Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On 12/2/11 11:46 AM, David L Wetzell wrote: dlw: Deep down, I am skeptical of whether a multi-party system improves things that much or would do so in my country. RBJ:i am thoroughly convinced that a multi-party (and viable independent) system improves things over the two-party system. besides the money thing, dlw: It might improve things over our current two-party system, but is there really no choice C? Ie, 2 major parties, an indefinite number of minor parties trying to become or merge with a major party, and a whole lot of LTPs who specialize in contesting more local elections and o.w. move the political center thru voting strategically together in less local elections and engaging in civil disobedience actions. RBJ: i just cannot believe that exhausting our social choice to between Dumb and Dumber is the lot that a democratic society must be forced to accept. what was so frustrating during Town Meeting Day in 2010 (when the IRV repeal vote was up), it was another choice between Dumb and Dumber. and, as usual, Dumber prevailed in that choice. nobody seems to get it (present company excluded). added to the result of the 2000 prez election and, even more so, the 2004 result, the aggregate evidence is that American voters are stupid. incredibly stupid. and a large portion of Burlington Democrats were stupid to join with the GOPpers, the latter who were acting simply in their self-interest to repeal IRV. and the Progs were dumb to continue to blather IRV happy talk as if it worked just fine in 2009. dlw: It wd have worked just fine if it was continued. you keep repeating that without justifying it with any facts. if it was continued and was in place for the coming mayoral election in 2012, the GOP Prog haters would be saying to themselves In this town full of liberals, I gotta choose between Liberal and More Liberal because if I vote for the guy I really like, More Liberal gets elected. It's failure to elect the CW was a byproduct of how IRV does not end the tendency twds 2 party domination. Sorry David, but you blather. the reason that IRV failed to elect the CW is that it is not a Condorcet-compliant method. like Borda or Bucklin. the reason that IRV failed to elect the CW is because IRV elects the IRV winner. sometimes the IRV winner is the same as the CW and sometimes it is not. 2-party domination is certainly, to use a term you seem to like, non sequitur. you can apply the same blather to the use of the Electoral College in electing the president. sometimes the EC elects the same candidate that the popular vote does, but it is not constrained to do so in all cases. it has different criteria than the popular vote, although often the two will agree on the same candidate. dlw:Burlington's two major parties would not be the same as the two nat'l major parties. RBJ:David, we don't have two major parties. we have three. dlw: I'm speaking in future tense. If we got 2 dynamic major parties then we don't need a centrist party, cuz the center will be too dynamic to be the basis for a party platform. silly blather. my interest in voting method reform is because long ago i came to the other conclusion (we need more than two viable parties). RBJ: Republicans would vote Democrat in Burlington mayoral elections. if forced to. but they would like to give their own guy their primary support. IRV promised them that they could vote for their guy and, by doing so, not elect the candidate they hated the most. and in 2009, IRV precisely failed that promise. dlw: You can't make a melding pot without breaking some vases. David, YOU DO NOT GET IT. it went pt over your head. stop trying to impress us with argument when you just really do not get it. IRV promised something. in 2009 in Burlington Vermont, IRV failed to deliver on that promise in a totally objective and technical manner. it's like the steering system in your car failed and the car was directed into the ditch. something didn't work right. something didn't work as intended. unfortunately, as a consequence, the whole concept of ranked-choice voting got sullied by that failure of this particular method of tabulating the votes. unfortunately, even though IRV was repealed by a pretty thin margin (4%), the detractors of IRV (and, because of guilt by association in their simple minds, ranked voting by any other method) believe that God himself ordained the traditional vote-for-one-with-an-X ballot. IRV tends to do that, it doesn't do it all the time, especially when there's a transition to a new set of two major parties around the new political center. totally unimpressive blather. you're stringing together words without creating meaning. RBJ:it not a tug-of-war with a single rope and the centrists have to decide whether
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
Thanks for worthy comments, but I disagree a bit: We need single-member districts, for we have offices that fit, such as mayor and governor. We need to ban plurality. While plurality is enough on a good day, most any election can have bad days. I will promote Condorcet (see B2 below) - among its advantages are that voting here is no more effort than plurality on good days (think of a community's treasurer - simply reelect via ranking only such on good days; want to demand replacements on bad days). We need an agreed method for doing PR for such as legislatures. They can be done single-member, but those managing elections can choose PR. While STV exists, I suggest having the voters use something more like Condorcet for PR. On Dec 2, 2011, at 1:35 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote: This thread now has 50 messages, back-and-forth. I'll try to make this my last word on the subject. Basically, the bottom line for me is that I trust real evidence more than I trust theory, but I need to find room to take hopeful action. That's not a matter of building an elaborate model of reality in my head and then repeatedly claiming that I'm a pragmatist; it's a matter of trying to make my questions as simple as possible, answering them with evidence, and then finding the shortest path of least resistance to hope. What does the evidence tell us? A. Evidence about the status quo says: 1. Plurality is a theoretically-horrible system, with no redeeming features. 2. Single-member districts have certain advantages, but also serious problems; I'd say that on the whole the problems dominate. (?) 3. In practice, the problems with both plurality and single-member districts seem to culminate in two-party domination. 4. It takes a lot of money to get elected in the current system. 5. Status quo politics are badly broken. 6. It's likely that 3 is one main cause of 4, and that 3 and 4 together are the main causes of 5. Thus there is a need to change either plurality, single-member districts, or both. (?) B. Evidence about IRV says: 1. There's been a well-organized and decently-funded national campaign for IRV. I'm speakin of course about Fairvote, whose spending on IRV over its history has probably totalled millions of dollars. Fair Vote offers a valuable service to voters - better than just approving candidates, as in Approval, voters use ranking to indicate whether they like A or B better - but are not required to indicate amount that A is better than B. Fair Vote also gives a simple task to vote counters - recognizing that small groups of voters can like best different groups of candidates, discard such top groups until the winner has a majority of what remain top. 1a. It's had real successes 1b. It's still fallen widely short of the progress that is needed. It can happen that one of the top groups discarded, per above, was only part of the votes for the truly best liked candidate - who thus fails to win. 2. Even in places that were initially favorable to IRV, and have tried it, opposition is persistent. (This includes Australia, where reputable polls have found majorities favoring changing the system.) 3. IRV pathologies can happen in real life. Burlington proves what simulations tell us to expect. 4. Especially when pathologies happen, IRV is subject to repeal. 5. IRV does not seem to end two-party domination; certainly it does not do so reliably. (?) 6. In a hard-fought national referendum in the UK, where both sides had significant funding and organization, IRV lost resoundingly. B2. Condorcet has had less use than IRV. 1. It offers the same service to voters, except also permitting equal ranking. 2. Counting is (as if) into an x*x matrix showing which of each possible pair of candidates would win in a race between those two. 3. There is value in humans reading x*x - it tells how third parties are doing even when they do not win - clues as to whether they are worth joining; clues as to where the center of gravity is moving. 4. The Condorcet Winner (CW) is recognized as proper winner even when discussing other methods. It means winning when racing against each other candidate with Condorcet counting. 5. Only by having at least 3 strong candidates and them being voted in a cycle such as ABCA, is there no CW. 6. I and a few others argue strongly that only candidates the voter could approve getting elected should be ranked - and against ranking others such as enemies. C. Evidence about other single-winner systems says: 1. Non-IRV voting activists are, as a whole, fractious and disorganized. 2. It is very difficult to get all voting reform advocates to agree on a single best system. 2a. It's especially difficult to get theorists to support IRV in spite of its theoretical flaws. (?) Not surprising, since the flaws are real. 3. It is less difficult to get reform advocates and
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
We're still hitting the same disagreements. I say look at the others, you say this time it'll be different, I say Condorcet IRV, you say marketing differences are great while in practice, there's no difference between Condorcet and IRV large enough to make a difference. Thus, let me do some asking, because we're not getting anywhere. Consider in your mind: what kind of data could I show that would change your mind about whether IRV is stronger in the hegemonic direction than PR is in the enabling-contesting-parties direction? Furthermore: On what do you base that reality is: 0 Plurality 0.7 IRV 0.72 Condorcet rather than: 0 Plurality 0.25 IRV 0.72 Condorcet? You keep saying that X_Condorcet - X_IRV is small. Is that just a belief, or do you have something on which to support it? Some replies below. David L Wetzell wrote: KM:If the cost of campaigning is high enough that only the two major parties can play the game, then money (what you call $peech) will still have serious influence. dlw:My understanding/political theory is that $peech is inevitable and all modern democracies are unstable mixtures of popular democracy and kleptocracy/plutocracy. To bolster the former, we must accept the inevitability of the latter. This is part of why I accept a two-party dominated system and seek to balance the use of single-seat/multi-seat elections and am an anti-perfectionist on the details of getting the best single/multi-seat election. Deep down, I am skeptical of whether a multi-party system improves things that much or would do so in my country. The mode of corruption you have in the US, where monied interests openly give the organizations that participate in the political process power by which to be seen, seems to be a particular thing to the US itself. To my knowledge, there's no Canadian OpenSecrets, nor, for that matter, a New Zealand one. In more corrupt nations, corruption usually happens within the context of the state itself, and on all levels: you might be stopped by a police officer who wants some money to not claim your car has a problem -- or parties might pay the electoral commission not to rig the vote as heavily. In other first-world nations, the parties may be given money, but such is usually tightly regulated. Thus, the corruption is less overt - corporations may collude to fix prices in a state bid, for instance, or try to convince appointed officials or mid-level bureaucrats that it's better if they do it their way. Now, you could say that just supports your conclusion: if the US is different, then multiparty won't help it where it helped other nations. But you could also turn this the other way, and say that the difference between US and the other nations is that the US has two effective parties both by EFNPP as measured by seats and votes - i.e. that the reinforcing process of Plurality has gone so far that people are resigned to two parties alone. If so, to reverse the corruption, you should let other parties but the big two grow -- and other parties but the big two be seen as having a chance. dlw: It is counterbalanced by the fact that in a system with more competitive elections, intere$t$ would need to hedge between the two major parties and consequently accept a lower, more variable return on their $peech and that there'd be turnover wrt which two parties are the major parties so it'd be a contested duopoly. A hedge among ten is better at that than a hedge among two. It is also counterbalanced by political cultural ways to move the political center. Political ways that will be hampered because other parties on the ascent to meaningful opposition to the big two will have to do a tightrope walk between appealing to the center (get more votes) and not appealing to the center (or they'll be center squeezed). dlw:Burlington's two major parties would not be the same as the two nat'l major parties. Republicans would vote Democrat in Burlington mayoral elections. This would add to the ferment of the system as a whole being a contested duopoly or contribute to a shift to a new duopoly between Prog-Dems and Dem-Pubs. Is it really worth the marketing advantage to burden people with having to vote strategically, or the parties to have to keep that in mind when they position themselves? dlw:It should be emphasized here that more more local elections would tend to be multi-winner/PR. This permits LTPs to win seats without having to move too much close to the de facto center. This gives them the chance to move the center and/or possibly center squeeze the two local major parties in single-winner elections. I agree this could get complicated, but I believe that the potential to center-squeeze is what makes the center tend to become more dynamic. And the unpredictability is not unlike a similar undpredictability due to the nonexistence of a Condorcet winner when there are 3 strong parties.
