Re: [EM] Legal brief vs. San Francisco limited IRV
On Sun, Mar 7, 2010 at 9:08 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: > At 12:39 AM 3/7/2010, Kathy Dopp wrote: >> >> I've posted the latest plaintiffs' legal brief here. Plaintiffs >> Francisco rank only three version of IRV. >> >> http://kathydopp.com/wordpress/?cat=8 > > It is actually brilliant. Yes; limited. My view is that IRV is generally > constitutional. I.e., if top two runoff is constitutional, full-ranking IRV > is constitutional. Top-two allows *all* voters the opportunity to participate in the final election of who will govern, so is IMO clearly more constitutional than IRV which fails constitutionality in at least three ways: 1. fails to allow all voters to participate in the final decision-making process by excluding voters from the last round 2. fails to treat all voters' ballots equally, counting the 2nd and lower rank choices of some, but not all, voters 3. fails to provide voters with knowledge of the effect (positive or negative) of their votes on the candidates they rank due to its nonmonotonicity. Top-two runoff treats all voters equally, allows all voters to participate, and allows all voters to cast a ballot with a positive effect on a candidate's chances of winning, (I.e. voters know which candidate they are helping to win each election.) > They've hit on a technicality, the loss of equal > treatment of voters if the voter can't rank enough candidates, but as they > point out, the deprivation of equal treatment can be quite small and be > unconstitutional. > > And there is a quick fix, of course. Instant Runoff Approval Voting. Allow > the voters to mark as many candidates as they choose in each of the three > ranks. Then use Bucklin procedure. And make this a primary round, hold a > runoff if there is no true majority found. What this will do is to eliminate > *most* runoff elections. Not all. It's just a more efficient way of finding > a majority in the primary. The same trick could be done with IRV, but, note > this: IRV no longer would satisfy later-no-harm, and IRV does not count all > the votes. Unless all the votes *are* counted, which would mean that one > would count lower ranked votes against non-eliminated higher-ranked > candidates. Bucklin does it much better and because there are no > eliminations in the primary rounds, it finds a candidate who is supported by > more voters than any other. Because of the runff, voters need not, in the > primary, support someone who is the "least evil." They can vote sincerely. > They can bullet vote if they want. They can add alternate preferences if > they'd prefer these to a runoff (or if they'd want to see them get into a > runoff). They choose. I agree with you and find no objection to Bucklin method or most other alternative voting methods that treat all voters' equally and is thus precinct-summable, but don't have time to thoroughly study it now. Interesting that this idea allows putting as many candidates as desired into a limited number of slots. I like that on first glance. The Condorcet method would still be easy to count in that case too since an n x n matrix (where n = # candidates) would still work just fine. > > From my analysis, IRV, however, would not find a majority in most of the > elections that went to instant runoff in San Francisco, and Bucklin would > find it it in maybe half. But Bucklin is far less expensive to count, it's > precinct summable, just count all the votes in each rank (typically three > ranks were used) and report them separately. They can then be added > together. > > Bucklin was used in a lot of places in the U.S., at one time, pushing 100. > The actual method was only found unconstitutional in one place, Minnesota, > is a decision that was aware it was idiosyncratic. It was popular, the > Minnesotata Supreme Court decision was quite unpopular, the court notes that > in its reconsideration. My guess is that political forces were operating. > Some people did not want a good voting system, it's more difficult to > manipulate. > I like Bucklin. Too bad the MN Supremes shot it down. MN Supremes seem to make consistently poor decisions re. voting systems thus far, although perhaps with an "as-applied" case they'd do better. Cheers, Kathy -- Kathy Dopp http://electionmathematics.org Town of Colonie, NY 12304 "One of the best ways to keep any conversation civil is to support the discussion with true facts." Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf Voters Have Reason to Worry http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf Checking election outcome accuracy http://electionmathematics.org/em-audits/US/PEAuditSamplingMethods.pdf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] GOLD PLATED
Abd ul offers Gold Plated advice here! It is properly our civic duty to vote, and thus our duty to first determine what candidates can be expected to best serve our needs. However, if our determining is that voting for some candidates is more likely to hurt, rather than help, our interests, we must not vote for such. Doing a write-in may be helpful if we must reject all nominated candidates. On Mar 6, 2010, at 9:15 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: [EM] Burlington Vermont repeals IRV 52% to 48% At 02:34 PM 3/6/2010, Raph Frank wrote: In any case, you really should cast all 6 votes. Not necessarily. What if you only recognize the names of three? Or what if you only support three and have no opinion on the rest, sufficient to prefer one from another? The optimal vote is actually, then, to vote just for three. Yes, you are wasting half your voting power, but if you don't know what to do with it, using it just introduces noise into the system, and might quite possibly be a vote cast based on the worst kinds of media manipulation, creating vague impressions about candidates not firmly based in fact. "Wasting" is not the right word. If you did not see any candidate to vote for, you had no power to waste - as Abd ul writes, odds are that voting here is as likely to be destructive as to be productive. That people consider it some kind of obligation to *vote*, per se, regardless of how well the voter understands the situation, is part of the problem with the system. There's lots of propaganda out that that proposes voting as a civic duty, when the real duty would be to investigate situations, become knowledgeable about them, and *then* vote. Or, alternatively, decide whom to trust, based on the best information available, and preferably, even, some level of personal contact either with the potential advisor, or someone who knows the advisor, and then follow that person's recommendations, assuming that it's reasonable that this person knows more than you do. This is equivalent to putting all your eggs in one basket and then watching that basket closely. It's a reasonable strategy, because the capacity to watch all the eggs separately might not be there. Most people have other things to do with their lives. Politics is far from everything, important as it is. A variation on this, with partisan elections, is to adhere to a political party. Probably more dangerous, in fact. