2022:
In New Zealand
Palmerston North City Council, Nelson (New Zealand) and two other cities are adopting STV, starting in 2022. (With these four, fifteen NZ cities now use STV.)
USA
In California, Palm Desert and Albany are adopting STV ("proportional ranked choice voting") starting in 2022.
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I wrote:
Palm Desert and Albany adopting STV is great news - hopefully cities in Canada will copy the principle of adopting STV but hopefully they will not copy the exact application to be used in the two cities.
Palm Desert will just barely have STV - the District Magnitude (number of members elected in each contest) will be just two. so proportional rep. for just the two largest groups.
in each contest, white males will doubtless take one seat, leaving just one for a minority group, whether it is to be women, of colour, Latinos, etc. or combo remains to be seen.
the only MM district has four seats but two are elected each time (staggered terms) so don't hold your breath for a great flowering of democracy or minority representation.
Electing all five seats at one time (at-large) would be much fairer.
the court case ruled that at-large elections were not fair but that obviously was based on either political concerns (hidden bias against actual minority rep) or without understanding of how PR-STV system does not need districts to ensure local representation - any neighbourhood with a quota will take a seat, just as any minority group with a quota will take a seat..
Wards do ensure that each ward will have a seat but often just means that the white males in each ward will take the ward seat in each ward, meaning that overall white males take all the seats or anyways much more than their due share. sure each sits for the ward, but really he may represent the one voting block - white males for example - merely split up into separate wards - a plurality but minority in each ward.
Actually at-large election would provide more rep of minority groups while also allowing local neighbourhood representation if that is desired - as long as single voting is used (STV).
any group with 16 percent of the vote (quota) will take one seat.
each voting block will take one seat for each 16 percent or so.
each voter will cast just one vote so it will easy to measure the voter satisfaction - to see that perhaps 80 percent of the votes actually were used to elect someone.
under the FPTP/STV system as they propose it,
the one-member district will likely see most of the votes cast there ignored.
and the four-member district (elected in two-seat contests) will see the two largest groups (each with perhaps one third of the vote) elected each time - and in each contest the two largest groups will be the same - so white males will take two seats and and likely just one other "minority" will take the other two seats.
I see from the linked article that about 26% of the city’s population is Latino. so it is possible that no Latino will be elected, shut-out of Latino candidates will be assured if the non-Latino vote (74 percent of the city) vote for non-Latino candidates.
each voter will cast just one vote so it will easy to measure the voter satisfaction - to see that perhaps only about 59 percent actually will be used to elect the council (based on 17-30 percent of the city voters in the one district taking the one seat and almost certainly 34 percent of the city votes in the other district taking the 2X2 seats).
Albany is also adopting STV this year but its system is about the same as Palm Spring, flawed by small DM:
city council contest is only two seats -- one voting block with 67 percent of the votes could take both seats.
Board of education is three seats so at most the three largest groups, each with at least a quarter of the voters, will be elected-- perhaps just two groups will take the seats -- the largest group (say with half the votes) will take two seats and one other group will take the remaining seat.
so not great but hopefully, if it fizzles, the small DM will be blamed, not STV itself!
Goes to show that court cases can ensure the end of non-PR systems (FPTP or Block Voting) but do not ensure that fair and widely-inclusive PR systems will be brought in.
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people will likely only benefit from STV if they have numbers equal to quota or more..
I see from the linked article that about 26% of Palm Desert population is Latino. so it is possible that no Latino will be elected if DM is only two, which is the case under proposed system.
where DM is two, shut-out of Latino candidates will be assured if the non-Latino vote (74 percent of the city) vote for non-Latino candidates and give their back-up preferences only to non-Latino candidates. (perhaps a Latino-friendly non-Latino might get a seat, so perhaps there would be softening of the race lines, but not direct rep of the minority group..)
you need seat number elected at one time (DM) to be three or more for 26 percent to be assured rep.
so if purpose of reform was to produce Latino rep., it may not work.
(the other purpose might have been merely to obey court order by doing as little reform as possible.)
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The most that a two-seat election contest can do is to elect members of just two parties.
Sure, two-seat contests are broader and thus more proportional than single-winner but small parties will not get seats. likely only the two largest parties will split the seats, getting one each.
and the offering to voters will be just two of each party at most, with perhaps the white male candidate of each party taking the party's one seat?
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Some say that Albany and Palm Desert should be applauded because even if they are not to have STV-5 or larger, they do have STV-2 and that will train voters how to rank candidates.
I think though that the ranking of candidates is not the main part of PR. The essential mechanism of STV is single voting in MM districts - the more members, the better within reason.
