[EM] A design flaw in the electoral system
Thanks very much for replying, Fred. Metagovernment is a good list for these kind of discussions, as good as any I know. You'd definitely be welcome there. I'll look up the reference you mention, and respond more fully soon. In the meantime, I wish to share an updated abstract, plus a first draft of the section that concerns the electoral system. Critique is welcome. http://zelea.com/project/autonomy/a/fau/fau.xht ABSTRACT An individual vote has no effect on the formal outcome of the election; whether the vote is cast or not, the outcome is the same regardless. This appears to open a structural fault in society between the individual person and the individual vote. The voter as such (as a decider) is thus alienated from the means and product of decision, and thereby disengaged from political power and freedom. I argue that the sum of these disengagements across the population amounts to a power vacuum, which, in mid to late Victorian times, led to the effective collapse of the electoral system and the rise of a mass party system. Today, the organized parties make the decisions and exercise the political power that was intended for the individual voters. I trace this failure back to a technical design flaw in the electoral system, wherein the elector is physically separated from the ballot. [QCW] A DESIGN FLAW IN THE ELECTORAL SYSTEM - The electoral system uses a flawed model of the social world and no valid decision may be extracted from its results. The results depend upon a voting procedure in which the individual person as an elector is separated from her ballot (or his ballot) prior to the formation of a decision. This procedure not only invalidates the decision, but physically causes the structural fault in society between the individual person and the individual vote, thereby raising the possibility of broader societal failures. That fault and those failures are the topic of the previous and subsequent sections respectively, while this section deals with the root cause in the design of the electoral system. Objectively + meaningless vote + | | (a) | V (d) | (g) Disconnect between elect-Structural fault between -or and ballot in flawed -- person and vote in electoral procedure society | | (b) V V (e) Flawed model of social Power vacuum world in count engine | | V (f) (c) V Collapse of electoral Invalid decision system onto party system == Formal failure of -- Actual failures in technical design society (h) [REL] Causal relations. The direct causal relations among flaws, fault and failures (a - g) appear to establish an indirect relation (h) between a formal failure of technical design and the actual failures in society. Consider the voting procedure. On election day, the individual elector arrives at the polling place and enters a voting booth. There she (or he) places a pencil on the ballot and marks an 'X'. By this act, she becomes an actual voter. As a voter, she walks over to the ballot box and deposits her ballot, then walks away a non-voter again. She and her vote now go separate ways, her vote to remain in the ballot box to be summed with the others; and she perhaps homeward to await the announcement of the results. This, in essence, is the procedure for every voter in every state election. It is a direct cause (g) of the structural fault between person and vote in society, which here assumes its physical form in the disconnection between elector and ballot, as multiplied across the population. The individual votes are summed in the count engine to produce a numeric result, which in turn decides the final issue of the election - one of the candidates enters office, for example, while the others do not. This issue is interpreted as a legitimate decision of the voters. Some doubt might be cast on this interpretation, at this point, by observing the state of expectant curiosity in which the voters, now bereft of their votes, await to hear the decision. Ordinarily a group of decision makers is cognizant of the decision they are making. This doubt as to legitimacy takes on a technical form in the observation that the interpretation of results is lacking in material grounds. The formal aggregate of votes in the count engine does not correspond to an
Re: [EM] A design flaw in the electoral system