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On Fri, Dec 2, 2011 at 7:31 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_el...@lavabit.com wrote: We're still hitting the same disagreements. I say look at the others, you say this time it'll be different, I say Condorcet IRV, you say marketing differences are great while in practice, there's no difference between Condorcet and IRV large enough to make a difference. Thus, let me do some asking, because we're not getting anywhere. Consider in your mind: what kind of data could I show that would change your mind about whether IRV is stronger in the hegemonic direction than PR is in the enabling-contesting-parties direction? Furthermore: On what do you base that reality is: 0 Plurality 0.7 IRV 0.72 Condorcet rather than: 0 Plurality 0.25 IRV 0.72 Condorcet? You keep saying that X_Condorcet - X_IRV is small. Is that just a belief, or do you have something on which to support it? Here's an 'AV faith article that looks at how the use of IRV would have changed outcomes in UK MP elections. http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2011/04/seats-party-election-majority For a heuristic, we could consider the Bayesian Regret measures with only 4 candidates, instead of the 7 candidates typically used. Condorcet doesn't do best in this procedure, but FPTP and purely random voting do a lot better with only 4 serious candidates, as is more realistic for single-winner/member elections. Thus, if the worse election rule does considerably better under more realistic assumptions, it stands to reason that the diffs among all of the election rules will be lowered considerably. Let's say that in a close 3-way election that it's .25 IRV and .75 Cond. Let's say that in other elections that it's .70 IRV and .72 Cond then the appropos question is how often are there 3-way close elections? In the US, not very often and that is the context that I am presuming. So the weighted average is going to be closer to .7 IRV and .72 Cond. Moreover, the biases from IRV will get averaged out over time and place and a bias against centrists won't matter so much if the biases to the right and left cancel... This makes the X_IRV closer to X_other alts to FPTP. I'll reply to the below later. dlw Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On 12/1/11 5:14 PM, David L Wetzell wrote: KM:If the cost of campaigning is high enough that only the two major parties can play the game, then money (what you call $peech) will still have serious influence. dlw:My understanding/political theory is that $peech is inevitable and all modern democracies are unstable mixtures of popular democracy and kleptocracy/plutocracy. To bolster the former, we must accept the inevitability of the latter. This is part of why I accept a two-party dominated system and seek to balance the use of single-seat/multi-seat elections and am an anti-perfectionist on the details of getting the best single/multi-seat election. Deep down, I am skeptical of whether a multi-party system improves things that much or would do so in my country. i am thoroughly convinced that a multi-party (and viable independent) system improves things over the two-party system. besides the money thing, i just cannot believe that exhausting our social choice to between Dumb and Dumber is the lot that a democratic society must be forced to accept. what was so frustrating during Town Meeting Day in 2010 (when the IRV repeal vote was up), it was another choice between Dumb and Dumber. and, as usual, Dumber prevailed in that choice. nobody seems to get it (present company excluded). added to the result of the 2000 prez election and, even more so, the 2004 result, the aggregate evidence is that American voters are stupid. incredibly stupid. and a large portion of Burlington Democrats were stupid to join with the GOPpers, the latter who were acting simply in their self-interest to repeal IRV. and the Progs were dumb to continue to blather IRV happy talk as if it worked just fine in 2009. dlw:Burlington's two major parties would not be the same as the two nat'l major parties. David, we don't have two major parties. we have three. the Dems may be the least of the three, but they're centrist and preferable to the GOP than are the Progs and preferable to the Progs than are the GOP. but they are literally center squeezed. that is precisely the term. Republicans would vote Democrat in Burlington mayoral elections. if forced to. but they would like to give their own guy their primary support. IRV promised them that they could vote for their guy and, by doing so, not elect the candidate they hated the most. and in 2009, IRV precisely failed that promise. it not a tug-of-war with a single rope and the centrists have to decide whether they get on the side of the GOP or the side of the Progs. the idea of having a viable multi-party election and a decent method to measure voter preference is a joined, three-way rope going off in directions 120 degrees apart. Progs get to be Progs, Dems get to be Dems, and GOP get to be dicks (errr, Repubs). we know, because the ballots are public record, that the outcome that would have caused the least amount of collective disappointment is not the winner that the IRV algorithms picked, given the voter preference information available and weighting that equally for each voter. KM:So why would IRV improve things enough over Plurality? That verdict, too, has to come from somewhere. dlw: more votes get counted in the final round than with FPTP. Thus, the de facto center is closer to the true center i dunno what you mean by de facto or true center, but neither was elected in the Burlington 2009 example. (but, again, favoring the center more than the wings is not why Condorcet is better than IRV. it is because of the negative consequences of electing a candidate when a majority of voters prefer an different specific candidate and mark their ballots so.) and third party candidates can speak out their dissents and force the major party candidates to take them seriously. well, here the third party won, against the expressed wishes of a majority of voters. i do not agree with the GOPpers that IRV was a method taylor made to elect the Progs, it's there to make a three-party system work which means that third parties have a good change and win (or lose) on their merits, not because they are perceived (or not) as electable. Why not look at the total number of cities that have adopted IRV and see what a small fraction have had buyer's remorse? doesn't look good, David. Cary NC, Aspen CO, Pierce Co WA, Ann Arbor MI, Burlington VT. it's a damn shame that reform advocates didn't think this out a little in advance and sell the ranked-choice ballot tabulated by Condorcet instead of Hare. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
Trying one more time to start a sales pitch for switching from IRV to Condorcet. On Dec 1, 2011, at 10:18 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On 12/1/11 5:14 PM, David L Wetzell wrote: KM:If the cost of campaigning is high enough that only the two major parties can play the game, then money (what you call $peech) will still have serious influence. dlw:My understanding/political theory is that $peech is inevitable and all modern democracies are unstable mixtures of popular democracy and kleptocracy/plutocracy. To bolster the former, we must accept the inevitability of the latter. This is part of why I accept a two-party dominated system and seek to balance the use of single-seat/multi-seat elections and am an anti-perfectionist on the details of getting the best single/multi-seat election. Deep down, I am skeptical of whether a multi-party system improves things that much or would do so in my country. i am thoroughly convinced that a multi-party (and viable independent) system improves things over the two-party system. besides the money thing, i just cannot believe that exhausting our social choice to between Dumb and Dumber is the lot that a democratic society must be forced to accept. what was so frustrating during Town Meeting Day in 2010 (when the IRV repeal vote was up), it was another choice between Dumb and Dumber. and, as usual, Dumber prevailed in that choice. nobody seems to get it (present company excluded). added to the result of the 2000 prez election and, even more so, the 2004 result, the aggregate evidence is that American voters are stupid. incredibly stupid. and a large portion of Burlington Democrats were stupid to join with the GOPpers, the latter who were acting simply in their self-interest to repeal IRV. and the Progs were dumb to continue to blather IRV happy talk as if it worked just fine in 2009. Voters know ranking from IRV (except equal ranks are permitted). Voters can rank as many as they approve of (and SHOULD get told they are not required to rank any others they would not want to have win). BIG deal is ability to rank both choice among likely winners, and own best choice, and use strongest ranking for the one you like best. Big difference from IRV is that counters read all that the voters rank. From this the counters produce the x*x matrix that anyone can learn to read and see how close any third parties are getting to becoming winners. When there are one or more strong third parties such can win, or become part of a cycle among the strongest candidates. Not likely to happen often but cycle members were each close to winning. There are multiple Condorcet methods to support the various ways cycles may get resolved. dlw:Burlington's two major parties would not be the same as the two nat'l major parties. David, we don't have two major parties. we have three. the Dems may be the least of the three, but they're centrist and preferable to the GOP than are the Progs and preferable to the Progs than are the GOP. but they are literally center squeezed. that is precisely the term. Republicans would vote Democrat in Burlington mayoral elections. if forced to. but they would like to give their own guy their primary support. IRV promised them that they could vote for their guy and, by doing so, not elect the candidate they hated the most. and in 2009, IRV precisely failed that promise. it not a tug-of-war with a single rope and the centrists have to decide whether they get on the side of the GOP or the side of the Progs. the idea of having a viable multi-party election and a decent method to measure voter preference is a joined, three-way rope going off in directions 120 degrees apart. Progs get to be Progs, Dems get to be Dems, and GOP get to be dicks (errr, Repubs). we know, because the ballots are public record, that the outcome that would have caused the least amount of collective disappointment is not the winner that the IRV algorithms picked, given the voter preference information available and weighting that equally for each voter. KM:So why would IRV improve things enough over Plurality? That verdict, too, has to come from somewhere. dlw: more votes get counted in the final round than with FPTP. Thus, the de facto center is closer to the true center i dunno what you mean by de facto or true center, but neither was elected in the Burlington 2009 example. (but, again, favoring the center more than the wings is not why Condorcet is better than IRV. it is because of the negative consequences of electing a candidate when a majority of voters prefer an different specific candidate and mark their ballots so.) and third party candidates can speak out their dissents and force the major party candidates to take them seriously. well, here the third party won, against the expressed wishes of a majority
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On 12/1/11 11:33 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote: Trying one more time to start a sales pitch for switching from IRV to Condorcet. well regarding me, you're preaching to the choir. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
