At 07:51 PM 12/28/2008, James Gilmour wrote:
All my campaigning has been to get STV-PR used instead
of (mainly) FPTP/SMD and more recently instead of MMP.
By the way, multiwinner STV is a *far* better system than
single-winner IRV. Later-No-Harm makes must more sense when applied
to *representation.* It doesn't make so much sense for single-winner
offices, where compromise is necessary (which is also that *last
seat* being elected in a multiwinner STV election.)
(And, in fact, the nearly-ideal Asset Voting tweak on STV makes
"Later" pretty much unnecessary! If the method remains STV, fine, it
means voters can control the process to a degree, but, frankly, I
doubt I would bother. Vote for the one I want to represent me, and
this one represents me, either in the parliament or assembly, or
represents me in the process of choosing who will represent me.)
My interpretation (and it is my interpretation) of UK electors' likely
reaction to different voting systems is based on a mixture of
comments made in face-to-face meetings with ordinary electors, party
activists and elected politicians; daily reading of the political
press and readers' letters and blogs; comments made by political
parties (which have obvious vested interested, both pro- and
anti-reform); comments made by other political pressure groups, from
trade unions, commerce, media moguls and "big money", all of whom
have vested interests which they try to make less obvious, mostly
anti-reform. And from time to time there have been public opinion
polls in which relevant questions have been asked, usually
without a great deal of context and without any discussion.
The problem is that knee-jerk reactions to many of the involved
issues can be very far from what would be a response of someone who
has become educated on the subject. We have seen where it appears
that FairVote advocates, if they were not outright lying, failed to
understand the issues of majority vote, and most opponents of IRV
here likewise missed it; yet it strikes to the core of the claims being made.
I just read again where a FairVote presentation to Los Angeles
continues to claim that IRV guarantees a majority result. It's said
over and over again, but it is *never* mentioned that this isn't what
is ordinarily meant by a majority, and it is not what one gets with
real runoff voting. It's a faux majority, obtained by simply
disregarding all *legitimate ballots* that don't contain a vote for
the frontrunners.
Now, if the methods being advocated allowed full ranking, some
semblance of argument might be made that by not fully ranking, voters
were forfeiting their right to participate in the "runoff." Except,
of course, that this requires that voters (1) have the necessary
knowledge to deeply rank the candidates and (2) could *tolerate*
voting for a candidate whom they detest. Real runoffs allow the voter
to reconsider, for one thing, and sometimes voters can still cast a
write-in vote, and sometimes these actually win.
But the methods don't allow full ranking. Not here in the U.S. in
major elections. 3 ranks, period. So someone who prefers three
candidates to any of the frontrunners: doesn't count.
As I've pointed out, this could be done with Plurality: don't vote
for one of the frontrunners, too bad, your vote doesn't count, and
won't be considered part of the basis for "majority." Instant Runoff
Plurality. Just take the top two candidates, set aside all other
candidates, and notice which one has a majority of the remaining
ballots. It's pretty much what IRV does, anyway, in nonpartisan
elections, if anyone would bother to notice. Vote transfers only
rarely affect the overall social ordering that results from IRV, in
nonpartisan elections, when voters don't have that party marker to guide them.
You can of course dismiss my interpretation of that accumulated
evidence, especially as that evidence is of the "grey" or "soft"
variety and cannot be subject to the normal rigorous scrutiny which
one would apply to "hard" evidence. You can also dismiss the
evidence as being obtained from a community that for many decades
has been exposed to nothing but (bad) plurality voting systems and
has accepted the political outcomes without any serious
protest. (All the recent reforms of voting systems in the UK, except for a
few mayoral elections in England, have been to introduce PR - in
three varieties! - but that has happened only in the last decade.)
So that "plurality mindset" (for the sake of having a shorthand
term) is the reality we have to confront when we campaign for
practical voting reform. I don't need any persuading about the
potential merit of a Condorcet winner over an IRV winner when they
are not the same (though there are some unresolved technical issues
about breaking Condorcet cycles). I have said I think I could
sell Condorcet to our "plurality minded" electors when the likely
outcome would be a strong third-placed Condorcet winner, and see
off the vested interests that opposed reform. But if the likely
outcome was a weak Condorcet winner, I am quite convinced that the
forces of reaction would have no problem in winning the public and
political debate, and the reform would never happen - or if it
had happened, it would be reversed.
You might notice that I'm not advocating Condorcet methods, as such.
I've become far more interested in majority rule, and how to foster
it. A Condorcet violation is offensive to majority rule; but there
are ways to resolve this. Real Condorcet cycles don't persist, there
are no Condorcet cycles in social utility, when the considerations
have become broad enough.
We do not have in the UK a really powerful, high profile political
office to which the incumbent is directly elected.
And that's a good thing. We do. And it basically is an elected King.
Our history brought us here: remarkable, isn't it? We rebelled
against the British King, but adopted the system, only, of course,
with some checks and balances, but still the same idea: very strong
executive, not immediately accountable, unless he's so foolish as to
fool around with an intern....
