Miscellaneous K

Hospitals and the $963 million question

One percent of Medicare funding (almost a billion dollars) will be based upon a quality index. These include benchmarks such as giving aspirin within twenty four hours to heart attack victims as well as patient satisfaction scores. As often is the case, there is question as to whether this is fair to hospitals treating sicker and poorer patients. (The alternatives are to develop statistical adjustments based upon patient population, or to simply allow a participatory sortition judgment to take this into account.)

An experiment where some hospitals were given bonusses showed no difference with hospitals that were not part of the bonus structure. If there is no change in performance, hospitals will get back of the most payment. There is thus too little downside to incentivize change. Bloomberg Business Week page 35 and 36, September 17 to Sept 23 2012.

White House Petition Site

A federal government web site allows one to post and sign petitions. Here are some of them:

subject	number of signatures
The US should go to the metric system	37089
disclose information that the government has been keeping secret about exraterrestrial visits	1947
FDA should not regulate electronic cigarettes	18503
Legalize online poker	9816
recount 2012 president election--alleges 'blatantly obvious' fraud	69610
recognize American sign languages	32,457

Although, obviously, some of these are ridiculous and the subject of derision by the media. Yet Obama responds to many of them including the petition to deport Piers Morgan, a "CNN talk-show host who supports gun control." Obama's team polled the people signing the Piers Morgan petition. Over half says the Obama answer was helpful and one in four say "they learned something new."

Obama organized a conference call between those who petitioned for immigration reform and the people establishing policy.

With 25000 signatures, the White House used to guarantee a response--now it is 100,000 for a guaranteed response..

Sign Here -- Please", page 34, by Michael Scherrer> Time Volume 181 Number Five, 2013

Porto Allegre - participatory democracy

Each neighborhood has a full town democracy, but they send delgates to a city wide assembly. However, there have benn dramatic improvements:

1. sewer access is now 95% , up from 46%
2. tax evasion fell--presumably because people felt the money was spent wisely.
3. The poorest 12 percent are a third of participants in the assembly
4. One in ten citizen have taken part in at least one of the assemblies.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/sep/10/participatory-democracy-in-porto-alegre

Participatory budgeting in Venezuela and in United states Cities

Although this paper emphasizes the progress Venezuela has made in human development--and I suspect many people would disagree with this piece--but that is beyond the scope of this blog. It does talk about 20,000 "community councils" of 200 to 400 families. Some councils have joined to work on larger poblems. Also article talks about Port Allegre participatory democracy, which I do above, and references Mike Fox's democracy "Beyond Elections: Redefining Democracy in the Americas"

And one ward has particpatory democracy spend its alderman's capital budget of 1.3 million dollars with three other alderpersons following. Participatory democracies tend to have more smaller projects than the conventional budgets.

New York City now has eight council persons doing the same thing. Also, see an article in Epoch Times that said that 42 council members still are not using it. Participants identify and debate infrastructure projects at neighborhood assemblies. Then "budget delegates" do the mechanics to get precise costed out proposals. These are voted on by the community--to determine which get funded. People in the area, whether as an employee, resident or business owner can become budget delgates but only residents get to vote in the final decision. Note that this process only does a small sliver of the 9.5 billion that the city spends each year on capital improvents--and the city expense budget is not involved at all.

I had a thoughtful Thursday on Participatory budgeting in May 2010.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/14649-the-secret-rise-of-21st-century-democracy

Referendum on pay rates

Switzerland referendum just passed-- share holders have binding say on executive pay. Also bans "golden hellos" and "golden good bye" (golden parachutes). There is controversy whether this will discourage companies from coming to Switzerland, or even if it will attract new investment.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/ca90f1b4-83ff-11e2-b700-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2MVXNQ1Zm
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324678604578338171658493636.html

California in 2010 allows parents to vote 51 percent to take over a school. Apparently, it can be done by petition. In Desert Trails School District, there has been concern that the petitioner organizers told parents that it was simply a "petition to get new computers and clean bathrooms" rather than starting a take over. They claim that the oppositon blocked parents from exiting if they did not sign the "counterpetition." Hollywood made a movie where the parents succeeded. The article questions whether parents have the ability to run a school, whether the process will be coopted by the wealthy, an issue with referenda (see Wikipedia article on Initatives and eEferendums in the United states).

