Posts by Graeme Edgeler
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Legal Beagle: The law to make it easier…, in reply to izogi,
you forgot to add the part about how you think this is a highly necessary Bill and that its robust debate is well worth the allocation of Parliament’s limited resources
It does meet the most important test for a piece of legislation:
First, do no harm.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Steve Todd,
STV’s so-called defects are not properties, if that’s the right word, that ordinary voters in large public elections can in any way take advantage of.
I’m absolutely fine with STV, and what anomalies remain don't really concern me either.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Steve Todd,
What proof do have that STV “certainly doesn’t have that property?”
The Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem?
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Tim McKenzie,
And in multiple-winner STV elections, later-no-harm seems likely to harm voters’ preferences over the sets of possible winners.
Tactical voting is possible in all fair electoral systems with more than two candidates.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to izogi,
I haven’t yet thought this through to the point of my brain sizzling, but wouldn’t there be theoretical scenarios where there simply wouldn’t be a candidate who could beat every other candidate in a two way race?
Yes. It's possible to have a race with no condorcet winner. The complaint about STV is that *if* there is a condorcet winner, STV does not guarantee that that person will win.
eg imagine there are four candidates for a single position. 3 of them get around a third of the first preference votes each, the fourth candidate gets no first preference votes, but gets ever voter's second preference. In a match-up between them and any one of the other candidates, they'd get around 2/3 of the vote, and are the clear consensus choice. STV (or Alternative Vote, which is STV in single member elections) does not gaurantee they will win.
When there are more than two candidates for an election, there is no perfect voting system that will meet all the criteria you might want in a voting system.
I quite like STV because it meets the later no harm criterion (where you cannot harm the election prospects of a candidate by ranking additional candidates lower than them). But it's a judgment call as to what particular criteria you want a voting system to meet. It cannot meet them all.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Tim McKenzie,
Hold on. I live in Lower Hutt, and get to vote for members of the Greater Wellington Regional Council, but the Hutt City Council elections won't be STV, will they?
You're right. That was misleading. I listed all the councils that will use STV and Hutt City Council elections won't be run with them, so you'll have to used both :-)
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to James Littlewood*,
I’d thought giving no ranking would hurt a candidate more than a low ranking.
Lots of people do. That's why I post this every time we have an ranked vote election :-)
What happens if you don’t number all candidates sequentially? E.g.
Candidate A: rank 1
Candidate B: no ranking
Candidate C: rank 3Invalid?
A valid vote for candidate A. In the even candidate A is elected, or eliminated, the vote will not transfer to any other candidate. This is functionally identical to voting Candidate A: rank 1, and leaving the rest blank.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Paul Campbell,
(still in minor nit territory) true for the last seat, but it’s really “if anyone has NUMBER-OF-OUTSTANDING-VOTES/(NUMBER_OF_OUTSTANDING SEATS+1) votes then they’re elected”
That was because I was using an example where you needed two candidates. Also, it's not number of outstanding seats + 1, the quota is still calculated using number of seats + 1, even after the first person is elected.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Hospital Board voting is only silly if the government hasn’t taken away your right to vote for your local hospital board
My view is that we should elect people into positions where they make decisions (especially decisions around funding levels), and not elect people into positions where they are administering decisions made by others.
If DHBs had the power to tax people/businesses/whatever in their area in order to fund healthcare, so that elections were about how much healthcare your DHB would provide etc. I would absolutely support having DHB elections. At present, DHBs appear to be organisations whose main purpose is to provide someone whom the government can blame when the health system doesn't work well.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Paul Campbell,
Minor nit: the quota changes downwards during the voting, largely because people don't rank all 40 odd (in Dunedin's case) candidates
I did include an acknowledgement of that in an earlier question, but I accept if you were only reading that, then it could be a bit misleading:
If anyone now has a majority of the remaining votes, they’re elected.