This thread now has 50 messages, back-and-forth. I'll try to make this my last word on the subject. Basically, the bottom line for me is that I trust real evidence more than I trust theory, but I need to find room to take hopeful action. That's not a matter of building an elaborate model of reality in my head and then repeatedly claiming that I'm a pragmatist; it's a matter of trying to make my questions as simple as possible, answering them with evidence, and then finding the shortest path of least resistance to hope. What does the evidence tell us? A. Evidence about the status quo says: 1. Plurality is a theoretically-horrible system, with no redeeming features. 2. Single-member districts have certain advantages, but also serious problems; I'd say that on the whole the problems dominate. (?) 3. In practice, the problems with both plurality and single-member districts seem to culminate in two-party domination. 4. It takes a lot of money to get elected in the current system. 5. Status quo politics are badly broken. 6. It's likely that 3 is one main cause of 4, and that 3 and 4 together are the main causes of 5. Thus there is a need to change either plurality, single-member districts, or both. (?) B. Evidence about IRV says: 1. There's been a well-organized and decently-funded national campaign for IRV. I'm speakin of course about Fairvote, whose spending on IRV over its history has probably totalled millions of dollars. 1a. It's had real successes 1b. It's still fallen widely short of the progress that is needed. 2. Even in places that were initially favorable to IRV, and have tried it, opposition is persistent. (This includes Australia, where reputable polls have found majorities favoring changing the system.) 3. IRV pathologies can happen in real life. 4. Especially when pathologies happen, IRV is subject to repeal. 5. IRV does not seem to end two-party domination; certainly it does not do so reliably. (?) 6. In a hard-fought national referendum in the UK, where both sides had significant funding and organization, IRV lost resoundingly. C. Evidence about other single-winner systems says: 1. Non-IRV voting activists are, as a whole, fractious and disorganized. 2. It is very difficult to get all voting reform advocates to agree on a single best system. 2a. It's especially difficult to get theorists to support IRV in spite of its theoretical flaws. (?) 3. It is less difficult to get reform advocates and theorists to agree that a set of systems are all better than plurality. 4. Other single-winner reforms haven't been implemented much. 5. Therefore, there is little evidence of what would happen after they were implemented, although we can theorize. (?) D. Evidence about PR says: 1. PR can end two-party domination. 2. With PR, there can still be fewer competitive elections and more safe seats than voters would like to see. (?) 3. When combined with a parliamentary system, PR can lead to instability. 3a. But there are reasons to believe that those problems would not generalize to a presidential system. (?) 4. PR is a more-radical change than single-winner reform. 4a. It may be harder to promote to an American audience. 4b. It may be harder to sell to politicians who have won in the status quo. 5. PR systems can be tuned to optimize various advantages, but it's hard to find a system which is perfect in all ways (simple, local, voter-centric, doesn't require ranking dozens of candidates) (?) There's plenty of reasons for pessimism in the above. David seems to find his optimism by emphasizing points B1a, C1, C4, D1, and D5, and giving (plausible) counterarguments for points B1b, B2, B3, B4, B5, B6, C2a (though he backed off from a bet), D4a, and D4b. That's 9 points he's trying to overcome (though since B4 is little more than B2+B3, I guess it may be more like 8 than 9). I on the other hand think that the path of least resistance is to emphasize C3 as a way to overcome C1, C2, and C4. I think that it's better to fight reality on 2-3 points than on 8-9, no matter how plausible the arguments that the 8 or 9 battles are winnable. One specific response: JQ: 3. Some other organization pushes some other system(s), and reaches a tipping point. dlw:IOW, they need to reinvent what FairVote's been working hard to build up for some time... Yep. It's a lot of work. If voting reform were an easy task, we (and I include Fairvote in that we) would have won already. JQ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
Condorcet is easy for voters to move to for it is a strong, but simple, step up from FPTP and: 1. Ranking means ability indicate order of varying desires of liking candidates. 2. But ranking is much less of a task than Score's rating where you have to calculate the difference in value of A vs B, and express this difference as a number. 3. More detail below. Not against PR here - PR is not suitable for electing a single-winner. On Nov 26, 2011, at 10:31 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On 11/26/11 6:58 PM, matt welland wrote: On Sat, 2011-11-26 at 16:56 -0500, robert bristow-johnson wrote: The next two are related, though not directly quoted. On Sat, 2011-11-26 at 1:39 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On Sat, 2011-11-24 at 10:47 PM, Dave Ketchum wrote: Initial topic is IRV. the counterexample, again, is Burlington Vermont. Dems haven't sat in the mayor's chair for decades. Is this due to a split of the liberal vote by progressives or other liberal blocs? Or is it due to a truly Republican leaning demographic? Burlington is, for the U.S., a very very liberal town with a well- educated and activist populace. it's the origin of Ben Jerry's and now these two guys are starting a movement ( http://movetoamend.org/ ) to get a constitutional amendment to reverse the obscene Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court. the far north end of Burlington (called the New North End, also where i live) is a little more suburban in appearance and here is where the GOP hangs in this town. the mayors have been Progs with an occasional GOP. it is precisely the center squeeze syndrome and IRV didn't solve that problem. and without getting Condorcet adopted, i am not sure how it will be reversed. Also, do folks generally see approval as better than or worse than IRV? they don't know anything about Approval (or Score or Borda or Bucklin or Condorcet) despite some effort by me to illustrate it regarding the state senate race in our county. to attain some measure of proportional representation w.r.t. geography, state senate districts are either divided ( http://www.leg.state.vt.us/lms/legdir/districts.asp?Body=S ) or, in the case of our county, have an unusually large number, 6, of state senators all elected at large. this means that besides running against Progs and GOP, the Dems are running against each other. as a consequence, even though we are allowed to vote for as many as 6, everyone that i know (bullet) votes for 1 or 2 or maybe 3. effectively, it is no different than Approval voting. but the only voting methods folks generally see here are FPTP, FPTP with a delayed runoff, and IRV. and, thanks to FairVote, nearly everyone are ignorant of other methods to tabulate the ranked ballot than the STV method in IRV. To me Approval seems to solve the spoiler problem without introducing any unstable weirdness and it is much simpler and cheaper to do than IRV. unless one were to bullet vote (which would make Approval degenerate to FPTP), there is no way to express one's favorite over other candidates that one approves of. it forces a burden of tactical voting onto voters who have to decide whether or not they will vote for their 2nd favorite candidate. i've repeated this over and over and over again on this list. while Score voting demands too much reflection and information from voters, Approval voting extracts too little information from voters. both saddle voters with the need for calculation (and strategy) that the ranked ballot does not. both Score and Approval are non-starters, because of the nature of the ballot. but a ranked ballot is not a non-starter, even if we lost it recently here in Burlington. we just need to unlearn what FairVote did and decouple the concept of ranked-choice voting from IRV. Back to promoting Condorcet: It is easier to understand the basics the voter needs to know: 1. Voting is the same as for IRV, except equal ranking is also permitted. 2. A voter familiar with FPTP can express the same thoughts, with the same definitions and power, by approving of a single candidate and ranking only that candidate. Often few will want to approve more than one for offices such as Clerk or Coroner (but makes sense for ballots to permit ranking for the rare incidents of more controversy in even such offices). 3. To emphasize point 2, a voter satisfied with FPTP voting is not seriously handicapped by not instantly learning Condorcet details - what is already known is enough to pick and rank a single candidate. 4. Condorcet counting, unlike IRV's, requires reading all that the voters vote in one pass at each reading station and then combining the readings at one location to determine results. 5. Do not have FPTP's need for primaries. 6. Do not have FPTP's need for runoffs - because voters can express themselves more completely, the leader is deserving of
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
matt welland wrote: On Sat, 2011-11-26 at 22:31 -0500, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On 11/26/11 6:58 PM, matt welland wrote: Also, do folks generally see approval as better than or worse than IRV? they don't know anything about Approval (or Score or Borda or Bucklin or Condorcet) despite some effort by me to illustrate it regarding the state senate race in our county. I wasn't clear. I want to hear opinions from the list: Is approval better or worse than IRV and why? In my opinion, Approval is somewhere between IRV and the advanced methods (good Condorcet methods, MJ, etc). The reason I think Approval is better than IRV is that while IRV makes its own decision about essentially whether to emulate people voting both Nader and Gore, or Nader alone, Approval lets the voters decide on their own. The voters can therefore approve both if it's more important to beat Bush than to support Nader over Gore, or approve Nader only if Nader's got a chance. The reason I think the advanced methods are better than Approval is that they take this burden off the voters when the voters are sincere. If you vote Nader Gore Bush in Schulze (say), then you're both helping Nader to win against (Gore, Bush) and Gore to win against Bush. If Gore is a CW with a sufficient margin that you don't create a cycle - well, then Gore wins. Same with Nader. If there's a cycle, it gets a bit more tricky. The method is easier influenced by strategy and your vote could hurt you. The Condorcet criterion no longer says what the answer should be, and the method thus has to use more indirect reasoning to find out who should win. At least it narrows down the region in which strange things can happen. The good Condorcet methods pass criteria like Smith and independence of Smith-dominated alternatives, and so further narrow down these regions. So, in short: IRV makes a guess as to which comparisons are the most important (using the logic of least first-place votes = worst), and when it gets it wrong, there's your center squeeze. Approval gives the decision to the voters, who will do better if they have access to polling data. Condorcet looks at more comparisons at once, while MJ reads ratings using robust statistics to satisfy criteria like Majority and to deter strategy. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
