At 02:07 AM 9/18/2005, Rob Lanphier wrote:
For voters, "approving" a candidate is cheap, and in the context of an
election, has little to do with any sort of absolute
approval/disapproval of the candidate, and much more to do with
increasing/decreasing the relative strength of that candidate to the
rest of the field. In other words, Approval asks voters to assign an
absolute property when the question is all relative.
Approval is not an absolute property, but a relative one. I don't
have a clue where Mr. Lanphier got the idea that approving a
candidate is assigning an absolute property.
If there are two candidates in an election, and I vote for one of
them, I have assigned no absolute value to either candidate. The
winner might be lousy, the loser might be a genius and a saint. But
not both at the same time....
Voting is expressing relative preference, in plurality and Condorcet,
and relative acceptability, in Approval.
If there are three candidates in an election, and I vote for two,
again, I have assigned no absolute value to any candidate, but have
only acted to effect my preference: I prefer the election of either
of the two I voted for over the election of the third.
I think that some critics of Approval are grasping at straws. But I
commend the effort. Even defective arguments are valuable, for we
will meet all of them again.
I would have many fewer problems with Approval if there were an absolute
question being asked.
What is the absolute question being asked in a plurality question?
The question being asked in an Approval election is "What set of
candidates are you willing to help be elected by casting your vote
for each of them?"
Voters are not being asked, in an Approval election, to rank the
candidates, but only to divide them into two groups: preferred and
not preferred. "Preferred" means that every member of the preferred
set is preferred over every member of the not preferred set. That's
all.... trying to assign more meaning to that is just going to
confuse everyone.
And, by the way, that is related to the suggested strategy for voting
Approval: vote for your favorite from among the frontrunners, and for
anyone else whom you more highly approve. If there are three
frontrunners, and two of them are acceptable, and there is a third
whom you fear might win, vote for the two you prefer, you will
minimize your regret.
And send a couple of dollars to your favorite, it will be more than
the favorite would get from public campaign funding anyway.
For example, rather than always awarding the
winner of an approval election a full-length, full-power term, we could
make the length and nature of their term depend on their approval score.
How about making terms dependent upon continued approval? That is
exactly what parliamentary systems do.... Much of the mess in the
U.S. is due to *terms*. The argument for them was excellent at the
time of the writing of the Constitution, because terms were being
compared to election for life.
For U.S. president, we currently give four year terms to the winner.
Under this proposal, a candidate with an approval score under 50% only
gets an "interim" 12 month term, and cannot fire the current cabinet
without approval from Congress, though would be able to fill any
vacancies. A candidate with over 50% approval would get a standard four
year term (still eligible for re-election to a second four year term),
and would have the standard privileges of appointing a new cabinet. A
candidate with over 65% approval would get a six year term, and be
eligible for another four year term after that.
The idea has some merit, but there are simpler ways to reach similar
goals. And, of course, these ideas require Constitutional amendment,
serious amendment. There is a way to bypass that need.
It's only under conditions such as these that approval makes sense as a
standalone question. "Do you trust this candidate enough to give
him/her as many as six years in office, should he/she win the election?"
That has tangible meaning to voters, and would force them to make hard
decisions as to who they give or don't give approval to. If there are
two or three years of interim presidents, the voters would hopefully get
tired of having elections, and would be more liberal with approvals.
We go to the polls every year or two anyway. What's the problem with
that? It's campaigning that is the problem. The President should not
have to be distracted by campaigning for office.... And, again, there
is a solution to this problem as well.
The really big difficulty is that, by far, most people only look at
the symptoms and try to put band-aids on them. The central problem is
rarely addressed. Believe me, I know. I look actively for such
consideration by people anywhere I can find it.
The central problem is how human beings can organize themselves (or,
I suppose, be organized) in such a way as to maximize benefit to the
society as a whole. We know pretty well how to do it in small groups,
though even there a lot of room for improvement remains. But direct
democracy, which functions quite well in some small groups, typically
breaks down under two conditions: large groups, or small groups that
continue for a long time and which develop ... attachments or special
interests would be two ways of describing it.
Is it possible to bring the benefits of direct democracy to large
groups while avoiding the problems of direct democracy?
Is anyone trying?
I can tell you, those who are working to reform democracy generally
do not believe in democracy. They follow Churchill in his famous
saying. Democracy, for them, is a necessary evil, the idea that it
could actually function efficiently and effectively seems impossible,
so they do not choose democratic forms when they organize for the
purpose of lobbying or acting for change.
One or two bad presidents who get six year terms would cause voters to
get more conservative. In the end, it would equalize pretty quickly.
Problem is, the one bad president could end life as we know it on the
earth. We've been lucky so far. Will be continue to be lucky? New
Orleans thought so....
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