Anonymous user
PLACE FAQ: Difference between revisions
→Isn't there some downside to PLACE that's hard to foresee?
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I have long experience thinking about voting strategies and finding pathological cases for specific voting methods. As theorems like [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbard%E2%80%93Satterthwaite_theorem Gibbard-Satterthwaite] underline, no voting method is entirely free of such pathologies. Here's the worst I've come up with for PLACE:
Third parties could unseat specific enemy incumbents from major parties by endorsing those incumbents' major-party opponents. I call this possibility "targeted knockouts". Here's how it works:
Third parties could unseat specific enemy incumbents from major parties by endorsing those incumbents' major-party opponents. Say there was a third party that had enough votes for 3 seats, but only 2 of their candidates passed the 25% local threshold. So after they'd elected those two candidates, they'd still have one quota of votes to transfer. If they hated major-party candidate X, they could endorse X's major-party opponent Y in order to unseat X. Since those transfers would happen at the start of the counting process, when the third-party candidates were eliminated, Y could win before X had a chance to get within-party transfers. Because of the one-candidate-per-district rule, X would be eliminated, even if he was popular enough to easily win a seat without third-party interference.▼
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There are a few ways this strategy could fail. If the third party candidates endorsed another candidate Z who's more popular than Y, the transfers would elect Z first and the votes would be soaked up. If in the X/Y district X were highly popular and/or Y unpopular, Y might be eliminated by the 25% rule. And if X got enough cross-district direct votes to reach a quota without vote transfers, X would beat Y no matter how many transfer votes Y got. Still, there is a real possibility this could work.
Still, this "knockout" power is limited to at most one candidate per faction. As soon as the first candidate X is "knocked out", their votes would pass to the strongest other candidate W in their faction. If W has more local direct votes than their opponent P, then W would win immediately even if the third party had also passed votes to P.
I see this as a problem, but not an intolerable one. The best way to solve it would be to add a few non-district seats, as in MMP (explained below). Say that a given state had 3 non-district-based seats. In that case, candidates in the same district with winning candidates would not be eliminated until there were 3 districts with 2 winners. The third time that a second (or later) winner was elected from some district, all candidates in districts that had 1 or more winners would be eliminated simultaneously. Even a small proportion (say, 10%) of such MMP-like seats would be sufficient to prevent "targeted knockouts" from becoming a problem.
== Other #PropRep options ==
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