A clarification would be helpful in this discussion (below).
David seems to be talking about the number of candidates in _general_
elections.
I am more focused on the number of candidates in _primary_ elections.
This is where the greatest unfairnesses now occur. This is where there
should be more candidates.
Specifically, in a congressional election where the district boundaries
do not ensure victory for the incumbent's party, the other party should
have about four to seven credible candidates in their primary election.
IRV cannot handle that many credible candidates.
Richard Fobes
On 5/29/2013 11:44 AM, David L Wetzell wrote:
On 5/28/2013 12:51 PM, David L Wetzell wrote:
>> Richard Fobes wrote:
>> Plurality voting and limited voting (and the Borda count if
the voters
>> are undisciplined) are about the only methods that _cannot_
handle 3 or
>> (maybe) 4 popular choices along with any number of unpopular
choices.
>
> So you agree that IRV works w. relatively few popular candidates?
The results for IRV get worse as the number of candidates increase.
Condorcet methods give fair results regardless of the number of
candidates. Approval voting gives reasonably fair results regardless of
the number of candidates.
IRV can usually -- but not always -- handle 3 candidates. And IRV can
sometimes handle 4 candidates. But IRV becomes quite unreliable -- and
also vulnerable to strategic voting -- if there are 5 or more
candidates.
dlw: So if there is a feedback from the election rule used that tends to
change the number of competitive candidates then it might make sense to
first push IRV and then
something more "advanced" later on, after the expected number of
candidates rises?
> > So it seems disengaged from reality to let C, the number of
> candidates,
> > go to infinity... and if a lot of candidates are not going to get
> > elected then to disregard voter info/preference over them is of
much
> > less consequence.
>
> Although the number of popular candidates is now small,
that's because
> we use plurality voting. When we use better voting methods,
the number
> of popular candidates will increase; of course not to
infinity, but
> frequently beyond the 3 or 4 popular choices that IRV can
handle with
> fairness.
>
> dlw: This is a conjecture. One that I don't think makes economic
sense
> when one considers all that is entailed with a competitive
campaign for
> an important single-seat election.
The biggest campaign contributors (a.k.a. special interests) have forced
voters into the Republican and Democratic parties, and then taken
control of the primary elections of both parties by taking advantage of
vote splitting. All sorts of things will change when these constraints
are removed.
dlw: These constraints won't per se be removed entirely.
Special interests will still exist and $peech will still matter for
elections, regardless
of what election rules get used.
If there exists varying cognitive limits in voters, it doesn't negate
the need for electoral reform but it does mitigate the scope for
expanding the number of competitive candidates/parties, or how much
merely changing the single-winner election rule used would make a
difference.
I believe the diff IRV makes makes it worth it. Given the current
habits of the US, I don't see "advanced-systems" havinge sufficient
additional value-added to justify switching from the extensive marketing
campaign already in place for IRV. If things evolve, it will be easier
to switch from IRV, in part because of widespread habituation to IRV and
how it'll make it harder for those who benefit from the status quo to
divide and conquer advocates of reform.
My point is that Condorcet and Approval methods can handle whatever
number of parties arise. In contrast, IRV will fail if there turn out
to be more than 3 or 4 effective parties, so IRV is not a reliable
choice.
You mean IRV is not reliable if it becomes reasonable to expect for
there to be more than 3 or 4 effective candidates in a single-winner
election... This is not the case in the US today.
> Although it's a non-governmental example, take a look at the
current
> VoteFair American Idol poll. The number of popular music
genres is
> about 5, and there are about 7 singers who get more than a few
> first-choice votes.
>
> http://www.votefair.org/cgi-bin/votefairrank.cgi/votingid=idols
>
> IRV would correctly identify the most popular music genre
(based on
> current results), but probably would not correctly identify
the most
> popular singer.
>
> Apples and Oranges.
> There's no serious economic costs to competing in American Idol
and so
> the number of competitive singers is not naturally hampered by
that and
> the need for a large support base or expensive advertisements or
> connections for important endorsements.
Here you seem to be saying that IRV is OK in governmental elections even
though it can't handle a singing contest.
Only because the number of competitive candidates tends to be
significantly lower, as is consistent with my economics-based argument.
> Why would voters trust a voting method that stops getting
fair results
> with so few popular candidates?
>
> Because when one considers the potential candidates have for
taking on
> ideas, there isn't a need for a large number of candidates to
make the
> de facto center much more like the true center.
>
> Only among theorists does one constrain candidates to fixed
positions in
> policy-spaces.
Actually I see politics as multi-dimensional, which is why I don't talk
about left and center and right (because that's one-dimensional).
dlw: But any multi-dim policy-space can be collapsed into a one-dim
system. So left/center/right can still prove useful... and my more
important point about candidates/parties shifting within the one or
multi-dim system still holds in mitigating the import of raising the
number of competitive candidates.
We can increase the expected quality of competitive candidates w.o.
increasing the expected number of competitive candidates much.
> Yes, IRV is easy to explain, but that advantage becomes
unimportant as
> the number of popular candidates increases, which it will
when better
> voting methods are adopted.
>
> That may be your story, but when one adds realism with folks able to
> express voice thru other means besides voting then it becomes less
> important to amp up C much. The non-competitive candidates can still
> move the center.
I don't know what your words here mean. As I said, "center" implies
one-dimensional thinking, and I see things as multi-dimensional (which
means there is lots of cross-party voting [although mainstream media
mistakenly calls those voters "undecided"]).
dlw: There is still a center in a multi-dim system and it's not per se
either multi-dim or single-dim, since a multi-dim can be collapsed into
a single-dim.
> And the opportunity cost of trying to settle on an alternative
> alternative to FPTP than IRV will become apparent.
I support the idea of having (initially, small) organizations try out
different kinds of voting and letting that process educate citizens as
to what works and what doesn't.
dlw: But if the scale is small then the number of competitive candidates
will tend to be bigger, which in turn will affect the relative value of
IRV vs non-IRV and so there needs
to be a mindfulness of how the expected number of competitive candidates
matters.
This means I oppose the belief that IRV is the only method that should
be tried. It has been tried, and the results have not been impressive.
dlw: The jury is still out and there's also an aggressive status quo
that has a strong perverse incentive to stir up rivalries among
advocates for different electoral alternatives to FPTP. As an advocate
for alternative rules than IRV you aren't the most disengaged person
from the assessment of the evicence.
One broader point underlies this discussion. A major reason why the
U.S. has only two political parties is that if a third-party
Presidential candidate gets even a (relatively) few _electoral_ votes,
that would likely block a majority of votes going to either the
Republican or Democratic candidate, and that would throw the election
into the House of Representatives (with each state getting one vote),
and the House is not going to choose the third-party candidate. That
scenario has happened in the past, and the after-effect is the
abandonment of an otherwise strong third party. IRV would not solve
this problem, yet many proponents of IRV seem to think it would, and
accordingly (but mistakenly) they promote IRV as a way to help third
parties grow in popularity.
dlw: I doubt anyone who supports 3rd parties wants IRV alone. IRV in
our prez election wd get 3rd party candidates R-E-S-P-E-C-T and help
them to move the "de facto" political center that the two major parties
tend to center around. They may want that a lot more than an end to our
two-party system.
For there's nothing intrinsic to a two-party dominated system to be as
dysfunctional as our current two-party dominated system with its tilt
towards becoming a single-party dominated system.
dlw
Richard Fobes
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