2011/11/27 matt welland m...@kiatoa.com On Sat, 2011-11-26 at 22:31 -0500, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On 11/26/11 6:58 PM, matt welland wrote: Also, do folks generally see approval as better than or worse than IRV? they don't know anything about Approval (or Score or Borda or Bucklin or Condorcet) despite some effort by me to illustrate it regarding the state senate race in our county. I wasn't clear. I want to hear opinions from the list: Is approval better or worse than IRV and why? I consider Approval to be better than IRV. Consider the case of Burlington, which I think well-illustrates the flaws of both. Approval could easily have failed in Burlington. Assuming most Republicans bullet voted (which is probably strategically smart), then there would be a chicken dilemma for the Democratic and Progressive voters. They could bullet vote and risk electing the Republican, or approve 2 and give up their voice in the choice between D and P. So in theory any of the three candidates could win. In that sense, Approval is as bad or worse than IRV. But then look at how people would react (if the system were un-repealable). In Approval, people could adjust their vote until they got a result they liked better. The eventual strategic equilibrium would be that the CW would tend to win. In IRV, however, there's no way to change the result without voting dishonestly. So you'd either be stuck with progressives winning, or people would start to use two-party-lesser-evil strategy, and you'd get a two-power lock on power as in plurality. I consider the corrupt, non-competitive nature of either of these long-term results to be far worse than a single spoiled election. Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On 27.11.2011, at 8.05, matt welland wrote: On Sat, 2011-11-26 at 22:31 -0500, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On 11/26/11 6:58 PM, matt welland wrote: Also, do folks generally see approval as better than or worse than IRV? they don't know anything about Approval (or Score or Borda or Bucklin or Condorcet) despite some effort by me to illustrate it regarding the state senate race in our county. I wasn't clear. I want to hear opinions from the list: Is approval better or worse than IRV and why? Unlike others, I think Approval might be worse. Lets assume that there are two wings, left and right. Left has slight majority this time. Left consists of multiple candidates or multiple parties. Right has one candidate. One basic problem of Approval is that all left supporters have to approve all plausible winners of the left wing in order to guarantee that left will win. That makes Approval quite numb to the opinions of the voters. If (almost) all approve all, the choice among left wing candidates will be random. Some voters might be tempted to approve only their favourites, and make them win this way. They may well succeed. But if number of strategic voters grows, then right wins. This kind of close competitions are not rare in politics. And in such situations one can not tell which candidate is the strongest among the left wing candidates (and a natural choice that all left supporters should approve). All candidates present themselves as likely winners, and their supporters tend to think that their favourite candidate is the strongest one. Approval is nice because the ballots are simple. It works fine with two major parties and some new third parties. But when the third parties grow, the problems arise. There are no good solutions and no good guidance to the left voters in the situation where left wing has two or more plausible winners. If one of the left wing candidates is a Condorcet winner (closer to the centre than the competing candidate), then that candidate may propose that all supporters of the other candidate should approve him although his supporters need not approve that other candidate. Maybe there are some voters that would even rank the right candidate second. But often there is no such clear order. And the other left candidate might be slightly ahead in first preferences. IRV has its problems too. The reason why it might be better than Approval is that voters still have some sensible strategies, like ability to compromise. In the environment above left wing IRV voters will anyway rank all left wing candidates first. One of them will win, although the best of them might be eliminated too early. If there are two equally strong left candidates, the number of first preferences will decide which one of the left candidates will win. That is not as bad as the problems of Approval in this situation. In IRV minor parties are a bigger problem than in Approval. In this example they may steal first preference votes from the second favourite of their supporters, and thereby make some worse left wing candidate win. In this situation the voters may compromise. If their own candidate has no chances to win, they might be ok with ranking the stronger second favourite above him. Not good, but at least the voters can do something. And even if they will do nothing, they would still get a left winner. If there is a clear Condorcet winner (like in Burlington), IRV will have problems. So will Approval. But this mail is already too long, so I'll stop here. My basic argument against Approval is that although IRV may make wrong decisions, it does not lead to as terrible situations as Approval does (with more than two plausible winners). In Approval the idea of all left wing voters approving all the left wing candidates sounds quite impossible. Therefore it is likely to violate the opinion of the majority. And the voters do not have any good strategies to fix the problem. Approving all the left wing candidates and letting a random one of them win, or to allow others (maybe the few strategic voters) to decide, does not sound like a system that voters would like to keep. In IRV people are (as we have seen) quite ignorant and don't understand that someone else than the (fair) IRV winner should have won. The results are a bit random, but often people just think better luck next time. So, impossible situations vs. randomish elimination process. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
David L Wetzell wrote: The two major-party equilibrium would be centered around the de facto center. But positioning yourself around the de facto center is dangerous in IRV. You might get center-squeezed unless either you or your voters start using strategic lesser-evil logic - the same sort of logic that IRV was supposed to free you from by being impervious to spoilers. dlw: the cost of campaigning in less local elections is high enuf that it's hard for a major party to get center-squeezed. And if such did happen, they could reposition to prevent it. Yes, I said that parties or voters could escape this problem by repositioning, i.e. adopting strategic lesser-evil logic. If the cost of campaigning is high enough that only the two major parties can play the game, then money (what you call $peech) will still have serious influence. You might say that this is counterbalanced by the more local elections, so that minor parties can grow into major ones and there will be different minor-to-major parties in each location -- but you still have to convince the more local divisions (counties, cities, etc) to use IRV, and so the same problem applies there. Or in other words: if you're right and there are only two major parties on the national scene (and so no center-squeeze problem), there will still be a center-squeeze problem in, say, Burlington's mayoral elections. Either Burlington has only two major parties (but then where would your more-local accountability come from?) or it has multiple parties, each of which has its own mayoral candidate, and the centermost n of which will be susceptible to center squeeze. You want local areas to support smaller parties so they can grow and challenge the major parties. Well, then the local environment must be conducive to growth. If the parties have to strategically balance IRV's center squeeze (which forces them towards the wings) against the voter support they get from moving closer to the center, that's not exactly conducive to such growth. Nor is it so if the voters have to keep the breakdown point of IRV (when minor becomes major) in mind when voting. Can the parties really be as flexible as you'd like when they're facing the additional constraint of having to walk that tightrope produced by the election method itself? (It might well be that the nature of IRV, plus cost of campaigning means there could only be two national-level parties. I don't think cost of campaigning alone would force there to be only two national-level parties - e.g. France - but the answer to that question isn't critical to what I wrote above. I'm saying that even if we assume what you're saying, you get into trouble on a more local level.) Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
David L Wetzell wrote: KM:I think this is where we differ, really. On a scale from 0 to 1, you think their relative merit is something like: 0: Plurality 0.7: IRV3/AV3 0.72: Condorcet, MJ, etc while I think it's something like: 0: Plurality 0.25: IRV 0.3: IRV3/AV3 0.7: Condorcet, MJ, etc. (Rough numbers.) If you're right, of course arguing for Condorcet seems like an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin thing - and it's even harmful because X_IRV * p(IRV) X_Condorcet * p(Condorcet) . The step from IRV3/AV3 to Condorcet is only 0.02 after all, and the momentum difference is huge! But if I'm right (and this is why I keep bringing up the examples where IRV has been used), then going for IRV is much more likely to rebound on you later. dlw: This is a good statement of our diffs. I'd say I rank the partial use of PR to get a contested duopoly (or to prevent a contested monopoly) very high, while you rank it rather low, especially relative to the development of a multi-party system, not unlike what you have in Norway. This is likely a matter of political cultural differences, which makes my valuations more likely to be prevalent in the US. I base my low confidence of PR's capacity to pull stronger towards competition than IRV does towards consolidation in that IRV pulls stronger wherever it's been tried. You say they aren't applicable. You may have that opinion, but then there's little I can show that will help. So there are two disagreements. Ultimately, I think that multiparty democracy would be better than your contested two-party rule. I could pull market analogies for this (oligopolies and cartels), or I could simply say it's harder to buy off ten than to buy off two. Here you may claim that this is because of my political difference if you want to do so. However, stronger is this: even if you wanted a contested two-party rule, I think IRV would pull too strongly. Again I take my evidence from other countries where that is the case - where the major two are the same as they have been a long time ago, and again, you say that's not applicable. Of course, nothing is absolute: even with Plurality, your own major parties have changed a few times since the time of the Founding Fathers. I just don't think IRV will make a difference. So if we boil down our disagreement further, I think that we *can* generalize from other IRV nations. You think we can't, because your rules are different. There have been many IRV elections (so there are samples to pick), but not very many different systems of government in which IRV is placed. If I pull 100 local Australian elections and NatLibs or Labor win in 95 of them, you could say that's because of the Australian rules so they only count as one sample. I think you're judging IRV too harshly on account of Burlington VT. The sample size is too small to make such a strong judgment. Well, Burlington just confirms things. The simulations say IRV can fail to pick the CW, and may squeeze the center out, and the less minor the minor parties are, the worse it gets. As Burlington agrees with the simulations, that doesn't count in IRV's favor. 4. This is why I pick away at how the args in favor of other election rules get watered down or annihilated when you make the homo politicus / rational choice assumptions more realistic or you reduce the number of effective candidates, or you consider how perceived biases/errors get averaged out over time and space, or you focus on the import of marketing and how IRV has the advantage in that area of critical importance to the probability of successful replacement of FPTP. You try to do so. From my point of view, when I give you examples from the real world, you say that it'll be different here (re Australia on the one hand and France on the other, for instance). When I pull from theory, you say that the theory doesn't apply because it assumes too much; and when I pick examples where theory and practice seem to agree (Burlington), you say that that's just because the status-quo-ists put pressure to bear on IRV. dlw: 1. Well, the sample of IRV uses is small, which makes it hard to render verdict on it. So why would IRV improve things enough over Plurality? That verdict, too, has to come from somewhere. 2. AU does use IRV/PR in the opposite from ideal mix if the goal is to increase the number of competitive elections. 3. WRT France, we disagreed on matters of taxonomy. I classified their top two as a hybrid. You classified it as a winner-take-all and used it to show how IRV has been improved upon and could be improved upon further. Let me try your pragmatism for a minute. You say that our disagreement about top-two is taxonomy. Why should taxonomy matter, though? If I have a tacs-type voting method, and an intar-type voting
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
