James,

My source for AMS not having been programmed, a couple or so decades ago,
came from a book (edited?) by Iain McClean. (his name might be spelt
slightly differently) You'll know who I mean, the Oxford prof. who took over
from David Butler.
McClean said: By the way no program had been written for AMS yet.
So, he seemed to think it becessary at the time. I wouldnt know.

I gather from your reply that no AMS program has been written but that
spreadsheets will do, at least for Scottish AMS.
However, I take it that there is no program in the sense of a general
procedure
for tackling all or most of the contingencies thrown up by this anomalous
system
of Additional Members as variously used thru-out the world..
I mentioned the dual partisan count both of list votes and another totaling
of party votes
from the single member system. As you know, there are other partisan
problems
such as the proportion of list seats to singles; the size of the small party
threshold;
over-hang seats ( or is it hang-over seats?); closed lists or open lists
(any number
of varieties); dual candidature or not.

An AMS program could count the votes in all these and no doubt more ways to
arrive at many different results from exactly the same votes cast.
Also for any given result, AMS gives, its proportional aspect would be
transformed
to an unreformed FPTP majoritarian type result, if it
were revealed that one of the parties was a dummy for another to boost its
representation disproportionately - as I believe you were the first to tell
me.

Proportional partisanship can be a deceptive duplication of representation,
even if
there was no conscious attempt to make it so:
People often get furiously at odds over quite small differences of opinion,
that
make mountains out of molehills like Swift's big-enders vs little-enders.
Such
doctrinal divisions on partisan lines may monopolise the political issues,
that
representative elections could liberate.


Richard.

----- Original Message -----
From: "James Gilmour" <jgilmour@...>
To: <stv-voting@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, February 15, 2009 12:10 AM
Subject: [stv-voting] Re: Announcing OpenSTV 1.3


--- In stv-voting@yahoogroups.com, "Richard Lung" <voting@...> wrote:
>
> A couple of decades ago, AMS hadn't been programmed. I suppose that
> deficiency has long been made good.

Richard
I may have missed something, but I didn't see anything about AMS (aka
MMP) on the OpenSTV website - indeed, it would have been a surprise
to find it there as it does not use preferential ballots.

But in any case, why would anyone want to write a "program" for AMS
(MMP)? It all tumbles out with a comparatively simple spreadsheet or
set of spreadsheets for the regionalised version we use in Scotland.

James