"Parent Coup", by Caroline Winter, page 80 to 84. Bloomberg Business Week, September 17 to September 23 2012

miscellaneous (H)

Immigration Discretion

Earlier,

I wrote about the need for discretion in immigration matters, in marriage, and immigration.
Democracy Now, August 10 2011, talked briefly about a gay marriage where one member, the undocumented immigrant, is caring for his partner with AIDS. Regardless of one's feelings
about same-sex marriage, is there grounds for compassionate
discretion, when one person is caring for a United States citizen with critical health issues.

Is this best administered by a government, even the personal intervention
of the President, or participatory democracy?

The Federal Reserve

The Federal Reserve made a 15 billion dollar loan to Goldman Sacchs
and it had a peak balance of 34.5 billion. Credit Suisse had
a 45 billion balance. Fortunately, these loans were all paid back.

Bloomberg Business Week, July 11 to July to 2011

Irrational Verbal Exuberance

Stock analysts were more often give "buy" signal when the CEO used
charismatic vision language.

Business Week, Page 017.August 3 2009.

Green

Carbon credit mechanism allow offsets. By preserving trees in the Amazon,
one avoids putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Should those producing
carbon dioxide be allowed to purchase such credits. But the problem is avoiding paying people for not chopping down trees that they would not have chopped
down any way. Deforestation now produces 18% of the global greenhouse
emissions, the same as all the world transport. But Brazil is doing less chopping down of trees now than it did before. (I recall reading many decades ago in a book on the global plenty, that the United States cut down one third of its forests. However, recently, there has been a net increase in forests
in the United States. Thus countries will naturally clear a lot and then
as the forest lands becomes more valuable as there are less of them.)


If money is paid to one group in a country, to preserve some acres, won't
the people who want to exploit simply move to another part of the same forest.
China paid people to stop using HFC-23, a greenhouse gas. But somepeople
received "windfall profits" and they had to create a "windfall profit" tax
to reverse the bonus.

The Economist September 26th 2009, page 94 to 95, Volume 392, Number 8650

Romney

About Romney's successes (Staples) versus jobs lost in other Romney
businesses. "IN sum, the form of capitalism that Romney practices helped revive the U.S. corporate sector in the 1980s and made it more efficient in the short term but left it less likely to produce new products
and technologies--with the excepton of Wall Street, where phenomental salaries lured the smartest young Americans to create fabulous new computerized gambling devices with,
as former Fed chairman Paul Volcker has noted, no redeeming social value."
These strong words came from Time December 12th 2011, article
"Where is the Love?" by Joe Klein, Volume 178 Number 23.

Similarity to the United States Constitution

Several law professors found that Countries adopting new Constitutions
were less likely to makethem like that of the United States.
Ruth Bader Ginsberg recommended the South African, Canadian Charter
of Rights and Freedom and the European Convention on Human Rights
as recommendations.  And the United States Constitution is the most difficult to amend.
The average lifetime for a constitution is nineteen years--Thomas
Jefferson recommended that a Constitution should expire tat
the end of nineteen years.  The U. S. A. Constitution protects

1. speedy public trial, not widely recognized
2. and is an "outlier" in prohibiting governemnt establishnment
   of religion
3. the right to bear arms--only Guatemala and Mexico also do so.

And other Constitutions do protect:

1. right to travel
2. presumíption of innocence--specifically stated
3. entitlements such as to food, education or health care.

Also foreign judges are less likely to cite decisions of the United States Supreme Court.
New York Times, page A1 , February 7 2012

Miscellaneous (G)

European Bank Stress Tests

I have proposed the alternative of share economy to our present banking
and debt system. And Ann Pettifor showed how the finance system
is a parasite creating money in a leverage.
And Nassim Taleb, of "Black Swan" fame, decries debt.

