While Abd and I regularly bump heads on certain issues, I am quite sympathetic to his core concept of Asset voting (essentially a super-proxy system). But for near term adoption for North American governmental legislative elections, STV is the best option out there.
And contrary to Abd's concern about "premature election reform" the BC-STV plan was the result of one of the best deliberative processes I have ever seen (the BC Citizens Assembly). By the way, Abd has an error or typo where he miss-states the Droop quota as 1/(N-1), but I assume nearly everybody on this list who read his message already noticed that. Terry Bouricius ----- Original Message ----- From: "Abd ul-Rahman Lomax" <[email protected]> To: <[email protected]>; "Terry Bouricius" <[email protected]> Cc: <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2009 1:18 PM Subject: Re: [EM] British Colombia considering change to STV At 10:18 PM 4/29/2009, Kathy Dopp wrote: >STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even worse. It is >unimaginable how anyone could support any method for counting votes >that is so fundamentally unfair in its treatment of ballots and >produces such undesirable results. I don't think Ms. Dopp, who has put quite a bit of effort into exposing the problems with IRV, has really studied the situation with STV. Obviously, the problems of IRV are the same as single-winner STV, they are the same method. However, multiwinner STV, particularly forms that use fractional votes to deal with reassignments, is quite good *with early choices,* and only breaks down when there are too many candidates, such that eliminations start before there is fair assessment. I'm going to describe a variation of STV that isn't necessarily what's being used, and, in fact, I don't think it's being used anywhere in details. But the Droop quota variation may be in use, more or less. That is, STV chooses winners according to a quota, and were it the Hare quota, and if it were required that a candidate receive that quota to be elected, it's clear that every STV winner is reasonably fair, if certain conditions obtain. The conditions: lower rank votes aren't coerced (as they are in Australia), and voters never choose a lower ranked candidate when they won't be reasonably satisfied with that candidate as a winner. Under these conditions, every winner is reasonable as a representative. Every winner chosen before eliminations begin is also *ideal* as a winner. In the first round of counting, every candidate elected is the first choice of a quota of voters. Only those candidates are eliminated from the subsequent rounds (before eliminations begin) who are already elected. Let's assume that a candidate got double the quota. The Hare quota is 1/N * (total valid votes) with any choice shown. If there are ten seats in an assembly to be elected, and a candidate gets, as a first choice, one-tenth of the vote, that candidate is obviously a good representative for one-tenth of the electorate. But what if the candidate gets two-tenths of the vote? If the ballots electing that candidate are eliminated, the *faction* "led" by this candidate is under-represented. So the idea is to eliminate half the votes and to then reassign the rest to lower ranked choices. How is this done? Some places use methods like random elimination, and I don't know the details. But the fairest method to me seems to be to revalue the votes, all of them, and look at second-rank votes. In this case, each ballot would then be worth one-half of a vote. So, second round, if all these voters voted the same second rank, they would then elect their second choice. This then would proceed iteratively until all ballots have been assigned to a winner, or eliminations would need to start. So far, every choice has been clearly a good representative. Problems begin with eliminations, where votes cast are set aside and replaced with lower rank votes, not having been used to create a winner. Further, the Hare quota isn't used, rather the Droop quota is used. It's assumed that some ballots will not contain a countable vote, and that some ballots will not end up choosing a representative. Maybe the first vote is for some unpopular candidate, and there were no second choice votes. That one ballot would prevent the election of a full assembly, because a Hare quota couldn't be found for the last seat. So the Droop quota is used, the fraction, instead of being 1/N, is 1/(N-1). This, then, allows a supposedly realistic compromise to be found. In addition, (I'm not sure about actual practice), the quota may decline, being revised according to the number of remaining seats and the number of "unexhausted" ballots. Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) realized the problem and invented what we now call Asset Voting to deal with it. Asset Voting doesn't allow ballots to be exhausted, publishing a pamphlet in 1884. It's not at all clear that Dodgson realized all the implications, he was just thinking about politics being more or less the same as it was, and that voters would vote in more or less the same way. He was concerned that many or most voters don't really know much more about the various candidates except to know who their favorite was. So his idea was to assign an otherwise exhausted ballot to the favorite, and this vote becomes, as it were, the "property" of the favorite, to be reassigned at the discretion of that candidate. With this fix, which converts a raw election method into an input stage for a deliberative process, and with a Hare quota (to a slightly less extent with the Droop Quota), totally fair method of choosing winners, not subject to most of the normal election pathologies. But, to my knowledge, it's never been tried. The big secret: if this were done, all votes would count. No votes would be wasted. Voters would still be able to use a preference list, if they prefer to control vote transfers before their ballot is eliminated from direct use. Many people, reading about this for the first time, seem to think that this gives too much power to politicians, but they, I'd say, haven't thought it all the way through. We are electing representatives who will exercise power; this allows someone trusted with a vote to have a say in who gets to actually exercise the power, counting and using votes that would otherwise be *eliminated.