At 01:06 AM 1/2/2009, Dave Ketchum wrote:
Terry and Abd look set to duel forever.
It could look that way. Terrill Bouricius is one of the major players
with FairVote, he has a lot invested there, so to speak. He finally
said that he wouldn't, personally, make the majority claims that
others have made.... though his basis for it was solely that full
ranking wasn't allowed. Nearly all U.S. implementations allow, at
most, three expressed ranks.
However, the point of a majority requirement is that a majority of
voters support the winner! This is standard democratic procedure.
Even with full ranking, it could occur that the only reason *a
majority of voters* have supported the IRV winner is that someone
*worse* was on the ballot.
One may argue that a runoff election can present the same Hobson's
choice, and, indeed it can. However, if write-ins are allowed, there
is a way for voters to fix the problem -- and they have, on occasion.
Even without that, the voters are, at least, making a fresh choice,
with increased opportunity to examine the candidates, with a real runoff.
Conduct of elections is a serious topic, but both of them offer too many
words without usefully covering the topic.
Perhaps. Occupational hazard for me. Possibly smokescreen for
Terrill, or not. It did take a lot of words to explain the tortuous
logic that turns a minority of those who voted into a majority, into
a "majority winner," to try to turn Robert's Rules of Order on its
head, when *clearly* RRONR, for preferential voting, considers that
majority failure may occur if there is truncation by voters, they are
explicit, but that doesn't stop Terrill from trying anyway.
They offer RRONR as ammunition in a war it was never intended for: Over
100 years ago General Robert had to chair a meeting. As an army general he
should be able to handle such a task? After doing it he decided there
better be batter directions put together for the future. The resulting
rules continue to be used by many.
Yes, Dave, we know where RRO came from, and what it is used for. The
term "majority of the vote" has clear meaning for the rules of order.
I didn't bring it into this debate, FairVote did, and they were quite
successful. Researching this, I found that election officials had
repeated the claim, using exactly the same language as FairVote.
RRONR has a few pages about elections. Unlike some of their directions for
new meeting chairs, these are not designed for blind obedience. Their
major direction is that whoever does serious elections had better decide
carefully and formally agree as to how they will do such.
Yes. There are default rules, and the default is repeated ballot
until a majority is found. No eliminations, but perhaps voluntary withdrawals.
Meaning of 'majority' is their big dispute.
It's not in dispute for anyone who understands the rules. Further,
the context is typically the replacement of a top-two runoff process
with IRV. TTR requires a majority in the primary, or a runoff is
held. "Majority" here means that more than half of all those who
voted any legal ballot (typically containing a vote for an eligible
candidate, and not otherwise spoiled) voted for the winner.
Now, to people who have a runoff system, the word "majority" has a
very clear meaning, and when you tell them that they can get a
majority without having the runoff, they are certainly interested.
IRV *looks* like it would do this, if you don't look too closely, and
if you don't look at the Australian experience with Optional
Preferential Voting, but, instead, only look where FairVote points
you: standard Preferential Voting there, which finds an "absolute
majority," and can do so because full ranking is required, the ballot
is spoiled if not fully ranked.
Without making any specification or indication that the word
"majority" is now being used in a different way, FairVote activists
make the argument, and they have made it successfully enough and with
such insignificant opposition, that even supposedly neutral analysts
have repeated the claim.
Voters have been deceived, and may well have voted differently had
they known the truth.
IRV documentation claims its found winner has a majority (with no
attached statement of what this means) and Terry defends this usage.
He finally said that "He wouldn't say it himself," though for a
different reason.;
Abd claims this is deception, if not worse:
No. Just deception. It is probably deliberate, given the power of the
argument and how badly the argument is damaged if the necessary
qualification to make the claims into true statements, and that it
was made by some very knowledgeable people.
Majority means more than half and, without qualification, means of
the whole thing measured.
That's right. So the only question, then, is, "What is the whole thing?"
Blanks are excludable - presumably their voters chose not to
participate in deciding whatever is voted on.
We don't know what blanks mean.
Exhausted ballots are not excludable - those voters certainly
participated, though for other candidates. But IRV, claiming a
majority, has to be excluding these since IRV only has a majority
between the last two candidates considered.
