[EM] Expressing pairwise preferences

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 02:31 AM 8/19/2005, Juho Laatu wrote:
>US presidential elections are a strange case. I have never really 
>understood why one elects several people (slate) although the intention is 
>to give all votes of a state to one candidate. It would be so easy to 
>elect proportionally n candidates from one list, m candidates from another 
>etc. Maybe all this comes from days when the states had to send a big 
>group of men riding to Washington to make sure that the voice of the state 
>will be heard :-).

Yes. That was the intention, and that was how it worked. As far as I know, 
electors may have had opinions, but they were not pledged. They still 
aren't pledged to stick with their candidate beyond the first ballot, and 
it is not against the law for an elector to vote differently than expected, 
and it has rarely happened.

But the party system hijacked the process and made the electoral college, 
quite against the clear intent of the Constitution, into a weird 
rubber-stamp that in practice reflects the will of the majority party in 
each state. This was possible because the Constitution left the method of 
the selection of electors to each state, and the majority party in each 
state gains by going for all-or-nothing. I don't know if this has ever been 
challenged, but it is the true problem with the electoral college, not the 
number inequities that are often the focus of criticism. Odd, don't you 
think, that those who supposedly believe in original intent would probably 
be in the forefront of those opposing the reform of this system?

(Not odd at all, actually. Pure self-interest that prefers to win than to 
have a government with true majority support. It is not "Our way" over "My 
Way" over "The Minority's Way." And this is why I've claimed that so-called 
"strategic voting" is not necessarily insincere, and it is certainly not 
insincere to vote Approval, ranking a less-liked candidate equally with 
one's favorite.)

>>Now let me muddy the waters with something doable per New York law.  I 
>>will get together with other EM members from New York to put together a 
>>slate of 31 electoral college candidates - they likely see this as the 
>>joke that it is, and we enlist friends if needed for the total.
>>We file this with myself as candidate for President and someone from 
>>outside NY as VP.
>>      Not believable that my slate gets elected - maybe enough nasty 
>> words get said about the other candidates.  I still cannot expect 
>> election as President since I only ran in NY, so my slate could be on 
>> their own as to who to vote for for President.

I didn't respond to this when originally posted, so here is my comment: 
Yes, one would not win the Presidency. But if one could win the state, one 
would then have a block of pledged electors who might prevent a majority 
winner in the first ballot. And then, as I recall, the electors are freed 
to vote their consciences, or as they can negotiate. It *could* produce a 
better election outcome. In 2000, who knows what would have happened?

More to the point, if voting reform comes to pass and the ways in which 
states choose their electors changes (preferably to some kind of PR rather 
than to district election, which would not produce as strongly this 
desirable effect), then third parties would be at the table, it would 
become common for the first ballot to fail, and thus the original intent of 
the Constitution would be restored.

And I do not know if the voting methods for selecting electors have ever 
been challenged. I think the argument for ruling all-or-nothing 
unconstitutional is much stronger than the prevailing opinion that the 
Supreme Court issued in 2000 to resolve the election for Bush. 
All-or-nothing really does disenfranchise the minority party 
state-by-state, and it has more than once resulted in mere plurality 
winners and, as we saw in 2000, a winner with a popular vote minority, by a 
substantial margin (about 500,000 votes?)

>>Agreed 100 candidates could happen - but could it be expectable enough to 
>>rate special provisions in law?
>
>Probably not.

The rules for getting on the ballot should not be the same as the rules for 
being eligible to win. At present, you can usually vote for anyone you 
please. Locally, the rules require that you put a name and address on the 
ballot. I don't know if the address is actually legally required, but in 
Florida, supposedly, if the intention were clear, nothing but a clear 
indication of that intention would be required. However, election officials 
there have been known to violate the law, and usually nothing is done about it.

(Thus overvoted ballots with the correct desired vote written in, an 
explicit declaration of intent, were discarded as spoiled. Even worse, 
*non* overvoted ballots that were ambiguous to some voters, it appears, 
with only an additional written-in vote for the *same* candidate, 
presumably to make the intention clear, were discarded. There were, I have 
seen it alleged, enough of these ballots to swing the election, one more 
underreported story out of Florida 2000.)

>Yes, the rule of ranking unlisted candidates last is a good guess of what 
>voters' opinions are.

Unfortunately, it is only a guess. I've argued that it is best to so 
interpret blanks, but the intention is far from clear. Blanks can simply 
mean "I don't know," which is quite different from "Disliked" or a rating 
of zero or "F". On the other hand, we must remember the purpose of 
elections, which is to create a government by the consent of the people. 
Consent is actually more important, much more important, than Preference.

And if a candidate is not known by, say, a majority of candidates, it can 
hardly be said that an election which has elected this candidate because 
blanks were ignored has expressed the *consent* of the people. Indeed, in 
this case a majority of people (or at least a plurality) will experience a 
situation where their favorite candidate lost to this relative unknown. 
People have been known to revolt for less cause. Even if everyone who knows 
this person thinks, as I wrote on the Range list, he is a saint and a 
genius. He might never get a chance to show it!