At 01:55 PM 1/22/2010, James Gilmour wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax > Sent: Friday, January 22, 2010 5:53 PM
> > At 03:57 AM 1/22/2010, James Gilmour wrote:
> >This
> >second set of rules are those that prescribe the transfer of votes
> >"to the bitter end", i.e. even after the winners have all been
> >determined. Under this rule a ballot marked "A" would be treated
> >differently from a ballot marked "A>B": at the last possible
> >transfer, the "A" ballot would become 'non-transferable
> >(exhausted)', but the "A>B" ballot would be transferred to A.
>
> You mean transferred to B, of course.
Apologies - my example was incomplete. To illustrate this stupid
rule properly, I should have posited two candidates, A and B, (or
just two left after all others have been eliminated), with A the
winner. Then consider two ballots, one marked B and the other
marked B>A. In the last round of a count under the "to the bitter
end" transfer rule, the ballot marked B would be
'non-transferrable (exhausted)', but the vote on the B>A ballot
would be transferred to A. It is illogical to treat these ballots
differently in an STV (contingency choice) election and it offends
the underlying concepts of 'Later No Harm' to transfer the B>A
ballot to A.
If truncation is allowed, there is a difference, as you know.
However, if a plurality of ballots is sufficient for victory, it's
irrelevant to the result. The real difference shows up when a true
majority is required.
In Australia, they use the term "absolute majority" as the quota that
must be reached, but that is with mandatory full ranking. So there is
never majority failure, absent a tie, and a majority is always found
when there are only two candidates still standing. Where truncation
is permitted, which is in a few places in Australia, they change the
quota to "a majority of votes for candidates not eliminated." That,
too, never requires that last counting step.
But we have been discussing the general case, and that case most
notably includes elections as described in Robert's Rules of Order,
Newly Revised, RRONR 10th edition, where a single-transferable vote
method is described for single-winner (and a multiwinner variation is
also described, a detail I won't address). RRONR never permits
election without a majority unless a special bylaw has been passed
allowing election by plurality. Which is strongly discouraged.
FairVote managed to confuse nearly everyone with their description of
what is in Robert's Rules. They have slightly modified their rhetoric
since I started nailing them on this, so that generally they aren't
actually lying any more, but they still cherry-pick and create
deceptive implications. If a majority is sought, and full ranking is
optional, and the ballots are ones on which the voter writes
candidates in order of preference, going to the last elimination is
quite proper, for one has thereby found all the ballots containing a
vote for the leader. If that is not a majority of all ballots, the
election fails.
And, yes, this violates Later No Harm. If only a plurality is
required, Later No Harm is not violated. LNH is incompatible with a
majority requirement, unless voters are coerced or misled, that is
one of the dirty little secrets of IRV.
In RRONR elections, the voters are not constrained to a list of
candidates. In the normal procedure, the ballots are blank, and the
voter writes down the names of candidates, ranking them. The voter
may vote for *anyone*, including ineligible candidates or Donald
Duck, or, more importantly, Mr. None of the Above.
Why does RRONR even propose the STV method? Good question! They
propose it in cases where repeated balloting is not considered
practical. But they think of it as a way to find a majority, and they
advise the voters to rank "all the candidates," cautioning that if
they don't, it is possible that no candidate will get a majority,
thus requiring the election to be repeated.
Now, this is what I've found in studying U.S. elections with IRV. In
partisan elections, IRV sometimes works and finds a better winner,
clearly more democratic, than FPTP or Plurality. In nonpartisan
elections, however, at least in these public elections studied, IRV
simply reproduces the results of Plurality. There is enough evidence
to come to the conclusion that exceptions would be rare and typically
close elections.
We have been discussing the election in Burlington, Vermont. There, a
naive impression can be created that Plurality would have elected
Wright, the Republican, he did get the most first preference votes.
However, prior to IRV being adopted there, they used top two runoff,
with a 40% requirement for election, otherwise a runoff was held
between the top two. The runoff would have been between Kiss and
Wright. Likely result would have been the same as with IRV.
The problem is that, while Kiss was a better winner than Wright, the
eliminated Democrat, Montroll, was a beats-all winner, based on the
expressed votes. Burlington politics are complicated. In this
election, there were four major vote-getters (some analyses neglect
the fourth, Smith, but he got 15% of the first preference vote). The
more there are significant candidates, the more IRV can break down.
IRV works to reduce the first-order spoiler effect in a two-party
system, but, with three parties at rough parity, plus a fourth that
is significant, it's a mess.
And the shame is that there is a much better method handy. It doesn't
fully satisfy later-no-harm, but if you want real majorities, as do
most jurisdictions that have been sold IRV as a top-two-runoff
replacement, later no harm is broken anyway.
> >This second rule is, of course, a stupid rule but that does not mean
> >it has not been implemented in some jurisdictions, including,
> >sadly, Scotland.
>
> Not stupid, precisely because of the difference between A>B and A.
> The former is an acceptance of the last listed preference, the latter
> is not. It makes a difference if a majority is required. Not if it is
> not, though it might make a difference with some methods. But not IRV.
But my comments were exclusively in the context of STV elections
(IRV, STV-PR, RCV).
And I'm talking about STV elections, as described in the most popular
parliamentary procedure manual in the United States.
What's your problem with the full counting, however? It doesn't cause
LNH failure in the context you describe, because the uncovering of
those last votes does not change the result, it merely provides a
kind of blessing. Or not!
> > It is also a highly undesirable rule because it means that my vote
> > could, in some circumstances, be transferred to
> >the candidate I deliberately ranked last in the lowest possible
> >place, e.g. 12th out of 12 candidates.
>
> Basically, if there are as many ranks as candidates, don't vote for
> that last one! That's your choice, unless full ranking is required,
> in which case you *can't* vote the truncated vote and it is
> irrelevant if it's counted or not.