The Europeans, and similarly the United States of America Government,
is having "stress tests" of the banks.
After the financial crisis, many governments go through this exercise to
prove that their financial system is sound.
Unfortunately the Europeans use rather bland assumptions for
these allegedly
worst case scenarios:

1. 
   What if the United States Dollar falls eleven percent
   
2. 
   What if theEuropean unemployment goes up a mere 0.5 per cent to 10.5 percent.
   
3. 
   if stocks drop 15 percent
   
4. 
   gdp goes down a mere 0.4 percent
   

and specifically they don't consider that even a single European country might default on its debts.

And banks include assumptions over how much revenue their "trading desks" would generate.

Source: Page C1 and C2, Wall Street Journal July 14th 2011, "Late Stress Over Tests". Volume CCLVIII Number Eleven

Arab Unemployment

I pointed out in June 12th's Miscellaneous category the unemployment among educated Arabs. The IEEE Spectrum pointed out this issue. Sixty percent of college graduates do not find jobs in their fields. Engineers still face bleek prospectsd, but fortunately Egyptian Engineers are doing better, particularly electrical engineers. ("What Young Engineers Want Out of the Revolutions" Prachi Patel, June 2011, Pages 11 and 12, Volume 48, Number Six)

The Bond Market

"James Carville, Bill Clinton's political adviser, once said he wanted to be reincarnated as the bond market so that he could 'intimidate everybody.'"

Global Markets: A Wild Ride, The Economist January 26th 2008, page 70, Volume 386 Number 8564

We are now so accustomed to governments running up billions of dollars in deficits every year that we take it as normal, even to people outside the country. "But it is insane to think that a country can run up such debts for years and not have it affect their fiscal autonomy." (Will Kymlicka, "Citienship in an era of Globalizstion: commentary on Held" Page 112 to 126, Democracy's Edges, edited by Ian Shaipro & Casiano Hacker-Cordon Cambridge University Press 1999.

Dr. Kymlicka went on to say that when Canada, which he discusses in the article, will soon be running a surplus and this will test whether it has more power.

But a share economy would deal with this appropriately--one would sell the bonds not at an interest rate but as a share of the income or tax revenue or imports or exports of the country. (I would argue that a country would be better to make it a share of imports so as toimprove its international competitiveness.)

And to be explicit, a bond holder gets a vote proportional to the amount of their share. So if two percent of the country's GDP is contracted away in lieu of interest. Then, the Currently the United States Public debt interest cost is 1.6 percent of GNP of 212 billion per year.

I propose to replace that by a share of the GDP instead of bonds. But the new debt would also include a vote--thus bond holders would together have voting power equivalent to 2% of the population.

In a share economy, the interests of the bondholders would be pretty much aligned with that of the citizens, although perhaps with a some difference in time preferences, but neither would really want to sacrifice long-term growth for a larger payment now.

In the United States, we talk about not saddling our unborn children or children with these debts. Make our bonds payable at a certain percentage of the income of all people who were of voting edge at the time the debt was contracted. The debt gets retired naturally as these individuals die off.

More on the Financial Crisis

Michael Hudson on Democracy Now stated that at the time of the financial crisis and bail out:

1. 
   There was enough money in the banks to pay the ordinary depositors. That is
   the FDIC could liquidate the banks and pay the individuals. What there
   was not money to pay is the "gambles" in derivatives and trading and exotic
   financial instruments where the losing counterparty was broke.
   
2. 
   Money is created on a keyboard, the FED did it, and the banks do it.
   This echoes my review of Ann Pettifor's book
   

patents and patent trolls

On the pay everyone what they earned theory, I suggested that each individual and business pay a tax for intellectual property. They can then allocate this to the intellectual property they consider worthwhile, whether it be a drug, the result of scientific research, music, tv/memovies and services and content agregators like google npr or MSNBC, or the reporters who actually get the news. We would select a median amount to pay by a median process. Each person can then distribute their share to whichever intellectual providers THEY feel made the most contributions, whether it be Einstein, a researcher finding a great medicine, the latest Startrek movie, or google that provides a wonderful search engine.