(STV-4 means quota (amount needed to ensure election) is 20 percent of the votes;
STV-9 means quota (amount needed to ensure election) is 10 percent of the votes;
STV-12 means quota (amount needed to ensure election) is 8 percent of the votes,
so there is not advantage to go up past STV-9.)
Most winners in STV anywhere anytime are the candidates in the winning position in the first round. before any votes are transferred. In some STV elections, the vote transfers make no change at all to the ordering of the candidates.)
I and many other PR-reformers don't endorse IRV even though it is a way for voters learn about ranked voting.) (and we should not defend PR of 2 DM just cause it is PR, IMO.)
We - or me anyway - want PR because it gives us representation of both large groups and small groups, to the extent of DM anyway. and DM of two at most produces representation of the two largest parties or the two most popular Independent candidates and that is all, in each contest anyway.
DM of two means a quota of 33 percent. so we are not achieving rep of small parties, not small as we usually think of it.
and with quota of 33 percent we are likely not going to elect any Independent candidate if parties are involved.
Certainly in Alberta's STV use from 1920s to 1950s no Independent candidates were elected. and that was with DM of 5, 6 or 7. (I know, I know -- in Ireland many Ind candidates are elected - it just depends on how votes are cast. I know. But with DM of 2 I would not expect Ind. candidates to be elected when parties are used.)
I would rather a PR system that does not use ranked votes but uses DM of five or more, than a ranked-voting election that has DM of one or two.
The results where many districts are used but DM of two would be so open to chance.
Say in case where parties are used, most districts would elect one of each major party whatever they are - in the U.S. Republican and Democrats obviously - and if a district gave both seats to one party or a third party or Ind. candidate "stole" a seat from one of the two major parties, that would cause considerable shift.
Exciting, edge of the seat electioneering but not the stable or balanced rep that PR is renowned for.
But we'll see how it works in Palm Desert
hopefully it will work as well as you expect, or if not the city will move to higher DM - easy to do by dropping staggered terms)
instead of as, I fear, people turning away from PR or from voting altogether or social unrest, if it fizzles.
It can be a sort of social experiment, but one where people don't get hurt (or they'll get hurt only as much as they do in any flawed election!)
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I notice that Australia Senate elects two members in each of the Aus. Territories - Northern Territory (NT) and the Aus. Capital Territory (ACT) - through STV.
2022 Northern Territory election of Senators
Each party (or most of them anyway) ran two candidates although there was no chance it would elect both - not with votes as spread as they are. (It would take about 66 percent of the votes for a party to take both seats.)
Results in short
total vote 103,617
quota 34,540
17 candidates
15 counts used to establish the two winners.
1st count Last count
C. McCarthy 33,854 34,540 (peak of votes 34,827 in Count 13)
A Price 32,630 36,195 (passed quota in Count 15)
Anzelark 12,459 18,458
McMahon 9490 13,888
all other candidates were less popular in 1st Count, all were eliminated in Counts 2 to 15
exhausted votes 311.
Price's surplus votes were not transferred away so the vote totals at end imply he was more popular than McCarthy but McCarthy won with more first preference votes and with quota attained earlier.
the two winners were of different parties, so balance that way.
Each party ran just two candidates so not wide choice for voters.
The two most popular in the 1st Count were elected in the end. Vote transfers did not change the STV winners from whom would have won under SNTV. This was not caused by the DM being just 2 - it happens in most STV elections even with DM of 5 to 7.
In the end, 70,700 votes (70 percent) were used to elect the winners.
in STV where DM is 5 to 7, perhaps 80 percent are used to elect winners.
that only 311 votes were exhausted is sign that most voters ranked many preferences, perhaps as much as 14 in some cases, perhaps a carry-over from the days when voters had to rank all the candidates.
(although recently it has become optional how many candidates a voter has to rank).
the back-up preferences on the 66,000 ballots originally placed on Price and McCarthy were not consulted at all, no matter how many they were.
Those two took the lion share of the votes even in the 1st Count, their slate mates got less than 500 votes and were early eliminated. (When they were eliminated, not all of their votes were transferred to their slate mates. There was not 100 percent party allegiance in marking back-up preferences, as is the voters' liberty under STV - although it is possible that some of these votes wound their way back to the slate mate in later eliminations.)
Like in the Canadian Territories (NWT, Nunavut and Yukon) there is only so much proportionality you can make with small number of members. and the system used in the Northern Territory produces as much PR as two members can do (I just don't see the reason to go out of your way to create small DM by using districts to divide a city or use staggered terms to limit number of seats open at one time, as is done in some applications of STV.)
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