That's why when running an STV election where we can use "write in"
boxes for all preferences, I always provide one fewer preference
box than the number of candidates (as I see you recommended in a
later part of your post). But all of our ballots for public
elections have the candidates names printed on them.
Here, write-in votes are allowed in all primary elections. Sometimes
they are allowed in runoff elections.
In general, preferential voting encourages the expansion of declared
candidacies.
When it comes to the bottom of the candidate barrel, I would not
personally vote for the last few unless I had a strong preference
between them. With IRV, that could be a tough choice.
But the vistas open up if we use and advanced voting system for a
primary, still requiring a majority or some threshold that is
reliable for predicting that it will become a majority in a runoff.
(40% isn't that, but it is better than raw plurality: in the
Burlington election, for example, we can assume that if the voters
didn't alter their behavior and voted sincerely, the 40% requirement
did suffice to detect a bad plurality result.)
See, James, I start by considering as an ideal election method
full-on deliberative process, majority required. That is only not
done on the excuse of efficiency. Can you imagine a Parliament using
IRV to elect the Prime Minister?
No, they simply use repeated ballot if they must complete an
election, or, if I have it right, the incumbent remains if there is
majority failure. Or does something happen on a loss of a vote of
confidence? (I'm not a student of parliamentary systems even though I
advocate electing officers deliberatively in a legislature,
parliament, or assembly, instead of direct elections by single
ballot; the officers become, then, like public employees, hired and
fired at will.)
Now, to optimize voting systems, I then look at what will simulate
repeated ballot. IRV absolutely does not do that, because IRV is STV
and STV is sequential elimination of candidates, and repeated ballot
does not eliminate candidates at all. Each ballot is a new election
and could possibly have completely different candidates.
So, first of all, I want to see a winner gain an uncoerced majority.
Now, in the study of Approval Voting, the concept of repeated
balloting with declining approval threshold has been considered. In
pure repeated balloting, the voters eventually make compromises (or
sometimes they do even better, they actually revised their opinions
or bring in a new candidate who actually is more satisfactory
overall). We can't do the new-candidate thing with a simulated
series, but we can imitate the lowering of approval thresholds.
And that is what Bucklin does, and particularly Bucklin-ER, or pure
Instant Runoff Approval Voting. It could even become more accurate:
the voter would provide a range ballot, and the method would start
out by looking at max-rated candidates, seeking a majority, then
sliding down the scale to add approvals as they appear, until a
majority is found. At each step we have an approval election with a
particular approval threshold. If we want a "majority of votes," we
would specify some level on the Range ballot (in advance, the voters
must know it to make their decisions well) that is "approval." And
votes below that level might be used in selecting runoff candidates,
if there is majority failure, but would not, in themselves, ever
determine a winner in a primary. The might in a runoff, and this
would be a compromise for efficiency, if it is considered that a
third ballot is impractical.
Bucklin, as I assume you know, was called American Preferential
Voting at the time it was rather widely adopted (almost a hundred
jurisdictions adopted it), and it was simpler than the Range-Bucklin
I describe, but the basic idea is there, and the only problem was
that, like IRV here, it was sold as a way to find majorities without
runoff elections. Naturally, it failed to do that, because people
would, in fact, truncate with Bucklin just as they do with IRV. (And
probably more so, a bit. Not as much as FairVote claims.)
> > Following on from the
> >concept of 'Later No Harm' (which underpins the whole of contingency
> >voting, as in IRV and STV-PR), it is very important to be able
> >to give a voter the absolutely assurance that under no circumstances
> >will her vote ever be transferred to the candidate she has
> >ranked 12th out of 12. Sadly, the stupid "transfer to the bitter
> >end" rule undermines this.
>
> Only because of voter ignorance, an ignorance which has sometimes
> been encouraged by activists.
No, not at all. This is a piece of nonsense that some have
introduced into STV counting, especially since electronic counting
became available. It does not feature in any of the
long-established versions of STV counting rules promoted in the UK.
Are there any applications of STV counting rules for single-winner
elections in the UK, where a majority is required or there is a
repeat election?
Bottom line, though, what actually simulates repeated elections well
is Bucklin. It allows voters to classify candidates into three ranks,
which might be called Favorite, Preferred, and Acceptable. While it
doesn't satisfy Later-No-Harm, strictly, it doesn't actually help the
lower-ranked candidate beat the more-favored one, because what
happens is that the ranked votes collapse into multiple approvals,
which are abstentions, in effect, from that pair-wise election. But
they aren't true abstentions, rather they contribute a vote to all
supported candidates toward gaining a majority, either in the second
or third round of counting. (or a plurality in the end, if that is
allowed to complete.)
Instead of "your lower ranked vote won't hurt your more-favored
candidate because it won't be counted until your more-favored
candidate is eliminated" it becomes, "your lower ranked vote won't
hurt your more-favored candidate, ever, because it won't be counted
until it is known that your more-favored candidate won't win with a
majority, but your vote for your favorite will only help your
favorite over your lower preference up to the point that the majority
hasn't been found and lower preference votes are counted. It isn't
actually Later-No-Harm violation, it is Later-No-Help. If you add a
lower preference vote, you may end up with the preference being lost,
but both candidates are then preferred over all others.
I've noticed that if you have a relatively strong first preference,
you could skip the second rank and only add additional approvals in
the third rank. In original Bucklin, multiple voting was only allowed
in the third rank, but this, by the way, is a counterexample to the
claim that Approval Voting hasn't ever been used for a public
election. Bucklin is really a close form of Approval, it simply
phases in the votes instead of counting them all at once as with
standard Approval. In many Bucklin elections, all the ranks were
counted, so it became pure Approval.
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