[Lnc-business] commentary on Scottish STV

[Alicia Mattson]

I have a number of comments I wish to make about the Scottish STV voting
system, but I don't have time to write it all up this evening.  I will
start with these comments and add more details to these thoughts later.

It is one thing to read the theory and rules for a voting system on a
webpage, but it's another thing to print out the paper ballots and enact
the process yourself to see the effects of each step.  Last night, I took
the 7 ballots cast up to that point, printed them out on paper, and put
them in piles on the floor to manually experience how it works.

It didn't take long before my eyes got wide.  Then a little later my jaw
dropped as I realized more and more implications of the process.  When I
was done, I paced around the living room in a bit of a rant as I put my
realizations into words.

Clearly, this voting system was envisioned for situations in which the
number of ballots being cast VASTLY outnumbers (by orders of magnitude)
both the number of seats being filled and also the number of candidates.

In our case, however, if everyone had voted it would have been 17 ballots
cast to choose from more than 40 candidates to fill 9 seats.  I only saw
ballots from 12 people on one election and 13 on the other, making the
ratios even worse.  This seems to be in the range of worst-case-scenario
for this voting system.

With these ratios, the process devolves into essentially a casino game of
chance necessitating random candidate eliminations early in the process.
After the first round of vote distributions, we might as well just tell the
candidates to play Russian roulette...or for fewer dead bodies we could
just draw names out of a hat.

If I correctly understand the process, then it's mathematically impossible
for the number of ballots cast in these two elections to elect more than 6
candidates to each committee.  Looking at the vote distribution, we'll
elect at least 3 but no more than 6, depending on the outcome of some
random selections, so we're in for re-balloting anyway.

More specifics later...

-Alicia