i s'pose it's about time for me to write something and send it to
Adrian. is it too late? it would be an analysis of what we, in
Burlington Vermont, wanted to accomplish with the adoption of IRV in
2005 and how it failed in 2009.
On 5/5/12 11:05 PM, Richard Fobes wrote:
You ask for evidence to support my claim that most election-method
experts do not regard the Favorite Betrayal Criterion as being as
important as the Condorcet criterion. On the election-method forum my
observation is that far fewer participants have expressed support for
FBC compared to Condorcet compliance. We could conduct a poll here on
the forum if you think I am mistaken.
the reason that it is silly and undemocratic to elect someone who is not
the Condocet Winner is simple: if you do that, you have elected to
office a candidate when *more* of us voters marked explicitly on our
ballots that we wanted someone else. if more of us voters agree that
Candidate A is a better choice for office than those of us who agree
that Candidate B is better, then what sense of democracy is upheld by
electing Candidate B?
everyone, even the dumb First-Past-The-Post reactionaries, agree in a
simple two-candidate race, that the candidate with the most votes (the
"simple majority") wins. if a CW exists and you elect someone else (as
we did in Burlington in 2009) you fail that fundamental criterion.
that's why i hold the Condorcet criterion higher than FBC or whatever
alphabet soup Mike tosses out. it's a proof by contradiction.
On 5/5/2012 12:00 AM, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
back to Plurality.
I'm embarrassed to have to repeat this again:
If, in Plurality, you really vote for your favorite, then you will or
should approve only hir in Approval.
If, in Plurality, you instead vote for a less-liked "lesser-of-2-evils",
then, in Approval, you'd probably approve hir, and, additionally,
everyone whom you like better, including your favorite(s).
perhaps it's appropriate to be embarrassed.
do you propose to post these suggested instruction for voters at the
polls? do you expect that any decent proportion of voters would go into
the booth, pull the curtain, and strategize thusly?
besides the experience that Burlington Vermont has had with IRV, it
seems interesting to me to note that the state senate district that
Burlington is in is the largest multi-seat legislative district in the
country (most number of seats). that was confirmed again in the news
yesterday when they were discussing the new legislative district maps
that were just enacted in consequence to the 2010 census. and it
remains a 6 seat district. there are 6 nominees each from the major
parties (the Progs put in a few, but maybe not 6) and our voting
instructions are to vote for no more than six. but people have figured
out that the Democrat candidates are not just running against the
Republicans or Progressives, they are running against each other. no
one i know votes for all 6. if voters do not exhaust the number of
votes allowed on this single race, then it is essentially Approval
voting. and it's *full* of strategizing.
perhaps these are perfectly good tactics to take into the booth in an
Approval election, but it's unreasonable to expect voters that are any
less savvy than the most sophisticated to know about, think about, and
take these tactics into the voting booth. *and*, as a matter of general
principle, we want to *remove* any burden of tactical voting from the
general electorate. we want them to not have to worry about their
contingency vote acting to harm their favorite.
In other words, the only difference is that people are supporting
candidates whom they like more. A more liked candidate is being elected.
Richard neglected to tell us how that would make people want to go back
to Plurality.
It would be difficult to try to argue that it's bad to elect to an
office the candidate who has been approved for that
office by the most voters.
Someone could say, "But what if some approvals are _strategic?" No,
it's still true that that winning candidate has been approved for the
office by the most voters. It isn't for us to question their motives.
the issue is not about questioning the motives of voters. again, the
issue is about saddling them with a burden of strategic voting that
*might* force these voters to betray their favorite by also approving of
a contingency candidate. it's only when the contingency candidate beats
the favorite, especially when both the favorite and contingency
candidate turn out to be unchallenged by the hated candidate that voters
may actually choose to cast a tactical vote against (the tactic called
"compromising") that voters experience regret.
--
r b-j [email protected]
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
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