At 03:48 PM 12/29/2008, Terry Bouricius wrote:
Abd wrote:
<snip>
The term "majority" as applied to elections has some very well-established
meanings. If we say that a candidate got a majority in an election,
we mean that a majority of those voting supported that candidate.
There are quibbles around the edges. What about ballots with marks on
them but the clerk can't figure out what the marks mean? Robert's
Rules are clear: that's a vote, part of the basis for a majority.
<snip>
I guess a little rehashing is needed to correct Abd's miss-stating of
Robert's Rules of Order on the basis for determining a majority.
Pot. Kettle. Black. We'll see:
Abd seems
to be relying on RRONR description in chapter XIII on Voting, on page 402
of how to deal with "illegal votes," such as over-votes, cast by legal
voters -- they should be included in the denominator for calculating a
majority. However, on page 387 RRONR states that "majority vote" means
"more than half of the votes cast by persons legally entitled to vote,
EXCLUDING BLANKS OR ABSTENTIONS..." [emphasis added].
Yes. A "blank" is exactly that, a *blank ballot.* This has been
referred to as "scrap paper." It is moot, it is not counted for
anything, though the clerk may make a note of it. "Abstentions"
generally refers to no vote at all.
Bouricius has acknowledged that illegal votes are nevertheless
included in the basis for majority. But he will try to turn
"abstention" into some reference to incomplete ranking. In other
words, overvotes count, but not exhausted ballots? He's stretching
desperately for some way to claim that what FairVote has been doing
for the last decade has been legitimate.
The question is
whether an exhausted ballot (one with no preference shown between the
finalists) in an IRV election, is an abstention or an "illegal" vote.
Please do remember, as well, to consider the case where the voter has
filled out all available ranks on a ballot.
That vote is neither an abstention nor is it an illegal vote. It's a
vote for every ranked candidate. On a Bucklin ballot, all those votes
would eventually be counted. There is no precedent at all for
considering these votes as abstentions or illegal. If they are
considered illegal, the rule would be, in public elections,
unconstitutional in the U.S. Were the votes for Nader in Florida 2000
"abstentions."? If the Nader voters believed Nader's argument that
Gore and Bush were Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and, even on an IRV
ballot, they only ranked Nader, would that have been an abstention?
No, it would have been a vote for Nader, not an abstention. They
voted, they didn't vote for the winner, the winner did not get a
majority, not matter what tricks you do, what shuffling you do with
the ballots.
What is found with IRV is a "majority of ballots containing a vote
for continuing candidates." Not an unqualified "majority.*
Since RRONR mentions "abstentions" rather than merely using the word
"blanks," it can be interpreted that there may be some way of indicating
abstention, other than with a blank ballot.
"Abstentions" are explicit. You have to remember that the statement
is a general one, it doesn't only refer to written ballots. A member
abstains informally simply by not acting to vote in any way. And a
member may abstain formally, and it will be recorded as such under
some circumstances, by stating -- or writing -- the abstention. The
intention of one abstaining is to have no part in the process, and
this must then exclude the abstaining voter not only from the votes
but also from the basis for majority. This is *entirely* different from voting.
I think this perfectly fits
the concept of an exhausted ballot, where the voter has abstained and
indicated no preference between remaining candidates, if the voters
favored candidates cannot win.
This assumes that the "abstention" is a deliberate act, so this
argument utterly fails with RCV ballots. And this does total violence
to Robert's Rules. Their meaning is very clear. As I've mentioned,
Australian law is explicit about this: they use the term "absolute
majority" to refer to the quota in single-winner STV, mandatory full
ranking, and they drop that word and use something like the "majority
of ballots containing a vote for the continuing candidates," with
Optional Preferential Voting.
In any case, the ballot arguments I cited were quite explicit: "a
majority of the ballots". There was no mention of excluding any
ballots at all, and, as you know, Robert's Rules doesn't accept this
argument about majority. It claims that if voters don't fully rank
the candidates, "it may prevent any candidate from receiving a
majority and require the voting to be repeated."
It is impossible to reconcile this with the argument Bouricius is
making. He and his friends have redefined "majority," and have used
that redefined word in propaganda promoting IRV, without making the
redefinition clear. It is a sophisticated form of lying, if done
deliberately. And I saw what happened when I started to edit the
Wikipedia article to make the distinction clear: it was vigorously
resisted by Bouricius and others. I'm afraid that they do not want
voters to understand this, when they are considering replacing
majority-required runoff voting with IRV. They are quite happy to
lead them along.
