[EM] Why Robert's Rules is relevant to this list

[James Gilmour]

RLSuter at aol.com Sent: Monday, August 08, 2005 4:30 AM
> Just a few comments. Granted it's a tough task, but is it 
> really tougher than others -- e.g., the task of selecting a 
> group of people who will adequately represent all citizens of 
> a nation or all members of an organization and are highly 
> likely to make good and fair decisions?

Yes, I really do believe that electing the "best representative" or "most representative" single winner is more
difficult than electing the "best representative" or "most representative" group.  Some will see the difference purely
in quantitative terms, but the difference between electing one and electing two (or more) is so great that it is better
seen a qualitative difference.  If the task of electing the "best" single winner were no so difficult there would be
little debate on this list.

Consider the trivial example of electing "our" representative to the beverage committee.  In our room, 26 of us vote for
the coffee candidate and 24 of us vote for the tea candidate.  So we send the coffee candidate to the beverage committee
as "our representative".  Nearly half of us voted for tea, but we have no representation.  This is the best any
single-winner election can guarantee, no matter how the votes may be marked or counted.  It was the same in the room
next door  -  they too voted 26 for their coffee candidate and 24 for their tea candidate.  So half of them were also
left without representation.

But suppose the two rooms were brought together for this election, to form a 2-member voting "district".  If we all
voted as before we should have 52 votes for coffee candidates and 48 votes for tea candidates.  This is a 2-member
election and if we use a sensitive voting system, we now elect one coffee candidate and one tea candidate.  This
improvement in representation when we elect two together is so great and so easy to achieve that devising a voting
system to obtain such a result is a qualitatively different problem from the task of electing the "best representative"
or "most representative" in a single-winner election.  Obviously, the more representatives we elect together, the more
representative the elected group becomes, but the differences with each successive addition are small and almost
insignificant compared to the difference between electing one alone and electing two together.  It is for this reason
that the single-winner election (eg President, state governor, city mayor) is a special case  -  the most difficult
case.

No voting system can ensure that those elected "are highly likely to make good and fair decisions".  The best any voting
system can do, and should be expected to do, is to secure the election of the "most representative" candidates where the
decision about which candidates are the "most representative" is made by the voters.  We must also recognise that the
voters may sometimes want their representatives to make decisions that some will see as "unfair".  Judgements about
which decisions were "good" are best left to history  -  those who wanted something different will always see those
decisions as "bad".

> How about the task of 
> choosing judges and juries? Aren't these and others all more 
> or less equally tough?

In the UK we don't elect judges or juries, so these tasks are quite different from securing the best representation by
election.  Juries are chosen at random from the electors' roll.  Judges are appointed, supposedly on merit  -  at least
we don't have the overt political involvement in these appointments that is apparent in the USA.

> Second, there are at least some multi-option decisions that 
> are very similar to multi-candidate elections, 

Yes, of course, there are.  But my point was that you should recognise those for which you had a real alternative.  In
some cases (in many cases?), what could be presented as multi-option might be better presented as a sequence of well
structured "yes/no" questions  -  'better' in the sense of producing a less ambiguous statement of the voters' wishes.

> such as 
> choosing the best name for a new product or program or the

I would expect such decisions to be made by focus group research among the target customer group.  If there isn't a
consensus, you have a segmented market.

> best headquarters location for a new organization.

I would expect such decisions to be made by hard-headed option appraisals that took all the relevant factors into
account.  Of course, there might still be disagreement among the board members and a vote might then be necessary.

> Third, I wish I could be more certain your example of no 
> change, change to A, or change to B is the kind of 
> multi-option decision most likely to arise. It seems to me 
> that if multi-option decisions were explicitly welcomed and 
> there were accepted means for dealing with different kinds of 
> them (e.g., approval voting for those of relatively minor 
> importance and some variation of Condorcet for those of 
> relatively major importance), then the number of options 
> routinely proposed and given serious consideration would 
> increase and there would be more multi-option votes.

Let's consider one aspect of voting reform in the UK.  For the UK parliament (646 MPs) we use FPTP (simple plurality) in
single-member districts.  Some of us want to change to proportional representation.  STV or party list?  If party list,
closed lists or open lists?  National districts or regional districts?  If STV, rules that can be counted only by
computer or rules that can be counted by hand and by computer?  These options for decision could all be presented as one
multi-option vote.  But I am quite sure that we should get a much clearer view of what the voters wanted if we asked a
series of structured questions, each requiring a "yes/no" answer or the choice of one of two alternatives at each
decision point.

> On the other hand, there are certainly other ways of dealing 
> with such situations, such as discussions aimed at "whittling 
> down" the number, ideally to one best option, which would 
> make it unnecessary to vote at all. The ideal outcome of any 
> collective decision-making process is unanimous agreement and 
> therefore no need for a vote. The problem is that often there 
> is very limited time for discussion and a decision must be 
> made. In those cases, voting is needed.

I accept you ideal, but consensus discussion is often not possible  -  as when significant numbers of electors (the
majority!) choose not to attend but are still entitled to vote.  It was experience of such legally binding
decision-making I had in mind when I made my suggestion.

> In any case, it seems to me that the strongest opponents of 
> introducing new voting methods will be politically motivated 
> politicians and political activists rather than professional 
> parliamentarians. 

I don't understand the difference between "professional parliamentarians" and "politically motivated politicians".  Here
in the UK all of our parliamentarians are politically motivated politicians!

James Gilmour