At 09:32 PM 1/13/2010, Kathy Dopp wrote:
> This sounds like a variation on Borda count, but with an
incentive to vote on fewer candidates.
Yes perhaps, but normalized to give a value of one in total to all
ballots since Borda was rejected by the MN Supreme court as violating
one-person/one-vote.
No. Borda was never considered by the MN Supreme Court. You are
thinking of Bucklin, which was simply called Preferential Voting
then, as I recall, after the ballot. FairVote created some propaganda
that claimed that the rejection was based on one-person, one-vote,
but that's not supported by a full reading of the decision. And Brown
v. Smallwood wasn't confirmed anywhere else, it was disliked even
within Minnesota, bucking the general opinion of the legal
profession. You can read Brown v. Smallwood on rangevoting.org, there
is a copy there. There was an appeal for reconsideration, be sure to
read it all.
The decision was quite remarkable. It quoted another decision, with
approval, that it was the number of voters supporting a candidate
that mattered, not the number of votes. And then, next breath, it
counted the number of votes and noted that there were more votes cast
than voters.
The principle was correct: it's the number of voters that count, and
a voting system like Approval or Bucklin simply finds ways to allow a
majority of voters to assemble through making compromise choices on
the ballot. In the end, if only one full vote is effective, or none,
should the voter not have supported the winner at all, then we have
one person, one vote. Because we have counted the number of *voters*
supporting the result, not the number of votes, per se.
Bucklin, with a majority requirement, simulates what happens in
repeated single-vote elections, which is standard democratic process,
as does Approval. Each election, if the voters want to move toward
resolution, they will lower their approval cutoff to include more
candidates. With Bucklin, the method does this for them, allowing
them to participate in a limited series of such elections. If they
want to. They can just vote for one, if they want. It depends on what
they would prefer to see happen: completion or a runoff.
It's like IRV, in that way, but without the top-N eliminations, which
are what cause the trouble with IRV. There are no eliminations in
standard repeated-election, majority-required elections, there are
only voluntary withdrawals (which can't happen with Bucklin,
presumably, there isn't the time provided and it would do harm if
done mid-counting) or presumably increased voter compromise and
respect for an appearing majority and possible willingness to accept
it and terminate the process.
That multiple votes are cast simultaneously is confused with one
person one vote violation. They wouldn't have to be counted
simultaneously, there could be a way to count Bucklin votes so that
only one vote is counted at a time, it would be an iterative process.
But why do an iterative process to just count one vote at a time,
when you'd get the same result by counting them all at once?
(Okay, I'll describe the algorithm: just consider each pairwise
election, and only count votes, in any round, for each pair of
candidates. Count them as votes are presently counted, where
overvotes void the ballot -- but these votes will be counted later,
if needed. Is there a candidate who beats all others? Consider this
the tentative winner, or just the winner, period, if a majority isn't
required. If a majority is required, count all the votes up to the
final round, for the winner. If no majority of valid ballots, then
move to the next round of counting and repeat. If no majority after
the last round, follow runoff rules.)
(If a method violates one-person, one-vote, surely it would produce a
different result when only one vote is considered at a time! With
IRV, voters cast more than one vote at a time, but only one vote from
each voter is considered at a time. Or none. Same as Bucklin. The
difference is in how the votes are counted; IRV is counting different
ranks on different ballots, at once, based on having eliminated the
higher ranked candidates on some of the ballots. And the result is
that some votes, cast by a voter, are not effective and are passed
over, whereas had the voter voted for another candidate in that exact
same position, it would be counted.
An argument can indeed be made that IRV violates basic voting
principles of equality. Bucklin doesn't, in spite of Brown v.
Smallwood, which made its argument defectively, and, as written then,
clearly would have applied to IRV as well as Bucklin. We know that
some very smart lawyers were on the Bucklin side (not to mention the
political scientists who generally loved Bucklin), but they were
unable to prevail. And they did not have the political clout to
follow the Supreme Court's advice: if you want to do this, get the
constitution changed to allow it. Politics as usual, folks, it has
little to do with what the best voting methods are.
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