Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
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!
"Who says organization, says oligarchy". One has to be careful not to
have the organization become undemocratic, because the default tendency
is for it to turn so, since it is (initially) more effective that way.
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.
I think there's somewhat of an "improvement no matter how small" aspect
to it, as well. "IRV handles the spoiler problem with minor third
parties, woo hoo!" and then they stop there. But how much of that is
after-the-fact justification (means for the ends that is STV) and how
much of that is truly believed is hard to tell.
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....
For multiwinner STV, you could argue that the reason it was replaced was
not because it did so badly, but because it did too well. Consider New
York. After STV, there were many parties, not just the Democratic
stranglehold. What did the Democrats do, seeing their power being
diluted? Since they didn't want to share, they started employing
red-scare tactics, with such rational appeals as calling the method
"Stalin Frankenstein".
As for IRV, the single-winner method, you're probably right. In some
situations, the reason is that it seems to provide no different results
than Plurality. In others, there's complexity (which is made no better
by that IRV isn't summable).
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.)
Dissolving the problem - making it irrelevant - is the best solution,
when it can be done, yes. However, I feel unsure about Asset because it
hands power to someone who may hand power to someone who may ... and so
on. The closest thing to it around in governmental elections is where
parties (or candidates) specify an inheritance order, and your vote
follows that order; what results is that the candidates might transfer
your vote in the wrong direction. For instance, if you vote for X
because of Y, and X also likes some property Z that you don't, then if
he transfers to Z, that is not what you want. Asset's logic is that you
don't have to do that (because you can vote for a minor player and your
vote will still not be wasted), but why doesn't that logic hold for vote
inheritance orders? It seems like it would, yet we see the effect
mentioned above...
The iterated variant (some times called "liquid democracy") has another
problem: the graph (who is a delegate of whom) is transparent -
therefore, vote buying and selling becomes very simple. Now you may say
that the voters won't accept a candidate who sells his power and so will
desert the candidate, but as long as there's inertia (and reality seems
to support that), the problem remains.
If I were to dissolve the problem of elections, I'd rather look towards
Gohlke's triad idea, or a larger PR variant. If the base layers have
some measure of randomization, it becomes hard to influence the
candidates ahead of time, because everyone (who's interested) is a
potential candidate.
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....
Would the various (smaller, usually technical) organizations and groups
using Schulze count in this direction?
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