Re: [EM] A design flaw in the electoral system
Dear Juho and Fred, Your vote never made a difference. Most people feel uncomfortable or perplexed in this knowledge, and I think the feeling indicates that something's wrong. Juho Laatu wrote: I'm not sure that most people feel uncomfortable with this. Many have learned to live as part of the surrounding society, and they don't expect their vote to be the one that should decide between two alternatives. I certainly never expected my own vote to be decisive in an election. But knowing it has *no* effect on the outcome? This is unexpected and makes me uneasy. (more below) Fred Gohlke wrote: re: I say that electors are physically separated from their ballots ... This is the point I don't understand. What do you mean by physically separated from their ballots? I mean the ballot goes in the ballot box and the elector walks away without it. When there are candidates for an office and a voter expresses a preference by voting for one of them, how could the voter not be physically separated from the ballot - and why is it important? The importance lies in being able to trace the structural fault and other societal failures back to this physical separation. Here's an updated graph: http://zelea.com/project/autonomy/a/fau/fau.xht#REL Rounding procedure | (a) | |Objectively + meaningless vote + | | (e) | V (b) |(ab) Disconnect between elect-Structural fault between -or and ballot in flawed -- person and vote in electoral procedure society | | (f) V V (c) Flawed model of social Power vacuum world in count engine| | V (d) (g) 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, ab) appear to establish an indirect relation (h) between a formal failure of technical design and actual failures in society. Leaving aside the obvious physical relation (ab), consider how the separation is causing (e) the meaningless vote. ... since the meaninglessness of an individual vote arises from the objective certainty that the vote is *not* a source of decision, the flaw can only (e) be contributing to that meaninglessness; in fact, by separating the elector from the ballot and the voter from the voter, it closes off all possible avenues for the voter *as such* to overcome (a) the rounding procedure at election's end. This seals the vote's formal fate as a numerical nullity. [RP] How could a voter not be separated from the ballot? Consider how an informal process of decision plays out in a small group. The means of assent here is a semi-formal signal - an aye or nod of the head - that is equivalent to the ballot, but inseparable from the person. Consider the role played by such signals and the persons who *as signallers* remain in control of them. Imagine one person is nodding in agreement to a proposal, while another is shaking her head. Observe how the other participants respond to these signals, and the level of energy they put into trying to understand each other, and to helping the group as a whole reach a decision. These observations would go some way to answering your question, because the participant in such an informal decision group (or even a formal triad) is effectively an elector in possession and control of his/her ballot. Call him a voter. We could ask, What effect did this voter *as such* have on the decision that was reached, or anything that followed from it? In most cases, the answer would be incalculable, tied up in a web of cause and effect that plays out endlessly. We might say it was boundless, or that it hovered somewhere between zero and infinity. In further reply to Juho, I would offer this indeterminacy as an alternative to the apparent dilemma of no effect vs. decisive effect. [RP] Once separated from the voter, the effect of the individual vote is nullified by the rounding procedure that translates a fine-grained sum into a coarse-grained outcome (who gets into office). In that rounding, the effect of the fine grain is lost (originally discussed with TE, Skype 2011.10.1-3). -- Michael Allan Toronto, +1 416-699-9528 http://zelea.com/ Election-Methods
Re: [EM] A design flaw in the electoral system
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Michael Allan wrote: Dear Juho and Fred, Your vote never made a difference. Most people feel uncomfortable or perplexed in this knowledge, and I think the feeling indicates that something's wrong. Juho Laatu wrote: I'm not sure that most people feel uncomfortable with this. Many have learned to live as part of the surrounding society, and they don't expect their vote to be the one that should decide between two alternatives. I certainly never expected my own vote to be decisive in an election. But knowing it has *no* effect on the outcome? This is unexpected and makes me uneasy. (more below) I think we should be a little more careful here. Just because a voter's vote has no effect on the outcome of an election does not mean that the vote has no effect. By voting you are affecting the margin of victory or defeat. And vote margins still matter to politicians -- they signal whether the politicians are taking the right positions and making convincing arguments. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] A design flaw in the electoral system
At 04:30 AM 10/3/2011, Michael Allan wrote: 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] The flaw is real, and it results from secret ballot voting as a method of making complex decisions (choice between more than two alternatives), where the amalgamation process, which in pure democracy is only the final stage of a complete deliberative process, a ratification of prior work, becomees the only form of expression of the voter. The flaw was addressed by Lewis Carroll in about 1883, with his invention of what was later called Candidate Proxy (several authors, this list in the 1990s) and Asset Voting (Warren Smith, c. 2002, as I recall). If Asset Voting is used to create a proportional representation system, using STV (but probably most voters just listing one candidate), and the Hare quota (thus allowing one or possibly more seats to remain vacant pending further process), a system is set up whereby the norm is that every vote counts, and can be seen to affect the result. That is, the method, if applied in a certain way, creates an assembly where every voter made their own personal optimal vote, and that vote then enabled the election either of a specific seat in the Assembly, or, in some cases, may have been split to elect more than one seat, or in relatively rare cases, all or part of the vote is *suspended*, as it were, pending further process, and the vote, even then, though not having a seat, and thus creating a right to participate in the full assembly deliberative process, may still have real political power, that is, may be expressed directly in the Assembly whenever amalgamation takes place. I'm not aware of any other system that can do this on a large scale. Asset Voting is really Delegable Proxy with a secret ballot initial proxy assignment stage. It could make possible the election of very highly representative assemblies, with no reliance on party systems being necessary. Yet it is not a pure election method, it incorporates a deliberative phase (negotiation between candidates being an aspect of deliberation). Nevertheless it can produce *results* that allow the purest imaginable form of democracy even with the scale being enormous. Every vote is counted and counts. An Asset experiment was done by the Election Science Foundation, where a three-member steering committee was elected by 17 voters, such that every winner was either explicitly approved by every voter, or was approved by the candidate approved by the voter, within a few days of the closing of the polls. To my knowledge, that was an historic result. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
