At 11:53 AM 10/7/2007, Brian Olson wrote: >In case anyone's interested in what the general public are hearing >about voting strategy. > >http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/10/07/ballot_query_to_bullet_or_not_to_bullet
I fixed the link, hopefully, so it should work unless it gets split again. The article seemed pretty good. Bullet Voting is a choice that voters can legitimately make. It is not "insincere", practically by definition. In Approval, voters effectively consider their internal range of preferences, and we assume that voters will rather naturally choose their favorite frontrunner, if they have the information, and vote for that one, plus any candidates they prefer to that frontrunner. This latter is likely to occur, in a two-party system, for only a small percentage of people, essentially third-party supporters. Thus we can expect most votes in elections where party affiliation is an issue to have only a small percentage of additional votes. Bucklin Voting is alleged in documents provided by FairVote, a singularly biased source, to have been dropped because too few voters were using the additional ranks, which, in Bucklin, become Approval-like because if there is no majority in the first round, with first preference votes, there is no candidate-dropping, as with IRV, but additional votes are added in. But, in fact, few use of those votes is what would be expected under some circumstances, but, and this is important, those small number of voters are responsible, under Plurality, for the spoiler effect, and Bucklin solved that problem, as would basic unranked Approval. FairVote claims that the small percentage of second rank votes that they found in Bucklin elections were because "voting for someone in second rank can hurt your first choice," but this is only true if both choices are real candidates, i.e., could possibly win, and this almost never is the case in a two-party system, as we had then and now (but there may have been some places where it was true back when Bucklin wa being used, and we have no data yet on this. Eventually, it will be gathered, I'm sure.) Bucklin was dropped, I am fairly sure from an examination of what evidence I have been able to gather so far, not because it wasn't working and was merely an exercise in futile complication, but because it was working. Brown v. Smallwood was based on a case where the plurality winner in the first round was defeated by additional votes coming in from the second and third rounds, which turned the tide to Smallwood. Brown was a voter who didn't like this, and he sued. And his position was upheld by the Minnesota Supreme Court in a case which FairVote claims turns on one-man, one-vote, though that argument, was, in fact not the coreof the Court's reasoning, though the Court's reasoning was to bizarrely distorted that it's hard to say what they were actually thinking. It reminds me of other result-driven decisions that we have seen. In any case, it was very clear that the Court was rejecting the very idea of having alternative votes and would almost certainly have rejected IRV just as well as it did Bucklin. Somebody did not want to allow third parties a toehold, or, more likely, some political position required that a major party enjoy the vote-splitting of the opposition to gain victories in Plurality elections, which alternative voting eliminated. Thus the Republicans in Ann Arbor shot down IRV when it was implemented there, because it worked, and they lost the mayor's office to a Democrat, the first Black mayor in the U.S. Bullet Voting? The right of the voter, or it should be. It does *not* mean "I have no preference among the remaining candidates." It could mean, "I detest them all and could not stand giving any of them any support, so I am equal-ranking them bottom." Robert's Rules, in its alleged "recommendation" of "IRV," as has been claimed on the Wikipedia article on IRV, for some time, actually is "describing," not exactly recommending, an IRV-like method with one critical difference. It is not explicitly stated, but, actually, if one simply reads the description without having in mind that one already knows what this method is, the majority needed for a victory is based on *all* ballots cast, not just those that are not exhausted. From other material on Robert's Rules and the meaning of majority of votes cast, it is clear that no ballots are to be discarded. And this makes the method nondeterministic, it can fail, and, in real public elections with a majority victory requirement, it would fail, if applied. There may be, indeed, some basis somewhere to challenge an IRV result if ballot exhaustion led to a winner who did not get an explicit vote from a true majority, being more than half of all ballots cast. Which includes exhausted ballots containing an otherwise valid vote. I'm under some pretty strong criticism for insisting that the Robert's Rules mention be scrupulously correct, which is not difficult to do. But this is seriously offensive to the Fairvote editor who might once again start an edit war over it. It would help if anyone knew of a parliamentarian who could consider the specific question. I seem to recall already having seen the opinion, but don't remember where it was. If exhausted ballots are still counted and used to determine majority, the meaning of them is clear: they are votes against the remaining candidates in favor of a losing candidate. Thus discarding them is clearly unjust. They should continue to be counted, and this makes IRV, actually, a somewhat better method. Is that better method "recommended" by Robert's Rules? Well, not exactly. They point out, actually, it's serious problems and do state what they recommend, which is repeated balloting until one candidate has a majority. A real majority. They only suggest "preference voting" as an option where runoffs, or, better, entirely new elections, are considered impractical. And they don't specify which form of preference voting they are recommending, they just give a common example. All this is an example of how FairVote has managed to craft propaganda, true-seeming statements that only fall apart when examined closely. There are many other examples.... For the Instant Runoff Voting article, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant_runoff_voting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Instant-runoff_voting for the discussion about this, there are three sections referring to Roberts' Rules. And, by the way, I am *not* soliciting meat puppets. I hope that more editors who support Instant Runoff Voting will join and participate, as well as more who oppose it, plus, ideally, some election experts and parliamentarians who are neutral. My goal in working with the article is that it be truly NPOV, not a carefully crafted propaganda piece either for or against Instant Runoff Voting. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