When we have intellectual property or a public good as private property, one has problems. The most severe is determining who has worthy intellectual property. The worst of this is patent trolls, people who get me-too patents on obvious things. One example of the disfunctional system: someone in 2000 got a patent on toast. And the featured patent Chris Crawford for setting up internet backup or software refreshening softwares. There is a patent suit about the mouse bringing up a popup when it hovers over something. 30% of all U. S. patents are for things that were already known. And eighty percent of software engineers said that the patent system hinders innovation.

Intellectual Ventures, described as a largest patent troll, brought in two billion dollars. Nortels old patent collection sold for 4.5 billion dollars.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to define "Patent Trolls." using conventional statutes. "Under some definitions, the legendary independent inventor toiling in his garage could be a troll. Under other defnitions, well-known productive companies could sometimes be deemed to be polls, if they sue over a patent which covers a product the company does not currently sell." (Mechanical Engioneering, page 35 to 36, August 2011 Volume 133 Number Eight

The patent statute punishes companies who mark their item with a patent number, but the patent has expired or has been judged invalid. If a company marks their object with a patent number, then all companies are non notice about the patent. Otherwise, the company has to send a "cease and desist letter" to the infringer.

This kind of problem happens when a manufacturer still has usable molds, except that they have a patent number on them which is no longer appropriate. Do they make a new mold, or save money on molds but risk a lawsuit under the rule that one cannot put a misleading patent number on one's products.

All these things can be handled by sortiton juries.

ExpertLens

An online method that can use both experts and individuals to determine difficult policy questions. It uses some crowdsourcing and feedback between the group's answers and seeing if people changed. This is a type of deliberative polling. (Source, Mechanical Engineering August 2011, Page 21-22. Volume 133 Number Eight.

Weird Results

Undergraduates were asked to rate five personality traits of Chief Executives of Fortune 1000 firms solely on the basis of their photograph. And found that these were correlated with the firm's profits. By the way, another set of researchers tried to look at actual chief executive personality. They found no correlation between that and how well the company did. (Perhaps more profitable firms are able to get chief executives that look competent, dominant and who have "facial maturity," i. e., not "baby-faced.")

"Face Value" The Economist Page 78, January 26th 2008, Volume 386, Number 8564.

Safety First

The proposed design for a product included a particular safety features. Marketing wanted it removed to save money. The three engineers involved inthe design and a recognize testing laboratory stated that the safety device should be included (but no standard mandated the requirement). Marketing prevailed, but Eventually all the items had to be recalled because of the fire risk. It was of course much more expensive to do the recall than to have done it right the same time.

"Serving Two Masters" Brian porter, Mechanical Engineering August 2011, Volume 133 Number Eight

Predictions

Freakonomics Radio just had a good show on Predictions. Tetlock did a twenty year study of political experts predicting political events. Most did somewhat better than chance, but no better than regression. The predictors who were dogmatic were not effective. And the predictors who might make the big prediction, say the person in 2006 or 2007 who predicted the financial meltdown, did worse on average than others.

Michael Hudson on Democracy Now pointed out tht the bond rating agencies do not want to be liable to their "opinions." Thus, those who bought AAA-rated mortgage banked securities that turned out to be "junk" could not sue the rating agency that gave it an AAA-rating Dodd-Frank made the rating agencies liable. Michael Hudson proferred that the rating agencies are threatening to downgrade the United States debt if they don't repeal these provisions of Dodd-Frank.

The Freakanomics radio programs began with a new Romanian law that made "witches" liable for their bad opinions with criminal fines and jail sentences. But Romanian politicians were not liable for their bad predictions. We need to track each predictor's predictions over a lifetime. Right now, predictors have an incentive to make wild predictions because they can trumpet that "they predicted the big one." There is nobody to day that 90% of that experts predictions were wrong. In my clawback tax and the "pay when we really know" proposals, we should only
pay people much later than the predictions and hopefully their lifetime
record will determine people's rewards.

Miscellaneous

Referendum News

This November, San Francisco will have
a referendum
might be unconstitutional as Jews and Moslems practice circumcision for
religious reasons. It also would be ineffective, as people could easily
have the procedure down outside San Francisco limits. It is sad that
referendums, a wonderful tool, are used for such silliness when Californians
have very pressing problems.

