Authors of RR have their own primary goals and properly avoid the election
methods wars that take place in EM, etc, - simply recommending that group's
rules authors should be careful as to what methods they choose to define
for their groups.
DWK
On Sun, 14 Dec 2008 21:27:40 -0500 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 12:49 PM 12/14/2008, Steve Eppley wrote:
Hi,
I think Mr. Lomax missed the big point (though I agree he is right to
criticize Instant Runoff). The big point is that the authors of books
on Robert's Rules showed zero awareness of the existence of
Condorcetian preferential voting methods--or perhaps they were aware
but their analysis was made before the technological age made it easy
to exhaustively tally all the voters' pairwise preferences--so their
recommendation of single winner STV preferential voting was only
relative to a few even worse methods. Clearly, Condorcetian methods
have properties that are much closer to the properties of the Single
Elimination Pairwise method that RR advocates, because Condorcetian
methods are not subject to the criticism they made of STV that it can
easily defeat the best compromise.
This analysis is incorrect. Yes, they show no specific awareness, but
the language they used was quite precisely crafted, surprisingly so, if
they were not aware that other preferential voting methods did not
suffer from the failure of the STV method. That is, they make it a
criticism of the *specific method they have described*, which is STV.
They have also mentioned that there are many forms of preferential
voting. That they spent precious words -- this is a manual of practice,
not a dissertation -- to make it clear that center squeeze was a
specific problem of this method, i.e., the one they describe,
indicates to me that they were quite aware that this wasn't a universal
problem with preferential voting.
You have missed something else. RR does not recommend single elimination
pairwise. They recommend, indeed *require* by default, repetition of the
election, until a majority is found. There is no candidate elimination.
It's true, though. The RR method -- election repetition -- together with
associated rules, is an approximately Condorcet compliant method. The
deviation is, in fact, a Range-like effect. When a proposed candidate is
close enough, i.e., the general preference for the Condorcet winner is
low enough, the process terminates. People would rather finish with the
election than seek any more improvement in satisfaction with the result.
If there is some group of voters who strongly oppose this, they will
attempt to prevent it, they will attempt to wheel and deal to come up
with some better compromise. It's when the remaining preference
strength, possible improvement, is lower than the perceived cost of
continuing the process, that it terminates. With the explicit consent of
a majority for the result.
I'm told that the reason they didn't describe other voting methods is
that those other methods, at the time, were not in common use, and they
still are not. They are a manual of actual practice, and it's remarkable
that they said as much as they did. In any case, they clearly think that
the practice of repeated elections is superior to IRV, and that using
this *even with a majority requirement* is deficient compared to
repeated elections. That's because, if voters do fully rank, a majority
may be found which is *not* the compromise winner.
But they don't seem to have realized that truncation is a reasonable
voter strategy in Center Squeeze conditions. And when the election must
be repeated, the top-two failure is irrelevant, or almost so.
(Approval can easily defeat the best compromise too, because many
voters will fail to approve compromise candidates out of fear of
defeating preferred candidates, which in turn will deter potential
candidates from competing. If Mr. Lomax likes Approval due to its
cheapness and simplicity, I'll point out that the family of voting
methods known as Voting for a Published Ranking are as cheap as
Approval, easier for the voters, some methods of the family are as
simple, and if I'm right about how candidates would behave would tend
to elect a good compromise.)
Published ranking is interesting, for sure, but Approval is far, far
simple and far less radical. Bucklin, in fact, addresses that
reluctance. Unstated here was how the published rankings would be used.
Condorcet? Bucklin is simpler, but when we are dealing with published
rankings, we need only collect those votes en masse, and then applying
them to a Condorcet matrix would be simple.
However, politically, it's, shall we say, a step. Count All the Votes is
a small step, *and* cheap. And quite surprisingly powerful, considering.
Bucklin has been used, and this might make it easier to bring it back.
The behavior of Published Rankings is unknown. There are a *lot* of
questions, some of them quite difficult to
