Doug Woodard has kindly granted me permission to post my reply to an e-mail he sent me. I thought it might be of some interest to list members. Of course, comments are welcome.
Doug wrote: > In a message to the election-methods list a few days ago, you asked for > comments on your support for approval voting in your campaign for election > to the Texas state legislature. Well, more precisely, I asked for comments on the section of my campaign webpage that argues for Approval Voting and against IRV. However, it's always helpful to receive divergent views on which voting reform is best, so I thank you for writing. (I regret that you couldn't watch my recent TV appearance in which I explained the advantages of Approval Voting and the defects (some academic, some serious) of IRV. It went very well. The host of the show, previously an IRV supporter, seemed convinced.) > As Donald G. Saari has pointed out in his recent writings, the approval > vote while (like the Borda count) very attractive if people are honest, > is vulnerable because it sets up a direct competition between one's > favourite candidate and less preferred choices. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "direct competition". (I'd be happy to see an election example that illustrates the problem.) I agree that the Borda system fails miserably when voters are free to vote strategically, but it turns out that Approval Voting doesn't fail in this way. One of Approval Voting's strengths is that it elects good compromises whether voters are sincere or strategic, unlike Borda or IRV. > I note that this seems > to be a feature of all voting systems which allow for more than one choice > but do not use a transferable vote or cumulative voting. I disagree. In fact, all systems that use a transferable vote have similar defects stemming from the fact that they consider only a small part of the ballot information before they eliminate a candidate. Very often compromise candidates are eliminated relatively early in the running. Here's a simple example using IRV: 40% vote D over L over R 25% vote L over R over D 35% vote R over L over D This example is simplified but not contrived. It's perfectly reasonable that Democratic and Republican voters would vote a Libertarian second as a compromise, and most Libertarians prefer Republicans to Democrats. Using IRV, L is eliminated first because he doesn't have enough *first-place* votes, and R wins the election over D. Is this a fair result? I don't think so. Take R out of the election and L beats D 60% to 40%. Take D out of the election and L beats R 65% to 35%; in effect, IRV ignores the D voters' preference of L over R. So L beats every other candidate one-on-one (and so is called the Condorcet winner). I'd say that's a strong reason for an election method to choose L in this case. An even stronger reason is this: IRV's choosing of R makes the D voters (40% of the electorate!) regret their vote. If only they had compromised by voting L in first place, they would have ended up with L, their second choice, instead of R, their last. An election system that chooses L as the winner in this example doesn't cause any voter to regret his vote. Cumulative voting, the system that allows some number of votes per voter to be distributed among the candidates, has been shown to be equivalent to plurality (a.k.a. FPTP). > Where voters are > likely to have a gradation of strong feelings about candidates, the > approval vote is likely to degenerate into first-past-the-post. I encounter this criticism of Approval frequently. I have shown it to be false using computer simulations, assuming several different kinds of voter strategy. Voters who try to gain an advantage by stubbornly voting for only one candidate tend to do poorly. When voters tend to use non-stupid strategies, Approval Voting quickly homes in on the Condorcet candidate. In the example above, the stable Approval outcome would be 40% vote only D 25% vote only L 35% vote R and L and L would win with 60% approval. Even when voters stick to their guns, Approval (by definition) elects a broadly-acceptable candidate. Approval Voting has shown to be incredibly good at finding the best compromise candidate whether voters are smart, sincere or anywhere in between. > The alternative vote (instant runoff) while not perfect is probably > the most practical improvement on plurality (FPTP) voting for the > filling of one place. It is criticised by theoreticians because it > can prefer extremists to a generally acceptable moderate candidate, > but I think that in practice this weakness is seldom shown because the > extremes are rarely symmetrical. I disagree. My biggest criticism of IRV, besides the fact that it would require expensive overhauls of voting equipment and re-education of voters, is that voters will still *often* face a lesser-of-two-evils dilemma when there are more than two candidates who have a chance to win. As long as only two candidates have a chance, voters can vote sincerely without fear of regret. But as soon as a third-party candidate gains enough support to challenge the frontrunners, voters must decide whether to risk voting sincerely, which could easily end up eliminating a compromise choice on the way to electing their last choice. In the end, IRV does not encourage a truly multi-party system; the lesser-of-two-evils and spoiler problems remain, even if they're not as obvious as under FPTP. (See Mike Ossipoff's writings for more detail on this point.) If a voting system uses ranked ballots, it must use the information on those ballots more completely to insure that compromise candidates aren't discarded capriciously, encouraging insincere strategic voting. > Usually there is a candidate straddling > the centre assymetrically but competing effectively with one extreme, who > would be elected under AV but defeated under FPTP, as we saw in the U.S. > presidential election in 2000 (assuming it was honest which may be a > considerable assumption). AV (which I call IRV to minimize confusion with Approval Voting) does often happen to elect a good compromise, but it's certainly worse at this than Approval. > The Coombs version of AV may be preferable but I am not sure how usable it > is where one cannot count on all candidates being ranked, although I must > admit that I don't know much about the apparently sparse literature on the > Coombs count. It seems to eliminate the theoretical excluded-moderate > problem of AV. Coombs does well when candidates are arranged on a single-dimensional political spectrum. Unfortunately, it's not much better than IRV at finding compromise candidates when the situation is more complicated, and Coombs turns out to be even more prone to manipulation than IRV. > I am surprised that you are not more interested in proportional > representation. It seems to me the likeliest way to get a Libertarian > voice in a legislature. I have studied PR also, though not as much as single-winner systems. In my opinion, the best PR method is SNTV (*not* STV), but I've never come across a PR method without serious flaws. Keeping in mind that the best single-winner methods are much better than the best multiwinner elections, I think as long as district lines are drawn fairly and without regard to politics, single-member districts are good enough. I certainly haven't closed my mind to PR, but its disadvantages discourage my support of it. > I think it is much more democratic than FPTP or > any system using single-seat constituencies, produces better public > policy results, and in its PR-STV form deals effectively with the > problem of attack ads and negative campaigning which is such an > unfortunate feature of American politics. What do you mean by "better public policy results"? Would a legislature elected through PR be more or less likely to get mired in deadlocks than one elected in single-member districts? I would say that Approval Voting is the ultimate in discouraging negative campaigning, especially when there are many candidates. This is due to the independence of choices; a voter's voting for a given candidate doesn't restrict him in his voting for the other candidates in any way. Why would a candidate go on the attack when trying to convince voters to approve him? Thanks for your message; you certainly brought up some interesting points. May I have your permission to post my reply to the election-methods list? > I wish you luck in your campaign. Thank you! ===== Rob LeGrand [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.onr.com/user/honky98/campaign.html __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com ---- For more information about this list (subscribe, unsubscribe, FAQ, etc), please see http://www.eskimo.com/~robla/em
