Re: [EM] A design flaw in the electoral system
Good Afternoon, Jonathan re: Not entirely. In his Republic, the rulers were the Guardians, wise folks like himself, who live in poverty and rule benevolently. Plato for Senate! That was Plato's idea of how things 'should be', not how they were. In any case, he did not see himself as one of 'the people' he referred to - a fallacy that plagues us to this day. Those who refer to 'the people' as 'sheeple' perpetuate this nonsense. Our woes will not cease until our political seers move past thinking of themselves as more gifted than the rest of humanity. We have no shortage of individuals with the intellect and integrity to represent the people. What we lack is an election method that lets the people find and elect them. Can you help accomplish that? Fred Gohlke Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] reply to a reply to IRV args by Mike Ossipoff
-- Forwarded message -- From: MIKE OSSIPOFF nkk...@hotmail.com To: election-meth...@electorama.com Date: Thu, 3 Nov 2011 21:12:09 + Subject: [EM] Reply to a few IRV arguments I'm sorry, I can't find the message that I'm replying to. It was by an apparent IRV advocate. He said that claims about IRV's problems are theoretical or hypothetical, and have never been observed. Of course that isn't true. In Australia, where IRV has been in use for a long time, various people have reported to us on EM that it isn't at all unusual for voters to bury their favorite to top-rank a compromise, so as not to waste their vote. Sound familiar? That's what is done in Plurality, in this country, by everyone who doesn't consider the Democrat and Republican the best. dlw: Remind me, are voters required to rank all of the candidates in both elections? It may still happen, but it happens less with IRV. MO:And, in Australia, as here, there remains a two-party system, a political system with two large parties who always win. Here, that's the result of Plurality. Given the way people vote in Australia, and the reason that they give, that might be why Australia, too, has a two-party system. dlw: Not everyone thinks having a two-party dominated system is bad. Good luck getting electoral reforms in a two-party dominated system tilting to a single-party dominated system that level the playing fiield for all parties 100%. MO:Theoretical or hypothetical? IRV's compromise-elimination problem is blatantly obvious: All it requires is that candidate-strength (favoriteness) taper gradually away from the middle sincere CW. That's hardly an unusual state of affairs. dlw: Remind me what CW is? I view voter preferences as endogenous, more so than exogenous and fuzzy. I don't think we need to nail the center, so much as we need to have it moved via extra-political cultural change-oriented activities. This lets me deemph these purported flaws in IRV. MO:Under those conditions, eliminations begin at the extremes, and transfers send votes inwards, till the candidates flanking that middle CW accumulate enough votes to easily eliminate hir. We'll never know how often that happens unless the raw rankings are available from IRV elections. But it must happen quite often, given the common state of affairs that is its reqirement. Andy himself implied an admission that voters in IRV should be advised that sometimes it's necessary to bury their favorite, to top-rank a compromise. dlw: Some may think that this is wise. IRV doesn't leave no party behind. But they'd be voting like that a lot more often with plurality. Ultimately, though if folks want to change things, they need to do more than try to get the right party into power. MO:Do we want a method that needs that? Do we want that when there are plenty of methods that don't force that favorite-burial strategy? dlw: Do most people care? Not really. At the end of the day, it's just not that key of a facet of an electoral rule. IRV is a signicant improvement over FPTP. It's got a first-mover and a marketing edge over all other alternatives to FPTP in the US. There is no self-evident oft-used alternative. You all proffer four possibilities. That's not going to help rally folks around electoral reform. IRV+(PR in More local elections) is a sound prescription for making the US's political system a lot better, especially when coupled with even more critical political cultural changes, like what #OWS is trying to accomplish. This is what's going to be on the front-burner and so do you want to get behind it or do you want to try shoot its tires? Cuz, unless you got a clear alternative that is easy to market to US voters, the consequence will be to retain FPTP in the US for even longer. dlw Mike Ossipoff Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] reply to a reply to IRV args by Mike Ossipoff
Dave Wetzel-- You wrote: Not everyone thinks having a two-party dominated system is bad. [endquote] Quite so. The Republicans, the Democrats, and the media owned and run by the same corporate rich families that own the Republocrats don't think two-party domination is bad. Neither do some voting system academics. For the explanation, a hint: Follow the money. Look at the books Who Rules America?, and The Powers that Be. You continued: Good luck getting electoral reforms in a two-party dominated system tilting to a single-party dominated system that level the playing fiield for all parties 100%. [endquote] You're quite right. Voting system reform may never happen. If it does, then maybe the children of our great grandchildren will benefit from it. That's why our immediate effort should be devoted not to getting a better voting system, but rather to best using the voting system that we already have. Plurality may be the worst (or maybe the 2nd worst, after Borda, or the 3rd worst, after Borda and IRV), but its full badness depends on more than just the voting system. It depends on worthless polling, maybe even combined with falsified polling. (Falsified poll-results have sometimes been caught). That's why suggest that we should be putting most of our effort into polling, to inform Plurality voting. As I've said, our Plurality elections are zero-information elections. The right strategy for 0-info elections is to just vote for one's favorite. Voters should be informed of those facts. This lesser-of-2-evils defensive stragegy could be valid, if it were the result of good information. But it isn't. Quite aside from that, tell people about these valid sayings: If you vote for a lesser-evil, then you get an evil. It's better to vote for what you want, and not get it, than to vote for what you don't want, and get it. And, as I said, polling should be done, to inform Plurality strategy. Ideally, it should be rank-balloting, nationwide, with the national results of each local poll weighted by the quotient of the population of the region represented by that poll (probably much more than the city polled) divided by the number of voters in the poll. The resulting national set of ballots should then be counted to look for a Condorcet Winner (CW). The CW is a candidate who doesn't have a pairwise defeat. X has a pairwise defeat if there is some Y such that the number of voters who rank Y over X is greater than the number of voters who rank X over Y. That CW is the candidate that Plurality voters need to come