[EM] Posting #2: intro, a plea, LWV, organizing v. IRV, terms & taxonomy

[Bart Ingles]

Just trying to catch up on my inbox -- this is a very old post which was
apparently addressed to me, at least in part, and I apologize for not
replying sooner.  Apparently this message looked as though it would take
more study than I was capable of devoting at the time, so it stayed in
the pile while I dealt with simpler issues.

ITEM 3:  (LWV), I'm not sure what to recommend. If you haven't become
involved by already, it's probably not worth joining at this point.  The
results of the so-called study are most certainly predetermined.  I'm
just hoping to at least reach a few people in the process.

ITEM 4:  Despite the above, I'm not really interested in organizing
against IRV or CVD.  I am more pro- approval voting, and nearly neutral
regarding proportional representation.  The only anti-IRV statements I
am interested in making are those incidental to side-by-side comparisons
with approval voting, or when responding to deliberate or unintended
misinformation by pro-IRV advocates (such as claims that IRV eliminates
the lesser-evil problem, etc.)

I'm not sure what to think of a non-aligned web site and organization
name, vs. one obviously designed to promote approval voting (or some
other method).  I suppose the non-aligned name & site are clearly better
if one isn't completely in favor of a particular method.  But after
2-1/2 years of study, I've pretty well made up my mind on the subject,
and would not really be interested in debating methods on a promotional
site -- that's what this list is for.  Besides, even if discrediting IRV
were the primary objective, what would be a better way to do so than to
rally behind a viable alternative?

In this regard, I don't really have too much of a problem with CVD
keeping debate about alternate voting systems out of its promotional
arenas (although I strongly object to using a supposedly neutral
organization as the LWV as such an arena).  Of course if CVD were
renamed C-IRV, they wouldn't have to worry about people trying to get
them to consider other systems.

ITEM 5:  I agree that there are better terms than 'plurality' to
describe the vote-for-one (or lone-mark) system.  Even worse are the
list of non-descript terms used in place of IRV/STV, such as
"alternative vote", "preferential voting", "choice voting", et al.  For
all I know these terms were adopted as a way to use up the available
acronyms & confuse the public (Alternative Vote to confuse IRV with
Approval Voting, Choice Voting to confuse STV with cumulative voting,
etc.)

Approval voting, cumulative voting, and instant runoff are pretty
widely-known terms, though, so I can't see re-inventing those.

