[EM] Janets questions

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Janet wrote:

Calling CVD
>anti human rights, I still don't get!)

Maybe Craig said that, but I merely implied or said that CVD is
sleazy.


If you don't like what California is doing, you
>probably won't like what we did either!

What I don't like about the California study is the gross improprieties
in a study for which CVD has paid money to LWV. I trust that you
don't mean that the Washington study is on a similar ethical level.
If not, then we'd have no reason to dislike what it did. I emphasize
that the California study hasn't returned results yet. I'm not saying
that I dislike it because of its results. I dislike it because of
the dishonesty and sleaze in its process. I don't know what the result
of the Washington study were. Even if I don't agree with the
recommendations from your study, we wouldn't dislike it in the way
that we dislike the California study, if your study was conducted
honestly, without any question of influence due to monetary gifts.


>The study can be found at
>www.lwvwa.org/election.

I tried to reach the Washington study website, from the link to it
from the California LWV website, but there was a message saying that
the website is unavailable. Can it only be accessed in Washington?

>We were faced with the need  to provide enough
>information to serve as a basis of two or three hours of discussion by
>people who for the most part are even less math inclined than I am!



We did
>not include Condorcet in fear of losing our audience on details.

Some Condorcet versions are at least as briefly-defined as CVD's
definition of IRV. But that's your judgement call.

A few examples:

Drop the weakest defeat. Repeat till there's an unbeaten candidate.

(How complicated is that?)

OR:

Drop the strongest defeat that's the weakest defeat in a cycle. Repeat
till there are no cycles.

(This method, Tideman's method, has a longer, but more intuitively-
natural definition at the website http://www.electionmethods.org )

One of the faults of CVD's approach is that someone, maybe Richie,
has ruled on the question of what people will understand and what they
won't. Without polling, anyone's guess is nothing more than a guess.

Peculiarly, CVD believes that people will understand the _long_
specification of fractional STV, but that they won't understand a
brief Condorcet definition.

Approval is much simpler to define, and easier to propose and
implement than IRV is. Was Approval included in the Washington study?
Was IRV the only single-winner method considered as a replacement for
Plurality? If so, it isn't difficult to predict that IRV, as the
only "reform" considered, would win the study's endorsement or
recommendation--if there was no opposition. Here there's opposition,
but IRVies write the website articles, and have put up nothing on
Approval (unless they did during the last few weeks), and certainly
nothing written by an Approval advocate in Calif. LWV.


>I accept Kenneth Arrow's (and your?) theorem that there is no perfect
>election method.

We often hear that. CVD often uses it. Not perfect is one thing;
abyssmally inadequate is another thing. Apparently the implication
of CVD is that Kenneth Arrow proved that there can't be a better method
than IRV :-)

It's one thing for you to accept that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility
theorem is true--as far as it goes. But you shouldn't take someone
else's word for it that that theorem implies that we can't get a
better method than IRV. You say you don't want to hear mathematics,
then don't take someone's word for it about what a theorem means.
My arguments to you have been in plain language. I told you why
IRV fails in unnecessary ways in which other methods don't fail.

>I am not content to wait another 200 years for someone to
>successfully counter that idea.

We have no intention to counter Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem,
now or in 200 years. But, right now, we have methods that are
incomparably better than IRV in regards to getting rid of the
lesser-of-2-evils problem. Methods that don't share IRV's ridiculous
failures of Monotonicity. And one of them (Approval) is much simpler
than IRV, much easier to propose & implement.



>As you will see in the Introduction to our
>study,  representation in our state is so badly out of kilter, even baby
>steps in the right direction will be an improvement.

It's questionable whether IRV is a step in the right direction. In
any case, CVD's baby steps would be a waste of everyone's time, when
real reform is possible, and just as feasible.

>
>I am a pragmatist

>I think of CVD as a clearinghouse of information

No, a "clearinghouse" would make information available in an unbiased
way. CVD is merely promoting its own agenda, including its own
completely inadequate single-winner proposal. It's their business what
they promote, of course, but they are not a clearinghouse.

>I think of them as pragmatists
>rather than researchers.

Sometimes "pragmatic" promoters need to research what they're promoting
enough to find out if it's any good. You may not consider them
researchers (neither do I), but do you know that some of them seem
to be misrepresenting themselves as authorities who are qualified to
advise on single-winner methods?

>As for software, what is Cambridge, Mass. now
>using for their elections?

Some form of STV. I didn't mean to imply that IRV softare can't be
written. But, with Approval, no one needs to ask a county to
change its election software. Where the ballot now says "Vote for 1",
we merely change that to "Vote for 1 or more".

>I hope you now have a clearer idea of what a LWV "study" can and
>cannot do.

I hope that an LWV study can be more honest & legitimate than the one
in California.




>I think there is a need for the work you do in the ivory tower
>as well as what we do.

I'm not in an ivory tower. I want to get rid of the lesser-of-2-evils
problem. Millions of voters recognize that problem and are cowed &
dominated by it. I do advocacy for & against actual proposals.

Mike Ossipoff


>

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