On 11/15/2012 04:25 AM, Richard Fobes wrote:
On 11/13/2012 3:29 AM, aGREATER.US wrote:
Incumbents have a huge unfair advantage in that corporations
> (including unions) pour money into their reelection campaigns.
> ...
Easily overlooked is the fact that corporations elect their board
members using single-mark ballots, and labor-union members use
single-mark ballots to elect their union leaders.
Keeping in mind the unfairness of elections that use single-mark
ballots, the consequence is that corporations are not under the control
of shareholders, and labor unions are not under the control of voting
labor-union members.
As a consequence, the Republican party is not controlled by individual
investors, and the Democratic Party is not controlled by labor-union
workers.
Instead, both parties are controlled by the biggest campaign
contributors using lots of money that was given to them by people who
are not well-represented by those "elected" corporate/union leaders.
If better ballots and better counting methods were used in corporate
board-member elections and labor-union-leader elections, the Republican
and Democratic parties would come closer to representing the majority of
voters (even without any improvements in governmental elections).
I've thought that one way to get reform starting is to use the advocated
methods in organizations - a sort of bottom-up approach, if you will.
Why should we expect the voters to jump right onto something untested
when they don't know how it's going to act? Some kind of precedent would
be very useful.
In Fa!rvote's case, they're trying to establish that precedent by local
elections, to varying degrees of success. Quite a number of these local
areas seem to have voters that discover what IRV is doing, and rather
than try to salvage it by adjusting their ballots to be less harmful,
throw IRV out.
Schulze's precedent is somewhat different. It consists mostly of
technically minded organizations, as one may see in the Wikipedia list,
(although someone seems to be quite determined to remove these links
from the Schulze method article at the moment). I suppose the influence
here originated from Debian. Debian decided to use Schulze, then other
technically minded organizations decided that if it's good enough for
Debian, it's good enough for them. However, that may not necessarily
carry weight with the voters at large, and I've heard that it is in some
cases being misused for multiwinner elections.
Approval is the simplest improvement upon Plurality, but I'm not
familiar with any organizations or companies using it internally. It is
in use on "user-facing" parts of certain well-known websites, like
Youtube (whose maintainers switched from Range to Approval, presumably
because just about everybody voted min or max).
In any event, switching to a more advanced voting methods would seem to
provide only benefits to a new organization. Unlike a nation or a large
established organization, they don't have to fight an enormous amount of
inertia to get there, and if the advanced methods really are as good as
they say, they'll almost immediately be better off for it. It sounds
like a no-brainer.
However, there might be a hidden reason for why they don't. When an
organization is small, things can be done informally. After it has
grown, inertia becomes a problem. Perhaps in that in-between state, the
organizations or companies (corporations) simply tend to go with what
either has been used before or "seems obvious" until it's too hard to
change?
I'm not an administrator, so I wouldn't know. If there are any among the
EM readers, perhaps they could explain why organizations rarely use more
advanced things than Plurality or the cumulative vote :-)
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