On Nov 7, 2009, at 3:12 PM, Matthew Welland wrote:
It seems to me that approval and range voting eliminate most of the
strategic opportunity in single winner elections and the marginal
improvement of other methods is fairly small. Can anyone point me to
analysis, preferably at a layman level, that contradicts or
supports this
assertion?
Or, in succinct terms, what are the strategic flaws in approval or
range
voting?
this is no published analysis, but it should qualify as layman
level. this is why i don't like either approval or range voting in a
governmental election.
in a sentence: Approval Voting does not collect enough information
from voters and Range Voting requires too much.
since any of these methods we discuss here really exist for the
purpose of dealing with more than two candidates (if there are
exactly two candidates no one really disagrees about what to do)
let's see if we have to do with multiple candidates. in fact we can
use the 2009 mayoral election in Burlington VT as an object lesson.
we have Candidate A (we'll call "Andy"), Candidate B (we'll call
"Bob"), Candidate C (we'll call "Curtis", but in Burlington his name
was Kurt), and candidate D (we'll call Dan).
Approval Voting: so i approve of Andy and Bob, maybe Dan (not likely)
and definitely not Kurt (err "Curtis", candidate C). but, if the
election comes down to Andy vs. Bob, i want to register my preference
for Andy. how do i do that? so then i'm thinking (tactically) that
the Bob supporters aren't gonna be reciprocating with an approval
vote for Andy, so what do i do if i really support Andy, am willing
to settle for Bob, but really want Andy. i will agonize over the
decision and likely just vote approval for Andy, just like i would in
a traditional FPTP election. but then there is no information coming
from me that i prefer Bob a helluva lot more than i approve of
Curtis. so Approval Voting has not relieved me, as a voter, from the
need to consider tactics, if i want my vote to be effective.
Range Voting: so i have 100 points that i can distribute among the 4
candidates. well definitely Candidate C ("Curtis", really Kurt) gets
zero of my points. i might toss Dan 5 points, but i would likely not
waste them. so how do i divide my points between Andy and Bob? i
like them both, but prefer Andy over Bob, so what do i do? i have to
think tactically again. are the Bob supporters gonna be tossing any
points to Andy? i can't trust that they will, they will probably
just put all of their support for the candidate that they are
behind. if i want my vote to compete effectively with theirs, i will
end up putting all 100 points behind my candidate Andy. so, if we
have any political identification at all, my vote under Range will
convey no more information than it would with FPTP.
IRV, Condorcet, and Borda, use the simple ranked-order ballot where
we say who we support first (candidate A for me), who is our second
choice (candidate B), who is our third choice (candidate D for me)
and who is our last choice (candidate C for me). so if the election
was just between A and B, we know that this voter (me) would vote for
A. if the election was just between B and D, we know this voter
would vote for B. if the election was between C and D, we know this
voter would choose D. of course, for a single voter (not necessarily
for the aggregation of votes) there is no circular preference, we
know that if the election was between A and D, this voter would vote
for A. we know that this voter would vote for B if the election was
between B and C. and we know that this voter would vote for A if it
were between A and C. from that simple ranked-order ballot, we know
how the voter would vote between any selected pair of candidates in
the hypothetical two-candidate election between those two.
of course IRV, Condorcet, and Borda use different methods to tabulate
the votes and select the winner and my opinion is that IRV ("asset
voting", i might call it "commodity voting": your vote is a
"commodity" that you transfer according to your preferences) is a
kabuki dance of transferred votes. and there is an *arbitrary*
evaluation in the elimination of candidates in the IRV rounds: 2nd-
choice votes don't count for shit in deciding who to eliminate (who
decided that? 2nd-choice votes are as good as last-choice? under
what meaningful and consistent philosophy was that decided?), then
when your candidate is eliminated your 2nd-choice vote counts as much
as your 1st-choice.
i don't like Borda because it has another arbitrary valuation. the
difference in score between your 1st and 2nd choice is the same as
the difference in score between your 2nd and 3rd choice. but what
eternal value is that based on? what if i like my 1st and 2nd choice
almost equally, but think my 3rd choice is a piece of crap? (this is
what Range Voting is trying to solve by *asking* me what the
difference is, but as i wrote above, Range Voting makes me consider
tactics and i'll likely just put all of my marbles under the
candidate of my choice, so as not to harm him if he ends up
ultimately competing against my second choice.)
that leaves Condorcet, for me. and the reason to elect the Condorcet
winner is simply that this candidate is preferred to every other
candidate when the elecorate is asked to choose between the two. or
stated negatively, if a Condorcet winner exists and the Condorcet
winner was not elected (by whatever rules, like IRV's kabuki dance)
then your election authority just elected a candidate when a majority
of voters marked their ballots explicitly that they preferred a
different *specific* candidate. in a democracy, why should we elect
someone when more of us prefers someone else? that makes no sense.
this actually happened in Burlington Vermont in 2009. and, again, if
someone wants to read a paper i wrote (to Burlingtonians) about what
happened (with IRV) and why we should change it, i'll email you a copy.
my $0.02 .
--
r b-j r...@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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