Geez, a President misleads the nation into a war, leading to the
death of easily a million people, and nobody says "Boo!" Well, not
nobody, but nobody who counts, until the next election. No, not the
next election, the next election after that!
But just
suppose for a moment that we had direct elections for the Prime
Minister, but within our parliamentary system. The public opinion
polls show support for the three main parties has fluctuated quite a
bit during the past year, but one recent set of figures was
Conservatives 47%, Labour 41%, Liberal Democrats 12% (after removing
the "Don't knows"). Now suppose these were the voting figures
in a direct election for Prime Minister. The Liberal Democrat would
be the second choice of most Conservatives and most Labour
voters; the Liberal Democrats' second choice would mainly be Labour
with some Conservative.
The Liberal Democrat would be the Condorcet winner, but the
political consequences, both in Parliament and in the country would be
horrific - given the reality of our politics.
"Horrific"? First of all, this would depend on the preference
strengths. That someone is most people's second choice means nothing
if we don't know the preference strength involved. "Second choice"
could be *awful.* This is why mandatory ranking can be a Bad Idea. A
vote for a candidate should be just that, a vote *for* a candidate.
While it's possible to collect and use data about whether or not I
prefer Mr. Awful to Mr. Worse, it's not what most of a voting system
should be based on.
I.e., if we collect all the "preferences" without knowing and using
preference strengths, we can come up with, yes, a disastrous result.
Your "weak Condorcet winner." A good voting system *must* sometimes
violate the Condorcet criterion!
But a Condorcet winner still *means something.* We tend to assume
fixed preferences, i.e., the voters have voted these preferences, and
we are going to use them. But there is ranking that is clear and
ranking that is not, plus truncation, which leaves candidates,
perhaps many candidates, unranked.
With truncation or weak ranking, where the voter really doesn't care
-- perhaps because the voter hasn't considered the pairs involved --
Condorcet methods can come up with garbage as a result. Well,
probably not the worst garbage, but the decision could be pretty bad.
This is why I don't like Plurality methods. Condorcet is a Plurality
method, as usually proposed: it can elect a candidate with only a
plurality of voters expressing a preference for that candidate.
That's a weak winner! It doesn't matter how much shuffling of votes
one did to get there: either a majority of voters supported and
"approved" the candidate, or they didn't.
Some ranked or rating methods don't specify approval, and, then, the
ballot can't be used to test for majority acceptance of the result.
That's a problem! Open Voting, or Approval, of course, has no problem
with this, but Range does, unless some approval cutoff is specified.
I'm saying that two round methods are almost inherently superior to
single round methods, other things being equal. There is a *huge*
advantage to that second round, and improving two round methods
becomes a much simpler necessity to get the best possible winners
into the runoff, instead of insisting that everything be discovered
in a single step. A plurality primary is primitive and quirky, but if
it finds a majority, and it usually does in a two party system! or in
many nonpartisan elections when there aren't insane numbers of
candidates, it can be good enough.
STV, though, does its first elections without much opposition (under
current conditions). My guess is that the bulk of voters get the
representation they want. It would be interesting to get some numbers
on this! Under Asset, we would see fewer direct elections (quota of
votes from first preferences), but also fewer wasted votes and fewer
compromises with significant loss of value. The "compromises" made in
Asset may not be losses at all, they may be gains. I.e., I may gain a
better representative than I would have known to vote for!
STV is certainly respectable! But it could also be improved, in a
really spectacular way that could possibly evolve into something very
much like direct democracy, the best of direct and representative
democracy. The actual voting system could remain STV.... with
Carroll's simple suggestion for handling exhausted ballots.
You can blame that on the "plurality mindset" of our electors and
of all the other
political stakeholders if you like, but that is not going to change
the political reality. Now that is the reason why I see
problems with a weak Condorcet winner. And because such an outcome
is a likely outcome, that is why I see problems with
recommending Condorcet voting for such single-office elections.
It must be for others to judge the extent to which any of this is
interpretation is relevant to their own countries, but from what I
read about politics in countries that were cursed with the British
legacy of FPTP/SMD voting systems, I fear they too would likely
face similar problems with a weak Condorcet winner.
<snip>
> IRV is equally vulnerable. Fear of change and a misunderstanding of
> one-person-one-vote work against us both (although I don't know if
> one-person-one-vote is treated as a quasi-Constitutional
> principle in the UK).
I think there are three issues here. First, any reform that breaks
or reduces the power of the current vested interests will be
opposed, but that opposition can be overcome. Second,
one-person-one-vote is not written into our constitution (we don't have
one!), but it is the assumed basis for all our many voting systems,
even for the pernicious multi-winner FPTP "block vote". Third,
IRV has a "political" weakness that is the obverse of the weak
Condorcet winner - IRV fails to recognise and elect the strong
third-placed Condorcet winner. This defect in IRV is recognised in
the UK - the elimination of the candidate "who is everyone's
second choice". But that failure of IRV is accepted political by
our electors and our political community, I suspect because it
fits with the "plurality mindset" and it protects them from the weak
Condorcet winner. I have not heard it expressed in these terms
in the UK, but that should be no surprise as Condorcet voting does
not feature at all in any public debate about voting reform in
the UK.
James
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