[EM] 05/20/02 - True Majority Winner or Candidate:

[Donald Davison]

05/20/02 - True Majority Winner or Candidate:

Greetings list members,

Richard Squabble Moore and Michael Rouse are pretending that the term `True
Majority Winner or Candidate' has not appeared on this list.  The poor boys
are in denial, they don't remember nor can find what they don't want to
remember nor find.
   What makes them think that some of the rest of us will not remember nor
be able to find text bearing the term `True Majority Winner or Candidate'.

Anyone who has been on this list any length of time has seen the term many
times in text supporting Approval Voting and/or Condorcet.  One does not
need to search the entire world of the internet nor the entire EM archives.
One only needs to have been on this list one month ago on 22 April to have
received a letter written by a one Paul Hager.

You Approval people do remember Paul Hager, do you not?  He was your
darling politician, who was going to spearhead the drive for Approval
Voting.  I remember some of you big spenders even donated fifty bucks to
the `Cause'.
  (Only fifty bucks? - Some big spenders)

As a politician, Hager was a fool to promote Approval Voting, he was
putting himself too far removed from his public.  To be an effective
leader, a politician needs to know where the public is at on an issue, and
then the politician must place himself only one or two steps ahead of the
public, but no more.  If so, then he would be viewed as a leader.

It was foolish for you `Big Spenders' to donate money to him, for his
efforts were doomed to failure, but in failure, maybe he learned something
about being a politician.  On the other hand, I don't think you people have
learned anything in your loss of fifty bucks, he should have taken you for
more, but I digress.

Anyway, in Hager's post of 22 April, you will find he uses the term `true
majority winner or candidate' three times.  Once in relation to Approval
Voting, once in relation to Condorcet, and once in relation to IRV.  Hager
seems to regard True Majority Candidate/Winner as some sort of standard to
compare all methods.

I don't know if Hager is still on this list.  If he has learned anything he
should have wised-up and dropped this list, dropped Approval Voting, and
dropped the losers that support Approval Voting or Condorcet.

Anyway, I'm sending Hager a courtesy copy of this post so I can ask him
what the hell he means by `true majority winner or candidate'.  The people
on this list don't seem to know.

Dear Hager,
   I see you use the term `true majority candidate or winner' as a
standard.  We all feel that somewhere in the many votes and choices of any
election there should exist a true majority that should revel to us who
should be the winner.  The question I would like to put to you, is: `How do
you know which candidate is the true majority candidate?'
  I mean, suppose there is an single-seat election in which the voters make
a number of choices each, but no method is defined yet for the election.
How do we know which candidate is the `true majority candidate' so we can
compare our results when we do decide on which method to use?
  This has always puzzled me, how do you know this before you work the math
of some method?
  Please reply.

Regards to all, Donald Davison,


PS, I include a copy of Hager's 4/22/02 letter below for Poor Richard and
Michael who are unable to remember nor find that which they don't want to
remember nor find.


  ------------ Original Hager Letter -----------
From: hager2002 at lsh107.siteprotect.com
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2002 18:43:12 -0500 (CDT)
To: election-methods-list at eskimo.com
Subject: Re: [EM] The Allure of IRV...

On Mon, 22 Apr 2002, Alex Small wrote:

> I was talking to a co-worker about France.  I said this indicates a flaw of
> runoff methods.
>
> She doesn't know much about voting methods, so she started saying that
> the "successive elimination method" is much better because in France a
> whole bunch of liberals divided the vote and kept any liberals out of the
> finale, whereas "successive elimination" (her name for IRV) would have put
> a liberal in the finale.  Basically, she'd heard somebody describe IRV once
> and she thinks it's great.  (In all fairness, I also thought it was great
> when I first learned there were alternatives to plurality.)
>
[...]
>
> This is the problem with dissuading people against IRV:  The idea of a
> guaranteed majority looks so great, never mind that the majority is very
> path-dependent (which leads to non-monotonicity, IIAC, etc.).  It also
> looks so great that if our favorite is gone, well, at least we can weigh in
> on the remaining candidates.  Face it, folks, IRV _LOOKS_ really good.

