On Apr 18, 2010, at 6:39 PM, Kevin Venzke wrote:
--- En date de : Dim 18.4.10, robert bristow-johnson <[email protected]
> a écrit :
now i disagree with Gierzynski's value system here, but i
agree with him about the consequences. if the Liberals
in Burlington want to minimize the likelihood of electing
the Conservative candidate for mayor, they will now need to
seriously consider putting together a *single* coalition
candidate rather than run a candidate from each of the Prog
or Dem caucuses. Gierzynski thinks this is good, i
think it's bad.
It seems like you must mostly disagree with what you quoted.
i disagree with the essential point he is making, although i don't
take great issue with some of his axioms taken loosely.
what i agree with (as i read it): in order to win elections and become
politically effective or relevant, participants need to decide what is
most important, seek out other participants that have common goals
regarding what is most important, and collaborate or coalesce with
these persons. this is why Kucinich supporters (or Hillary
supporters) needed to get behind Obama when it was getting clear where
that train was going (sorry to be U.S. centric but it's what i know
best). it is why, in Vermont, when "Independent" Senator Bernie
Sanders is running, the Democrats do *not* bother to endorse a
candidate to oppose him. that is a political strategy, but not
necessarily a political value (such as "majority rule" or "transparent
elections" or "inclusive voter participation" are political values).
so Gierzynski conflates a legitimate political strategy as a political
value and i do not. essentially, if done well (and IRV does not do it
so good), a Preferential Voting system (ranked ballot) can allow for
this coalition building to happen on Election Day. what Gierzynski
thinks is that the lines should be drawn well in advance of the
election and to narrow this thing down to the "thems" and the "us"
right away in the party caucuses and i think that the whole election
season should be put to use in laying out political territory beneath
the various, possibly overlapping, constituencies. who says that it's
the Dems and the Progs that have the most in common? maybe some year
the GOP will run an attractive, smart, and moderate candidate and the
GOPs and Dems team up and blast the Progs outa the water. or maybe
(and this has happened in Burlington City Council) the GOP and Progs
team up to stick it to the Dems. it all depends on who the candidates
are on some particular year and the changing political landscape.
Preferential Voting allows for contingency information to be taken
from the voters and, with Condorcet, all contingencies can be
considered on equal grounding (rather than IRV which somehow
eliminates contingencies it sometimes erroneously thinks is less
relevant). every voter's weight is equal and all the voter expresses
is "between Candidate A and Candidate B, i choose Candidate A" for
every pair of candidates. that results in the ballot ranking and
there is no quantitative measure required from the voter for how much
he/she prefers candidate A over B (or any other candidate). it uses
*only* the qualitative (or binary) information that A is preferred
over B (which is identical to what FPP does with two candidates, and
no one disagrees with how that kind of election should be decided: the
candidate with the most votes is also the candidate with the majority
support). it doesn't make any dumb quantitative assumptions that
Borda or Score make and only assumes that every voter's weight is equal.
then Condorcet considers every contingency just as if it were
announced to the voters on Election Day that the election was only
between A and B (or between A and C or between B and C) and picks out
the consistent winner out of all possible contingencies. if there is
a CW, it can't possibly be worse for Warren's metric of "Bayesean
Regret", no one can regret the rankings they made because it wouldn't
help their political interests if they changed it from their sincere
rankings. if there is no CW, we have problems, but i think that
either Schulze or Tideman have a meaningful resolution to that.
my metric of goodness for an election method is not minimizing
Bayesean regret but is in minimizing mean voter disappointment in the
election result. that's why we don't give the office to the loser
(the minority candidate) in a simple 2-candidate FPP race - more
voters would be disappointed with that result than would be
disappointed by awarding the office to the person with the greater
number of votes. and then the question is, with 3 or more candidates,
how do we minimize disappointment among the electorate? i think the
answer is to consider what all the possible 2-candidate permutations
are (the "contingencies") and to award the office to the only
consistent majority winner (if such exists). i think that is obvious,
because the alternative is to possibly award the office to a candidate
when there exists another candidate that the majority of the
electorate agree is a better candidate. to pick anyone other than the
CW is do disappoint the majority of the electorate.
What worries me is the possibility that every time we succeed in
implementing an election method which can handle any number of
candidates that we throw at it, we will mostly see scenarios with
one or two strong candidates and a half-dozen losers that never
coalesced into anything, so that we mostly will not be able to tell
the difference in effect from just using FPP.
i dunno about France, but is that the case in Italy? or Israel? i
thought there were a bunch of countries with a half dozen contending
parties or more. it looks to me that even the UK has three
significant parties.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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