On the subject of silliness in California Referendums, Amazon is using the
referendum process so it does not have to collect sales tax, even though
it "has a physical presence in the state."

Unfortunately, it will probably end in court--apparently in.
California, budget related
laws and "laws that take effect immediately" can't be referendum-vetoed

And one borough is dealing with anti-budget referendum by a clause in its. And there is a move to discourage voting.
bylaws that says fifteen percent of the voters must vote in a referendum--otherwise the referendum is null and void

And Maryland is going to have a referendum on whether undocumented immigrants.
will be eligible for in-state tuition in the Universities

New Zealand will vote on which parliamentary voting system it will use:

1. 
   Currently they use mixed-member proportional with 70 chosen from districts
   and fifty thorugh party lists
2. 
   single transferable vote with some districts electing more than one member
   of parliament
3. 
   a conventinal system like what the United States does, where each district
   elects one represenative.
4. 
   A variation of this with single transferable
5. 
   and a variation on MMP, but where they don't try to adjust the party list members
   to ensure tghat the percentage of each party in parliament matches the total
   voting.

I discussed many of these voting options in my last Thoughtful Thursday posting.

Apparently, the voters will choose on two questions and then there will (I would be in favor of using approval.)
be another referendum in 2014.
voting here between the systems

Anti-nuclear referndum are popular world wide. Poland is planning one on shelving
building their own that were planning.

Italy voted against nuclear energy. Voters also rejected immunity for government officials, so they could
concentrate on their official duties. This is a referendum on Berlusconi who
would have to attend four separate trials.

Health Care

The new health care law allows businesses to pay two thousand dollars
instead of insuring its workers. At that point the workers move into
subsidized "exchanges." There is debate about how many businesses will But Freakonomics reports that when a day care center
take that option. And small businesses less than fifty employees pay nothing
if they choose not to pay their employee's health insurance.
moved from no fine for coming late to pick up your child to a three-dollar
fine, more parents were tardy to collect their kids. Sometimes, people
will take a minor penalty when given that option. With no penalty, moral
pressure will get them to do the "right thing" whether that be picking
up their kid on time or health insuring their workers.
In any event, my suggestion is to apply a sales tax based upon.
the business's provision of health insurance, among other factors.

Businesses would compete to be good businesses, and that includes

taking care of their workers.

elatedly, the June 28th issue of the New York Times (Andrew Pollack, page one)
reported on drugs that
extend the lives of a small percentage of prostate cancer sufferers, those
who are unfortunate enough to have the cancer goe beyond the prostrate and
for which hormone therapy has not worked. This is the question of whether
a few billion dollars is worth what appears to be a modest extension of survival.

And the Wall Street Journal just reported on several drugs that
are truly innovative as opposed to a me-too product. They include a new
drug for advanced melanoma, the first drug for lupus in over fifty years,
and improvements in hepatitis C care.

Of course, I propose that we have a fixed amount of money for drug innovations.

The drug companies would innovate to achieve the best improvements and try
to find drugs that work where no drug has worked before, as contrasted with
me-oo drugs.

Then, the money would be given to the teams and companies achieving the best
outcome, compared to current care.

Admittedly, the insurance companies are achieving this outcome already, by simply
demanding that their patients use generic drugs when such are available and
the new pharmaceutical, under patent protection, dosn't do much better.

Good Statistics, in 2006, pharmaceutical firms spent 45.8 billion on research,
17 percent of their revenue.
("Drug Makers Refill Prched Pipelines", by Jonathan D. Rockoff and Ron Winslow,
July 11 2011 BVol CCLVIII No 8, Wall Street Journal, pages A1, A12)

Another pork barrel project

Representative John L. Mica, who happens to be chairman of the House
Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has pushed through a 61 mile
ommuter ail prject. The federal government ranks it as one of the least
cost-effective, only projected to serve 2100 people per day. Althougn in

Central Florida, it does not serve the Orlando Airport or Disney world attraction. The Federal government will pay CSX $432 million
for the use of its tracks. CSX and other contractors have contributed to
r. Mica's campaign.

