At 12:20 PM 2/8/2010, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
Given that much better methods exist, have been tried and worked,
and are much easier to canvass, WTF?
If I were to guess: in part a desire to produce a stepping stone to
STV, and in part organizational inertia. FairVote bet on IRV and now
will "stay the course".
That's right. One of my first observations on this, when I became
aware of the election methods list and the Approval voting list, and
discovered the Center for Voting and Democracy, which had started as
the Center for Proportional Representation, and which became
FairVote, was that people trying to reform democracy didn't trust
democracy, they would always gravitate toward nondemocratic
institutions which are easily co-opted to become self-preserving and
inflexible. Typical co-opt is by staff!
Yes, it's quite likely that they will stay this course right into the
ground. Hitching proportional representation (a very good idea) on to
single-winner STV (a quite bad idea) may have seemed like a good idea
at the time, perhaps because of the "brilliant" invention of the
name, "instant runoff voting," which itself suggested a strategy to
spread the idea by attacking a vulnerable institution, but it was, in
fact, not sustainable.
Some of the reasons why it is not sustainable were not necessarily
known then. Who would have expected that IRV would closely imitate
Plurality in nonpartisan elections? Lots of people seem to be
surprised that IRV doesn't produce real majorities, but that one was known.
And the prior history of IRV in the U.S. should have been a clue.
What was it replaced with? Often -- not always -- with top two
runoff. Because of the desire for majorities....
To address the former: the grail here would be a polytime monotone
summable multiwinner method that reduces to a good Condorcet variant
(or Bucklin/Range/etc) in the single-winner case. A multiwinner
method can be summable in two ways: summable with the number of
seats held fixed, or summable no matter what.
Well, Asset bypasses the whole shebang, by making what we think of as
"elections" irrelevant. At least in theory. Everyone wins in an Asset
election, or, if not, then there is someone very specific for the
voter to blame: the candidate the voter voted for in first
preference. (Asset may be STV with the Asset tweak for exhausted
ballots, or it could just be vote-for-one. I, personally, would see
no need or desirability to rank more candidates, provided my choice
has a backup (a proxy should be allowed in case of incapacity), but
some people seem to think otherwise. I'd rather not yank my vote away
from my most-trusted candidate to put it in the hands of this
less-trusted candidate, but then to return it to the most trusted if
the less-trusted drops out somehow. .... rules in STV/Asset have not
much been delineated.)
What's important is that we don't know of such a method; but also
that the stepping stone strategy itself might be dangerous - if the
base method is bad, then it may fail to dislodge those whose
interest is in less democracy, and so the objective of moving to
multiwinner never gains any additional strength by the so-called
stepping stone.
My own decision about all this is that it's best to begin with NGOs,
voluntary organizations that demonstrate how advanced methods work.
The Election Science Foundation held an Asset election for its
steering committee. It was quite interesting....
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