On Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:19:29 -0500 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 10:28 PM 1/4/2009, Dave Ketchum wrote:
On Sun, 04 Jan 2009 16:16:14 -0500 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Perhaps. Perhaps not. That can be a *lot* of preparation, and people
are busy, many don't already, find time for voting. Bullet voting is
simple, it can be relatively easy to know who your favorite is.
Agreed that bullet voting is often appropriate.
Only occasional elections provide reason for some voters to do more
ranking.
And only certain voters. It's relatively uncommon that there are more
than two frontrunners, and most voters know who they are. Under those
circumstances, the only strong reason not to bullet vote is if you
prefer someone other than a frontrunner, and care to express it. The
argument for Plurality would be that the system shouldn't be encouraging
"useless candidates" to run at all! That is, since vote-for-one usually
works, and the only reason it doesn't work (usually, and even this is
fairly unusual) is that some silly voters will throw away their vote on
a candidate who can't win, why should we respect the unexpressed wishes
of those voters? After all, they had their chance! We don't run
elections as a popularity contest, i.e., so minor party candidates can
brag about how many votes they got....
Your argument for Plurality is empty:
Letting useless candidates run in Condorcet means less runoffs than
for Plurality, for voters can vote for both a frontrunner (helping it win),
and those the voters desire to have counted even if not expected to win.
Useless candidates can run in Plurality. Condorcet lets them get
voted for without, necessarily, disturbing the frontrunner - also, their
getting counted helps in the rare occasions when they deserve to win.
*My* point here is that there are some reasons to prefer plurality, we
often neglect them completely. Whatever system we try to implement, it's
not likely to be stable if it is more work than it's worth. If all the
system does is to, nearly always, confirm Plurality results -- and this
is the case with IRV in nonpartisan elections -- it is a *huge* waste.
Condorcet certainly costs more for the system than Plurality. Costs
bullet-voters nothing - provides a service to whichever voters like to do
more than bullet vote.
Actually can be a service to candidates. Clinton and Obama had to
try to kill their competitor's campaign for the Democrat nomination they
could not share. A similar race in Condorcet would let them both get
nominated and have a more civilized fight as to which should be ranked
higher than the other on the ballot.
Even if runoffs are possible/expected, it is wise to vote carefully in
the primary to minimize possibility of bad choices getting to the runoff.
And when it isn't easy to know, having trouble deciding between two,
Open Voting (Approval) allows a simple option: vote for both!
What is important is that Condorcet, unlike Approval, permits voting
for both Good and Soso, while indicating that Good is preferred.
Right. However, with American Preferential Voting (Bucklin), you *can*
indicate your preferences. My point is only that equal ranking, if
allowed, can be, actually, more expressive.
Bucklin deserves more thought as a competitor to Condorcet.
Looking over the ballots from Burlington, as I just did, I'm struck by
how many voters do seem to imagine that their votes will be counted!
Overvotes are more common than I'd expect if they were mere slips. It is
very easy for me to imagine that voters think that if they vote for more
than one candidate in one of the ranks, why, the votes will be counted,
they are merely saying that, for first preference, they prefer either
the Progressive or the Democrat, or some other combination. The fact is
that if such votes were counted, they'd make sense, even in IRV.
(Allowing equal ranking turns IRV into a much better system than without
it.)
How do you count equal ranking in IRV? If I vote X>A=B>Y, A and B become
visible to the counters at the same time - what does this do to deciding
what candidate is next to mark lost?
Those concerned about Later-No-Harm can simply avoid equal ranking!
If any Condorcet method is used, it should allow equal ranking,
because this *allows* more sincere voting, in fact.
AGREED that equal ranking should be permitted.
Permitting it with Plurality turns Plurality into a far better system,
with no cost. Bucklin is very much like Open Voting (i.e., plurality
with equal ranking allowed, i.e., Approval) except that it is possible
for the voter to rank so that votes are counted in rounds. The original
Bucklin only allowed multiple votes in the third rank, but I don't see
any reason to *prohibit it* -- i.e., discard ballots that equal rank --
in the first two ranks.
Approval, Plurality and IRV are distractions from need to pick a live
destination. I see need to compare, more carefully, Condorcet vs Range vs
Bucklin.
It makes one less reason to discard and not count a vote....
In the Burlington election, there were 77 "blank" ballots, if we can
believe the images. I suspect that, in fact, some of these weren't
blank, but that they had no vote in the first rank. Another technical
reason to discard a ballot. A voter thinks, "I really don't like any of
these guys much, so I'll just leave the first preference blank -- not
realizing that, probably, by the rules, the ballot won't be counted at
all." IRV is *complicated.*
On a Bucklin ballot, I'd argue, abstaining from the first rank shouldn't
cause later ranked votes not to be counted. (And I'd argue that there is
no reason in IRV to not count ballots with a vote in second rank, but
none if first. The intended meaning is reasonably clear.)
However, majority vote and avoidance of all runoffs are two
incompatible goals. So the question is, how important is it that a
majority of those voting support the winner?
The CW has been compared with EACH other candidate, and found better
liked in every case. However this does not guarantee a majority,
since voters are not each required to rank all candidates.
That's right. And, in fact, it could only be a small minority who so
voted, i.e., that the winner was "better liked." Majority requirements
*require* that the electorate actually consider and accept or reject a
winner.
A "small minority" cannot win in Condorcet, except for the tortured case of
a zillion candidates with at most a small minority voting for any one.
I am still trying to promote series thought as to need for a majority for
other than Plurality or Approval.
When there is a cycle its 3 or more members would each be CW if compared
only with non-cycle members. For this I claim near-ties since their
strengths overlap.