Bart



Joe Weinstein wrote:
> 
> Posting #2 - 17 Nov 2000.
> (1) Intro. (2) A plea. (3) LWV. (4) Org. vs. IRV. (5)  Terminology and
> Taxonomy.  (6) Glossary
> 
>         (1)  Introduction
> 
> My first-ever posting,  3 Nov. 2000, gave arguments for high- resolution
> grading.  Thanks - notably to Bart I. and Mike O. - for the responses.
> These contend mainly that hi-res can be simplified to crudest-res, i.e.
> pass-fail (‘approval'), considering strategic voting.  A later posting will
> argue otherwise, and will examine issues of sincerity and strategy.
> 
> On Fri. 3 Nov - hours after Posting #1, my wife and I left for a glorious
> getaway week, including for me on 6 Nov. a day of solo dayhiking Grand
> Canyon, S. rim to river and return.
> 
> We had already (on Halloween) voted absentee in our Los Angeles County
> version of Election USA 2000, on a slick new Touchscreen system.  Physically
> very nice, but of course just another implementation of the humiliating
> affront to civil rights which is embodied in the usual lone-mark
> ballot-marking requirement.  (What I call ‘lone-mark' is usually called -
> quite undescriptively and misleadingly - ‘plurality'. See Terminology and
> Taxonomy discussion below.)
> 
> I return to find a flurry of new postings.  Bart's and Mike's postings re
> LWV and re organizing v. IRV raise real questions: see below.
> 
>         (2)  A Plea
> 
> Most other recent postings discuss angels-on-pinheads subtleties.  Maybe
> these deserve heed, but I can't readily track acronyms and definitions, and
> it's cumbersome to digress to various (and uncited) web sites.  Please,
> learned authors, let each of your more abstruse postings include a (brief I
> hope) glossary of the used acronyms and trickier definitions (as I have
> tried to do below).   Do this, if only to humor new guys like me, each with
> our respective deficiencies (which in my case include a math Ph.D. and some
> pubs. in logic and in graph theory).
> 
>         (3)  LWV
> 
> It's hard to imagine that an organization with the cachet of LWV circulates
> position papers only in non-e modes; but, OK, stranger things do happen.
> Bart, please indicate what you would have us Californians do re LWV -
> actions, contacts, etc. - and maybe I can do some of it.
> 
>         (4)  Organizing v. IRV
> 
> Based on my very recent experience, such organizing should be taken very
> seriously very soon.
> 
> I've just joined a Long Beach local civic activist list, to which my first
> posting (2 Nov) concerned the (then-impending) tragedy/travesty of Election
> 2000 arising from the lone-mark method forcing people to support just one
> candidate.  The only specific response to my posting was a typical pro-IRV
> tirade, spouting the doubly dubious CVD cult equations:  reform = p.r. =
> IRV.
> 
> The cult is spreading because, using its very name and a website, CVD
> conveys the impression that it is an authoritative organization.
> 
> I am ready to help create and support a real organization for use of better
> election methods.  To be effective, let's flatter CVD by imitating it and
> then some.  I suggest the following ingredients.
> 
> *1.   An authoritative-looking web site. (There is now, for instance, a
> low-key 'Approval' web site, but it doesn't connect to an
> authoritative-looking organization).
> 
> *2.   A slick name - objective and authoritative sounding.  Better yet, two
> or even three such names, for the following three different aspects of the
> organization:
> 
>         (A)  A small hands-on managing (operating and controlling) organization:
> e.g., ‘Center for...' or ‘Institute for...'.
> 
>         (B)  A mass public organization - e.g. ‘Association for ...',  which anyone
> can readily join (e.g. via online checkoff) for no or low cost, just to
> indicate support and receive special info.
> 
>         (C)  An information effort whose label implies backup by research, e.g.
> ‘Research Program for ...'.  This effort will be operated by (A) and be
> directed at (B) and the broad public.
> 
> For instance:
>         (A) Center for Better Election Methods
>         (B) Association for Better Election Methods
>         (C) Research Program for Better Election Methods
> 
> For a loftier tone or a broader scope, replace ‘better election methods' by,
> e.g., ‘effective democratic choice', or ‘better election and representation
> methods'.
> 
> *3.   An explicitly stated mission to promote superior election methods.
> The mission statement must include attractive and broadly accepted criteria
> for desired methods.  These criteria should include many usual methods,
> while clearly excluding IRV.
> 
>         My suggestion: a  qualifying method should be one which ‘faithfully'
> rewards each voter's expression of priorities.  Here, ‘faithfully...' is
> taken to mean or anyhow to imply isotony, alias MONOTONICITY - thereby
> qualifying many non-runoff methods but clearly disqualifying runoff (or
> automated runoff) methods like IRV.
> 
> (Face it, true runoff - i.e. potentially multiple ballots for successive
> elimination of options - is inherently non-monotonic.  It seems to me that
> the main purpose of runoff, at least in the 1-winner case, is to guarantee