All government projects should go before a sortition jury for approval.
New York TimesJune 28th, pages A1 and A3, "A Congressman's Pet Project;
a Railroad's Boon" by Eric Lipton.

Thoughtful Thursday, Construction Construction Kit Two and the ACE

Protecting minority rights can be written into a Constitution. There are two cases. The easiest case, the approve case, is when the people have a plebiscite to say something is OK with them. It is a take-it-or-leave-it-proposition. The usual case is ratifying a Constitution, or voting Yes, is OK to cede sovereignty in some matter like joining the European Union, or a giving major rights to develop the country's mineral or oil resources or building a free city. The more complicated case is choosing among several alternatives. This has been studied extensively when there are n people running for a single office, e.g. President . This means that the the plebiscite has more alternatives. Allow the people to choose one of many proposed constitutions.
I discussed this briefly in the case of finalizing a peace treaty between two peoples. I explained that Israeli demos and the Palestinian Demos together would find the best peace deal for themselves without relying on their leaders to negotiate one. Simply seeing which peace deal got the most votes
total won't work. One must find one that gets the best possible approval from both
sides.

And there could have been several health care bills presented to the people.
In such a multi-candidate election, there are many techniques of converting the votes into a "Who Won?" or a ranking among candidates--approval voting, range voting, Single-Transferrable voting, Kemeny and Dodgson Scores. But these all keep all voters alike. Assume in Ethnic Group A is 55% of the population; ethnic group B is the rest. If 98% of a want to do something B really don't like such as outlawing their religion. In a simple majority or any sophisticated multi-candidated election, a could get their way. And if 60% of the A's want to do something and only 40% of B want to do it, then it will be done. But how could we design a Constitution to ensure that issues get support among both (or all) ethnic groups. Or how could we design a Constitution to encourage the legislators to prepare bills that also get support from a wide variety of individuals?

We could simply require that no bill passes unless x percentage in y percent of the ethnic groups approve the act. Thus, in our simple example above, we could require that any bill that passes earns at least 40% of the votes of each ethnic group as well as the traditional 50% of the entire population.
And the Constitution could make a broad rule of the above sort, to pass a plebiscite, in addition to getting 50% of all votes cast, it must get at least 30% of the voters in seven out of the ten designated ethnic groups.
What about a multicandidate election or a referendum with seven choices of what bill to pass. The first is simply to do whatever we were going to with the multicandidate election, but add that whatever came out of it must also pass an approve. If the winner by Dodgson score, Approval Voting or whatever method the Constitution selects, did not meet the approve criteria, where to go the next one in the ranking. See if that meets the approve criteria, otherwise, go on to the third one in the ranking. Etc.
The other option is more gentle, it adjusts or subtracts from each voting total by a deviation factor. A bill that gets the same percentage support from each ethnic group has no adjustment factor downward. A bill that gets all its support from a single ethnic group, even a majority, would have the highest adjustment factor downward.
The constitution specifies the adjustment factor.
We describe this in terms of Wally Smith's COAF system. Recall that this means that each voter gives a number for each candidate. The most general is range voting, where each candidate gives any number from one to ten, let's say. The least general, and arguably the most problematic, is the basic plurality system. Each voter gets to vote once for only one candidate. The winner is the one with the most votes.
Assume our votes came as follows in a three way election. X,Y and Z might represent candidates for the president. Or they may be one of three alternatives in a referendum.

Ethnic Group	X	Y	Z	Percentage
A	3	2	1	15
B	3	6	1	15
C	15	18	25	70
COAF SUM	2	26	27

(The percentage of the population of the ethnic group is not used in the calculation, it simply explains why the vote totals are so much higher for ethnic group C.)
The next step in calculating the ethnic group by candidate is easily done. We simply find what percentage of each ethnic group voted for each canddiate. We then average these

Ethnic Group	X	Y	Z	Percentage
a	50.00%	33.33%	16.67%
b	30.00%	60.00%	10.00%
c	25.86%	31.03%	43.10%
Average	35.29%	41.46%	23.26%

The next step is computing the deviation from the average for that candidate for each of the boxes. This gives us the the three data rows in the table below.

