At 07:36 AM 6/16/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
On 06/14/2013 09:06 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 12:44 AM 6/14/2013, Chris Benham wrote:
My suggested 2-round method using Approval ballots is to elect the
most approved first-round candidate A if A is approved on more than
half the ballots, otherwise elect the winner of a runoff between A and
the candidate that is most approved on ballots that don't show
approval for A.
Yeah. My general position is that runoff voting can be *vastly improved*
by some fairly simple tweaks, or by using an advanced voting system, in
the primary and maybe in the runoff. Approval is an advanced voting
system *and* a tweak on Plurality.
Parties fielding 2 candidates is a disempowering move, in general,
weakening campaigning. I'm generally opposed to "open primaries" in
partisan elections. A unified primary makes sense in a non-partisan
election.
Couldn't open primaries weaken party leadership and so encourage the
transition from Duverger-style two party rule into multipartyism? As
long as the primary/runoff method can handle multiple candidates,
that is. Or do you think the leadership would instead say that "we
need to stick together or the other party, that keeps party
discipline, will divide and conquer us with much stronger focused campaigning"?
Open primaries attack the underlying principle of parties as
voluntary organizations. The first chip in this principle occurred
when major political parties allowed their nomination process to be
handled at public expense, instead of organizing it independently.
Open primaries allow candidates to declare as affiliated with a party
without *any* recognition from the party. And how would a party
designated a candidate for an open primary? That would require their
own selection process!
When a political party has a leadership that is not responsive to the
membership, that party can be predicted, long-term, to lose support.
And that's exactly how it should be.
I don't know what the effect will be of open primaries. However, if
you want to look at a pathological example, look at Lizard v. Wizard.
That was an open primary.
The *biggest* problem with open primaries is when they are
vote-for-one. This, then, can easily lead to serious vote-splitting,
with the true most-widely-supported candidate losing. And in those
primaries, the party stands by, helpless, it might seem, because
candidates simply claim to be affiliated with the party. If it's a
*party primary,* that's different. *Hosts* of problems arise, though,
when there are *public elections* that create binding results for
party nominations. Bottom line, they are no longer party nominations.
They are something else. A majority of party members may be against
them. Tough.
And we need to understand something about nonpartisan elections. They
are *very different* as to voter behavior from partisan elections. What
seems to be, from the behavior of nonpartisan IRV, is that voters vote
on name recognition and affect. It is the kind of thing that is heavily
influenced by public exposure of the candidates, and it has little to do
with "political position" on a spectrum. Voters do not appear to be
voting as if there is this spectrum, with second preferences then being
predictable from spectrum position of the candidates and the voter.
It'd be interesting to run some kind of SVD on cardinal polls in
such elections to confirm whether that's the case, but I trust you
:-) You certainly know more about non-partisan elections than I do,
since pretty much every election here is partisan. It's a
consequence of the party list method we use.
Right. With party list you are voting for the party. Short of Asset,
great system. The place to look for nonpartisan elections in such a
system is in how the parties themselves determine their party list.
Is that list determined democratically by party members? If it is,
that's a nonpartisan election. If it is determined by "leadership,"
it may be something else. How does the leadership make decisions?
(However, I do note that in one of the few cities that have direct
mayoral elections, a candidate from a very left-wing party was
elected. This party has about 2-3% national support, and I get the
impression he was elected on "nonpartisan" grounds - by character
and quality rather than by political affiliation.)
That happens, even in partisan elections. Was his party listed on the
ballot? If so, that was what we call a "partisan election."
Open primaries here follow a fairly new innovation: party name on the
ballot *without any approval from the party.* Yet candidates are only
allowed to use a "recognized party name." Specifically, this is a
party with ballot recognition. All others are "unaffiliated" or the like.
I would conceptualize Chris's system this way. It's a 2-winner approval
method, designed to maximize *representation* on the runoff ballot.
Voters who approve A are already represented, so, it makes sense to only
consider ballots not approving of A in determining the other runoff
candidate.
Yes, and it probably does so to a greater degree than a PR method would.
It could. It radically deprecates the "party" of the leader for the
second choice. I can see this, in a primary, being used to select
*three* candidates for the runoff. (And then a decent method is used
for the runoff. Approval is a tad too unselective. Bucklin, in fact,
could be close to perfect. Instant runoff Approval. That's if we want
to limit runoffs to a single poll. Multiple polls could use Approval,
i.e, one could go to three polls with only two allowed to advance.
This keeps the terminally simple Approval ballot. Bucklin is *close* to that.
Consider a case where we have a candidate that's preferred nearly
unanimously, and then another candidate preferred by the slight
minority that remains. Assuming Chris's method doesn't have a
threshold similar to the "greater than majority support and he
wins" threshold of TTR, the method would pick both candidates
mentioned above for the runoff. On the other hand, if the majority
is sufficiently large, a PR method could pick two candidates
preferred by the near-unanimous majority.
