[EM] One vote per voter

[Tom Ruen]

Anthony,

I appreciate your defense for approval. I'm not surrendering full-vote
Approval as a good concept. I agree with your defense for one vote per
candidate in approval.

Plurality and approval are different systems and I don't think you can ever
judge that one is right and the other wrong. They are simply different.

Full vote Approval doesn't help with Proportional Representation. Single or
fixed vote systems like STV and Cumulative Vote allow Proportional
Representation in multiseat elections. However Approval with split votes can
be used in this way.

Actually, I am seeing right now that split-vote-Approval is really a
simplified Cumulative vote, except voters can only split their vote in equal
proportions. Actually I recently analyzed the board election ballots for the
business I work for and I'd guess 90% of voters split their votes
(stock-holdings) in equal proportions among their favorites. This suggests
that split-vote-approval voting can do very well as a practical method for
multiseat elections.

Looking at votes/voter, in the most general one vote/election analysis,
there are 2^N-1 interesting subelections votable with N candidates:
Plurality takes one election with all candidates. [1 election]
Runoffs take a progression of subset elections. [N-1 subelections]
Approval takes all subelections with one candidate. [N subelections]
Condorcet takes all subelections with exactly two candidates. [N*(N-1)/2
subelections]

These are all "one vote per voter per election" systems. The tricky part is
how to combine subelection results to pick a winner. Only Plurality is
really, one-person, one vote.

I'm leaving town in a couple hours but I hope for some more opinions from EM
when I return on Monday.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Tom

----- Original Message -----
From: "Anthony Simmons" <asimmons at krl.org>
To: <election-methods-list at eskimo.com>
Sent: Friday, March 23, 2001 2:24 PM
Subject: [EM] One vote per voter


> >> From: "Tom Ruen" <tomruen at itascacg.com>
> >> Subject: [EM] Unranked-IRV
>
> >> I've been interested recently in using
> >> approval voting to end the spoiler effect of
> >> plurality elections, but I get objections to
>>> the approval process, most strongly from Don
> >> Davison, that everyone only should get one
> >> vote, and he's right that is how our current
> >> system works. For Don's sake, I considered
> >> split-vote tied-ranks within IRV. Tied ranks
> >> in IRV is completely reasonable and can be
> >> supported by dividing a vote by the number of
> >> candidates in the tie.
>
> Tom,
>
> I've enjoyed reading your report on your test
> election, and the idea of instant runoff approval
> is intriguing.  But there is one thing we won't
> have to worry about, which is the notion that
> approval allows voters more than one vote, or
> that some voters (those who approve more
> candidates) get more votes than those who approve
> fewer candidates.
>
> The first objection, that voters are allowed to
> vote more than once, is easy to dismiss.  It is
> merely confusion over the meaning of words.  In
> primitive elections using Plurality, one mark on
> the ballot constitutes one vote.  "One man one
> vote" (using the appropriately primitive gender-
> specific slogan) thus equates "one man one
> ballot" with "one man one mark".  What the slogan
> actually means is that each person should get one
> ballot.
>
> Do we object to a voter getting to vote twice --
> once for President and once for Senator?  Of
> course not.  Were we to do so, it would simply be
> another example of thinking derailed by devotion
> to loose use of language.
>
> The number of marks on the ballot has nothing to
> do with whether the election method is fair.  And
> that is, after all, what "one man one vote" is
> actually about.  An election fair is not fair
> because each voter is restricted to making a
> single mark on the ballot.  What makes the
> election fair is that everyone has the same
> ballot and marks it according to the same rules.
>
> The second objection is equally specious.  If we
> think about each mark on the ballot as a vote,
> that is one way to think about it.  Another is
> that every voter votes for or against every
> candidate.  Which way we think about it is
> arbitrary, and any argument based on such an
> arbitrary conceptualization is specious.
>
> If that isn't convincing, here's another way of
> looking at it.  An approval election could also
> be held by requiring voters to mark all of the
> candidates they *disapprove* of.  Then, voters
> who approve of more candidates would supposedly
> have fewer votes than those who approve of fewer
> candidates -- the exact opposite of the usual
> approval election, even though they are logically
> equivalent.