Ethnic Group	X	Y	Z
A	14.71%	-8.12%	-6.59%
B	-5.29%	18.54%	-13.26%
C	-9.43%	-10.42%	19.85%
Squares	216.5	66.0	43.4

Then, we sum the squares of those deviations, This a classic case of "sum of squares" or "norm two." Assume the constitution specifies an adjustment factor of 0.02. The new scores for the choices X, Y and Z. This gives us

	X	Y	z
Adjusted Score	14.3	15.6	14.7

Y won!. Thus, observe that even though Z won the popular election with 27 to 26 votes, that candidate was somewhat more skewed than y, turning the election over to Y after the adjustment factor.

nth smallest voting

There is another technique, nth smallest voting. The Constiution specifies a number nth smallest percentage is the winner. I suggested this in my first Thoughtful Thursday on the Constitution Construction Kit.
Assume, that there are seven provinces, which I call a, b, c, d, e, f and g. And assume there are three choices or candidates: X, Y and Z. And assume the Constituiton specified n = 3, or the third smallest vote,by province, determines the winning candidate. The table below states in the election of how many voted for each choice. (We allow each voter to vote for more than one alternative, like in approval voting, so the percentages don't add up to 100 per cent.)
The third smallest in each column is marked with a -.

	X	Y	z
a	38	47	43
b	12	42	42
c	13	32 -	40
d	35 -	27	34
e	60	35	37 -
f	20	28	32
g	50	50	50

Thus, the winner would be Z as its 37 for the third smallest is higher than that for other two candidates (35 and 32, respectively).

Electoral systems

The ACE Electoral District discusses many country's experiences and many statistics on how the countries choose the systems. It is a goldmine of information and analysis and suggestions for those making the decisions about constructing a Constitution. I see the fundamental division between proportional systems and geographic districts. The United States uses the latter. Each House Representative is elected from a contiguous, if not compact, district. And each voter gets to choose only one representative.
114 have districts and 35% use PR-type systems.
And twenty-two countries have some representatives being elected from districts and other representatives being elected at large or via proportional representation. A nice twist is to deal with the "wasted vote" problem. The proportional votes are distributed so as ensure that the percentage for each party matches the percentage they got fromt he whole country. E. G. Assume, there are 150 seats in parliament and 100 districts. And assume there are two parties: A and B. The top winner in each district gets elected, just like the United States. However, assume that because of the way each district votes, only 55 members of party A get elected from  the districts, and 45 of the districts B. This parallel system would then take the top 35 from the A list and 15 from the Party B-provided list. This means that the parliament would have ninety members from party A and 60 from party B--this gives the proportionality of the list system but allows each person to have a represenative for their geographical district.
And there is a really neat variation of the proportional system. The voters can rearrange the list from the parties, or just vote for a particular party.
And countries can and do use the many techniques of dealing with multiple candidate elections. Thus, if there are three people running in a district, they can simply have the one with the most votes wins, have a run off between the ones with the top two vote counts, or use one of the Hare-techniques.
And the Hare techniques can be extended to multi-member elections. Assume there are three members in a district. Those candidates getting 33% or more are chosen. Then, the bottom most candidate's second choice gets added to the total for each candidate. We then see if any of the remaining candidates got 33% votes. If not, the second choice of the second-lowest vote getter gets added to the totals. This process can continue until all the members are selected.

Minority Protection

The Ace Electoral System points out that several countries designate certain seats for specific ethnic groups including Jordan, India, Pakistan. (Also Iran reserves seats for specific groups including Zorastrians, Jews, Assyrian Christians and Armenian Christians. And of course several countries simply overrepresent certain regions in the legislature. This, of course, is done to favor ethnic groups tending to live in the area. And many nations have special arrangements for women.

Referendum News

British Columbia is referendum voting on a different way of consumption, a "Harmonized Sales Tax) versus
the older provincial sales tax. Of course, this is a take-it or leave-it proposition.
Why can't the people vote for the tax rate (median) and choose which items are to be subject to the tax and at which rate.

The Seattle citizens are deciding part of the major tunnel
project. Sadly, it give the people an opportunity to simply not build the tunnel. They only vote on part of the document or agreement authorizing the project.