Michael Allan Sent: Monday, October 03, 2011 9:31 AM ABSTRACT An individual vote has no effect on the formal outcome of the election; whether the vote is cast or not, the outcome is the same regardless. These statements worry me - surely they contain a logical flaw? If these statements were true and every elector responded rationally, no-one would ever vote. Then the outcome would not be the same. I am not into logic, but I suspect the flaw is in some disconnection between the individual and the aggregate. When A with 100 votes wins over B with 99 votes, we cannot say which of the 100 individual votes for A was the winning vote, but it is clear that is any one of those 100 votes had not been for A, then A would not have won. At best, if one A-voter had stayed at home, there would have been a tie. If one of the A-voters had voted for B instead, the outcome would have been very different. Or am I missing something? I do appreciate that there can be a disconnection, large or small, between the outcome of an election and the consequences in government (policy implementation - or not), but the statements quoted above were specifically about elections per se. That's why I'm puzzled. James Gilmour Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] A design flaw in the electoral system
On 3.10.2011, at 11.56, James Gilmour wrote: Michael Allan Sent: Monday, October 03, 2011 9:31 AM ABSTRACT An individual vote has no effect on the formal outcome of the election; whether the vote is cast or not, the outcome is the same regardless. These statements worry me - surely they contain a logical flaw? If these statements were true and every elector responded rationally, no-one would ever vote. Then the outcome would not be the same. One could also turn this around and say that a good method does not give the decision making power to any one individual voter. Voters should think in terms what do we want instead of what do I want. One voter with his numerous anonymous friends that have similar thoughts can make the difference and decide who wins. It is not a question of what if I don't vote but a question of what if we don't vote. I am not into logic, but I suspect the flaw is in some disconnection between the individual and the aggregate. When A with 100 votes wins over B with 99 votes, we cannot say which of the 100 individual votes for A was the winning vote, but it is clear that is any one of those 100 votes had not been for A, then A would not have won. At best, if one A-voter had stayed at home, there would have been a tie. If one of the A-voters had voted for B instead, the outcome would have been very different. One way to measure the impact of a vote would be to count how large percentage of some group of voters was needed. If A gets 100 votes and B gets 50, then A supporters needed 51% of their votes. Also all individual A supporters could in this case say that 51% of their vote was needed to win the election. Or am I missing something? I do appreciate that there can be a disconnection, large or small, between the outcome of an election and the consequences in government (policy implementation - or not), but the statements quoted above were specifically about elections per se. That's why I'm puzzled. I think it is incorrect or at least misleading to say that individual votes do not have any influence. They do, as a group. Juho James Gilmour Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] PR approval voting
On 03 Oct 2011 12:23:10 -0700, Toby Pereira wrote:
I noticed on your page that you suspect that all multi-winner
methods fail participation. I don't think that's the case. I would
suggest that Forest Simmons's Proportional Approval Voting passes
it. Also I think my versions of Proportional Approval Voting and
Proportional Range Voting pass.
Since I wrote that, I have come to believe (but still haven't proved)
that Approval-based methods will generally pass participation and
IIAC.
A range based method will pass participation, at least in
single-winner, if it doesn't adjust ratings.
In many cases my version of Range Transferable Vote will elect winners
without having to raise ratings to meet quota. It only fails
participation in those cases where the quota is not met, which most
often happens on the last or penultimate seat.
Is your PRV method quota-based? If so, does it pass Droop
proportionality? If so, how do you deal with elevating preferences if
no candidate achieves a quota?
Ted
From: Ted Stern araucaria.arauc...@gmail.com
To: Election Methods election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Cc: Ted Stern araucaria.arauc...@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, 3 October 2011, 19:45
Subject: Re: [EM] PR approval voting
I'd like to stick my oar in here, to point out that I have an
implementation of Range Transferable Vote, which can be used with
Droop or other quotas, that implements PR.
Code for it is located here:
https://github.com/dodecatheon/range-transferable-vote
It reduces to Approval Transferable Vote in the case of range(0,1).
I had to make one change to it recently to fulfill the Droop
proportionality criterion, which states that if a faction distributes
its votes among L candidates, and has enough votes to elect K = L
quotas, then the method will elect K candidates from the set of L
candidates.
For RTV, this meant that I had to find a way to elevate range
preferences in the event that no candidate achieves a quota.
The way I implement this is to increase non-zero ratings incrementally
(up to maximum score) until at least one candidate makes quota.