* Don't trust a candidate to recast the vote in a good way? Why, then, would you trust that candidate to directly exercise the power? It makes no sense to me, having thought about this for many years. Now, actual STV? It's probably reasonably fair up until the choice of the last seat, where the IRV problems kick in fully. Before that, it's quite possible that eliminations result in less than optimal choices, but still reasonable ones, unless full ranking is coerced. My biggest problem with premature election reform is that instead of, say, forming a commission to study voting systems, and making sure that this commission hears and considers evidence about all possible systems, and then presents a full report, in detail, of all the implications, there usually isn't any kind of comparative inquiry at all, there is only the raw choice of the present method or a single proposed reform; and even when there is a study group, as in Colorado, the decisions are made without adequate back-and-forth with experts, and, further, recommendations may be made based on political expediency (which method might actually be accepted, due to all the complex considerations?) instead of on an accurate comparison of methods (which would then leave the matter of practical expedience to the experts on that, the elected politicians who actually make the final decision). STV should be on the table, but there are other proportional representation systems, including variations of STV in use, reweighted range voting, and, indeed, Asset Voting. Systems have been proposed in the past which also use a quota to elect, but which don't reassign votes; instead, they reassign voting power in the assembly; this was proposed for, I think, one or two cities in the U.S. in the first part of the last century. This is fairer, in fact, than STV, and far less complicated, but it bucks the idea that we should elect peer assemblies, where every member has the same voting power as every other one. Asset Voting solves this problem by creating a peer assembly, as we are accustomed to seeing, but, still, with every ballot (within certain limitations) having served to elect a seat. It's even possible for it to be known what each individual ballot did, if when votes are reassigned, it's done by precinct; at least every voter who voted for only one would know, quite well, what their ballot did. (Because the precinct counts wouldn't be exact, but merely close, it would be more accurate to say, if a precinct's votes were one-tenth of the quota for a candidate, that 90% of the voter's vote elected Candidate X. The voter knows what precinct he or she voted in. However, the candidate doesn't know exactly which voters elected him or her.) What's truly interesting to me about Asset Voting is that it can shade, one small step at a time, into a hybrid direct/representative democracy that retains the best features of both. Deliberative assembly with identified representatives with special rights: the right to introduce motions and to address, by right, the assembly -- always the bugaboo of direct democracy because scale makes large assemblies bog down; it's not *voting* that's the problem, it's deliberation. Extended penumbra around the assembly consisting of those who received votes, they are known and identified, but who reassigned those votes to create winners. These can be considered "electors," and could have the right to vote directly. Because they are known, and the votes they recast are known, it becomes possible for their votes, should they choose to vote, to be counted, and the votes of those they elected then would be adjusted down accordingly, fractionally. My opinion is that these votes would only rarely affect an outcome. However, that they are there in theory would act as a restraint on the assembly, and, in addition, rapid and efficient recall could become possible, but even more than this, the penumbra acts as an advisory body for the assembly, directly representing, by free choice, the electorate, no compromises. You want to become part of this advisory body? You can. Just declare a candidacy and vote for yourself. (Now, there might be some restrictions, and you might have to declare a second choice, for various reasons that I won't go into, there might be some minimum threshold below which votes would not be reported, it has to do with voting security and the possibility of small-scale coercion. I personally think that the coercion problem is vastly overblown under most conditions; it's only a problem on a large scale, which doesn't apply to the problem that a candidate, say a wife, who demands that her husband vote for her, and she doesn't get any votes except her own.... So it's possible that singletons would not be recognized, or there are other solutions.... I can think of some, but ... way ahead of necessity!) The assembly size can be chosen to be the most efficient at providing the combination of best process (too many cooks spoil the soup) and full representation. The direct voting option means that making a compromise on assigning a vote to create a seat is less important, for any elector can still vote directly, if matters that much. The basic problem with all election methods that resolve with a single ballot is that *it's impossible for a single ballot to make sound choices under all circumstances.* Further, fixed terms create a gap between a representative assembly and the people it represents. Asset voting, where every voter can vote for the representative most trusted, without compromise, and where all the electors thereby created, should minimize or even eliminate the gap. Again, because votes can be amalgamated on a very small scale with Asset voting, I'd expect campaigning for office, as such, to practically disappear. Rather, someone just starts by registering as a candidate, and could take as many election cycles as necessary to build voting power, with no waste. When a candidate has reached the point where their voting power is a significant fraction of that necessary to hold a seat, they become, in effect, a lobbying representative to the holder of the seat, with real and tangible voting power behind it. They not only can deliver votes through influence, they directly deliver votes, it's all out in the open. The real importance, though, isn't in voting and votes, it is in creating a broad network that *deliberates* and *advises*. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
