At 11:20 AM 4/17/2007, James Gilmour wrote: > > Abd ul-Rahman Lomax> Sent: 17 April 2007 15:50 > > The ballots could also be counted sequentially, as needed. I dislike > > this, because I think every vote should be counted, even if > > supposedly "moot." If I went to the trouble to cast it, it shouldn't > > be tossed in the trash! > >This is an understandable "social choice" interpretation of ALL the >information on ALL the ballot papers. But that is not what STV-PR is >about, and certainly not where it came from.
Mr. Gilmour may not have understood what I wrote. I did not intend to indicate that the lower ranked votes should be used to elect winners. > You vote for your first >choice. Your second preference is a contingency choice, to be brought >into play only if your first choice is already elected and cannot >proportionately represent you as well, or has so little support that >he/she has no prospect of election and is excluded (eliminated). And so >on. And of course, originally it was "your vote", i.e. your whole vote, >that was transferred. The system asks me to rank contingency choices. I'm saying that the information provided shouldn't be left uncounted. It's entirely another matter if it is used to elect. What I'm saying is that there is a social value in counting all the votes, there is a cost to obtaining this value (voters have to fill out the ballot in order to generate the source data), and those lower ranks matter. Now, where an environment requires voters to rank all candidates, it's a bit of a different matter. Still, it would be valuable information to know that such and such a candidate ranked *last*. "My vote" includes all the information I enter on the ballot. "My electing vote" is extracted from that information and is used to create a winner. I didn't claim that this information was "what STV-PR is all about." It is primarily a method for creating a proportional representation assembly. The information I'm talking about is not directly relevant to that goal. But, I assert, it should still be made available. If it is determined that public funding shouldn't be spent on that, then ways could be provided for private funding (such as through nonprofits or media) to cover the costs of counting. If nobody is sufficiently interested to count all the votes, that's another matter..... but I think there would be interest. (I have proposed that ballot images should be public record, and that this could solve many security issues. It does raise, potentially, problems with vote-buying, allegedly a serious issue -- I doubt it --, but those problems already exist. Essentially, incumbents or those who are connected with them, in general, already have access to the ballots themselves, and either vote-buying is moot -- in which case the vote buyers wasted their money, as they might deserve -- or it was effective, in which case those who benefited from it may have preferential access to the ballots. And it's possible to handle ballots and ballot imaging in a way that would make reliable identification of ballots sufficiently difficult. If ballot images are public, then anyone can count votes; and part of the proposal was that ballots be serialized -- after being cast -- so that it becomes trivial to combine counts from many people to produce reliable and verifiable overall counts.) > > If I was a candidate for office, and it turns out that many people > > voted for me, but not at a high enough preference for me to be > > elected, I'd hate not to know this! The result might actually be > > encouraging. Or not, depending on what is in those buried votes.... > >The problem of excluding a "Condorcet winner" is unavoidable in STV-PR >so long as we give an absolute undertaking to every voter that under no >circumstances can a lower preference count against a higher preference. That's right. But I was not addressing this issue at all. I think that Mr. Gilmour did indeed misunderstand my comments. >Most proponents of STV-PR regard that undertaking as extremely >important, and that view is, in my experience, shared by the >overwhelming majority of the electors with whom I have ever discussed >STV. Once you change that solemn undertaking to save a "Condorcet >winner" from exclusion, you open the door to tactical voting which is >otherwise impossible in real STV public elections, i.e. with large >numbers of electors whose preference patterns you cannot possibly know. >This exclusion rule makes STV-PR non-monotonic, but that is not >generally regarded as important and certainly nothing like so important >as ensuring that a lower preference can never count against a higher >preference. Also, the non-monotonic effect cannot be exploited by >either the candidates or the voters, so it is of no practical effect. >It would be nice, but we cannot have it all - at least, not all at >once!! I wasn't proposing *any* change in the method. Only in procedures and practices *around* the method. From what I understand, it is rare that complete ballot information is available, and an additional undesirable result is that it becomes impossible to do any analysis of the election to determine how changes in voting methods would affect the results. (Actually, I've seen some people propose that as a desirable result, i.e., allegedly riots would result if people found that some flaw in the election method produced a poor result. So these would conceal the truth in favor of public order, a position I have always found to be short-term questionable and long-term just plain foolish. A public order that depends on hiding the truth is unstable.) I've argued that Range ballots could be used, allowing candidates to be rated rather than ranked, *without* changing the election method. The purpose would simply be to study the results, with a consideration, perhaps, to reforms down the road. Range ballots contain full ranking information (I'll neglect the issue of identical ratings for the moment), but the reverse is true only to a very small degree. In an election with a very large number of candidates, we could theoretically infer ratings from rankings, because we can assume that candidates exist on a spectrum, and that spacings are roughly even, if there are enough candidates. But voters wouldn't want to fill out such a ballot, and it's likely that many of the candidates would be unfamiliar.... Because such a system would not change the legal aspects of vote-counting, it could be tried on a small scale even in a large-scale election. It's simply a different ballot configuration, it shouldn't bias the results in any way. And, of course, all the ballot information would become relevant. Range, like Condorcet, does not neglect any votes. I will not address the wisdom, or lack thereof, of this alleged "absolute undertaking" with the voter that their second-place choice will not interfere with the election of the first. For one thing, it's possible to design ballots that allow the *voter* to choose whether or not this could be the case. Election system designers have a tendency to consider that they know better how to amalgamate preferences than do the voters themselves.... but this is a complex issue, and I'm not taking it up here. (But I will note that the idea of such a promise is actually the major argument made for IRV here -- single winner. And most of us consider that method defective. Again, I've written, the defects in IRV become much less objectionable when the method is multiwinner, because many more of the lower-ranked votes end up being considered. Single-winner, they could be doozies!) ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info