That's certainly what I thought! And Robert's Rules of Order
considers the question, in the section on educating voters: the
voters should know that if they do not fully rank the candidates,
there could be a failure to find a majority, and "the election would
have to be repeated."
They don't even mention the possibility that a winner would be
declared on the basis of a false majority, i.e., a last-round
majority. That's because RRONR *never* recommends election by
plurality. It's *allowed,* but only if the Bylaws so state. They are
providing preferential voting -- and they state there are many forms,
and they only give the STV form as a specific example, which they
proceed to specifically criticize, with criticism that doesn't
necessarily apply to other methods -- as a method of finding a
majority that might not be present in first preference votes. If all
the voters rank all the candidates, or at least rank a frontrunner,
it *does* find a true majority. So that's what they have in mind, it's obvious.
This is turned by FairVote into a "recommendation" of IRV. It's
actually several steps removed from that. The majority issue is only
one aspect of it. And FairVote activists bitterly contested efforts
to correct the mention in the Wikipedia article of this
"recommendation." To get it to stick, I had to exactly quote the
source, which was fine with me, it was brief enough; when that was
finally stable, the mention was removed from the introduction by a
FairVote activist, whereas previously, such had tenaciously resisted
any attempt to move it into the core of the article, where fuller
explanation was possible. This time other editors intervened; the
quote was considered important enough to remain in the introduction.
Nothing on Wikipedia is guaranteed to be permanent, except that the
history is presumably there indefinitely. This is the present text:
Robert's Rules of Order calls preferential voting "especially useful
and fair in an election by mail if it is impractical to take more
than one ballot. . . . In such cases it makes possible a more
representative result than that under a rule that a plurality shall
elect. . . . Preferential voting has many variations." The single
transferable vote technique used by IRV is the example given. The
manual goes on to note that if voters don't rank enough candidates,
this may prevent any from receiving a majority and "require the
voting to be repeated. . . . Although this type of preferential
ballot is preferable to an election by plurality, it affords less
freedom of choice than repeated balloting, because it denies voters
the opportunity of basing their second or lesser
choices on the results of earlier ballots, and because the candidate
in last place is automatically eliminated
and may thus be prevented from becoming a compromise choice."
Therefore Abd complains since:
Deciders can be sold IRV based on the Fairvote claim of majority.
Anyone looking close will disagree due to failure of IRV to
produce a true majority.
That's correct. I'm not exactly "complaining," I'm actively promoting
the truth on this. It's worse than I thought until I started to
actually examine U.S. IRV elections. It is unusual that a majority is
found after vote transfers when one did not exist before vote
transfers. However, when I looked around, I found that this is a
known phenomenon in Australia, with Optional Preferential Voting, as
they have in Queensland and some other places.
But I'm saying even more. I have, as yet, been unable to find out why
Bucklin voting, which was spreading like wildfire at one point,
stopped being used. There is some indication from Alabama, which
continued to use Bucklin for primaries for many years -- I have not
confirmed this --, that low usage of additional ranks was a factor.
All indications are that IRV, under similar conditions, results in
low usage of additional ranks. Most voters, in fact, appear to vote
for their favorite and leave it at that. The voters who *don't* are
those who support a minor candidate and who know that this candidate
is highly unlikely to win anyway.
So low usage of additional ranks may be *normal.* Now, if this
torpedoed Bucklin -- which was, like IRV, sold as a method of finding
majority winners with one ballot -- it's quite likely to torpedo IRV
as well, when jurisdictions wake up and discover that, if they use
IRV for nonpartisan elections, they are getting the same results as
Plurality at higher cost. If they wanted to get rid of the majority
requirement, they could have done it much more simply.
But they did *not* want to get rid of the requirement, they wanted to
keep it, and they were very explicitly -- and deceptively -- told
that it would remain. I'd say that if lying in ballot arguments were
a crime (it isn't), then they would easily be convicted, and all the
quibbles about last round majority would be of no avail. *In the
context,* where the word "majority" already had a clear meaning, the
claims were false.
Had they argued that the IRV result is "like a majority," that it was
better to accept this plurality result than to hold a runoff, they
might have been wrong, but the argument would not be deceptive, at
least not on this level. It would hinge on more complex issues.
But it isn't that way, it's simple: the emperor has no clothes.
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