robert bristow-johnson wrote: what do you mean: weight? rankings are just rankings. if a voter ranks Candidate A above Candidate B (independent of what the absolute rank values are), all that means is that this voter would vote for A if it were a simple two-candidate race with B. and all Condorcet seeks to accomplish is to be consistent with that social choice regardless if Candidate C or Candidate D were in the race or not. it's pretty simple: 1. if a majority of voters agree that Candidate A is a better choice for office than Candidate B, then Candidate B is not elected. this imposes consistency with the 2-candidate race where we all agree who should be elected and why. 2. the relative merit of Candidate A to Candidate B is not affected by the presence of a third candidate, C. in the converse, this means that removing any loser from the race and the ballot, that this should not change who the winner is. if it does, that loser is a spoiler. it is precisely the motivation for adopting IRV in the first place. To my knowledge, Condorcet passes IIA whenever there is a Condorcet winner. If Condorcet winners are frequent, that's a pretty good property. That is, if candidate A is a Condorcet winner, and you remove some other candidate B, A is still the Condorcet winner. If you add some other candidate C, unless C beats A, A is also still the Condorcet winner. Some may not like the tradeoffs Condorcet bring (like failing FBC), but it bears keeping in mind, I think. While IIA (general spoiler-independence, as it were) might be too strong to be sensible in the general case, having a method pass it in certain cases is welcome. Advanced methods can go further, as well: a method that passes independence of Smith-dominated alternatives will not be influenced by candidates outside the Smith set. (Of course, if there's rarely a CW or if the Smith set is usually large, this doesn't amount to much. Offensive strategy attempts to create cycles in the strategists' favor.) Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
Note that Majority Judgment, Range, and even arguably Approval are independent of irrelevant alternatives. Majority Judgment is the clearest; it passes IIA even with simple zero-information strategy. (That is to say, with MJ it is reasonable to vote honestly on an absolute scale, unlike Range or Approval where any reasonable zero-information voter must make sure to normalize their vote.) I point this out not to disparage Condorcet, but to show that different systems have different, important, advantages. In a world where the best answer to the question What is the current probability that system X will replace Plurality in the elections that affect me? is almost universally Not high enough, and I plan to do something about that, there is no excuse for letting our ideas of which system is best or most probable get in the way of our solidarity with other good systems. In other words, I find it flat-out immoral to say I agree that your system will be an improvement, but I refuse to say so publicly because that would distract from my system which is better-known publicly. And like it or not, that is what David's argument about expected benefits amounts to. Jameson 2011/11/26 Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_el...@lavabit.com robert bristow-johnson wrote: what do you mean: weight? rankings are just rankings. if a voter ranks Candidate A above Candidate B (independent of what the absolute rank values are), all that means is that this voter would vote for A if it were a simple two-candidate race with B. and all Condorcet seeks to accomplish is to be consistent with that social choice regardless if Candidate C or Candidate D were in the race or not. it's pretty simple: 1. if a majority of voters agree that Candidate A is a better choice for office than Candidate B, then Candidate B is not elected. this imposes consistency with the 2-candidate race where we all agree who should be elected and why. 2. the relative merit of Candidate A to Candidate B is not affected by the presence of a third candidate, C. in the converse, this means that removing any loser from the race and the ballot, that this should not change who the winner is. if it does, that loser is a spoiler. it is precisely the motivation for adopting IRV in the first place. To my knowledge, Condorcet passes IIA whenever there is a Condorcet winner. If Condorcet winners are frequent, that's a pretty good property. That is, if candidate A is a Condorcet winner, and you remove some other candidate B, A is still the Condorcet winner. If you add some other candidate C, unless C beats A, A is also still the Condorcet winner. Some may not like the tradeoffs Condorcet bring (like failing FBC), but it bears keeping in mind, I think. While IIA (general spoiler-independence, as it were) might be too strong to be sensible in the general case, having a method pass it in certain cases is welcome. Advanced methods can go further, as well: a method that passes independence of Smith-dominated alternatives will not be influenced by candidates outside the Smith set. (Of course, if there's rarely a CW or if the Smith set is usually large, this doesn't amount to much. Offensive strategy attempts to create cycles in the strategists' favor.) 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] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On Sat, 2011-11-26 at 16:56 -0500, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On 11/26/11 4:08 PM, David L Wetzell wrote: the counterexample, again, is Burlington Vermont. Dems haven't sat in the mayor's chair for decades. Is this due to a split of the liberal vote by progressives or other liberal blocs? Or is it due to a truly Republican leaning demographic? Also, do folks generally see approval as better than or worse than IRV? To me Approval seems to solve the spoiler problem without introducing any unstable weirdness and it is much simpler and cheaper to do than IRV. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On 11/26/11 6:58 PM, matt welland wrote: On Sat, 2011-11-26 at 16:56 -0500, robert bristow-johnson wrote: the counterexample, again, is Burlington Vermont. Dems haven't sat in the mayor's chair for decades. Is this due to a split of the liberal vote by progressives or other liberal blocs? Or is it due to a truly Republican leaning demographic? Burlington is, for the U.S., a very very liberal town with a well-educated and activist populace. it's the origin of Ben Jerry's and now these two guys are starting a movement ( http://movetoamend.org/ ) to get a constitutional amendment to reverse the obscene Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court. the far north end of Burlington (called the New North End, also where i live) is a little more suburban in appearance and here is where the GOP hangs in this town. the mayors have been Progs with an occasional GOP. it is precisely the center squeeze syndrome and IRV didn't solve that problem. and without getting Condorcet adopted, i am not sure how it will be reversed. Also, do folks generally see approval as better than or worse than IRV? they don't know anything about Approval (or Score or Borda or Bucklin or Condorcet) despite some effort by me to illustrate it regarding the state senate race in our county. to attain some measure of proportional representation w.r.t. geography, state senate districts are either divided ( http://www.leg.state.vt.us/lms/legdir/districts.asp?Body=S ) or, in the case of our county, have an unusually large number, 6, of state senators all elected at large. this means that besides running against Progs and GOP, the Dems are running against each other. as a consequence, even though we are allowed to vote for as many as 6, everyone that i know (bullet) votes for 1 or 2 or maybe 3. effectively, it is no different than Approval voting. but the only voting methods folks generally see here are FPTP, FPTP with a delayed runoff, and IRV. and, thanks to FairVote, nearly everyone are ignorant of other methods to tabulate the ranked ballot than the STV method in IRV. To me Approval seems to solve the spoiler problem without introducing any unstable weirdness and it is much simpler and cheaper to do than IRV. unless one were to bullet vote (which would make Approval degenerate to FPTP), there is no way to express one's favorite over other candidates that one approves of. it forces a burden of tactical voting onto voters who have to decide whether or not they will vote for their 2nd favorite candidate. i've repeated this over and over and over again on this list. while Score voting demands too much reflection and information from voters, Approval voting extracts too little information from voters. both saddle voters with the need for calculation (and strategy) that the ranked ballot does not. both Score and Approval are non-starters, because of the nature of the ballot. but a ranked ballot is not a non-starter, even if we lost it recently here in Burlington. we just need to unlearn what FairVote did and decouple the concept of ranked-choice voting from IRV. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
Both Score and Approval are non-starters, because of the nature of the ballot. but a ranked ballot is not a non-starter, Score and Approval are not the only rated systems. I favor a rated ballot - both more information and, if you can avoid the strategic burden, actually easier for the voter. But the way to avoid the strategic burden is with MJ or SODA. (Avoid in this context is not eliminate, but minimize to practical irrelevance.) Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
Here's I think the crux of your mistake: We can't say it's just a matter of opinion, cuz it's probably not such, I don't want to get too far into philosophical issues here, but I think that in one sense we can basically take it for granted that it's not such: that, in the proverbial phrase, God does, in fact, know whether p(irv_succeeds_broadly | voting_reform_succeeds_broadly ) is close to 1, close to 0.5, or close to 0. (I say that as shorthand; I'm actually quite convinced God doesn't exist, I'm just saying I believe in objective truth.) But the fact that the truth is out there, does not imply that it is either desirable or possible for people to stop arguing about it before we have much clearer evidence of what it is. and so what makes sense to me is to rally around IRV3/AV3 Exactly. What makes sense to YOU. You have chosen to believe in a certain scenario about the future. But repeating and repeating your plausible, but non-overwhelming, reasons for making that choice, simply is not going to lead to everyone lining up behind you. We already have a nice dinner riding on each of us believing I'm right and you're reasonable enough to see that eventually. But I think I could make you some further bets where your overconfident belief would make you a sucker. 1. I'd bet you at 5:1 odds that you won't convince this list to do what you say. You can propose your own terms, but I'm thinking of something like the following: 2 years from today, take people on this list to mean email addresses, weighted by max(0, ln(number of posts to this list)), that there will be more people on this list who support other methods over IRV than vice versa, by objective metrics. So I'd put up $500 against your $100. 2. I'd bet you at even odds that, ten years from today, IF more than 20 different US jurisdictions have separately implemented some single winner reform, that fewer than 10 of those are IRV. (I agree with you that if voting reform continues with limited, scattered success as today, that it will probably be mostly IRV. But I think that the case where it successfully takes off is a different kettle of fish.) I'd put up to $200 on this bet. I'm serious about both of these offers. If you're serious about what you affirm on this list, you should take me up on them, because you would have to believe that they're safe bets for you. Of course, since I'm talking about real money, though hopefully something either of us could afford, I wouldn't make these bets without further clarifying the rules and finding some way we can make our 2/10 year commitments reasonably trustworthy to each other. Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On Sat, 2011-11-26 at 22:31 -0500, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On 11/26/11 6:58 PM, matt welland wrote: Also, do folks generally see approval as better than or worse than IRV? they don't know anything about Approval (or Score or Borda or Bucklin or Condorcet) despite some effort by me to illustrate it regarding the state senate race in our county. I wasn't clear. I want to hear opinions from the list: Is approval better or worse than IRV and why? unless one were to bullet vote (which would make Approval degenerate to FPTP), there is no way to express one's favorite over other candidates that one approves of. it forces a burden of tactical voting onto voters who have to decide whether or not they will vote for their 2nd favorite candidate. i've repeated this over and over and over again on this list. while Score voting demands too much reflection and information from voters, Approval voting extracts too little information from voters. both saddle voters with the need for calculation (and strategy) that the ranked ballot does not. both Score and Approval are non-starters, because of the nature of the ballot. but a ranked ballot is not a non-starter, even if we lost it recently here in Burlington. we just need to unlearn what FairVote did and decouple the concept of ranked-choice voting from IRV. When you say approval and score are non-starters due to the ballot, what exactly do you mean? Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
David L Wetzell wrote: On Tue, Nov 22, 2011 at 5:34 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com wrote: What kind of evidence would convince you to change your mind about IRV? How about on IRV3/AV3 resolving most of IRV's problems? (I believe that using 3-slot+unapproved ballots and implicit approval to run approval/runoff, which I guess in your notation is IRV3/AV2, would, but don't agree that IRV3/AV3 would). dlw: 1. IRV is effectively the leading contender to replace FPTP in the US. (We agree on this, even if we don't like it, right?) 2. If you're going to attack IRV then you got to have an alternative (singular) to replace it with. 4 potential replacements do not cut it. In the US's current system, there can only be one alternative to FPTP at a time. If we push for multiple alternatives then the defenders of the status quo will divide and defeat us. 3. Let X be the quality of an election rule. Let p be its chances of implementation over fptp in the US's current system. Then Xirv doesn't need to be Xother. Xirv*p(irv) needs to be greater than Xother*p(other) for IRV to deserve its place as the key alternative to FPTP. I think this is where we differ, really. On a scale from 0 to 1, you think their relative merit is something like: 0: Plurality 0.3: Required for a sufficiently contested duopoly given PR 0.35: Top-two 0.5: IRV 0.7: IRV3/AV3 0.72: Condorcet, MJ, etc ?.??: Required for multipartyism in single-winner/seat/office positions (not important) while I think it's something like: 0: Plurality 0.25: IRV 0.3: IRV3/AV3 0.4: Required for a sufficiently contested duopoly given PR 0.45: Top-two 0.65: Required for multipartyism in single-winner/seat/office positions 0.7: Condorcet, MJ, etc. (Rough numbers.) If you're right, of course arguing for Condorcet seems like an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin thing - and it's even harmful because X_IRV * p(IRV) X_Condorcet * p(Condorcet) . The step from IRV3/AV3 to Condorcet is only 0.02 after all, and the momentum difference is huge! But if I'm right (and this is why I keep bringing up the examples where IRV has been used), then going for IRV is much more likely to rebound on you later. 4. This is why I pick away at how the args in favor of other election rules get watered down or annihilated when you make the homo politicus / rational choice assumptions more realistic or you reduce the number of effective candidates, or you consider how perceived biases/errors get averaged out over time and space, or you focus on the import of marketing and how IRV has the advantage in that area of critical importance to the probability of successful replacement of FPTP. You try to do so. From my point of view, when I give you examples from the real world, you say that it'll be different here (re Australia on the one hand and France on the other, for instance). When I pull from theory, you say that the theory doesn't apply because it assumes too much; and when I pick examples where theory and practice seem to agree (Burlington), you say that that's just because the status-quo-ists put pressure to bear on IRV. How can we go anywhere from there? If you can say every application is a special case that doesn't apply in the situation you have in mind, and if you can say that the theory that remains has no verification in the form of practical results, then we're not left with much except restating our relative merit numbers to each other. 5. It's not a religious commitment to IRV on my part. My ideological/religious commitment is to subvert the rivalry between the two major parties and to increase the chances of vulnerable minorities being swing voters by pushing for a much better mix of single-winner and multi-winner election rules. I also support IRV(or IRV3/AV3 (I don't understand your IRV3/AV2 remark)) to replace FPTP in single-winner elections. I want others to turn away from or tone down their debating of rival single-winner alternatives, whose probability of success in the near future is effectively much lower than IRV, to focus more on what I believe is the most needful electoral reform in the USA today. I have no problem with PR. The problem, as it is, is that advocating PR through FairVote (center of that momentum you like and want to use) bears with it the baggage of IRV. By my merit numbers, that's *a lot* to pay for marketing. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
okay, David, the subject is not about me (nor Kristofer), but about election methods. let's let the Subject: header reflect the subject of discussion, not the discussors. On 11/24/11 9:05 PM, David L Wetzell wrote: -- Forwarded message -- From: robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com mailto:r...@audioimagination.com To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com mailto:election-methods@lists.electorama.com Date: Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:50:02 -0500 Subject: Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage. On 11/24/11 2:20 PM, David L Wetzell wrote: Let me start off by saying that I'm thankful for this list-serve of people passionate about electoral reform and that you put together a working consensus statement. I'm trying to work it some more... My belief is that the US's system makes it necessary to frame electoral reform simply and to limit the options proffered. but they should be *good* options. limiting the proffered options to IRV is proven by our experience in Vermont to eventually fail. dlw: That is a huge non sequitur. it is precisely what we are talking about. how is it non sequitur? how is offering simple choice of crappy options a useful reform? Vermont proved nothing, other than the need to prepare for counter-IRV activism. there's truth to the latter half of that statement. We face the problem of induction and the hazard of drawing strong inference in the face of small sample sizes ;-). it's not because Burlington is small and it's not because we used IRV only twice (if the rocket detonates at launch the second time, we start looking at that as a 50% failure rate before just moving along to the next launch). it's because IRV failed in a context where the spoiler was not a minor candidate. when there are three or more candidates all, with a good chance of winning, IRV can fail and the election in Burlington is a textbook example how and why. and just like we identify the failure of the use of the Electoral College when it chooses a different presidential candidate than the popular vote, we identify the failure of IRV when an Condorcet winner exists and IRV did not elect that CW. then all sorts of pathologies or anomalies (thwarted majority, spoiler, reward strategic voting or punish sincere voting, monotonicity) resulted as cascaded consequences. it's really gonna be a textbook case. perhaps IRV advocates might start wising up from it. This is what FairVote does and they do it well. no they don't. FairVote sells ranked-choice voting and the IRV/STV method of tabulating the ranked ballots as if they are the same thing. i.e., once they convince voters, city councilors, and legislators that ranked-choice voting is a good thing (by accurately pointing out what is wrong with FPTP in a multiparty context and/or viable independent candidates), they present IRV as it is the only solution. that backfired BIG TIME here in Burlington Vermont. dlw: I see, you're from Burlington... The counter IRV campaign may have won, but we are too close to the event to judge rightly its wider significance. The bigger story is that democracy remains an ongoing experiment. but the immediate story is that IRV *failed*, in 2009, to do what it was adopted for in 2005. there was a lot of people that came to the conclusion that FairVote sorta sold us a bill of goods. If you're going to undercut their marketing strategy then ethically the burden of proof is on you wrt providing a clear-cut alternative to IRV3. Condorcet. b.s. what's BS? that Condorcet is an alternative to IRV (and to FPTP)? that it is clear and cut? that, in 2009, it would have avoided the anomalies (Warren would call them pathologies) that IRV had? In a world full of low-info voters and fuzzy-choices among political candidates, rankings don't have the weight that rational choice theorists purport for them. what do you mean: weight? rankings are just rankings. if a voter ranks Candidate A above Candidate B (independent of what the absolute rank values are), all that means is that this voter would vote for A if it were a simple two-candidate race with B. and all Condorcet seeks to accomplish is to be consistent with that social choice regardless if Candidate C or Candidate D were in the race or not. it's pretty simple: 1. if a majority of voters agree that Candidate A is a better choice for office than Candidate B, then Candidate B is not elected. this imposes consistency with the 2-candidate race where we all agree who should be elected and why. 2. the relative merit of Candidate A to Candidate B is not affected by the presence of a third candidate, C. in the converse, this means that removing any loser from the race and the ballot, that this should not change who the winner
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
I absolutely agree. We should not waste energy fighting over which election system is the ideal. For instance, if we are given the opportunity to sign a statement which clearly states some of the problems with the current system and supports several solutions we believe would help, including giving weak support to the solutions we consider best, we should sign it, not waste our energy criticizing the precise levels of support it gives to the various options. The statement is supportive of PR, and it also clearly says that IRV has advantages over plurality. Jameson 2011/11/23 David L Wetzell wetze...@gmail.com The variations in x, particularly among low-info voters as we predominantly have in the USA, are too small to put a lot of time/energy into trying to get it perfect. It just lowers the p because of the proliferation of election rules trying to become numero uno. But how else do we make more local elections become competitive and interesting than thru the use of multi-winner PR elections? dlw On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 5:58 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: If I've read you correctly here, it seems to me that you should sign the statement. You agree with everything it says, even if you wish it said some other things. And if you're truly being open-minded about this, you will want to avoid the circular logic involved in not signing. (I won't sign it because it doesn't have wide enough support.) dlw: Ah, but I can't support giving a lot of attention to single-winner reforms when the empirical evidence suggests that it's the mix of multi-winner and single-winner that is of far greater import. Seriously? You won't eat our chips and fish, because that's the wrong way around? Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
Let me start off by saying that I'm thankful for this list-serve of people passionate about electoral reform and that you put together a working consensus statement. I'm trying to work it some more... My belief is that the US's system makes it necessary to frame electoral reform simply and to limit the options proffered. This is what FairVote does and they do it well. If you're going to undercut their marketing strategy then ethically the burden of proof is on you wrt providing a clear-cut alternative to IRV3. Your statement provide several solutions. This is not a clear-cut alternative. I argue for IRV3/AV3 as such an alternative, for it addresses your critiques. It also could be pitched in such a way as permits FairVote to save face and retain its leadership role in electoral reform in the US, which increases the chances that they and others switch to it. And so what about IRV3/AV3? Is that not worth at least including in your statement, along with the phrase American forms of Proportional Representation, which is likely going to be getting big due to the leadership of FairVote in this coming year? I'll likely sign it, but I feel conflicted because of the reasons I mention above, and want some due process over these ideas first. dlw On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 4:52 AM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: I absolutely agree. We should not waste energy fighting over which election system is the ideal. For instance, if we are given the opportunity to sign a statement which clearly states some of the problems with the current system and supports several solutions we believe would help, including giving weak support to the solutions we consider best, we should sign it, not waste our energy criticizing the precise levels of support it gives to the various options. The statement is supportive of PR, and it also clearly says that IRV has advantages over plurality. Jameson 2011/11/23 David L Wetzell wetze...@gmail.com The variations in x, particularly among low-info voters as we predominantly have in the USA, are too small to put a lot of time/energy into trying to get it perfect. It just lowers the p because of the proliferation of election rules trying to become numero uno. But how else do we make more local elections become competitive and interesting than thru the use of multi-winner PR elections? dlw On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 5:58 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: If I've read you correctly here, it seems to me that you should sign the statement. You agree with everything it says, even if you wish it said some other things. And if you're truly being open-minded about this, you will want to avoid the circular logic involved in not signing. (I won't sign it because it doesn't have wide enough support.) dlw: Ah, but I can't support giving a lot of attention to single-winner reforms when the empirical evidence suggests that it's the mix of multi-winner and single-winner that is of far greater import. Seriously? You won't eat our chips and fish, because that's the wrong way around? Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On 11/24/11 2:20 PM, David L Wetzell wrote: Let me start off by saying that I'm thankful for this list-serve of people passionate about electoral reform and that you put together a working consensus statement. I'm trying to work it some more... My belief is that the US's system makes it necessary to frame electoral reform simply and to limit the options proffered. but they should be *good* options. limiting the proffered options to IRV is proven by our experience in Vermont to eventually fail. This is what FairVote does and they do it well. no they don't. FairVote sells ranked-choice voting and the IRV/STV method of tabulating the ranked ballots as if they are the same thing. i.e., once they convince voters, city councilors, and legislators that ranked-choice voting is a good thing (by accurately pointing out what is wrong with FPTP in a multiparty context and/or viable independent candidates), they present IRV as it is the only solution. that backfired BIG TIME here in Burlington Vermont. If you're going to undercut their marketing strategy then ethically the burden of proof is on you wrt providing a clear-cut alternative to IRV3. Condorcet. which Condorcet method i am not so particular about, but simplicity is good. Schulze may be the best from a functional POV (resistance to strategy) but, while i have a lot of respect for Markus, the Schulze method appears complicated and will be a hard sell. i also do not think that cycles will be common in governmental elections and am convinced that when a cycle rarely occurs, it will never involve more than 3 candidates in the Smith set. given a bunch of Condorcet-compliant methods that all pick the same winner in the 3-candidate Smith set, the simplest method should be the one marketed to the public and to legislators. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
I think it would be great if we could unite all the activists, theorists, and academics behind a single plan for system-wide election reform. I would get behind such a plan in a heartbeat, even if I thought it was flawed in its details. But that is, demonstrably, not happening. David, you do not have a choice between a world where you agree with others, and a world where they agree with you. You have a choice between a world where you agree with others, and a world where you don't. That's the only part you get to decide. I honestly believe that the statement, as it is, is going to bring the broadest possible consensus. To convince me to favor changing it, you'd have to convince me otherwise. Why do I care more about the breadth of consensus than about which reforms are most likely to pass in the short term? Because I think that short-term thinking is, well, shortsighted. Fairvote has some hard-won accomplishments behind it, yes. But honestly, the distance they've come is a small fraction of the total effort it's going to take to reform the whole voting system in the US (or Guatemala where I live, or the UK, or...). Given where we are in that larger context, I think that the most effective I can possibly be is by trying to promote the broadest consensus possible. Jameson 2011/11/24 David L Wetzell wetze...@gmail.com Let me start off by saying that I'm thankful for this list-serve of people passionate about electoral reform and that you put together a working consensus statement. I'm trying to work it some more... My belief is that the US's system makes it necessary to frame electoral reform simply and to limit the options proffered. This is what FairVote does and they do it well. If you're going to undercut their marketing strategy then ethically the burden of proof is on you wrt providing a clear-cut alternative to IRV3. Your statement provide several solutions. This is not a clear-cut alternative. I argue for IRV3/AV3 as such an alternative, for it addresses your critiques. It also could be pitched in such a way as permits FairVote to save face and retain its leadership role in electoral reform in the US, which increases the chances that they and others switch to it. And so what about IRV3/AV3? Is that not worth at least including in your statement, along with the phrase American forms of Proportional Representation, which is likely going to be getting big due to the leadership of FairVote in this coming year? I'll likely sign it, but I feel conflicted because of the reasons I mention above, and want some due process over these ideas first. dlw On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 4:52 AM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: I absolutely agree. We should not waste energy fighting over which election system is the ideal. For instance, if we are given the opportunity to sign a statement which clearly states some of the problems with the current system and supports several solutions we believe would help, including giving weak support to the solutions we consider best, we should sign it, not waste our energy criticizing the precise levels of support it gives to the various options. The statement is supportive of PR, and it also clearly says that IRV has advantages over plurality. Jameson 2011/11/23 David L Wetzell wetze...@gmail.com The variations in x, particularly among low-info voters as we predominantly have in the USA, are too small to put a lot of time/energy into trying to get it perfect. It just lowers the p because of the proliferation of election rules trying to become numero uno. But how else do we make more local elections become competitive and interesting than thru the use of multi-winner PR elections? dlw On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 5:58 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: If I've read you correctly here, it seems to me that you should sign the statement. You agree with everything it says, even if you wish it said some other things. And if you're truly being open-minded about this, you will want to avoid the circular logic involved in not signing. (I won't sign it because it doesn't have wide enough support.) dlw: Ah, but I can't support giving a lot of attention to single-winner reforms when the empirical evidence suggests that it's the mix of multi-winner and single-winner that is of far greater import. Seriously? You won't eat our chips and fish, because that's the wrong way around? Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 4:16 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: I think it would be great if we could unite all the activists, theorists, and academics behind a single plan for system-wide election reform. I would get behind such a plan in a heartbeat, even if I thought it was flawed in its details. But that is, demonstrably, not happening. It has not happened *yet*. There is a strong majority of electoral reform or progressive activists in favor of IRV+PR. It's the electoral theorists who don't like IRV. I'd like to think that if we take into account more realistic models of voter behavior that it'll help us to build more unity. Likewise, with the need to push for PR usages that handicap the rivalry between the two major parties et al. , rather than end two-party domination of US politics. Successful electoral reform advocacy has had to choose its battles with the status quo. It has not been driven by theory, it has used it as a tool. This list tends to elevate the role of electoral theory beyond what is meant for it. David, you do not have a choice between a world where you agree with others, and a world where they agree with you. You have a choice between a world where you agree with others, and a world where you don't. That's the only part you get to decide. I honestly believe that the statement, as it is, is going to bring the broadest possible consensus. To convince me to favor changing it, you'd have to convince me otherwise. If a political reform statement is not supported institutionally, it's going to swim upstream to influence things. I have learned this the hard way and it is why I view myself as a foot-soldier ally of FairVote. Why do I care more about the breadth of consensus than about which reforms are most likely to pass in the short term? Because I think that short-term thinking is, well, shortsighted. Fairvote has some hard-won accomplishments behind it, yes. But honestly, the distance they've come is a small fraction of the total effort it's going to take to reform the whole voting system in the US (or Guatemala where I live, or the UK, or...). Given where we are in that larger context, I think that the most effective I can possibly be is by trying to promote the broadest consensus possible. We agree that a FPTP dominated system really sucks. However, it is the system of my country(I don't know about Guatemala). As such, it dictates that we act strategically(as opposed to consensually). You can't end FPTP without following its logic and that entails the sort of activism mastered by FairVote. So when we snipe at FairVote and IRV, we make it easier for others to muddy the waters and we risk holding up electoral reform. And it's going to get easier to push for electoral reforms in the coming year thanks to #OWS and unhappiness with both major parties(especially when people wake up to how hard it is to get and enforce effective CFR). But I think we need to respect FairVote's leadership role and the first-mover and marketing advantage of IRV to take advantage of this time. dlw Jameson 2011/11/24 David L Wetzell wetze...@gmail.com Let me start off by saying that I'm thankful for this list-serve of people passionate about electoral reform and that you put together a working consensus statement. I'm trying to work it some more... My belief is that the US's system makes it necessary to frame electoral reform simply and to limit the options proffered. This is what FairVote does and they do it well. If you're going to undercut their marketing strategy then ethically the burden of proof is on you wrt providing a clear-cut alternative to IRV3. Your statement provide several solutions. This is not a clear-cut alternative. I argue for IRV3/AV3 as such an alternative, for it addresses your critiques. It also could be pitched in such a way as permits FairVote to save face and retain its leadership role in electoral reform in the US, which increases the chances that they and others switch to it. And so what about IRV3/AV3? Is that not worth at least including in your statement, along with the phrase American forms of Proportional Representation, which is likely going to be getting big due to the leadership of FairVote in this coming year? I'll likely sign it, but I feel conflicted because of the reasons I mention above, and want some due process over these ideas first. dlw On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 4:52 AM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: I absolutely agree. We should not waste energy fighting over which election system is the ideal. For instance, if we are given the opportunity to sign a statement which clearly states some of the problems with the current system and supports several solutions we believe would help, including giving weak support to the solutions we consider best, we should sign it, not waste our energy criticizing the precise levels of support it gives to the various
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
You can't end FPTP without following its logic and that entails the sort of activism mastered by FairVote And it's going to get easier to push for electoral reforms in the coming year thanks to #OWS #OWS embraces consensus logic, the polar opposite of plurality logic. And yet it is succeeding in moving the debate in a way that many things which preceded it did not. I believe that cautious reformism is as much of a dead-end as dreamy utopianism. We need to plan to take over the world, because right now the feasible and the necessary are non-overlapping sets. You don't get where we need to go without the tough work of solidarity and consensus (including swallowing your pride); you don't get there by seeing the logic of what precedes you as an inevitable crutch to the future; and you don't get there by over-valuing the sunk costs of past activism. Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 8:27 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: You can't end FPTP without following its logic and that entails the sort of activism mastered by FairVote And it's going to get easier to push for electoral reforms in the coming year thanks to #OWS #OWS embraces consensus logic, the polar opposite of plurality logic. And yet it is succeeding in moving the debate in a way that many things which preceded it did not. dlw: #OWS is about changing the political culture. This is more crucial than to change the literal rules in place but to change such rules will require an adaptation to plurality logic so that we pick a target and fix it. JQ:I believe that cautious reformism is as much of a dead-end as dreamy utopianism. We need to plan to take over the world, because right now the feasible and the necessary are non-overlapping sets. You don't get where we need to go without the tough work of solidarity and consensus (including swallowing your pride); you don't get there by seeing the logic of what precedes you as an inevitable crutch to the future; and you don't get there by over-valuing the sunk costs of past activism. dlw: IRV alone is cautious reformism. IRV+PR + the politics of Gandhi/MLKjr is not. When we put most of our chips on the politics of Gandhi/MLKjr/#OWS to make feasible the changes that we need then we can afford to play our cards smart on electoral reform. dlw Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
On Nov 24, 2011, at 3:50 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On 11/24/11 2:20 PM, David L Wetzell wrote: Let me start off by saying that I'm thankful for this list-serve of people passionate about electoral reform and that you put together a working consensus statement. I'm trying to work it some more... My belief is that the US's system makes it necessary to frame electoral reform simply and to limit the options proffered. but they should be *good* options. limiting the proffered options to IRV is proven by our experience in Vermont to eventually fail. That justifies promoting Condorcet - see below. Others deserve arguing against: FPTP- can only vote for one - why we are considering what to promote. Approval - can vote for more, but does not support expressing unequal liking. Range/score - demands expressing (in an amount understandable) how much better one candidate is than another. IRV or IRV3 - good voting, but counting does not promise to be complete (see Burlington). PR - that deserves promoting for such as legislators - but here we are thinking of electing single officers such as mayors and governors. This is what FairVote does and they do it well. no they don't. FairVote sells ranked-choice voting and the IRV/STV method of tabulating the ranked ballots as if they are the same thing. i.e., once they convince voters, city councilors, and legislators that ranked-choice voting is a good thing (by accurately pointing out what is wrong with FPTP in a multiparty context and/or viable independent candidates), they present IRV as it is the only solution. that backfired BIG TIME here in Burlington Vermont. If you're going to undercut their marketing strategy then ethically the burden of proof is on you wrt providing a clear-cut alternative to IRV3. Condorcet. which Condorcet method i am not so particular about, but simplicity is good. Schulze may be the best from a functional POV (resistance to strategy) but, while i have a lot of respect for Markus, the Schulze method appears complicated and will be a hard sell. i also do not think that cycles will be common in governmental elections and am convinced that when a cycle rarely occurs, it will never involve more than 3 candidates in the Smith set. given a bunch of Condorcet-compliant methods that all pick the same winner in the 3- candidate Smith set, the simplest method should be the one marketed to the public and to legislators. The ranking offers a bit of power that is easy to express - rank as many candidates as you approve of, showing for each pair whether you see them as AB, A=B, or AB, but no need to assign a value as to how much the better exceeds the weaker (note that ranking a candidate you do not approve of risks helping that reject win). It is in ranking multiple candidates that we lead to voting for more than two parties for we can vote among those parties plus our true desire. The voting is much like IRV's, except also permitting A=B. The vote counting, unlike IRV's, considers all the ranking you vote. While you can use as many ranks as the ballot permits, you are not required to do more than express your desires - ranking one as in FPTP, or more as equal as in Approval, is fine if that expresses your thoughts (especially if you only wish the leader to win or lose). To get a cycle you have to have three or more near tied candidates in which each beats at least one of its competitors. Resolving such requires a bit of fairness, but requires little more than that, since we got there by being near to ties. Dave Ketchum -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
The variations in x, particularly among low-info voters as we predominantly have in the USA, are too small to put a lot of time/energy into trying to get it perfect. It just lowers the p because of the proliferation of election rules trying to become numero uno. But how else do we make more local elections become competitive and interesting than thru the use of multi-winner PR elections? dlw On Wed, Nov 23, 2011 at 5:58 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: If I've read you correctly here, it seems to me that you should sign the statement. You agree with everything it says, even if you wish it said some other things. And if you're truly being open-minded about this, you will want to avoid the circular logic involved in not signing. (I won't sign it because it doesn't have wide enough support.) dlw: Ah, but I can't support giving a lot of attention to single-winner reforms when the empirical evidence suggests that it's the mix of multi-winner and single-winner that is of far greater import. Seriously? You won't eat our chips and fish, because that's the wrong way around? Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
-- Forwarded message -- From: Richard Fobes electionmeth...@votefair.org To: election-meth...@electorama.com Date: Tue, 22 Nov 2011 11:53:06 -0800 Subject: Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage. On 11/22/2011 9:38 AM, David L Wetzell wrote: So how about it? Can we try to rewrite the consensus statement to include an endorsement of IRV3/AV3 and to make it more marketable to #OWS and other folks? RF:IRV, and variations of it, are based on the mistaken belief that the candidate with the _fewest_ first-choice votes is the least popular. dlw:Or, it's easy to market. Doesn't rely on folks putting a lot of time/energy to rank all of the candidates and presumes people put most of their energy into their top rankings relative to their lower-rankings. RF:But just getting better results than plurality isn't persuasive (marketable). After all, plurality (FPTP) is such a low threshold, that it can almost be tripped over and end up with something better. dlw: There's plenty of real world evidence that IRV is quite marketable to the US public. What isn't persuasive are analysis based on pseudo-experiments with Bayesian Regret analysis or rational choice theory. RF:Note that the declaration leaves open the issue about the balance between IRV's advantages and disadvantages. You can sign the statement and say in your signature that you support IRV3/AV3, which is an improvement on IRV. This is compatible with the section about IRV that says some signers support it, and some don't. dlw: All analysis shows that the perceived problems with IRV are seriously attenuated with only 3 candidates. This is why it's a shame not to add IRV3/AV3 to the list of endorsed methods, since it always uses IRV with only 3 candidates and addresses other concerns like precinct summarizability. Now to Kristofer Munsterhjelm: KM:If the IRV-opponents are concerned about non-monotonicity or the lack of Condorcet, neither the page nor the KQED page it links to mentions this. I also hope that you're not implying that non-monotonicity or lack-of-Condorcet objections are somehow disingenuous and that IRV-opponents are all incumbents trying to protect their little domains. dlw: No, but I think all those who oppose IRV on more egalitarian/idealistic grounds, like yourself and most people I've interacted with on this list-serve, need to be aware of the real-politik of electoral reform and how others can use their arguments to hold back electoral reform. KM: While I don't find it that important, I can see how some could object to the relative opacity of IRV. Plurality has its score (how many top votes each candidate got), Range has mean score, and Minmax has the magnitude of the worst defeat (where lesser is better). What does IRV have? It has the round in which the candidate was eliminated, but that doesn't, by itself, say anything about whether it was a squeaker or the candidate was a sure loser. (In a sense, this ties in with the sensitivity to initial conditions of IRV. You might say B lost in the second round, and the guy that was next to last in the second round only survived by a single vote, so that was close. But perhaps B would have led someone else (D instead of E) to win, had he survived -- or perhaps defeating C instead of being defeated by C would only have made B lose soundly in a later round?) dlw: I agree that it's hard to summarize all the steps of pure IRV into a helpful metric. It'd be a lot easier with IRV3/AV3 to first summarize the totals for all candidates and then to sort the total votes into ten possible (complete or partial) rankings of three candidates. The latter could be summarized in a relatively small table and editorialized relatively easily. KM:It says nothing about the use of PR in a local setting to handicap rivalry between the two major parties because we don't know that it will do so enough to matter. More generally, it doesn't mention PR as it can't cover too wide an area - there was an earlier objection that the declaration was already too long. (I do like PR, but I can see that logic.) dlw: We know that it affected outcomes in IL from 1870-1980. There's a literature in political science on the import of state legislatures for the US political system. http://www.amazon.com/State-States-4th-Carl-Horn/dp/1933116528 And both electoral practice and theory suggests that the use of PR is extremely important for how a political system works and so it's damn tragic to spend so much ink on varieties of single-winner/stage elections and not to mention PR at all! Your logic is built on the wrong presupposition. The telos of electoral analytics is not to work out the best single-winner/stage election rule so that we can make more progress faster. We are engaging in exercises of learning by doing that often focus on marketing the need for electoral pluralism/experimentation to the general public. Electoral analysis can help these efforts, but they aren't per se the engine
Re: [EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.
dlw: All analysis shows that the perceived problems with IRV are seriously attenuated with only 3 candidates. The primary anti-IRV example people use is Burlington, with only 3 major candidates. Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