together on. If you want to avoid the election of someone worse than that CW, than you (and everyone who agrees with you on that) should vote for the CW in the Plurality election. So everyone, all the progressive parties, all the progressive political organizations, all the progressive media, should be told about that CW. Probably the CW will be a progressive, not a Republocrat. Ralph Nader won pretty much all of the Internet polls for President, when Nader was a candidate. It's sometimes said that there was selection bias. Yes, there was: People with more money are more likely to have a computer. People with more money are more likely to vote conservatively. Conservatives are more likely to vote. And who is more likely to be dishonest enough to ballot-stuff? Is a dishonest voter more or less likely to accept dishonesty in his preferred candidate? More or less likely to be dishonest with himself about the honesty of his candidate? So yes, there was selection-bias. Nader won in spite of that selection bias, not because of it. But let's do more polling this time, among the candidates (Starting immediately with all who've declared or might declare). Then, poll again after the nominations. Plurality with Condorcet polling is equivalent to Condorcet. Condorcet for 2012! MO:Theoretical or hypothetical? IRV's compromise-elimination problem is blatantly obvious: All it requires is that candidate-strength (favoriteness) taper gradually away from the middle sincere CW. That's hardly an unusual state of affairs. You wrote: dlw: Remind me what CW is? [endquote] CW is short for Condorcet Winner, defined above in this post. You wrote: I view voter preferences as endogenous, more so than exogenous and fuzzy. [endquote] If they don't matter, then there's no need for elections. And if voters are feeling the need to bury their favorite, then no one will ever know what voters really want. That's the worst state of affairs that a voting system can create. It makes a joke of voting. You wrote: I don't think we need to nail the center, so much as we need to have it moved via extra-political cultural change-oriented activities. This lets me deemph these purported flaws in IRV. [endquote] IRV forces voters to bury their favorite. De-emphasize that. MO:Under those conditions, eliminations begin at the extremes, and transfers send votes inwards, till the
[EM] Interactive Representation
In this post I discuss a proportional representation system called Interactive Representation (IR). A brief description of the system is followed by a discussion of some characteristics compared to traditional systems such as single-representative districts (the dominant paradigm in the United States) and proportional representation systems like STV. OVERVIEW In traditional systems, a state is divided into e.g. 100 districts, and each district elects one representative to the legislature, where each representative gets one vote. In IR, each district has multiple representatives. I believe that three or four would be a good number, but for simplicity I will assume two representatives per district for most of this post. Voters are presented with ranked ballots. By a mechanism I will describe in an appendix, the winning candidates are selected. The highest-ranked winner on each ballot is the preferred winner on that ballot. Each representative casts a number of votes equal to the number of ballots on which he was the preferred winner. A voter can leave candidates unranked; if no winning candidate appears on a ballot, then that ballot has no preferred winner. This is effectively the voter saying that he would rather be unrepresented in the legislature than be represented by someone who would vote contrary to his wishes. CHARACTERISTICS --- PRECISION OF REPRESENTATION: EVERY VOTE COUNTS In a single-winner district, your candidate may win or lose by, say, 5000 votes. If you had not bothered to vote, the margin would have been 4999 or 5001, and the end result would have been the same. Your one additional vote is effective discarded at the end of Election Day. This leads to a My vote doesn't make a difference mentality that discourages participation in the election. Even in STV, the proportion of elected representatives with a given political philosophy is a rounding of the proportion of votes cast for them. In IR, by contrast, that additional vote sticks, and your chosen representative is one vote stronger in the legislature than he would have been without your vote. I believe this would encourage voter participation. Similarly, increased voter participation in your district means more representation for your district in the legislature, which I believe would also serve to encourage participation. LOCALITY OF REPRESENTATION In STV, it takes a large number of representatives to capture small changes in voter support. For example, it takes at least 12 representatives to reflect any differences between 45%, 50%, and 55% support. (Even at 12, those proportions get rounded to 5/12=42%, 6/12=50%, and 7/12=58%. A more precise reflection of voter support requires more representatives.) In IR, those differences can be captured with as few as two representatives per district. This makes it feasible to have a large number of small districts. This has several advantages: * It empowers the voter to select a candidate who reflects both his political philosophy and the interests of his particular district. * It reduces the number of candidates and representatives with which the voter must be familiar in order to vote effectively. * It makes each representative answerable to a relatively small constituency, which in turn gives each voter better access to his representative. By contrast, in STV each representative is answerable to a much larger constituency and each individual voter is therefore less significant. In single-winner districts, each representative answers to a small district, but those voters who are politically opposed to his positions have effectively no representative to go to. IMMUNITY TO GERRYMANDERING With single-winner districts, if Big-endians constitute 51% of the electorate in each of two districts and 0% of the electorate in a third, they elect two out of the three representatives from those three districts, and get two out of three votes in the legislature, despite constituting barely one third of the electorate. With IR, they would get 34% of the legislative votes from those three districts, the same as their proportion in the electorate. A similar feature is that representation automatically adjusts to reflect changes in the size of the electorate. Traditionally, districts are redrawn every so often in such a way that all districts have about the same population size. In between such redistrictings, population shifts can lead to some districts being overrepresented and others underrepresented. In IR, the redistricting process would be similar, but in between redistrictings, a population increase in a district would automatically mean a representation increase, assuming the additional population votes. STABILITY OF LEGISLATURE MEMBERSHIP I suspect opinions will be mixed on whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. With single-winner districts, as the political views of the electorate vacillate between