It may have backfired with Bucklin, you know. Bucklin was sold as a
method for finding majority winners, which, of course it does
sometimes, probably a little better than IRV, in fact. But when it
was realized that it did not always do this (and under some
circumstances, like IRV, it *rarely* did this), my guess is that the
complexity of the ballot was no longer considered worthwhile. An RCV
ballot, from the voter's perspective, is the same as a three-rank RCV
ballot, except the voter may vote (with Duluth Bucklin) as many
candidates as desired (only in the third rank, which becomes pure
Approval). But, of course, the STV method for counting IRV is far more complex.
I'm really appalled that Bouricius is insisting on this, I thought he
had more integrity than that. It's possible to argue with a straight
face that there are problems with real runoffs, such as allegedly
lower turnout, and in order to make my case there I need to introduce
new concepts, though I'm rather surprised if it is actually new,
i.e., my observation that low turnout in runoffs may simply reflect a
normal occurrence: lower preference strength among the voters
regarding the candidates. And that such voters abstaining may
actually improve results. *That's* abstention. It is a separate decision.
Is an IRV election a single election? (Legally, it certainly is!) Did
a voter vote in that election? How can you say that the voter
"abstained" if the voter actually cast a legal vote? The voter simply
did not vote for a winner. Does it matter if the voter voted for the
runner-up or not? Why is a voter who votes for the runner-up a part
of the basis for this alleged majority but not one who voted for someone else?
The question of whether or not voters can be compelled to rank, in
the U.S., was quite firmly addressed in Dove v. Oglesby. They cannot.
And to exclude them from the basis for a majority because of the
details of IRV procedure is quite clearly unjust. Take the same
ballots and interpret them with IRV or with Bucklin. Bucklin will
tell you, perhaps, that no majority was found, so-and-so was the
winner by a plurality. Same voters who voted for that candidate on an
IRV ballot, same electorate voting overall, IRV reports a majority.
Difference? Well, IRV doesn't report a majority, it reports something
more specific: a "last-round majority." It's actually only a
technical detail of counting, it is not necessarily an ordinary
majority. I.e., the kind of majority that Robert's Rules and normal
democratic process require.
No, Robert's Rules of Order is very clear, overall. Ambiguity in how
they described the actual process allowed you and yours to claim that
they were describing the IRV process and the IRV "majority," and get
away with it for a while. (And I think you and many others were
convinced this was true -- *I was convinced at first, though I
smelled a rat. Why was RRONR allowing election by a plurality? It was
some time before I noticed the comment about educating the voters,
which clearly revealed that they understood what I understood and
what I'd thought any parliamentarian would understand.) The comment
about educating voters as to the consequences of not fully ranking
gives it away. No parliamentarian would have interpreted the
preferential voting method in RRONR as redefining majority, it is a
totally well-established and understood concept.
There is room here for reasonable people to
disagree.
Sure. There is, in fact, more: there is room for liars to lie.
The position Bouricius has taken here, that the IRV "last round
majority," called simply a "majority" by most IRV proponents, but
"majority of votes" by some or "majority of ballots" by some or even
"more than 50% of the total votes" in the ballot arguments in Santa
Clara County in 1998, is what the ordinary person and the informed
will consider a "majority," is not at all reasonable, and, since I'd
believed that Mr. Bouricius was reasonable, I must begin to suspect
something darker.
(Steve Chessin signed this in those ballot arguments: "Measure F does
NOT repeal the majority requirement for electing county officers. A
candidate still must earn more than 50% of the total votes cast in
order to be elected; it just allows the majority winner to be
determined in one election by using the more modern technique of
Instant Runoff Voting.)
Perhaps an organization could reasonably write bylaws to
expressly include or exclude such exhausted ballots from the denominator
in determining a majority threshold.
If Robert's Rules of Order applies, they are included unless
specifically excluded. Excluding them is the equivalent of allowing
election by a plurality. IRV is a method which *may* find a majority,
but which completes with only a plurality of voting members who cast
a vote for the winner. This was not the intention of RRONR in
suggesting the possible use of preferential voting; rather, it was to
be *better* than election by a plurality. That's not "Plurality
voting," but the generic matter of electing someone when less than a
majority of those voting in the poll voted for the winner. Thus
Approval Voting, Range Voting, etc., are plurality methods in this
meaning, if a majority isn't required.
There are only a few methods for guaranteeing a majority.
(1) Constrain the voters to vote for only one of two possibilities.
The most common example is Yes/No. If you leave the question blank,
that's an abstention -- or a blank if there is nothing else on the
ballot. With elections, restrict the ballot to two candidates and do
not allow write-in votes.
(2) Require all voters to vote for every candidate but one. This is
the STV method with mandatory ranking, as used in most of Australia.
The votes aren't counted simultaneously, but any method which does
this can guarantee a majority. This also does not work if write-in
votes are allowed.