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Legal brief vs. San Francisco limited IRV
At 12:39 AM 3/7/2010, Kathy Dopp wrote: I've posted the latest plaintiffs' legal brief here. Plaintiffs attorneys are brilliant and this brief is actually fun to read the way plaintiffs' attorneys expose all the disinformation told the court by the defendants' attorneys and use Fair Vote's own words and the words of the Minnesota Supreme Court Judges against the restricted San Francisco rank only three version of IRV. http://kathydopp.com/wordpress/?cat=8 It is actually brilliant. Yes; limited. My view is that IRV is generally constitutional. I.e., if top two runoff is constitutional, full-ranking IRV is constitutional. They've hit on a technicality, the loss of equal treatment of voters if the voter can't rank enough candidates, but as they point out, the deprivation of equal treatment can be quite small and be unconstitutional. And there is a quick fix, of course. Instant Runoff Approval Voting. Allow the voters to mark as many candidates as they choose in each of the three ranks. Then use Bucklin procedure. And make this a primary round, hold a runoff if there is no true majority found. What this will do is to eliminate *most* runoff elections. Not all. It's just a more efficient way of finding a majority in the primary. The same trick could be done with IRV, but, note this: IRV no longer would satisfy later-no-harm, and IRV does not count all the votes. Unless all the votes *are* counted, which would mean that one would count lower ranked votes against non-eliminated higher-ranked candidates. Bucklin does it much better and because there are no eliminations in the primary rounds, it finds a candidate who is supported by more voters than any other. Because of the runff, voters need not, in the primary, support someone who is the "least evil." They can vote sincerely. They can bullet vote if they want. They can add alternate preferences if they'd prefer these to a runoff (or if they'd want to see them get into a runoff). They choose. From my analysis, IRV, however, would not find a majority in most of the elections that went to instant runoff in San Francisco, and Bucklin would find it it in maybe half. But Bucklin is far less expensive to count, it's precinct summable, just count all the votes in each rank (typically three ranks were used) and report them separately. They can then be added together. Bucklin was used in a lot of places in the U.S., at one time, pushing 100. The actual method was only found unconstitutional in one place, Minnesota, is a decision that was aware it was idiosyncratic. It was popular, the Minnesotata Supreme Court decision was quite unpopular, the court notes that in its reconsideration. My guess is that political forces were operating. Some people did not want a good voting system, it's more difficult to manipulate. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Burlington Vermont repeals IRV 52% to 48%
On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 8:31 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: > i don't get it. just because the party i most identify with proffers 6 > candidates (as does two or three other parties) doesn't mean that i, as a > independently-minded voter, care if all of those candidates are elected. if > i "approve" of *all* of those candidates, it's only because of blind party > affiliation. Actually, my statement that you should always approve six isn't correct. As I said, the strategy should be based on approving those who you prefer to the expected 6th place candidate and your favourite of the 6th and 7th most popular candidate. If there are more than six candidates who you prefer to the expected 6th place candidates, then you should cast all six. The six candidates you should pick are the 6 who are most likely to end up in 6th place. This is assuming that your are voting as a pure individual. > but what if there is *one* (or maybe two) of those candidates that i take an > affirmative interest in seeing elected? that is, i would really like to see > that one candidate elected more than i would want to see any other > candidate, including those others in my party that i *might* have tepid > approval for. i know that, even being in the same party, those other > candidates *are* effectively running against the candidate i like. it's not > just the candidate from the other parties that are running against my > preferred candidate. voting for *any* other candidate (by me or by any > other voter) independently of the party that other candidate is from, > reduces the likelihood of my preferred candidate getting elected. It comes down to personal vs party power. Is it more important that party X wins or do the legislators have more freedom. In fact, you could look at it like a deal between you are the other party supports to support each other's candidates. Btw, is it normal under that system for 1 or other party to take all seats? > i actually think that, even in a multi-winner election, that Condorcet > ordering of the candidates could make sense (with the top 6 preferred > candidates elected). of course there is a problem if there is a cycle that > is transected by the cutoff boundary of the top 6 who get elected and those > lower who do not. i am not seriously proposing actually implementing this > without some serious study, and a good method (perhaps Ranked Pairs or > Schulze) would be needed to deal with a cycle that crosses the win/lose > boundary. This will elect a centerist legislature. I think a mixed legislature with say 2/3 elected by PR and 1/3 elected could be reasonable at combining stability and representation. > that said, Approval voting requires more strategy from me than just ranking > candidates in my preferred order. whether it's a single or multi-winner > election, i really think that the ranked ballot is the simplest way to > extract necessary information from voters, without expecting too much from > voters (which is what Range or Score voting does). The theory is that in most approval elections, all you need to know is who are the top-2. As long as you only vote for 1 or other of them, then your vote will almost certainly be effective. However, it stops 3rd party candidates from losing before the campaign even begins. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Burlington Vermont repeals IRV 52% to 48%
On Mar 6, 2010, at 3:01 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 08:13 PM 3/2/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote: Well, that's sad. Even with a sorta narrow victory the anti-IRVers will swagger down Church Street like they own the place. We will now all accept that God instituted the "traditional ballot" for use forever and that a 40% Plurality is a "winner". Well, not quite. First of all, recognize that Burlington is a relatively rare jurisdiction. It has three major parties, and it is using runoff voting in partisan elections. Had the Burlington voters not been fed a load of crap by FairVote, they might have made better choices in how to improve their system. Further, they might change it back to some other reform, next time a Republican wins there, as Wright might have won. Will the Progressives and the Democrats start to cooperate there to prevent this? Don't hold your breath, because the Democrats, in particular, have other irons in the fire. The opposition to IRV in Burlington seems to have been a coalition that had differing motives. I actually argued for these kinds of coaliions for looking for states to work on reform. If there is a state where vote-splitting is preferentially harming one of the major parties, it's a place where such a coalition becomes possible. Collectively, they may be in the majority. Vote splitting was harming two out of three parties in Burlington, and they may have cooperated to produce the narrow result. Or that narrow result was largely produced by preferential turnout for Republicans, won't be the first time. That's how IRV was knocked out in Ann Arbor in the 1970s. The basic idea that politicians (and voters) may not really be after the best system is very true. Quite often there is a majority to which it makes sense to promote a method that gives this majority more than proportional power. And it is possible that for every party there is a method that is they consider best and that is worse than the one that "theorists" and "idealists" consider to be the fairest method and the best method for the society. There may thus always be a "politically better" method than the theoretically best method is. The political culture and tradition of political argumentation is important here. In some societies the attitudes may be very "battle oriented" (or "court case" oriented) in the sense that people are expected to use arguments that overemphasize their own point of view. Since other people are expected to do the same from their point of view the end result may well lie something in between these extreme arguments and may in some cases even be a more balanced solution to the problem. On the other hand the outcome may often not be that balanced if there is a suitable majority that can force a decision that gives disproportional benefits to this majority of if the resulting compromise just happens to be no good. It is not so that the politicians would all be rotten and would play this unwanted game and not listen to the general public / voters that want something better. If the voters want argumentation that takes into account the needs of the society as a whole (and not just me, our party or our majority) the that tendency will be reflected also in the argumentation and thinking of the politicians. They want the voters to vote for them, so they must reflect the attitudes of the voters (or at least act as if they did). If people want short term benefits for themselves they should vote for politicians that try to implement that for them (and campaign for their preferred solution). If they believe that a society might perform even better for all (also for them) if the decisions would aim more at making the society work better then they should vote for this kind of politicians. The political arena may well often be one step more corrupt than the political thoughts and ideals of the voters, but that should not be a sufficient reason to give up improving the society and the political environment as a whole. My point thus is that whatever the politics and politicians are like, they to some extent reflect what the voters are. (There is a saying that people get the kind of government that they deserve.) In the area of election methods one may add to this the problem that politicians may be very unwilling to change the election method that elected them. That would be "suicidal". So there are multiple problems ahead when trying to improve the election methods of a society. In the example above I (idealistically) believe that it is a more efficient approach to try to explain to all how the system might work better for all than try to seek strategic paths to implement those changes that one wants to implement. One key reason is that there are also other paths, like in Burlington there was a path to kick IRV out, maybe partly because some people had other int
[EM] Book on Schulze method
Hallo, here is another book in favour of the Schulze method: Christoph Börgers, "Mathematics of Social Choice: Voting, Compensation, and Division", SIAM, 2009 http://books.google.com/books?id=dccBaphP1G4C&pg=PA37#v=onepage&q=&f=false Markus Schulze Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