This pushes RTV into the territory of Bucklin-style methods, and
therefore it does not satisfy the Independence from Irrelevant
Alternatives criterion, even in the single-winner case.
Ted
On 01 Oct 2011 09:25:45 -0700, Toby Pereira wrote:
Presumably this could also be used for range voting with a fairly
simple modification. It would just set a limit on the fraction of
someone's vote that could be used for each candidate. If you scored
a candidate 3 out of 10, then no more than 0.3 of your vote could go
to that candidate, regardless of whether the rest remained unused.
From: Ross Hyman rahy...@sbcglobal.net
To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Sent: Saturday, 1 October 2011, 5:07
Subject: [EM] PR approval voting
The following PR approval voting procedure is an approval limit of Schulze
STV
A score for each candidate set is determined in the following way: ?? The
vote of each ballot is distributed amongst the ballot's approved candidates in
the candidate set.? The score for each candidate set is the largest possible
vote for the candidate in the set with the smallest vote.? The candidate set
with the highest score wins the election.
example: 2 seats
approval voting profile
10 a
? 6 a b
? 2 b
? 5 a b c
? 4 c
The possible candidate sets are: {a b}, {a c}, and {b c}.
score for {a b} determined from
10 a
?11 a b
? 2 b
score for {a b} = 11.5
score for {a c} determined from
16 a
? 5 a c
? 4 c
score for {a c} = 9
score for {b c} determined from
?8 b
?5 b c
?4 c
score for {b c} = 8.5
set {a b} wins.
Schulze uses a maximum flow algorithm to distribute the votes optimally on
each ballot for each candidate set.? Here is another algorithm.
v_i,a is the vote assigned to candidate a from the ith ballot.? The optimal
v_i,a is determined iteratively.
1) Initially, the vote for each ballot is distributed equally between all the
candidates in the candidate set that are approved by that ballot.?
2) The total vote for a candidate in the set is determined from v_a = sum_i
v_i,a.? The lowest vote is a lower bound for the candidate score.
3) Form the adjusted vote w_i,a =? v_i,a/v_a.?
4) The adjusted vote for each ballot is w_i = sum_a w_i,a.
5) The new v_i,a = w_i,a / w_i.? Proceed to step 2.
?? ? ? ??
?
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[EM] advocacy: Approval is premature compromise
I know that Approval is technically better than a lot of things, and I think it's better than IRV, but I want to argue that it's not good enough and we shouldn't aim low or advocate it too strongly. I've always been personally unsatisfied with the prospect of filling out an Approval ballot. Sure I can say that either Al Gore or Ralph Nader would be fine choices for President, but I don't get to say which one I like better. I think this psychological aspect is important. In my mind it might drive me to misjudge my proper approval threshold, and I think I'd be likely to approve too few candidates and tend toward pick-one. I also today see Approval as fitting the pattern of premature compromise in politics. Afraid that we might not be able to get the awesome thing, we start off only trying for the mediocre thing. We could have real universal healthcare or Obama-Romney-care. We could try for a budget that makes sense, or we could have a budget half full of cruft and with tax tweaks that make no sense because someone whined for it. If we're going to do this, we should do it right. Go all the way. Go for the best thing possible. Isn't that one thing that frustrates us so much with the IRV advocates? They recognize that election method reform is important, but then they go all-in on a mediocre reform. Anyway, that's my random afternoon strategy opinion, I could be wrong. Brian Olson http://bolson.org/ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] PR approval voting
A range voting generalization is the following:
The score that the ith ballot assigns to the ath candidate is s_i,a. v_i,a is
the vote assigned to candidate a from the ith ballot. The optimal v_i,a is
determined iteratively.
For each candidate set
1) choose an initial v_i,a. such that sum_a v_i,a =1, where the sum is over
candidates in the candidate set.
2) The total score for a candidate in the set is determined from s_a =
sum_i v_i,a s_i,a. The lowest score is a lower bound for the candidate set
score.
