[Election-Methods] Bullet Voting in the wider media
In case anyone's interested in what the general public are hearing about voting strategy. http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/10/07/ ballot_query_to_bullet_or_not_to_bullet Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [Election-Methods] Bullet Voting in the wider media
At 11:53 AM 10/7/2007, Brian Olson wrote: >In case anyone's interested in what the general public are hearing >about voting strategy. > >http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/10/07/ballot_query_to_bullet_or_not_to_bullet I fixed the link, hopefully, so it should work unless it gets split again. The article seemed pretty good. Bullet Voting is a choice that voters can legitimately make. It is not "insincere", practically by definition. In Approval, voters effectively consider their internal range of preferences, and we assume that voters will rather naturally choose their favorite frontrunner, if they have the information, and vote for that one, plus any candidates they prefer to that frontrunner. This latter is likely to occur, in a two-party system, for only a small percentage of people, essentially third-party supporters. Thus we can expect most votes in elections where party affiliation is an issue to have only a small percentage of additional votes. Bucklin Voting is alleged in documents provided by FairVote, a singularly biased source, to have been dropped because too few voters were using the additional ranks, which, in Bucklin, become Approval-like because if there is no majority in the first round, with first preference votes, there is no candidate-dropping, as with IRV, but additional votes are added in. But, in fact, few use of those votes is what would be expected under some circumstances, but, and this is important, those small number of voters are responsible, under Plurality, for the spoiler effect, and Bucklin solved that problem, as would basic unranked Approval. FairVote claims that the small percentage of second rank votes that they found in Bucklin elections were because "voting for someone in second rank can hurt your first choice," but this is only true if both choices are real candidates, i.e., could possibly win, and this almost never is the case in a two-party system, as we had then and now (but there may have been some places where it was true back when Bucklin wa being used, and we have no data yet on this. Eventually, it will be gathered, I'm sure.) Bucklin was dropped, I am fairly sure from an examination of what evidence I have been able to gather so far, not because it wasn't working and was merely an exercise in futile complication, but because it was working. Brown v. Smallwood was based on a case where the plurality winner in the first round was defeated by additional votes coming in from the second and third rounds, which turned the tide to Smallwood. Brown was a voter who didn't like this, and he sued. And his position was upheld by the Minnesota Supreme Court in a case which FairVote claims turns on one-man, one-vote, though that argument, was, in fact not the coreof the Court's reasoning, though the Court's reasoning was to bizarrely distorted that it's hard to say what they were actually thinking. It reminds me of other result-driven decisions that we have seen. In any case, it was very clear that the Court was rejecting the very idea of having alternative votes and would almost certainly have rejected IRV just as well as it did Bucklin. Somebody did not want to allow third parties a toehold, or, more likely, some political position required that a major party enjoy the vote-splitting of the opposition to gain victories in Plurality elections, which alternative voting eliminated. Thus the Republicans in Ann Arbor shot down IRV when it was implemented there, because it worked, and they lost the mayor's office to a Democrat, the first Black mayor in the U.S. Bullet Voting? The right of the voter, or it should be. It does *not* mean "I have no preference among the remaining candidates." It could mean, "I detest them all and could not stand giving any of them any support, so I am equal-ranking them bottom." Robert's Rules, in its alleged "recommendation" of "IRV," as has been claimed on the Wikipedia article on IRV, for some time, actually is "describing," not exactly recommending, an IRV-like method with one critical difference. It is not explicitly stated, but, actually, if one simply reads the description without having in mind that one already knows what this method is, the majority needed for a victory is based on *all* ballots cast, not just those that are not exhausted. From other material on Robert's Rules and the meaning of majority of votes cast, it is clear that no ballots are to be discarded. And this makes the method nondeterministic, it can fail, and, in real public elections with a majority victory requirement, it would fail, if applied. There may be, indeed, some basis somewhere to challenge an IRV result if ballot exhaustion led to a winner who did not get an explicit vote from a true majority, being more than half of all ballots cast. Which includes exhausted ballots containing an otherwise valid vote. I'm under some pretty strong criticism for insisting that the Robert's Rul
Re: [Election-Methods] Bullet Voting in the wider media
On Oct 7, 2007, at 5:01 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> At 11:53 AM 10/7/2007, Brian Olson wrote:
>> In case anyone's interested in what the general public are hearing
>> about voting strategy.
>>
>> http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/10/07/
>> ballot_query_to_bullet_or_not_to_bullet
>
> I fixed the link, hopefully, so it should work unless it gets split
> again.
>
> The article seemed pretty good. Bullet Voting is a choice that voters
> can legitimately make. It is not "insincere", practically by
> definition.
It may be worth noting (it goes without saying in the US) that the
article is referring to n-seat plurality elections ("vote for no more
than n" and top n win). It's used for city councils, county and
school boards, etc.
