still haven't found the time to do another treatise on this thing.
On 1/21/12 2:47 PM, David L Wetzell wrote:
On Fri, Jan 20, 2012 at 3:59 PM, Jameson Quinn
<[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
Like I wrote, the only way a non-CW can win w. IRV is if the
two biggest parties do not center themselves around the
center. This possibility is what will goad them to recenter
themselves more often. That is what would have happened in
Burlington if the anti-IRV campaign had not succeeded.
1. This sounds to me like: "Sorry about your house. And your
neighbors'. But actually, it's kind of good this happened. It will
teach people in the future to leave enough space between their
houses for us to fire these test missiles. And that way, they'll
have room for bigger gardens." That is, a disaster is excused as
good because it will encourage actions that will prevent later
disasters and also have other benefits. To me, a disaster is a
disaster.
that's a tautology, so it's pretty hard to argue with. what's not a
tautology is equating electing the non-CW IRV winner to office to a
missile disaster or burning houses.
the election of the non-CW in the IRV election in Burlington in 2009 is
an "anomaly" and is indicative of a "pathology". "disaster" is too
strong of a description. because of some local political issues (this
Prog mayor had propped up a city-owned telecommunications company with
$17 million from the city's cash pool and there is an additional $33
million owed to Citibank or Citigroup) some had been calling it a
"disaster" and was one of the bullshit reasons for opposing IRV.
dlw: There is no good reason to call the election of the Prog mayor in
Burlington with IRV a disaster. It is an outcome whose effect would
have been to move the status quo to relocate the two biggest parties
around the true political center for Burlington. If it was a disaster
then you'd think it would have been shot-down by more than just a
little over 50% after a very deceptive campaign funded by the
defenders of the status quo.
Why are you giving oxygen to the tripe peddled by the lovers of FPTP
or Democracy In Name Only(DINO)?
because the "IRV happy talk" was lacking of credibility. anyone who
denied that there was any problem with the 2009 election in Burlington
quickly lost credibility in the argument. that is why i am mad at that
pro-IRV side in the 2010 repeal election even though i voted with them
on the repeal question.
2. Exactly who is supposed to move the center? First you have D vs
R. Then the center moves left. D is quite happy with their
permanent victories, so they won't move left; and so R has no room
to. Then discontented leftists start P and pass R. The rational
strategic response would be for D to move so far right that it
crushes R and makes it into the final round, so that D and P are
the new major parties. But center squeeze makes that hard; and
also human nature makes it hard to respond to a new interloper
from your left by moving right. It might also work R to move left,
ignoring D, and hope that when D and R really are clones then D
will be circumstantially a bit behind and so be eliminated first,
so that R and P will be the new major parties. But that means
embracing a 50/50 gamble. It's almost impossible for all of this
to work itself out without at least one, and probably more,
spoiled elections; and then we're back to point 1 above.
dlw: Yes, it's indeterminant who will be the new two major parties for
the local area, but either way they'll be centered around the true
center. And, the "spoiled" election will be spoiled in the right (or
center-ward) direction rather than the wrong direction with FPTP. And
with learning, it'll become more customary for the two biggest parties
to adjust to the moving center so that these sorts of "spoiled"
elections are not likely.
But it's inane to think that a particular third party is going
to be able to get as strong as the Prog party of VT in
Burlington at the Nat'l level w.o. getting coopted by the
major parties, jealous to keep their duopoly positions. So
the chances of this happening are nil in prez elections.
Watching the Republicans repeatedly shoot themselves in both feet,
throwing away what could have been a winnable election for them,
doesn't give me confidence that major US parties will always
embrace rationality.
dlw: The wages of FPTP are the game "Bloody the leader for a bloody
long time"... but it's only because of the lack of intra-party
discipline that their primaries are going on so long. That can be
remedied easily...
The problem with IRV in such elections wd be vote-counting and
that is fixed by IRV3/AV3....
Well... OK, I guess, although it's still only summable O(Nˆ3),
which is worse than any other polynomial-summable system I know of
(except some summable RRV-like pseudo-PR systems I've invented and
never published).
dlw: Dude, in real life, the difficulties of winning a single-winner
election(time/money commitments vs relative chance of winning) keeps N
down and so it's not useful to extrapolate....
with computers counting, i am not terribly worried about the
computational burden of either IRV or Condorcet. but the precinct
summability remains important. even IRV can be precinct summable, but
the number of piles (it's the subtotals for each pile that is
transmitted up the line to the central election authority and also
promulgated to the media, campaigns, and other interested parties) when
the number of candidates grows is much higher than either FPTP and
Condorcet. of course, precinct summability is important for
transparency which is important for election integrity.
dlw: What about IRV3/AV3? Like I said above, it's not easy
for a third party to get as strong as VT Prog was in
Burlington at the state or nat'l level... and the dynamics wd
be towards a change in the nature of the two major parties
more so than the continuation of a competitive 3-way election....
IRV3/AV3 doesn't fix spoilers. And as I said above... (see args 1
and 2).
it can, but does not always. i would say IRV fixes the hard-core
spoiler problem (strictly speaking, a "spoiler" is a candidate with NO
chance of being elected whose presence in the race changes the outcome
of the election) but not the "spoiler-lite" problem. the GOP candidate
was the spoiler-lite in 2009. nonetheless, IIA applies whether the
spoiler is hard-core (like Nader) or lite (like Kurt Wright in 2009 and
who is the GOP candidate again this year).
IRV works like shit when the election is between three or more
candidates with roughly equal support. that is how i imagine when we
finally arrive at a viable and lasting multiparty environment. if only
2 parties hog nearly all of the support, it's essentially still a
two-party system.
It matters for the world who "spoils" for who. The threat of spoiling
instills a center-ward dynamism that is abstracted from in most
rational choice theories of electoral rules because it's hard to model
deterministically, as you demonstrate above.
i do not understand what you mean. *any* spoiler, when discovered, will
result in a tactical pressure for the group that supported that spoiler
and hated who was actually elected. here in Burlington, it was the GOP
Prog-haters. if IRV survived to this year, these folks, if they're
savvy, would have to consider whether marking their favorite candidate
as #1 will *again* cause the election of their least favorite
candidate. that is precisely the tactical voting (the tactic is called
"compromising") that we were trying to avoid with the adoption of IRV.
rather than eliminate that burden of tactical voting, it was reduced by
transferring it from the shoulders of the liberal majority (that didn't
have a painful choice between Dem and Prog) to the GOP Prog-haters, a
smaller group who found out that simply by marking their favorite as #1,
they *caused* the election of their least favorite. that's gotta make
some people mad.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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