[EM] Re: Chris: Approval vs IRV

[Chris Benham]

Kevin,
In response to me writing (Sat.Jun.12):

In Australia, most voters don't know or care who the individual candidate is. They usually just decide 
which party they're going to support, and then fill out their ballots as that party reccomends. In some 
seats a major party will have a big majority, and so the election itself seems like a formality. The 
major parties are not run particularly democratically, so the decision of who gets endorsed for a given 
"safe seat" is sometimes made by party bureacrats on criteria other than merit or local popularity. 
Sometimes they go too far, and try to impose a candidate that the local branch and/or the local electors 
don't like. In that case, an independent who identifies as a supporter of the major party (whose "safe" 
seat it is) will sometimes run ("directing preferences" to that party), and win the seat (sometimes with
the help of the preferences of the other major party). The threat of this happening puts some limit on 
the power of major party machines to just give out these seats to whoever they like. Under Approval, I 
don't think that this would work as well.

You wrote:

>I think it would work 10x better in Approval.  In IRV the independent's supporters can
>spoil the election just by voting sincerely.  In Approval those voters have to downrank
>the unpopular nominated candidate, which has obvious risks which they can consider, in order 
>to spoil the result.

CB: Suppose that  for some single-member seat; previous election 
results, pubblished polls and all other indicators say that the
result in the next election will be:

60%:Labor
40%:Conservative

The Labor party machine trys to impose some candidate that local Labor 
party supporters don't like, or like decidedly less than
than some other pro-Labor candidate.  Under IRV, this third candidate 
can run as a Labor-clone, possibly badging himself  as
"Independent  Labor", which at a minimum means that he directs his 
preferences to Labor and if elected, will help make up the
numbers in parliament  on which  Labor  tries to base a government. For 
this reason,  the Labor party will direct their supporters
to give that  candidate their second preferences.
The threat of  the (potential) rebel-clone (to the official candidate) 
is "I will appeal to regular Labor supporters to supplant you as
their representative, without them being inhibited by any anxiety about 
splitting the anti-Conservative vote".
Under Approval, it can only be "I will appeal to regular Labor 
supporters to abandon you and risk decisively splitting the anti-
Conservative vote" or  "I will appeal to regular Labor supporters to 
vote for me as well as you, and then I will appeal to some of  
the Conservative supporters  (the enemy camp) to vote for me as well as 
their candidate so that I can win". Neither of  these stances
sit well with the rebel-clone claiming to be more "authentic" Labor than 
the "official"  endorsed Labor candidate.

Chris Benham