[EM] Three Stage Approval Election

[Dave Ketchum]

On Wed, 07 Jun 2006 12:32:55 -0400 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:

> At 02:37 AM 6/7/2006, Dave Ketchum wrote:
> 
>> Is this trip necessary?
> 
> 
> Yes. At least as necessary as any discussion of ideal election methods, 
> actual election methods, and possible intermediary steps.
> 
>> I claim not, for it is not up to competing with Condorcet - or even IRV,
>> which usually gets the right victor.
> 
> 
> First of all, "usually" means that there are exceptions. Those 
> exceptions can be devastating. IRV, in particular, could fail to elect 
> the best compromise candidate, and when compromise doesn't take place in 
> an election process, it can take years of civil war to bring people to 
> the table and to peace.


Agreed IRV deserves rejection - not clear whether it is more deserving 
than the method proposed here.

> 
> Secondly, Condorcet and IRV are far more complex than approval. Approval 
> is probably the absolute simplest election method after plurality. It is 
> clearly an improvement over plurality. It takes only a rule change to 
> allow it; it actually would be allowed and implemented if there were not 
> rules discarding overvoted ballots, rules that are clearly undemocratic.


Your words show there are TWO views of complexity:
      Ranked choice (IRV and Condorcet) have ballots that are messy to 
count by hand - but we can program computers to do the work and not get 
annoyed at the repetitiveness.
      As to complexity that the voter sees, Condorcet makes it easy:
           Plurality desires can be voted easily - just vote for one.
           Approval desires are also doable, provided the rules permit - 
just vote for all approved at the  same level.
           Even taking full advantage of Condorcet is simple - order as 
many as seem worth it in desire order and vote accordingly.
      Coming back to being offered Approval by itself, the voter can only 
accept vs reject - a difficult decision when the voter WANTS to show first 
vs second choices.

> 
> We should all be behind Approval, I'd suggest, even if it is not 
> perfect. It is a great step in the right direction, greatly reducing the 
> spoiler effect.
> 
> While the staged election process proposed in this thread is certainly 
> not as simple as basic Approval, and therefore probably less practical, 
> it is, in my view, a brilliant solution to one of the basic problems 
> with Approval: good Approval strategy relies on a reasonably good 
> judgement on the part of voters as to the likely winners, if the voter 
> does not vote. An Approval voter, *just like a plurality voter under 
> present conditions*, needs to know who the frontrunners are, to minimize 
> the chance that the voter's vote will be wasted.
> 
> Now, I think there are better solutions, myself, Asset Voting, and, in 
> particular, FAAV, my simplified version of Asset Voting, being one of 
> the best. But that does not make the discussion of lesser methods 
> useless. Among other things, it brings out the issues underlying 
> disagreements about election methods. We have discussed this before, and 
> have heard the argument presented by Mr. Ketchum before, but, obviously, 
> we need to continue that discussion.
> 
>> Approval still has a basic weakness.  Easy enough for Approval to be told
>> acceptable vs unacceptable, but Approval has no way, even in this
>> variation, for me to say acceptable, unacceptable, and between - those I
>> would settle for IF AND ONLY IF all the candidates I consider 
>> acceptable lose.
> 
> 
> That is correct. Approval forces the voter to make a black and white 
> decision: Approve or Not.
> 
> However, this is what I think Mr. Ketchum misses. The underlying problem 
> here is Single Winner. For a Single Winner election to represent a 
> desirable outcome, I suggest, the compromise involved in selecting that 
> single winner, given all the various preferences of the electorate, must 
> be approved, to some degree, by the electorate. Or else what we really 
> have is minority rule, which, historically, has been a major disaster. 
> The spoiler effect is a very serious one, and, among others, can be 
> credited with the election of Adolf Hitler, etc.
> 
> Condorcet methods ostensibly solve this problem, but there is also a 
> limitation to Condorcet methods. While the voter ranks candidates in a 
> Condorcet compliant method, the gap between ranks is not expressed. As a 
> result, a minor but common gap can cause a true compromise winner to be 
> passed over in favor of one who is merely the favorite of a sufficiently 
> large faction. Condorcet methods do not require voters to make the 
> judgement of "How acceptable is this compromise?" Approval does.


Agreed Condorcet asks only whether A is greater than B, but supports no 
attempt at saying how much - BTW how does a voter express how much AND BE 
UNDERSTOOD in a method that permits such.

Back to Approval - it does provide ONE gap between acceptable and 
unacceptable - but NO WAY to have any other gap or to express how big a 
gap the voter sees between those accepted and those rejected.

> 
> Approval allows voters to make a compromise judgement. With a more 
> sophisticated method, that judgement could be more refined. Approval is 
> a Range method, with restricted range, essentially binary. Increasing 
> the Range increases the level of judgement possible. The method which I 
> called A+/PW (Approval Plus, counted Pairwise) is a Condorcet-compliant 
> method which adds a single rank, Preferred, in addition to the normal 
> Approval ranks of Approved and Not Approved. (Basic Approval Plus has 
> this rank, but does not use it to determine the winner, only for 
> statistical and campaign finance and similar considerations.)
> 
> *Any election must find a compromise winner. To be an ideal 
> single-winner method, it must find the ideal compromise. What does 
> "ideal compromise" mean? Condorcet methods with more than two or three 
> ranks don't really address this question, unless they have a method of 
> expressing what could be called "ranking distance." I think some 
> Condorcet methods attempt to infer this from vote patterns.
> 
> But with Approval, the judgement of how to compromise is made by the 
> voters, and the election outcome hangs on how the voters make that 
> determination, collectively.
> 
> So, yes, this is a limitation of Approval, but it is also a strength, 
> potentially. It depends on the relative harm and benefit of the two effects.
> 
>> BUT, assuming Approval is the best we can do:
>>
>> "randomly chosen" is tricky - even done truly, voters will wonder if
>> selection was biased for a purpose.
> 

The discussion below misses the point.  WE KNOW from recent horror stories 
that anything uncheckable from results, such as selecting a group of 
voters, should be avoided in designing methods (could take more seriously 
validating implementation of methods - but that seems far in the future).