3) Form the adjusted vote w_i,a = v_i,a/s_a.
4) The adjusted vote for each ballot is w_i = sum_a w_i,a.
5) The new v_i,a = w_i,a / w_i. Proceed to step 2.
The candidate set with the highest score wins the election.
--- On Sat, 10/1/11, Toby Pereira tdp2...@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
From: Toby Pereira tdp2...@yahoo.co.uk
Subject: Re: [EM] PR approval voting
To: Ross Hyman rahy...@sbcglobal.net,
election-methods@lists.electorama.com election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Date: Saturday, October 1, 2011, 11:25 AM
Presumably this could also be used for range voting with a fairly simple
modification. It would just set a limit on the fraction of someone's vote that
could be used for each candidate. If you scored a candidate 3 out of 10, then
no more than 0.3 of your vote could go to that candidate, regardless of whether
the rest remained unused.
From: Ross Hyman rahy...@sbcglobal.net
To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com
Sent: Saturday, 1 October 2011, 5:07
Subject: [EM] PR approval voting
The following PR approval voting procedure is an approval limit of Schulze STV
A score for each candidate set is determined in the following way: The vote
of each ballot is distributed amongst the ballot's approved candidates in the
candidate set. The score for each candidate set is the largest possible vote
for the candidate in the set with the smallest vote. The candidate set with
the highest score wins the election.
example: 2 seats
approval voting profile
10 a
6 a b
2 b
5 a b c
4 c
The possible candidate sets are: {a b}, {a c}, and {b c}.
score for {a b} determined from
10 a
11 a b
2 b
score for {a b} = 11.5
score for {a c} determined from
16 a
5 a c
4 c
score for {a c} = 9
score for {b c} determined from
8 b
5 b c
4 c
score for {b c} =
8.5
set {a b} wins.
Schulze uses a maximum flow algorithm to distribute the votes optimally on each
ballot for each candidate set. Here is another algorithm.
v_i,a is the vote assigned to candidate a from the ith ballot. The optimal
v_i,a is determined iteratively.
1) Initially, the vote for each ballot is distributed equally between all the
candidates in the candidate set that are approved by that ballot.
2) The total vote for a candidate in the set is determined from v_a = sum_i
v_i,a. The lowest vote is a lower bound for the candidate score.
3) Form the adjusted vote w_i,a = v_i,a/v_a.
4) The adjusted vote for each ballot is w_i = sum_a w_i,a.
5) The new v_i,a = w_i,a / w_i. Proceed to step 2.
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] advocacy: Approval is premature compromise
On 10/3/11 4:54 PM, Brian Olson wrote: I know that Approval is technically better than a lot of things, and I think it's better than IRV, but I want to argue that it's not good enough and we shouldn't aim low or advocate it too strongly. I've always been personally unsatisfied with the prospect of filling out an Approval ballot. Sure I can say that either Al Gore or Ralph Nader would be fine choices for President, but I don't get to say which one I like better. I think this psychological aspect is important. In my mind it might drive me to misjudge my proper approval threshold, and I think I'd be likely to approve too few candidates and tend toward pick-one. I also today see Approval as fitting the pattern of premature compromise in politics. Afraid that we might not be able to get the awesome thing, we start off only trying for the mediocre thing. We could have real universal healthcare or Obama-Romney-care. We could try for a budget that makes sense, or we could have a budget half full of cruft and with tax tweaks that make no sense because someone whined for it. If we're going to do this, we should do it right. Go all the way. Go for the best thing possible. Isn't that one thing that frustrates us so much with the IRV advocates? They recognize that election method reform is important, but then they go all-in on a mediocre reform. Anyway, that's my random afternoon strategy opinion, I could be wrong. Brian Olson http://bolson.org/ Brian, i have posted much the same sentiments on August 22 and August 4. i really don't see why so much energy goes into promoting the approval ballot over the ranked-choice ballot as a reform of FPTP. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
