At 12:50 AM 6/9/2005, Russ Paielli wrote:
Abd ulRahman Lomax abd-at-lomaxdesign.com |EMlist| wrote:
So promoting Approval voting might be as simple as pointing out the
injustice of [discarding overvoted ballots]. I can't see any reason for
*preventing* a person from voting for more than one candidate. Allowing
it merely adds to the freedom of the voter without complicating the
process. For me, the question is "Why not" rather than "Why?"
You make an excellent point. Rather than defending Approval, Approval
advocates should go on the offensive and let the opponents explain why the
voter *shouldn't* be allowed to approve more than one candidate.
Having said that, let me play devil's advocate and give you a potential
reason.
One that I had not thought of, probably because I don't think of democratic
processes, in general, as properly "forcing" voters to do anything.
The basic principle of voting is that you, the voter, are supposed to
specify who *you* think should be elected. If you were the only voter,
your vote should choose the winner. But if you approve more than one
candidate, you have not specified who you think should be elected. You
have not made a final decision. You have only narrowed the field.
Plurality forces you to make up your mind!
This is correct. Note that this is basically an argument for IRV. IRV with
overvoting allowed (I'm trying to get in the habit of not calling it
Approval, even though the effect of counting overvotes is to implement
Approval voting) allows the kind of preference to be expressed that the
devil would be claiming it is proper to force the voter to express.
Typically of the devil's arguments, a partial truth is used in an attempt
to generate a false or misleading conclusion. The most clever liar will lie
with the truth, it is done all the time.
The partial truth is that discarding overvotes essentially punishes the
voter for failing to make a choice (within the approved set). However, the
goal of elections is not merely to produce a winner. A coin toss will do
that quite handily. In some jurisdictions, a tie vote is indeed resolved
with a coin toss, and the hypothetical situation of the single voter
marking two candidates could likewise be expeditiously resolved in the same
way.
In that election, also, if there were only two candidates, the voter could
express equality of preference simply by not voting for either. It is only
when more than two candidates are involved that overvoting becomes a method
of duplicating an option which is already available in single-candidate (or
likewise with yes/no questions).
Indeed, this is exactly what I do when I have no preference or, what
amounts to the same thing, I do not have sufficient knowledge to make an
intelligent choice. In that case, my decision is to leave the decision to
others, I don't mark the ballot for that race or question.
Since it is possible for a voter to express equal preference in a
two-candidate election, why should the voter not be allowed to express the
same if an additional candidate is added to the ballot.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
There are as many ways to look at things as there are people. I really
appreciate Mr. Paielli's examination of this question. We should have a
conversation with the devil more often. By playing devil's advocate, Mr.
Paielli has made that possible for us. The *real* devil will try to avoid
conversation, for he knows that open conversation will expose his schemes.
So, usually, someone must play his role in order for these deceptions to be
exposed.
(I'm using the word "devil" for "the force of deception that operates, as
it says in the Qur'an, from a place where we do not recognize him. My
opinion is that this place is within ourselves. What I write about "the
devil" in this forum and in other fora is intended to refer to a
personification of that force, which *does* exist in the way that other
abstractions exist, quite clearly, and not to some specifically religious
concept, about which much more disagreement legitimately exists.)
Now, I wonder if there is anyone on this list who thinks that overvotes
should not be counted?
If not, I'd suggest that this indicates a consensus of the community on the
topic. Because this is not an FA/DP organization of the community, this
appearance could be false, because this list is likely not a representative
sample. The theoretical ability of FA/DP organizations to quickly and
efficiently discover consensus is one reason why I think they should be
tried. The other reason is that it costs very little to try.
So, please, if anyone here either thinks that overvotes should be
discarded, or can think of other reasons why it would be so argued, please
let us know and, if possible, tell us why!
To summarize what has come before, two arguments were presented:
(1) An overvote could be the result of criminal alteration of the ballot.
[True.] Therefore the vote should be discarded. [non sequitur, discarding
the ballot accomplishes the goal of the criminal, at least in part.]
(More could be written on this. Allowing the overvote does allow the
additional fraudulent vote to remain, but under the present system it would
be unlikely that the overvote would be for the candidate that the criminal
desired to win; more likely the overvote would be for someone else. To give
an example, some Florida overvotes could have been generated by Bush
supporters even though an unusual number of such votes were cast for
Buchanan, not for Bush, thus throwing the election to Bush. [no charges are
being made here that this actually happened, it is just a hypothetical
example. In the actual case, there was a reasonable explanation, the
butterfly ballot. Of course, reasonable explanations often conceal the
truth....]
(2) Allowing overvotes allows the voter to fail to choose between two
candidates [True], thus potentially creating a "failed" election. [False.]
[And again, more could be written about this. For example, not only may the
voter abstain from making that choice anyway, the election has not failed
if it produces a tie; rather it has demonstrated that the electorate does
not prefer one candidate over another, so the election may fairly be
resolved by a coin toss, as is actually done. Indeed, were there a way to
set a clearly fair criterion, close elections in general might wisely be
settled by coin tosses, especially when they are for representation in
large bodies. This is done in Alcoholics Anonymous where elections for
Conference delegate fail to produce a supermajority, at least according the
publications. The argument for it is that the minority should at least
occasionally be represented. Since I find this fascinating, I'll add that
it would be more equitable to arrange the random choice method so that the
odds of winning approximated the actual vote result(s), thus resulting,
overall, in proportional representation. But one of the most famous mottos
originating in AA is KISS, Keep it Simple, Stupid. AA attempts to reach
consensus at the Conference level, so precision of vote strength is not
terribly important and diversity of representation is more important. AA is
a model Free Association (FA). And, typical of FA conditions, the
Conference does not actually make binding decisions. Rather its votes are
reported for guidance to the standard nonprofit corporation which holds
actual AA property, which corporation is almost entirely supported through
small donations from the members and which has no legal obligation to
follow Conference decisions (but a strong tradition to respect a Conference
supermajority); were it to stray seriously from Conference consensus, the
members could either shift the board composition, or bankrupt it in less
than a year and form a more congenial corporation.... This is how FAs could
exert tremendous power where necessary, but they are much more likely to
find paths to cooperation, coercion would be quite unusual.]
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