James Gilmour wrote:
Dave Ketchum > Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 9:54 PM
Ok, I did not say it clearly.
Obvious need is to package arguments such that they are salable.
Take the one about a Condorcet winner with no first preferences. Ugly
thought, but how do you get there? Perhaps with three incompatible
positions that share equally all the first preferences, while a neutral
candidate gets all the second preferences.
Assume it will never happen, so do not provide for such? As I suggested
before, somehow, if you assume such fate will, somehow, prove you wrong.
Provide a fence, forbidding getting too close to such? Where do you put
the fence without doing more harm than good?
Leave it legal, while assuring electors they should not worry about it ever
occurring? I see this as proper - it is unlikely, yet not a true disaster
if it does manage to occur.
Interesting points, but I don't think any of them address the problem I identified.
It is no answer at all to say "Obvious need is
to package arguments such that they are saleable.". The ordinary electors will
just not buy it when a weak Condorcet winner is a
real likely outcome.
I do not think you have to be anywhere near the zero first-preferences Condorcet
winner scenario to be in the sphere of "politically
unacceptable". I am quite certain that the 5% FP CW would also be politically
unacceptable, and that there would political chaos in
the government in consequence. The forces opposed to real reform of the voting
system (big party politicians, big money, media
moguls, to name a few) would ensure that there was chaos, and the electors
would have an intuitive reaction against a weak Condorcet
winner so they would go along with the demands to go back to "the good old
ways".
I said in an earlier post that I thought a strong third-placed Condorcet winner
could be politically acceptable, and thus the voting
system could be saleable if that was always the only likely outcome. So I
have been asked before where I thought the tipping point
might be, between acceptable and unacceptable. I don't know the answer to that
question because no work has been done on that -
certainly not in the UK where Condorcet is not on the voting reform agenda at
all. In some ways the answer is irrelevant because
the Condorcet voting system will never get off the ground so long as a 5% FP
Condorcet winner is a realistic scenario, as it is when
the current (pre-reform) political system is so dominated by two big political
parties.
Perhaps Condorcet would be like proportional representation in this
respect. True, pure PR is proportional representation even of a group
having 0.5% support, but most PR systems have a threshold (either
implicit or explicit). Perhaps real world implementation of Condorcet
systems would have a "first preference" threshold, either on candidates
or on sets: anyone getting less than x% FP is disqualified. If it's
directly on candidates, that isn't cloneproof, but if it's done on sets,
it could be. On the other hands, doing it on sets could preserve the
complaints, and in a completely polarized world, it would be a problem.
For instance,
49: Faction A controls nation > Compromise > Faction B controls nation
48: Faction B controls nation > Compromise > Faction A controls nation
2: Compromise > Faction A controls nation = Faction B controls nation
That's kinda contrived, but if either A or B wins, there'll be big trouble.
This represents a VERY idealistic view of politics - at least, it
would be so far as the UK is concerned. NO major party is going
into any single-office single-winner election with more than one
party candidate, no matter what the voting system. Having more
than one candidate causes problems for the party and it certainly
causes problems for the voters. And there is another important
intuitive reaction on the part of the electors - they don't like
parties that appear to be divided. They like the party to sort
all that internally and to present one candidate with a common front
in the public election for the office. But maybe my views are
somewhat coloured by my lack of enthusiasm for public primary
elections.
Some states in the US have public primary elections ("open primaries").
One could argue that if parties thought that it was important to focus
all its power on one candidate, the parties themselves would oppose open
primaries; but in some situations where it's up to the party whether the
primary is open to voters from other parties (such as with the Democrats
in California), they still leave it open.
But then again, perhaps that is because primaries are still an "election
before the election". Primaries are done, the candidate selected, and
*then* the party can focus on its winner.
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