[EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?

[Tim Hull]

On the subject of IRV and STV - this is actually quite relevant to my
situation.

As it stands, I'm primarily looking for a method of PR to allow the
multi-seat elections on my student government -
which constitute 75% of the representatives and probably 95% of the actual
voter turnout (the single-seat elections are in schools like the Medical
School with little student government interest) - to become more competitive
(as it is, the majority slate typically only loses one or two of these seats
even when they constitute just 40%-50% of the vote).

In this case, the only *tested* method which is fully candidate based (i.e.
no party lists, open or closed)  - and does not use anything other than
votes cast for candidates to determine winners  - is STV.  In the case of
voting, it seems like a good idea for the method of voting to be consistent
for everyone.  Hence, it only seems logical to use IRV.  Doing anything else
would only make the explanation of how voting works twice as long, and make
said effort more likely to fail.

Until these is a good, *proven* single-winner/multi-winner combination that
works well, I don't see this type of situation changing.  In my push to
implement a better voting system than our truncated Borda/FPTP combo, I see
IRV and STV as the best chance to actually make a change.  I don't see
myself trying to push two separate and complicated systems (one alone is
hard enough), or trying to sell a system that has not been widely used
anywhere.

In short - I would say that the lack of any good, tested multi-winner system
with a better-than-IRV single-winner version is part of why IRV is so
popular...



On 4/23/07, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
>
> At 05:53 PM 4/23/2007, Juho wrote:
> >Political elections are typically competitive. Polls are typically
> >less competitive. Voting on which family size Pizza (of several good
> >ones) to buy for the family today may well be a quite non-competitive
> >election.
>
> That's true. And one might ask why. Certainly it's understandable in
> a family. But it is also understandable in any functional
> neighborhood or community organization. Why does this
> "non-competitiveness" break down, and under what conditions?
>
> My point in bringing up the pizza example is that I find it odd to
> expect that an election method will bring good results in a
> competitive environment when it miserably fails in a non-competitive
> one. That is, a group of people want to quickly find which of a
> number of solutions is maximally satisfactory. Isn't this the problem
> of elections?
>
> Somehow it is believed that this doesn't apply to politics. In
> politics, the thinking goes, people only want to win, to see "their
> side" be the victor. Could it be that the *system* -- which includes
> plurality elections -- actually encourages this?
>
> What we see about Range is that it works quite well under competitive
> conditions, it is certainly not *worse* than FPTP, and, many of us
> would argue, than Condorcet methods. It usually finds the Condorcet
> winner, anyway, in examples which stick close to real-world
> conditions. And when it doesn't, it finds a *better* winner.
>
> The argument against Range typically goes: in competitive elections,
> where people really want their favorite to win, they will bullet
> vote, thus reducing the election to Approval.
>
> It's probably false. Sure, *partisans* will vote that way, we can
> expect, but many, many voters consider themselves independents. There
> is a cost to bullet-voting. It is essentially an abstention from
> every pairwise election other than those involving the favorite. In a
> strong two-party contest, where third parties are essentially
> irrelevant, we can expect partisans not to care about that. And,
> indeed, many of them may *not* bullet-vote, but will assign some
> value to one or more third party candidates. It is a way for them to
> express their leanings without risk of "losing."
>
> It's important to realize that Plurality *often* chooses the correct
> winner, i.e., the candidate who will win under either Range or a
> Condorcet method. It probably does this more often than not, though
> strong two-party systems tend to shift positions and match each other
> so that they remain close to parity.
>
> The problem is in the few percent of nonpartisan voters and
> third-party voters, what can *they* do? Range and Approval (and IRV,
> though not as safely) bring them in out of the cold, eliminating the
> immediate spoiler effect. That alone is well worth, with Approval,
> simply dropping the no-overvoting rules, which in one fell swoop and
> with minimum fuss and no cost turns elections into the most basic Range
> method.
>
> The IRV promoters here have Proportional Representation as a
> long-term goal. They don't really talk about their strategy, as far
> as anything we have seen, they are *not* people who believe in
> democracy in reform movements, they are one-pointed and, as far as we
> have seen, quite inflexible. But I suspect that their strategy is to
> bring IRV, which is, of course, single-winner STV, and then, they
> might think, the path to PR is open.
>
> But STV and IRV are actually worlds apart. The offensive effects
> possible in IRV, particularly center-squeeze, which can easily defeat
> a strong Condorcet winner (who will also win under Approval), is far
> less damaging in the multiwinner context. STV is quite a reasonable
> method, multiwinner, though we think there may be better. The
> strategy could backfire, if there is a prominent election failure.
> That is, the bad taste generated as a result of IRV defects could
> attach to STV and thus to PR.
>
> But the IRV people (by which I mean the political activists, there
> are some theoretical analysts who favor IRV who are exceptions) won't
> actually discuss the issue. It's a shame, actually.
>
>
>
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>
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