Funny, I first read about AV only after I'd heard about IRV -- which I
knew as preference voting.  AV was immediately attractive to me because it
was much simpler.  It was only in the past couple of years that I learned
that IRV has all sorts of nasty properties.

>
> I don't know how to break through that psychology for others.  I myself
> broke through it because I enjoy math, so I was drawn to investigate
> election methods further.  Also, I went to a talk by Saari, and although I
> don't agree with him on BC he at least illustrated issues I'd never thought
> of.  Even though I don't share his conclusions, I'm glad Saari showed that
> the issue is much bigger than simply making sure you get a majority
> (however manufactured) in the end.
>
> But, not everybody will attend a talk by an expert who doesn't like IRV.
> Not everybody will bother to read up on it.  They just hear that it worked
> in this one election, and if your first choice is gone, well, don't worry,
> you still have some say.  How to dissuade them?

It's somewhat early to tell, but I had an initial battle with pro-IRV
people on the Bylaws Committee of the national Libertarian Party.  I
basically ripped them to shreds -- very nicely of course -- and I think
they've all come around.  Of course, that process took several back and
forth exchanges.

Regarding my challenge in the general election, I won't have time for back
and forth.  However, I have a big advantage in that Indiana is virgin
territory -- the IRV folks haven't been around to muddy the waters.

If I'm challenged about (very rarely) IRV, my current approach is to
briefly explain that IRV, unlike AV, is a ranked voting system (most
people won't know what it is and I'm not going to attempt to explain it).
I then say something like:

"The advantage of AV over other systems is that it is very simple, very
good at finding the true majority candidate, and would cost essentially
nothing to implement.  I know of no other system which has all three
attributes.  Having said that, there are other voting systems that are
worth considering and the task force on voting reform that I will put
together when I'm elected will be charged with evaluating alternatives.
The best ranked system, incidentally, is not IRV -- it's called the
Condorcet method.  In voting science, Condorcet is the standard by which
all other voting methods are measured.  In fact, the term voting theorists
use for the majority winner is the "Condorcet winner" because Condorcet
will always find the true majority winner in an election.  If Hoosier
voters would prefer to see their tax dollars go for replacing all of our
voting machines in order to have a ranked system, then I and, I'm sure,
the task force will ratify that desire.  But I strongly suspect that the
recommendation would be for Condorcet, not IRV. A Condorcet ballot and an
IRV ballot are identical.  The difference is in how the votes are tallied.
That difference is important because the expert view is that, although IRV
is better than the current plurality system, it has some nasty properties
that make it a questionable choice for voting reform.  One of these is
that if you rank three candidates A, B, and C, it is possible that if you
swap your A and B choices, it could cause C to win.  Another is that,
unlike Condorcet, IRV will often fail to find the true majority
candidate."

At that point I say that if people are interested I'll be happy to go into
more detail.

>
> Don't say "Hitler-Stalin-Washington."  The example is so extreme that it
> will be ignored.
>
> Don't say "monotonicity" or "IIAC".  Most people will fall asleep.
>
> I guess the only way to beat the IRV psychology is to reach them before the
> IRV people do.  I got started on my Eastern European research by contacting
> Steven Brams.  He admits that his knowledge of E. Europe is dated, so the
> info posted to the list is likely right.  Well, time to get going faster on
> it...

AS I said, so far, I've had pretty good success converting people away
from IRV.  Of course, I haven't encountered any IRV true believers yet.
It probably helps that I say that ultimately, all I want is a system that
works and that the voters of Indiana will accept.

>
> Alex
>
> P.S.  This person is an engineer.
>

--
paul hager              hager2002 at hager2002.org

"The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason."
                        -- Thomas Paine, THE AGE OF REASON





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