Right. Now, is that bad? I see advantages to each.
I don't think that would make much of a difference in a runoff,
though. If candidate A is preferred (approved) by a near-unanimous
group, meaning that candidate is considered to be vastly superior to
everybody else, then that group will have the power to make him win
in the runoff.
And then the question is why we are going to the expense and bother
of a runoff? If the primary is merely a nominating system, that would
explain it. Low-participation primary, generally, picking candidates
for a general election that gives the voters a significant choice, at
the most convenient election for them to vote in.
The issue is more whether a runoff should aim towards maximizing
representation (as Chris's method, as well as minmax Approval,
tries to do), common center focus (as top-n Approval would do
absent deliberate clones) or some combination of both (as PR methods would do).
Asset, of course, totally sidesteps all these issues, by shoving
elections into deliberative process. However, short of that, I'm
liking the simplicity of Chris's method. Very simple to canvass:
1. total all votes. Single majority? Done, unless a runoff is *mandatory*.
2. If no majority, candidate with the most votes goes into the runoff.
3. Pull all ballots with a vote for that candidate. Retotal remaining votes.
4. Candidate with the most votes wins the second runoff position.
5. (repeat if needed for more candidates).
However, limiting the runoff or general election ballot to two
candidates is an unnecessary restriction. It is only a false majority
that is created when candidates are eliminated, and, as we know, the
pathologies of elimination systems are rooted in that elimination.
As a compromise, up to three candidates can be permitted on the runoff
ballot, using an advanced voting system that can handle three candidates
well, and the selection can include much better criteria that mere top
two. If a ranked ballot with sufficient ranks is used, condorect winners
can be identified and placed in the runoff, thus making the overall
method condorcet compliant, i.e., a persistent Condorcet winner would be
identified as such -- publically known -- and would win *unless voter
preferences change or turnout shows that the condorcet preference
strength is low.*
One possible way of doing that would be to use a combinatorial PR
method where you force-include the winner from the other type of
system. For instance, you might render cardinal ballots into ordinal
ballots and then run Schulze STV on them - but force the inclusion
of the Range (or MJ or whatnot) winner in the outcome. If the
Range/etc winner would appear in the winning Schulze STV outcome,
you don't lose anything; if it wouldn't, you've ensured the
representation of both strength-of-preference winners and ordinal winners.
It's probably way too complex, though, but it shows that making such
"combination slates" is indeed possible; and if the basis method is
PR, then it degrades gracefully - e.g. if the election is partisan
and the cardinal winner leans left, then that won't bias the list of
candidates leftward because the PR method will compensate for the
fixed winner that has to be included.
It's fairly obvious that the future of voting systems is toward hybrid methods.
Another approach with a fixed general election and the primary not being
the election, but a determination of ballot position, would be to run
the primary as three-winner STV, with an advanced method in the runoff
(not STV, single winner STV is atrocious.)
In an attempt to find a PR method that passed weak monotonicity, I
made one that is based on Bucklin. It reduces to Bucklin in the n=1
case while passing the Droop proportionality criterion for n>1. I
*think* it also passes weak monotonicity, but I'm not sure of this:
all I have is lack of evidence to the contrary, not a mathematical proof.
Simplicity and ease of understanding are important values.
(Here, for multiwinner methods, weak monotonicity means that if the
outcome includes X, then raising X can't push X off. It's not
"strong", because if the outcome includes X and Y, raising X could
push Y off and vice versa.)
Well, yes.
Anyway, the reason I mention it is because it reduces to Bucklin. So
using that method would mean that you don't have to use a different
method in the single-winner and multiwinner case, or in the
different rounds of the runoff. It is limited, though: It doesn't
support the kind of skipped-ranks feature some Bucklin methods do.
It's very strange to me that Bucklin seems to be the poor stepsister
of voting systems, when I started learning about this field. FairVote
was writing pieces about the history that radically distorted it. I
made up the name "Instant runoff approval," because that's what it
was. Then I noticed that the ballot was actually a Range ballot,
i.e., sane strategy indicated voting as if it were a Range ballot
covering the approved range (default vote, unapproved.) Jameson has
been running with this, pointing out that Bucklin is median range.
This leads to the idea of using a fuller Range ballot for Bucklin. If
that's done, we would be, for the first time, collecting real Range
data in public elections.
Bucklin was *really* rejected because it worked. That's my brief
summary of the history. However, it was also true that it did not
eliminate bullet voting, and in some elections, bullet voting is how
most voters will vote; essentially, they don't have the information
to do more than that, neither about the candidates, nor, more subtly,
about the position of the rest of the electorate. So the
last-standing Bucklin implementations were for party primary
elections. Those are nonpartisan elections, and as a first poll,
bullet voting should be quite common. Bucklin was replaced with
top-two runoff, vote for one. What would have been a deeper solution
was missed: Bucklin/runoff.
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
