Here I read serious thought from r b-j, and will only add a bit.
On Jan 9, 2010, at 5:15 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
On Jan 9, 2010, at 4:28 PM, Warren Smith wrote:
See this report on the Burlington 2009 IRV pathologies:
http://rangevoting.org/Burlington.html
one of the co-authors, Anthony Gierzynski,
is a UVM professor who lives in Burlington.
Prof. Gierzynski *works* in Burlington, but lives in Montpelier. i
am not sure where he was living last March 3, but i doubt that his
stake in this election is direct. his stake is professional and
scholarly. but, as a non-resident, he doesn't have the same stake
that either i or Terry have.
The report refutes a lot of lies commonly told about IRV,
and concludes that this election
"singled out IRV & plurality as nearly-uniquely bad performers
[among all
commonly-proposed election methods]."
i might even agree with that
Given this experience, I would suggest that Burlington switch to a
method different from plurality and different from IRV. Some
obvious
contenders are approval and range voting.
Warren, why is Condorcet not included?
the problem with Approval voting is that it requires too little
information from the voters.
and the problem with Range voting is that it requires too much.
I like that phrasing.
if you support a particular candidate (let's say the Dem) but you
approve of two (say both the Dem and the Prog), you have a problem
with voting strategy with Approval. maybe, depending on how other
folks vote, you can help your favorite against the candidate you
tepidly support, so you punch "Approve" for your fav only. or,
maybe your fav is actually not in really in the running and the
election becomes a contest between your fallback candidate and the
guy you think is a piece of crap. then "what to do, what to do?? oh
me oh my!" (the savvy voter must thing strategically.) most people
will just approve the single candidate they support and, if nearly
all do that, there is no difference between Approval and Plurality.
with Range voting, again if you support a particular candidate but
you sorta approve of two, you have a problem with voting strategy
again. depending on what other people are doing, it may be best
(for your interests) to plop all of your points onto your fav. but
what if it becomes a contest between your fallback and the piece of
crap candidate? again "what to do, what to do?? oh me oh my!"
the Ranked-Order Ballot extracts the correct amount of information
from the voter. if the voter rankes A>B>C>D, the ballot makes no
assumption regarding how much more the voter likes A over B compared
to how much the voter likes B>C. maybe the voter likes A and B
almost equally (but A just a little more) but thinks C is a piece of
crap. or maybe both B and C are crappy, but B is a little more
tolerable than C. the problem with Borda is that it assumes the
difference in preference are the same between adjacently ranked
candidates (an assumption not supported or refuted by the voter or
his ballot).
the ranked-order ballot only asks the voter: if the election were
solely between A and B (or any other pair), who would the voter vote
for? the problem with IRV is that it doesn't decide the election by
viewing the ballot information as such. instead IRV and the single
transferrable vote method looks at a voter's vote as a commodity to
be transferred from one preference to another based on the arbitrary
rule that only 1st-choice votes count when determining who the
biggest loser is and eliminating that "loser". 2nd-choice votes are
no better than last place in that evaluation. i am a DSP algorithm
engineer; one of the things we hate the most (and are sometime
unavoidable) are arbitrarily-set thresholds, we know that bad shit
happens when the numbers just don't quite get to the threshold.
immediately, in 2005, when i read the IRV law i was signing, i
recognized that as a problem, but hoped it would elect the Condorcet
winner anyway (and it did in 2006).
even though there is the *possibility* of a cycle (and thus a
*possible* strategy of some to try to throw a Condorcet election
into a cycle) the likelyhood is soooo low, because of political
alignment along the major axis of the political spectrum. Nader
voters in 2000 were not likely to choose Bush for their 2nd-choice
over Gore. even if voting strategists succeed in throwing a
Condorcet election into a cycle, they have no solid control in
advance about how that cycle will be resolved. sounds like a
dangerous "strategy" and i doubt anyone will try it or be successful
doing so in reality.
To decide on a strategy effort is a difficult challenge:
1. What is expectable for vote counts with no strategy - note
that what might be expectable could change if there is more than one
strategy effort, perhaps having different goals.
2. What changes would lead to better vote counts.
3. What might be doable toward such better vote counts, with
minimal risk of causing worse, considering the number of voters needed
to cause success.
Cycles do involve political alignment. In A>B >C>A a triangular
relationship among the three positions is required, as is nearing
equal strength among the three.
The difficulty is, that due to the fact that the world in
general and Burlington in particular, is inhabited by morons,
some of us are morons, that is true.
the ballot issue probably is going to consist of exactly of the two
worst choices "(a) IRV or (b) go back to plurality?"
with no third choice being offered.
no shit. that's what i've been crying in the wilderness since last
March. lately, where i've been crying is:
http://7d.blogs.com/blurt/2009/12/burlington-residents-seek-repeal-of-instant-runoff-voting/comments/page/2/#comments
.
Furthermore, without a decent voting system,
even HAVING an election with 3 or more choices, is rendered dubious
and risky.
no shit. but, at least with IRV, we are not risking electing the
slightly unpopular GOP candidate in this town of liberals. with the
old law (which requires a 40%+ plurality or it goes to runoff),
there is a greater risk of electing the unpopular GOP candidate,
which is why the GOPers are the biggest supporters of the repeal
question.
Ludicrous, isn't it?
about as ludi as the Electoral College.
Here I choke. Go back to the years in which it was born. What better
could you have proposed then than electing a committee (the EC) to
look intelligently for qualified candidates to elect as Pres and VP?
To have campaigns such as we have now would have been impractical.
Now civilization has advanced and it would make sense to move to
something new.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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