[EM] article on preferential voting

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 02:24 PM 12/30/2006, James Gilmour wrote:

> > >Maybe, but I suspect US readers will find that the acronym "AV" was
>used
> > >for "Alternative Vote" many decades before the term "Approval Voting"
> > >was first coined by Robert J. Weber in 1976 (Wikipedia).
> >
> > I did not claim that it was wrong, it was irritating. It's irritating.
>
>Yes, but not half as irritating as it was, and is, for those of us
>working with voting systems who had long used the acronym "AV" for
>"Alternative Vote", to have a bunch of Johnny-come-latelies hijack the
>acronym to mean something very different.

How can you compare your irritation with mine? Do you have some kind 
of universal mind-reading capacity, perhaps you can match neurons 
one-to-one and see how many are firing in the irritation pathways? Wow!

As to Johnny-come-latelies, acroynms, generally, are not copyrighted. 
Stuff it. The point was that the paper was confusing to those 
familiar with AV as meaning Approval Voting. I didn't coin the usage 
and language, in general, is like this. Usage is a haphazard process 
unless you have some kind of consensus committee.... good idea, I 
think, but we don't have it yet. The author of the paper quite 
correctly, I believe, decided to spell out what he means. Excellent. 
Costs very few characters, becomes much more readable to the johnnys, 
who are, after all, the next generation, and I fail to see how it 
could legitimately irritate you....

> > STV, by the way, could be implemented in a radically different way,
> > where the transfer is under the control of the candidate receiving
> > the vote.
>
>Radical it may be, but I don't want anything under the control of the
>candidate.  Elections are for electors, and so I want as much as
>possible under the control of the voter.

Everything transient and relatively trivial. But the actual 
governmental decisions, no, that's perfectly okay to put in the 
control of the candidates. And if your vote gets wasted, get over it, stuff it.

"Electors" in American usage generally refers to those who have been 
given the right to vote on behalf of some population. What I 
proposed, then, does exactly that: it elects electors, giving them 
them electoral power on behalf of those who trusted them. So far, 
*no* wasted votes. If you imagine that someone could better exercise 
your voting power than one of the people running for the office, 
fine. Write the name in. If the system is as I'm proposing, your vote 
won't be wasted. You can even write your own name in. (The 
complication in real world systems is that there must be some way to 
identify the person voted for, what I've seen is that if those 
counting don't recognize the name or have some way of nailing down 
who it is exactly, they disregard it. But that is a soluble problem.)

What are the implications of voting for yourself? It means that, in 
the next stage, your vote is public. That's all. And if someone else 
votes for you, too, why, then you have more than one vote to 
exercise. Why not? The first stage of voting under Asset is secret. 
The next stage is not secret, just as the votes of representatives in 
assemblies are generally not secret. It's about responsibility and 
accountability. Voters are independent and not accountable, and thus 
it is perfectly proper that they vote secretly.

Asset Voting gives more power to the voter than any other system, 
*real* power, not imaginary power, where the voter is supposed to 
anticipate, somehow, the configurations that will arise that might 
require shifting a vote. Understand that Asset Voting only has to do 
with dealing with votes that would otherwise be wasted. It is 
perfectly possible to set up Asset Voting with other systems. If you 
want to determine the alternative votes you would cast, fine. But if 
you would prefer to simply trust one person, you would not go down 
the ranks, you would only vote for the one you trust. And if that 
person didn't directly win, then that person would have your vote to 
reassign. This is *more* power to the voter, not less, because the 
voter still has whatever power they had without asset, plus an 
additional power, the power of a proxy.

And, guess what? Wealthy people hire proxies whenever they can. It is 
a *power*, not a loss of power.

> > That would actually be a little closer to the implied
> > meaning of "single transferable vote."
>
>I think this is a most perverse interpretation of three simple words.

The words don't say who transfers it. Also the words imply a single 
vote, whereas the system actually involves the voter casting multiple 
votes. I'm not claiming that the usage was wrong, only that it was 
ambiguous, and it is simply a fact that this is what I thought. Of 
course, I was familiar with delegable proxy when I heard of STV -- I 
came into the Election Methods universe because I was pointed here -- 
and so my intepretation was natural for me. Pervert that I am.

>It is the elector's vote and in an elector-centred voting system (which
>STV-PR is, or should be) each voter should decide how his or her vote
>will be transferred.

Does the voter have the right to designate someone else to transfer 
it? If not, I'd say that the voter's natural rights have been 
abridged. We don't think of that because, historically, voting was 
not an intrinsic or common-law right, it was a privilege granted by 
the sovereign. Proxy rights are common-law whenever property rights 
are involved.

