[EM] majority rule criteria

[James Green-Armytage]

Ralph,

	You disagreed with my use of the derogatory term "pseudomajority" for
approval voting, and I can sympathize with you there, but I'm disappointed
to note that your response doesn't touch on the major points that I made
in the post that you are replying to, and therefore I wonder whether you
read it with an open mind.
	Anyway, is "pseudomajority" unnecessarily harsh? Maybe. I guess it
doesn't matter too much what name you use. The point is that the methods
in question fail the majority and mutual majority criteria, which I think
should be a bare-bottom minimum requirement for a method to be called a
majority rule method, and therefore it also fails the Condorcet and
minimal dominant set criteria, which I think provide the most authentic
definition of majority rule. And, in the portion of the e-mail that you
seem to have ignored, I go on to talk about why this is a problem. So, a
more proper classification would be "non-majoritarian single winner
methods", but "pseudomajority methods" just seemed a bit shorter. 
	The rest of your e-mail goes on to detail reasons why approval voting is
a good method. I agree with some of your points. I have always said that I
prefer approval to plurality, and I can also say that the marginal benefit
of using approval rather than plurality is non-trivial. In my
classification, approval and plurality are both pseudomajority methods,
and approval is superior to plurality.
>
>In actual practice, approval is far more likely to produce
>a majority winner than either plurality or Borda. (I'm
>not sure about range.) 

	Okay, but which definition of a "majority winner" are you using? I think
that "a member of the smallest non-empty mutual majority set" would be one
possible definition, but I think that it is still weak. My preferred
operational definition of a majority winner is "a member of the minimal
dominant set". Do we agree on this?

>  * For this reason, even though approval may not be the
>best method for conducting elections of public officials,
>it is such a good method for making quick decisions at
>meetings that it should be an integral part of all "rules
>of order." 

	I don't think that I agree with you here. I think that pairwise counts
should be part of the rules of order of legislatures, but why approval
voting? Pairwise counts can reveal majority-supported compromises; what
can approval counts reveal? The result of approval tallies constitute
ambiguous information, because the definition of "approval" is ambiguous.

>  * Given the widespread problems affecting elections in
>the U.S., including the current near universal lack of
>election administration and voting equipment adequate to
>conduct elections using more sophisticated voting methods,
>approval probably is -- at this time in the U.S. -- the
>method most likely to produce a majority winner. Only after
>election problems are fixed and better voting equipment
>is obtained will the methods you prefer be viable for U.S.
>elections. So in the U.S. at this time, approval is  less
>deserving of being called a "pseudomajority" method than
>ANY other method.

	Less deserving? ... or you just don't think that it's politically wise to
call it that? I think it is deserving of the title, but I can see how it
might be politically counterproductive. Although, in going from plurality
to approval we'd just be going from one pseudomajority method to another,
so the term wouldn't really be part of the discussion... unless switching
to approval means that we have to pretend that approval is the best
possible single-winner method, in which case I'm not interested.
>
>  * Approval voting would be a good way of introducing the
>problem of single winner election methods to students and
>other election method novices, because it is very easy to
>explain and to compare with plurality. If the Center for
>Voting and Democracy had developed an election methods
>instruction program directed at schools and included
>approval voting in the program, chances are CVD would have
>had far more success than it has had in building popular
>support for alternatives to plurality. 

	Yeah, maybe, but we shouldn't put everything on CVD's shoulders. Sure, it
does soak up some grant money, but really it doesn't run on a huge budget.
Anyway I suspect that you could start the sort of organization you're
describing if you had the right nonprofit management skills and you were
willing to invest the necessary time.

>Election method
>educational programs could even be developed for elementary
>schools. 

	Oh, I definitely agree. The math involved is so simple... even the math
in a lot of the STV methods. And it's a great way of applying math to
actual situations. Actually, voting methods is what got me interested in
math again; I had given it up at the end of high school and not touched it
for years, and now I'm trying to be an economist. I wonder who you'd have
to fight with to get that into the elementary school curriculum...

Sincerely,
James Green-Armytage
http://fc.antioch.edu/~james_green-armytage/voting.htm