Posts by Paul Campbell
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Steve Todd,
I’m going to let you into a little secret. As you probably know, I rank-ordered 13 out of the 20 Capital and Coast DHB candidates
lucky you, the Nats took away my right to elect my local DHB this year
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to izogi,
Given most people out there seem to compare this with FPP, claiming that FPP is more simple (and therefore better), I think it needs to be pointed out that FPP also results in votes being thrown away, except that it happens immediately for everyone whose first choice doesn’t get elected.
yes exactly
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Steve Todd,
right but the difference is that if you had otherwise just voted for 9 your vote goes to the 10th, not the 42nd .... but, if candidates 10-41 drop out during the counting and your vote does end up residing with #42 then, well that's why you listed them in reverse order, yes your vote ends up with someone you don't much like, but it goes to elect that person over someone you dislike even more.
Wile that's a rather negative sort of result it's still a great use of your result and ends up with a council without that person you despise the most.
Having said that - I only voted for 9 people, 3 of whom were elected so most of my vote went to good use, some small portion was left live, why didn't I vote for all 43? in the end it was way too much of a pain, it should be a lot easier
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Steve Todd,
unless of course all the people you choose are eliminated, then all of your vote is still in play and is thrown away ..... as I mentioned it's stupidly difficult to rank so many different people ...
However once you reach the "people I don't know enough about to vote for, plus people I don't want to vote for" one thing you can do is separate out from that list who you rate as "people I actively despise" and start numbering them backwards from the last number (43 in Dunedin's case) starting with the person you despise the most, this can actually be a quite satisfying process .... then take the remaining "people I don't know enough about to vote for" list and number them arbitrarily between the two groups.
The goal here is to make sure that your vote, or whatever is left over, lodges with someone not in your "actively despise" list - the alternate to not doing this is that you effectively contribute your still active vote to decreasing the quota/threshold ... which means you are effectively spliting your vote between ALL the candidates, including the ones you despise (and including ones already elected who you may not like, freeing up their voters STV votes)
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The bulk of redistributed votes come from those left over each time a candidate reaches the threshold and has votes left over (those votes ‘left over’ are not votes of individual people, they are fractions of votes equally shared between everyone who elected the candidate which are distributed to each voter’s next preference).
However there are also other fractional votes that come into play during counting from the other already elected candidates as the voting threshold reduces.
And the threshold reduces as votes (or redistributed fractions of votes) reach the end of their voter’s list and have no where to go – for example the Dunedin election this year started with a threshold of 2595 and ended with one of 2403, that mean that at least 2200 people (11 candidates times a 200 vote spread) voted for few enough candidates that some portion of their vote was left on the floor …. some of those are people who only voted for candidates who were excluded and their vore rested with no one .. others left their votes with 2 or 3 other candidates but still had a small fraction of their vote in play at the end …. my guess is that 0.1 of my vote was left unassigned at the very end. It was probably far far more people than 2200 who had a fraction of their vote not counted because sorting 43 names is not easy
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Up Front: Wonder Bi, in reply to BenWilson,
Or you could make them out of glass! But no one does that these days.
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Up Front: Wonder Bi, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
I guess canvas covered planes are cheaper to recreate…
invisible ones are cheaper ...
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Best tweet of last night: "Defective Mike" .... turns out that's his coke dealer
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Hard News: Trump's Dummkopfs, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Trump sounded like what I imagine Leighton Smith would sound like after one too many visits to the sherry decanter. Or in Trump’s case, if the sniffles are any guide, one too many fat lines in the toilet cubicle before the debate…
you know that was probably a lot of Muldoon's appeal with his base, except that it was the gins he'd had before he went on TV rather than sherry
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unlike the smog generator that comes mandatory with most cars