Mr. Gilmour's analysis is abridged and corrupted.

> > When I first heard the name,
> > that's what I thought it meant.
>
>You must already have had a very candidate-centred view of voting
>systems to have come to that conclusion.

No, I had a proxy-centered view. Proxies might be candidates, they 
might not be. They might be merely electors holding electoral power, 
having been voluntarily given it by single voters. Proxies aren't 
elected except in a technical sense; that is, nobody tells me who my 
proxy is, I don't have to engage in a contest with others to gain my 
desired proxy.

It wasn't a *conclusion,* it was an *impression.* I was perfectly 
aware that it might not mean that, but, quite simply, that is what I 
first thought of. Much simpler, in fact, than what it actually is 
used to mean. (Simple ballot, simple counting, but more complex 
post-poll process.)

This whole "candidate-centered" nonsense is particularly inane 
because the whole idea is to elect a candidate who is going to 
exercise power. If we trust the candidate with the powers of the 
office, it is a small step to trust the candidate with the power of 
selection, on behalf only of the voters who would, among other 
options, accept that candidate in the office. Since they voted for him or her.

In Asset Voting, there are two ways in which votes get used other 
than to elect the one for whom one voted. First, if the candidate 
does not receive a quota of votes, all is not lost. That candidate 
may be able to get votes from others. If not, the candidate may 
choose, on behalf of his or her voters, the best alternative and 
transfer the votes to him or her. It's an *intelligent* process, that 
is, *active* intelligence, not the kind of intelligence involved in 
setting up a series of fairly rigid actions in advance, with no 
ability to alter the sequence in process. Asset Voting makes much of 
an election into a deliberative process, and this is why I consider 
it likely to be far more fair and wise.

The other way that votes get recast is where the candidate receiving 
them has more than the quota. In this case, the candidate has excess 
votes to distribute.

That this can produce *accurate* proportional representation with no 
need to make political parties a formal part of the system, I'd 
think, should be quite interesting. Parties *will* have an effect. 
There may still be party lists, and candidates who are pledged to 
transfer their votes according to a preset list, either one from a 
party, or one of their own. I can vote for one of these if I like. It 
boils down to whom I trust most.

Once again, key to understanding the appeal of Asset Voting: very few 
wasted votes, if any. Yet, for the voter, it is very simple. Vote for 
the candidate(s) you most trust. One is enough, no need to rank the 
rest. But if the system allows it, you *may* rank the rest. If your 
vote is exhausted, I'd suggest, your vote would revert back to your 
first choice for reassignment, after all, this is the person you most 
trusted for the office, and thus, of that set of candidates, probably 
the one you would trust most to act as your proxy to recast your vote.

Single-winner, this method only wastes votes not cast for the winner 
or someone who will reassign votes to the winner. Thus it wastes the 
minimum of votes. It essentially creates a 
proportional-representation Electoral College (though, because 
members of the College will have differing voting power, it is really 
a proxy assembly). In many elections, perhaps, the winner will appear 
with no vote reassignments. It is only when a candidate does not get 
a majority in the direct poll that the deliberative process begins.

It is possible that voters would only be voting for electors, not 
eligible to vote for themselves. This would be more or less the 
original conception of the U.S. Electoral College, which was actually 
a brilliant idea that failed because the Convention could not come to 
agreement on how to select the electors, so they left it to the 
states, which meant the state legislatures or other process as 
determined by the state. The legislatures became subject to the 
control of majority parties, who realized that they could advance 
their national interests by naming all electors from their own party, 
instead of dividing them up or naming them in some nonpartisan way. 
And "reform" of this consisted in setting up a system which awarded 
all electors in quite a similar manner, but according to the popular 
vote for "President." This was not in the constitution, it is what 
parties were able to do jumping through the loophole left in the 
Constitutional system. And, of course, changing it is clearly not in 
the interest in the majority party, state by state. So it has 
remained, a clear corruption of the Constitutional intent.

Allowing the candidates to serve also as electors, being so enabled 
by the voters -- who could just as easily vote for persons pledging 
to transfer their votes to someone else, i.e., some trusted citizen 
who does not want to serve in the office -- is simpler. I think the 
framers of the U.S. Constitution, generally, would have liked this 
idea had it occurred to them. It would not have been so easily 
corrupted. (But implementing it could have been more difficult when 
travel was more difficult and likewise other forms of communication. 
Still, Asset would have worked even then, two centuries ago, 
especially if the votes were readily transferable as we imagine for 
delegable proxy. Indeed, one of the exciting possibilities for 
delegable proxy, a Brazilian sociologist has been interested, was for 
representation in political process of remote villages in Brazil.)