Top two runoff with only two candidates on the runoff ballot, then,
does guarantee a majority if write-ins are prohibited. (However,
prohibiting write-ins in order to guarantee a majority is putting the
cart before the horse. We don't find a *true* majority if we have
constrained the voters from free expression, we have simply forced
them to make only one of two choices. With elections, there is always
the third possibility, in theory: no election. Majority failure is a
form of voting "none of the above." The majority preferred none of
the above. We can see this clearly if it's an Approval ballot with
Yes/No voting.)
This clarity and this uncertainty of success is exactly what Robert's
Rules prefers to see. Majority required, and no guarantee of it. We
do not fulfill the democratic goals behind this by creating pretense
about majorities. We may, for expediency, be content with a
plurality, but we shouldn't pretend that this is democratically
optimal, or "majority rule," it's a compromise due to practicality.
RRONR suggests preferential voting, not to guarantee a majority, for
clearly they know it does not, but to more commonly find one, thus
avoiding inconvenient runoff elections.
RRONR contemplates that voters will be encouraged to completely rank;
if they do, there will, indeed, be a majority, and it will be a
genuine one if the voters were not coerced. But, of course, that
works with other forms of preferential voting as well, not just IRV.
If the organization wrote bylaws to
include exhausted ballots in the denominator, then an election could fail,
requiring some alternate procedure (or new election) to fill the office,
Robert's Rules *assumes* this. Election by plurality is prohibited
unless specifically authorized in the bylaws, which is discouraged.
They also state that preferential voting must be authorized in the
bylaws. I'm not quite sure why, in fact. If a preferential or other
ballot process finds a majority of voters supporting a result,
clearly accepting it, then I can't imagine why there would be an
objection to it from the point of view of the rules. There remains
the possibility of multiple majorities with some methods, and there
is clear precedent for handling that.
In any case, if an organization were to adopt IRV, stating that the
method is as described in RRONR, or if they were to simply place the
method description in the bylaws without adding additional
assumptions, the method would continue to require a true majority.
FairVote has snookered a host of organizations into doing something else.
While, at the same time, claiming that this method guarantees
majorities, or is "majority rule," or with arguments like that.
or the bylaws could be written to exclude exhausted ballots so that the
one election would be decisive using a reasonable definition of a
"majority vote" (using RRONR's standard definition that EXCLUDES
abstentions in determining a majority threshold.)
Bouricius has totally invented a new meaning to "abstention." It has
meant, until now, the action of someone who deliberately decided not
to vote. Now it means, according to him, someone who fails to vote
for a frontrunner, one of the last two (or sometimes a few)
candidates left standing in the IRV process. It doesn't matter if
they voted for someone else, those minor candidates don't count.
It doesn't matter if they used up all the ranks, believing that IRV
encouraged sincere voting, so why not vote sincerely?
All that matters is that FairVote gets another "success." It's going
to backfire; I'm hoping that we can head it off, and get some
sensible reform in place, reform that will actually work.
The mistake was made before with Bucklin. But if, when Bucklin was
dropped, they had instead kept it as the primary round in a two-round
system, they'd have had quite an advanced system.
Bucklin is really majority-criterion compliant Approval. Any Bucklin
election which didn't find a majority was a full-on Approval
election, so the claim that Approval wasn't used in the U.S. is
ignorant nonsense. Bucklin also had a Range implementation attempted,
though I don't think they realized what they were doing: this was
Oklahoma Bucklin, with fractional votes for lower ranks.
American Preferential Voting was a common name for it. We should have
kept it, and simply added runoffs when there was majority failure;
Bucklin probably finds a majority a little more than IRV, in
nonpartisan elections, because of significant votes for the winner
hidden under the runner-up, votes that are never counted in IRV.
IRV never counts *most* of the votes, commonly. Bucklin counts every
vote in the rounds that are reached, and, it seems, it was easy
enough to count them all that they did, even when the counting was
moot (i.e, a majority had been found without the round), at least I
think I've seen that.
In any case, I was genuinely surprised to see Bouricius continue to
debate this point about majority. This is not a college debate, and
I'm here not to "win" but to explore and discover and express the
truth, and to share that. I find arguing beyond all reason to be
utterly reprehensible; it's relatively harmless here because it will
be exposed, but, we have to remember, someone like Bouricius has
credentials. He can stand up and speak to some commission and
committee and people will think there must be something behind what he says.
I was just reading a presentation by some IRV advocate to a Los
Angeles commission; the same tired arguments, it doesn't matter how
many times they have been exposed among experts, these people know
that the sound bites work, they can deceive people with them (and
many of them have, I'm sure, deceived themselves as well. People
*want* to believe in their cause.)
But it backfires. History will repeat, unless we start to do something better.
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