used to neutralize
perceived extremists rather than empowering them as is often claimed.

Well, in the single-vote Baden-Wuerttemberg variant described and
compared with other variants here:
https://www.institutions-democratiques.gouv.qc.ca/publications/mode_scrutin_rapport_en.pdf

.. any candidate who gets a compensatory seat has received a high
amount (in absolute votes) of local support. So you end up with, say,
Green Party representatives from the districts that love the Green
Party the most. These lists are compiled from regions within the
state, to avoid pulling only from the biggest population centers.

There are other ways to build these lists from the results of a
single-vote MMP election. All of them have characteristics in common,
most of which I think are positive:

• Local campaigning is necessary, creating not so much an electoral
  threshold but a "seriousness threshold" and an economic cost that acts
  against party fragmentation.

• For political preferences that are highly concentrated, you get
  district representatives as in FPTP. For political preferences that
  are more spread out, you get representatives that are at least a
  reasonable match to the geographic areas where they have the most
  support. This in turn supports the development of party infrastructure
  and intra-party competition.

• Because you vote for both party and candidate and can't "vote-split"
  as in ordinary MMP, new parties can beat established ones by
  nominating more diverse candidates. Say the conservatives only ever
  put up white men. If the Green Party more consistently nominates women
  and minorities (as they in fact do), they may get an edge with those
  constituencies (they're in fact now running the state, though I don't
  know if this played a role).

What are the disadvantages? In theory, a party list system can produce
the best results for compensatory seats: make the best geographic
choices, allocate the best % of women/minorities (by legal quota),
identify the strongest leaders.

But then you either have to put a lot of power in the hands of the
party/government, or ask voters to familiarize themselves with a
larger roster of their preferred party's list candidates. Bavaria uses
an open list MMP variant, and it doesn't look like a lot of fun to me
due to the long lists:
http://www.fw-static.de/fileadmin/fw/oberbayern/dachau/dachau-land/Stimmzettel_Zweitstimme.jpg

Well, we already see lots of cases where the general election is
between two members of the same party, sometimes entirely due to split
votes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Assembly_election,_2016

Approval voting at least would avoid a situation where the general
election is between two candidates the majority doesn't like. So if
you didn't go to the primary (which has a much lower turnout) this is
very frustrating. But you're right that having two very similar
choices is likely also not what most voters will want.

Instead, you could sum by party and then pick the top two plurality
winners among the top two party winners. Would that have undesirable
consequences? You might sometimes end up with a 90%/10% general
election but that actually might not be so bad -- it signals to
smaller parties and independents that there's some potential to put up
a competitive candidate. And in other races they'd be less likely to
act as a spoiler because the Republicans wouldn't be able to run two
candidates in the general.

Does that seem like a positive change to the Jungle Primary model? If
not, how would you change it?

Cheers,

Erik

Regarding introduction of PR in Europe, many years ago a German
housemate told me that PR for post-war West Germany was partly designed
by academics in the United States who wanted to overcome the
unfairnesses of U.S. elections (i.e. two-party dominance, and unfairness
of gerrymandering).

(I presume closed-list PR is dominant in Europe because many members of
parliament would be unlikely to get re-elected under open-list PR.)

Richard Fobes

On 12/31/2016 3:51 AM, Erik Moeller via Election-Methods wrote: