[EM] MultiGroup voting method
Juho
juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk
Sat Apr 14 14:33:30 PDT 2007
Some delayed comments on MultiGroup.
On Apr 8, 2007, at 7:20 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> At 06:01 AM 4/7/2007, Juho wrote:
>>> it is an imposed system that the party names are on the ballot at
>>> all
>>
>> That could also be called "information"
>
> It is one particular kind of information, one which provides
> information about candidates affiliated with a party and no
> information about candidates not.
Note that the MultiGroup method allows also non-traditional-party
candidates to form groups, and it allows party candidates to form
groups across parties (and other groups and candidates). Parties are
just one of the reasons to form a group.
> If you allow one kind of information, you favor candidates who look
> good to the voter in the light of that information. It introduces a
> bias to provide one or two bits of information, I've never seen
> more than that.
All information and groupings are allowed, so there should be no bias
in that sense. All candidates are allowed to advertise themselves by
announcing "membership" in any group that they consider positive.
(Well, some groups might handpick their members while others could be
open to anyone to indicate support. There could be also limitations
set by the system, e.g. only one region/state allowed. And existing
parties are likely to influence in all voting methods, one way or
another.)
>> One difference is that in MultiGroup the declared associations to
>> different groups are used in determining which candidates will be
>> (proportionally!) elected.
>
> What this must mean is that, effectively, the voting is for
> "groups" rather than for candidates..... which in my view is the
> exact opposite of what we need....
The MultiGroup (vanilla) votes are to individual candidates. Only the
proportionality calculations are based on groups that are announced
before the election.
I can understand support to methods that are free of parties and
other groups. In some countries the parties have currently stronger
role than the citizens would like. But getting rid of all groupings
in large societies is not probable. This leaves "groupless" methods
(like STV) the benefit of flexible votes that are not bound to
announced relationships between different candidates. Ok, but I don't
know if the benefits weigh more than the complexity. The rules on who
is allowed to become a candidate in "groupless" elections may have
some further impact (do parties have a role? anyone free to become a
candidate?). Groupless methods have also the problem that if the
number of candidates is large voters need lots of information (one
could distribute informal grouping related information that doesn't
influence the vote counting process) and filling a ballot could
require lots of work (e.g. to list all the 100 candidates of the
favourite party).
>> Note that to some extent grass always looks greener at the other side
>> of the fence. Current political systems may not work optimally. But
>> also future and alternative political systems are subject to
>> corruption.
>
> The claim is made. The proof is actually lacking.
I can't prove that. Too difficult for entire social systems. But I
give one example. There have been lots of sincere belief and theories
about the benefits of single-party systems. Practical experiments
were not entirely successful. In the "partyless" methods I expect
some new form of parties to arise. In FA/DP I'd expect power hungry
people to get interested if the FA/DP system becomes influential. I
mean that when people learn the dynamics of the new systems they also
find ways to utilize whatever weaknesses the systems may have. I do
support studies on these topics and their success, but better be
careful and study carefully also the threat side of the coin.
> Delegable proxy, well implemented in a society which has learned
> how to use it, would be highly corruption-resistant. Essentially,
> there aren't any critical nodes to target. The obvious targets are
> high-level proxies, but high-level proxies can lose their power in
> a flash if their clients smell a rat. So the high-level proxies,
> who are generally proxies for quite sophisticated clients, have to
> be able to convince their clients that the proposed action (which
> is actually the product of bribery of the proxy) is the best
> action. Now, if these arguments exist, the corruption isn't necessary!
The property of "losing power in a flash" is common to all methods
that support "continuous elections" (= not necessarily a proxy
method, and all proxy methods might not have this property).
"Sophisticated clients" are more clearly a proxy related property.
Also "lower layer" clients could change their proxies when the media
informs them about the political events and this would immediately
impact also the higher layers. Proxies and continuous elections
however provide a nice setup that certainly has some positive
properties worth trying.
>> Sometimes it is better to change an old system to a new one, but
>> often it is also enough just to remove whatever rotten apples there
>> are and find ways how to avoid such problems to emerge repeatedly in
>> the future.
>
> More often, it is all blamed on the "rotten apples" and the remedy
> is limited to tossing them out, to be replaced by more rotting
> apples....
This is very true as well.
> until the system changes, the stone will continue to roll back down
> the hill.
Yes this may happen, but here I see both options, either to change
the whole system or to recognize the apple replacement problem and
learn tricks that keep such problems at manageable level. (Rotten
apples can be either persons, mechanisms etc.) Proxies have some
positive properties but I don't believe they would automatically
solve all the corruption related problems. My best guess is that they
work quite fine in many areas like AA but performance in areas where
power attracts power hungry people their performance is not quite
proven yet, and careful tuning may be needed to find the best working
scenarios.
Juho
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