> 
> Yes, it's tricky. But we don't have to solve that problem here. If the 
> method is a good one, presuming that this problem could be solved, then 
> that particular problem could be addressed. Since I think it is soluble, 
> I wouldn't make this the reason to avoid the method.
> 
> You know, there has been a lottery system in the U.S. at various times 
> for the draft. I know a lot of people who hated or resisted the draft, 
> but I don't recall any allegations that the lottery was specifically 
> biased, except in open ways: that is, you could get deferments for 
> various reasons, or could otherwise avoid the draft. Remember a certain 
> son of a prominent politician who was able to get a fairly cushy 
> assignment to the Air National Guard? And then to get leave from that to 
> help a certain congressman in his election campaign, etc., etc. This was 
> not a problem with the lottery.
> 
> Lotteries could be conducted quite openly, and locally. A locality would 
> have a quota, a number of voters for the first ballot, and those voters 
> might be chosen literally out of a box, by a person broadly trusted in 
> the community, with the box contents verifiable before and after the 
> drawing.
> 
> It could be done. That's the point.
> 
> With any election method, we can find some theoretical objection. If we 
> don't like the method for other reasons, we may describe this objection 
> as if it were an insoluble problem. It's a red herring. If the 
> staged-election method is a good method, the problem of random selection 
> of voters is soluble.
> 
> And it would make a good circus. That is, it would raise public 
> interest, I expect, in the election process. It would be exciting, like 
> a race. Frankly, it might be quite interesting to have more stages. 
> "Smith was in the lead by 2%, but Jones has nosed past him by 0.1%. This 
> is a real race, folks!"
> 
> In a close race, I expect that total election turnout would be greater. 
> Most people think that's good. Absent something like Delegable Proxy, I 
> agree.
> 
>> Voters will puzzle over whether the complications make sense.
> 
> 
> They will puzzle over any election method change.
> 
>> Messes up campaigning, for candidates need to try to have today's voters
>> aware of them today.


Just restating:  Preparing for ONE election day means one campaign and one 
load on the media.  For multiple days this gets multiplied.  Even the 
mailing is tricky - takes extra work on addressing and smaller mailings 
sometimes mean extra cost per item.

> 
> 
> A plus for the method, in my opinion. It may even be desirable for the 
> sample voters to be in a publicly known set. As a random sample, the 
> content of the campaign material wouldn't be different, but mailings 
> just to those voters would be less expensive, so that kind of 
> campaigning would get less expensive. The media would rebroadcast that 
> as news without requiring candidates to pay for advertising. I don't 
> have a crystal ball, but, my point is, this could be an improvement.
> 
> As with many of these issues, we won't really know for sure until it is 
> tried. This method could be tried in a fairly small jurisdiction. It 
> might take legislation to enable that, but I don't see any 
> constitutional issues, except perhaps with Presidential elections, I'm 
> not sure about that.
> 
>> Voters will have problems remembering when to vote.
> 

True, there should be a card as to where to vote.  As to when, with ONE 
election day the when gets publicized.  With multiple, family members may 
vote on different days.

> 
> Scraping the bottom of the barrel, there. A voter who has trouble 
> remembering when to vote, having received a voting card or ticket, this 
> is the person I least want to be voting. It would be all over the news....
> 
> The first poll might be quite a bit less than 10%. 1% might be quite 
> enough, if the sample is truly random. (In this case, more stages would 
> be used, almost certainly.)
> 
>> On a normal election day multiple races are attended to at each precinct,
>> with a dozen races in perhaps 4 different districts - how does this scheme
>> fit in?
> 

Needs more thought:
      Keeping ballots the same means later voters will have lots of 
opportunity for useless votes.
      Changing them complicates getting absentee ballots out when wanted.

> 
> Well, they would be included in the stages. I see no reason why not. 
> That is, the ballot would stay the same for all stages. There is no 
> extra cost for this, as far as I can anticipate. Because of the 
> possibility that a margin would be great enough that statistically it is 
> nearly certain -- or even impossible -- for the outcome to change 
> through the last stage, indeed, costs might be lowered by eliminating 
> that stage and replacing it with a mail-in ballot that would be used for 
> other purposes, such as campaign finance. But this wouldn't happen, I 
> think, with many-candidate ballots. Still, it could save voter time, 
> perhaps.
> 
> But, to my mind, the value of a good election outcome is much greater 
> than the costs for any of the election methods I've seen. Cost arguments 
> are, again, a red herring. Election costs are trivial compared to the 
> sums that will be handled and allocated by the victors; the most 
> significant election cost, which is often neglected, is voter time at 
> the voting booth and waiting to get there. This cost is enormous, it 
> dwarfs, in fact, in value, what is normally spent on campaigning.
> 

And the voting gets complicated by each voter needing to get to the polls 
ON THE DAY THAT voter is to vote.
-- 
  davek at clarityconnect.com    people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek
  Dave Ketchum   108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY  13827-1708   607-687-5026
            Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
                  If you want peace, work for justice.