> that in the last stage the contest can be claimed to be won by a ‘majority'
> - a magical term for some people.)
> 
> *4.   Positive promotional efforts for the family of methods which meet our
> criteria - as well as opposition to methods such as IRV which do not.  In
> particular, use of an attractive generic semi-descriptive term or phrase -
> e.g. ‘faithful' - for our favored family of methods.
> 
>         (5)  Terminology and Taxonomy
> 
> For productive discussions on election methods - let alone successful public
> promotion of superior methods - we would do well to start using for these
> methods a more careful and truly descriptive terminology, and its implied
> taxonomy.
> 
> In this spirit, I use the term ‘lone-mark', not ‘plurality', to describe the
> prevalent method.  I also suggest using: ‘pass-fail', not ‘approval';
> ‘tradeoff' or ‘fixed-sum', not ‘cumulative'; and ‘iterated reduction' rather
> than ‘instant runoff' (we can keep the acronym IR here).
> 
> Here's more detail.  Consider an electoral contest among various listed (or
> written in) options - candidates or measures.  In the USA, most contests
> call for just one ballot (i.e. voting episode) and just one winner.  For
> this most typical case - and many others - the various usual election
> methods differ primarily in terms of the constraints which each imposes on
> what the VOTER does, i.e. how the voter may MARK the ballot.
> 
> Each ballot comprises at least the following three distinct key phases:
> actual voting, i.e. VOTERS MARKING ballots; SCORING, from the marked
> ballots, of each of the options; and DECIDING a winner (or winners) from the
> scores.
> 
>         Marking.  Every method has the voter mark a grade - a positive integer or
> zero, directly or coded - for each of one or more of the options.  (An
> unmarked option gets zero by default.)
> 
>         Scoring.  At least for the usual case of just one ballot, every usual
> method gets an aggregate score for each option by summing (or if you like,
> averaging) the individual ballot grades for that option.
> 
>         Deciding.  Every usual method gets a single winner as the highest-scorer
> (with random means used to decide among tied highest-scorers).
> 
> Note that ALL methods usually use ‘PLURALITY' to DECIDE.  It is silly to tag
> a particular method by the noun-adjective ‘plurality': all methods are
> equally ‘plurality'.  Rather, methods differ in quite another way, namely in
> what sets of grades they allow at the MARKING phase.
> 
> So, rather than ‘plurality', I describe the prevalent system as
> ‘lone-mark': it allows only a single nonzero grade, and indeed just one such
> grade (i.e., 1).
> 
> Likewise, ‘pass-fail' better describes the method which allows each option
> to be marked with one of two grades, 1 and 0, i.e. ‘pass' and ‘fail'.
> Again, it's a bit silly to call this method ‘approval': for ALL methods each
> score is intended to register the option's degree of aggregate ‘approval'!
> 
> Again, ALL usual methods use cumulation (i.e. summation) to get scores.
> Rather than ‘cumulative' voting, a more descriptive tag would be ‘tradeoff'
> or ‘fixed-sum': summed across the ballot options, the sum of all marked
> grades must be at most a given fixed bound, so that allowed individual
> options' grades are in tradeoff.
> 
> ‘Instant runoff' too arguably applies to ALL usual methods, both for just
> one ballot and for ‘true' runoff (i.e., potentially requiring more than one
> ballot).  Namely, a one-ballot election may be viewed as a trivial kind of
> runoff, and surely is as ‘instant' as can be.  Moreover, nowadays any true
> runoff method can be automated and also made ‘instant', thanks to computer
> technology.  Namely, at the first ballot, the voters can supply all needed
> contingency information,and then be spared any later actual ballot.  I
> suggest keeping the acronym IR, but taking it to stand for ‘iterated
> reduction', i.e. runoff with one-at-a-time removal of options.
> 
> A ‘ranking' method is one where, in the MARKING phase, all nonzero grades
> are required to be distinct and to form a set of consecutive integers, from
> L downward, where L is the number of listed options.  Given that a method IS
> a ranking lone-balloting method, the standard SCORING procedure (by grade
> summation or averaging) amounts to Borda.  So in describing a lone-balloting
> method, the terms ‘Borda' and ‘ranking' should be deemed synonymous.  Only
> for a non-Borda ranking method need the nonstandard scoring procedure be
> specified.
> 
>         (6)  Glossary
> 
> Abbreviations and acronyms:
>         CVD = Center for Voting and Democracy; IRV = ‘instant runoff' voting;  LWV
> = League of Women Voters;  p.r. = proportional representation.
> 
> Tricky definitions:
>         Monotonicity.  An election method is monotone (more precisely, isotone)
> if, given any election held under the method, the result of changing any one
> marked ballot by raising a winning option's grade (and possibly
> simultaneously lowering the grades of one or more of the other options) must
> again result in victory for that option.
> 
> THANKS FOR YOUR HEED.
> 
> Best wishes,
> Joe Weinstein
> Long Beach CA USA
> 
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