I'd say it is a bare minimum! We have a defective democracy when we
elect with other than a majority, either of voters directly, or
through chosen representatives. Where representation is involved, we
have a defective democracy even with a majority!
Plurality NEEDS majority for, if top candidate gets less, another
could deserve the win and these voters cannot completely express their
desires in their votes.
All methods need majorities to satisfy basic democratic norms.
Democratic process, in deliberative bodies, generally avoids
multiple-choice questions; where such questions are allowed, as in
elections, a majority is required, just as it is with bivalued (Yes/No)
questions.
Go to RRONR and you see demand for a supermajority for some cases. I still
question actual need for a majority for all election methods (other than
Plurality, which has true need).
Condorcet has less need, for its voters can rank all the candidates
they approve of.
Less need, perhaps. It's possible that the Condorcet winner is a winner
by a majority over all other candidates. Advanced voting systems, in
general, can be used as devices to avoid unnecessary runoffs.
Try:
77A; 76B; 75C; 74blank
These voters like bullet voting and none ranks any competitor of their
first choice (though they could have ranked more if they approved of any).
Why not let A win? If you insist on a runoff, who deserves to be on that
ballot?
77A; 77B
Here I recommend the rules say "flip a coin" - and anyone who objects to
that should get to finance the runoff.
But Condorcet methods without some test of acceptance can fail rather
badly. It could be that the majority would reject the Condorcet winner,
given a choice of electing the person or running the whole election
over, and the only reason it appeared that this was the Condorcet winner
was that, say, voters fully ranked, and some of those who formed the
majority in some of the wins were actually saying that this was the
second-worst candidate, which could be pretty bad....
I do not understand "fail" here - Condorcet permits ranking multiple
candidates by any voter who chooses to.
I choke on any encouragement of "fully ranked". For example, ranking the
next to last is usually not worth the pain for it affects only the
relationship between the last two.
If you are going to use pure ranking, with a single ballot, Cordorcet is
king, so to speak. But that's an artificial limitation.
I do agree that if a better method is used (like Range or Score Voting),
a Condorcet test should be used to ensure that the Condorcet winner
isn't unconciously rejected. A runoff is needed to test this. If we have
a conflict between a Range winner and a Condorcet winner, what has
happened is that there may be a majority -- or a plurality -- with a
weak preference, against a minority with a strong preference. Social
utility theory would say that the Range winner is better; but the votes
imply that a majority would reject that winner in favor of the Condorcet
winner. For reasons I've described many times, I claim that a genuine
Range winner will prevail in a runoff, and that this would be the best
result. But occasionally, that would not happen, and the Condorcet
winner would prevail; what might be happening here is that the majority
is saying, "No, we do *not* want to give up our right of decision as a
majority, we don't accept the Range results as valid, or, for whatever
reason, we, in the majority, don't want to make the sacrifice."
Ugh! How do you get valid multiple method results without imposing some
kind of load on the voters?
And that is their right.
But it won't happen very often....
Therefore I recommend careful thought as to when runoffs may be worth
their expense.
Sure. Little work has been done on this. Some systems require a runoff
when the margin is less than a certain percentage. That makes sense....
Ideally, whatever system is used would predict what would happen in a
runoff, with reasonable accuracy, and then hold a real runoff only when
the possibility of a different result is significant.
Looking at the Burlington results, even though Bob Kiss did not gain a
majority of the votes, as reported by IRV, it's highly likely that he'd
win a real runoff against the runner-up, Miller, his margin was large
enough and there is no particular reason for it to disappear. In fact,
if we look at the second-choice votes, both he and Miller gained a
majority of first and second-choice votes. My guess is that Bucklin
would have returned a majority victory for him. IRV concealed a lot of
votes for Kiss underneath votes for Miller, and a lot of votes for
Miller underneath votes for Kiss. More Miller votes were concealed than
Kiss votes: the Kiss supporters were less likely to vote for Miller in
second place than the reverse.
Were it Bucklin, *some* voters would have truncated, not voting for the
other frontrunner. But, my guess, most wouldn't have truncated, and so
Kiss would have still obtained a majority. (There was a lot of
truncation, bullet voting, even with IRV.)
In the other direction, there were many voters, far more than I
expected, who *fully ranked,* so fully that they essentially voted for
every candidate against any write-in. (There was even one voter who
ranked all the candidates *and* wrote in a name in the last place,
overvoting that position.) Imagine what would happen if there was a
serious write-in candidacy in such an environment. These full-ranking
voters may have just voted for their worst nightmare, thinking that by
ranking this candidate "last," they were maximally voting against him or
her.
In this sense, three-rank IRV might be better....
(Burlington had five candidates on the ballot plus one write-in slot,
hence, because apparently they wanted to allow full ranking, they
allowed five ranks. The idea is that bottom rank is unexpressed. So you
could vote for your total favorite in first rank, say, then for the best
four of the other five candidates. But many voters seemed to think that
the fifth rank was the bottom, and it's apparent that many tried to use
burial strategy, bottom ranking the perceived competitor, while giving a
higher rank to a total joke candidate who they would probably be
horrified to elect. On the other hand, surprisingly many voters *wrote
in* a name in the fifth rank.)
BTW - cost of ballot support for complete ranking can tempt limits on
Condorcet ranking. How bad should we complain if offered 3 as in RCV?
Three seems like a good minimum, with cost vs voter desires controlling
whether more get implemented.
It's not the worst problem. Center squeeze is the worst problem.
--
[email protected] people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
Dave Ketchum 108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY 13827-1708 607-687-5026
Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
If you want peace, work for justice.
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
