[EM] Pseudo-election reform in California

[Dave Ketchum]

Long ago, Plurality was the practical election method.

Parties got in the act, and realized that it was destructive to have 
multiple candidates from one party dividing up their votes while the other 
party might be more unified - so parties nominated single candidates.

A hundred years ago primaries got invented to let all the party members 
get in on that nomination.

With Plurality still the practical voting method, and sometimes more than 
two candidates running, reruns got invented.

Recent French elections demonstrated need for something better than 
Plurality plus rerun.  I believe they also demonstrated that IRV does not 
cut it - IRV too easily locks out acceptable candidates when minorities 
each rate a few minor candidates as best.

To me this leads to Condorcet, using computer-based voting and counting. 
We should advise careful use of Condorcet in a single pass election - that 
it needs neither primaries nor reruns.

To those who point out that computers NOT suited to the purpose can be 
bought, I claim that this problem should be addressed, rather than 
insisting on throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Remember that Condorcet lets voters rank candidates as best, not quite so 
good, and less acceptable.  Thus it is no disaster for multiple candidates 
to run for a single party, or for parties that think alike.

Further, multiple elections, whether some are called primaries or reruns, 
need careful thought as to cost vs value.

AN ASIDE:  Forty years ago I was involved in air traffic control. 
Considering that humans could not attend to managing this for as much 
traffic as wanted to fly, computers were THE possibility.  Such computers 
could fail.  Considering the number of planes that might be in the air at 
failure time, it was UNACCEPTABLE to expect humans to notice such 
failures, figure out what to do, and get the system going again before 
planes started crashing.  THEREFORE the computers were put in charge of 
noticing failures, identifying and locking out failing hardware, and 
seeing to quick recovery (and, hardware design considered satisfying this 
need).

The computers we use for email are more capable than those available for 
the above were - but I suspect have less attention paid to careful 
programming.

Dave Ketchum

On Tue, 1 Jun 2004 11:54:03 -0700 Dr. Ernie Prabhakar wrote:

> Hi Curt,
> 
> On Jun 1, 2004, at 11:43 AM, Curt Siffert wrote:
> 
>> It seems clear to me that this would be worse than IRV.  IRV and this 
>> "French/Louisiana Runoff" method are identical in that there is a 
>> second round if there is no majority.
>>
>> IRV then removes the last-place candidate.  So does French Runoff, 
>> except that French Runoff also removes several others; all of which 
>> had more first-place support than the IRV loser.
>>
>> Since much of the flaw of IRV is that it eliminates the person with 
>> the least first-place votes, without looking at that candidate's 
>> down-ticket support, then eliminating *multiple* people based only on 
>> their first-place votes only exacerbates this.  IRV is better than 
>> this method because at least it allows a third-place candidate with 
>> greater consensus support to have a better shot in later rounds.
>>
>> (This is assuming that the plan is for all *general election 
>> candidates* to run together in one single primary, and that if one 
>> gets a majority, the general is skipped.  And this is assuming that 
>> this is compared against another similar primary of all general 
>> election candidates, counted by IRV.)
> 
> 
> I suspect both your assumptions are wrong, at least in the California 
> case.   The primary is just a primary - there will be a general election 
> with the top two, no matter how much of the vote they get.   This 
> reflects the fact that more people participate in general elections than 
> in primaries.
> 
> I agree that Plurality in the first round suffers from all the same 
> problems as Plurality in the final election.   So, my question is -- if 
> people *want* a two-round system, what is the most efficient election 
> method to use?  I think Ranked Ballots are probably optimal, but 
> Condorcet is designed for single-winner elections. Is Condorcet still 
> the best way to determine the optimal dual-winners, if the goal is to 
> reflect the diversity of the electorate (vs. just the two most 
> acceptable to everyone)?  Or would some form of IRV or STV accomplish 
> that goal?
> 
> Put another way -- I'm trying to figure out the optimal way to help 
> these reformers achieve *their* goals, rather than trying to get them to 
> -change- their goals.   Any suggestions?
> 
> -- Ernie P.

-- 
  davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
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