The term "insincere" is an unfortunate shorthand for something other
than the usual dictionary meaning. In this form of election, I take
it to mean voting, for strategic reasons, for other than the voter's
n favorite candidates, assuming that the voter approves of at least n
candidates for the office. In this case, it's the vote that would be
cast by a dictator.
"Insincere" is an unfortunate choice of terminology because the voter
here is not, of course, a dictator, and is morally entitled (that is,
in no sense blameworthy) to vote strategically to maximize the
chances of a favorite candidate, if there is one. The fault lies in
the voting method that obliges the voter to express something other
than the "ideal" outcome.
To beat the point over the head, if candidates A B C D E are running
for three seats, and my ideal result is A B C, but I prefer A so
strongly that I'd prefer A D E to any result without A, then bullet-
voting ("plumping") for A makes strategic sense, even though it means
withholding my votes from B and C, whom I would also like to see
elected (along with A) if possible. It's not insincere in the
blameworthy sense, but it's "insincere" in the election-methods
sense, according to me.
We should have another name for it.
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Re: [Election-Methods] Bullet Voting in the wider media
At 08:34 PM 10/7/2007, Jonathan Lundell wrote:
>The term "insincere" is an unfortunate shorthand for something other
>than the usual dictionary meaning. In this form of election, I take
>it to mean voting, for strategic reasons, for other than the voter's
>n favorite candidates, assuming that the voter approves of at least n
>candidates for the office
"Approves of" is undefined. The voter bullet votes. That only
indicates approval of one candidate.
Now, I have not spent much time with multiwinner elections. Yes, this
article was about elections where there are n winners, but I'll look
at one with two winners and so the voter has 2 votes. there are three
candidates:
Abraham Lincoln
Genghis Khan
Adolf Hitler.
so to speak.
Now, some elections have a threshold. If you don't get a certain
percentage of the vote, you are not elected; there will perhaps be a runoff.
The voter prefers Genghis Khan to Adolf Hitler, but detests both.
Are we saying that a bullet vote for Abraham Lincoln is insincere?
Why? The voter has essentially set an approval cutoff between Abraham
Lincoln and Adolf Hitler. In this case, that isn't even questionable,
it is quite sincere.
What bullet voting means, if deliberate, that the voter has such a
strong preference for the favored candidate winning that the voter
does not want to support any other candidate against him. While not
as drastic as the example I gave above, it merely indicates a strong
preference for the single candidate, strong enough that the voter is
willing to give up influencing a second seat. What's insincere about that?
There is a contradiction set up in every discussion I have seen of
the topic of strategic voting in Approval (and similar arguments are
made with Range):
1. There is a voter who approves of two candidates
2. But only votes for one because the voter wants that one to beat the other.
Ahem. Those are two contradictory conditions! Part of the problem is
the use of the term "approval." I was just reading Voting Matters and
discover that I'm not the first person to suggest that we are talking
about voting, not approving. I might vote for someone I rather
heavily disapprove of, if I have no better practical option. A Nader
supporter might vote for Gore, even if he thinks that Gore is just as
much a tool as Bush, for there are other issues, such as Supreme
Court appointments, etc.
My point is that a voter can set an approval cutoff anywhere the
voter pleases, and there is nothing insincere about it, in the
ordinary sense, nor, in fact, in the technical voting sense. What has
happened is that terms and measures developed for ranked methods are
being applied to cardinal methods. In a ranked method, "insincere"
has a clear meaning: preference reversal. That's easy to define! But
preference reversal never benefits the voter in Approval, nor in Range.
However, those who are actually advocating a ranked method, such as
"Instant Runoff Voting," can't stand the idea that Approval is not
"vulnerable" to insincere voting, so they must extend the definition
of "insincere" to include something else. Basically, they posit an
approval cutoff of their own, such that the voter "approves of" two
candidates, but only votes for one. And then they call this an
"insincere vote."
Now, unless the voter is merely lazy, we have to say that the voter
voted for the candidate the voter preferred; that the voter placed
his approval cutoff between the two candidate utilities. There is
*nothing* insincere about this, and no way to truly apply the concept
of tactical voting to it. There is no preference reversal.
Now, there is the reverse situation: the voter has a preference
between two candidates, but approves both. What I find amazing is
that critics of Approval will consider this as tactical voting as well.
"Bullet Voting" Bad.
"multiple approvals for other than clones" Bad.
Bottom line: not the method on my agenda: Bad.
I'm going after the Tactical Voting reference in the Wikipedia
article. It's not going to be easy. This warped concept of tactical
voting is found in published papers ("peer-reviewed") so there is a
problem. The fact is that a lot of opinion and shallow thinking has
been published in peer-reviewed journals, and there are contradictory
articles and opinions. I've already attracted one likely sock puppet
who reverted my changes. (My edits in the Instant Runoff Voting
article flushed out one sock puppet plus one he created just to try
to take me out; there is a good chance this is another sock for the
same foot. Certainly it is a single-purpose account, created just to
edit the Approval Voting article, so far, and registered about when
the first sock I encountered was about to be banned
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