[EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 05:53 PM 4/23/2007, Juho wrote:
>Political elections are typically competitive. Polls are typically
>less competitive. Voting on which family size Pizza (of several good
>ones) to buy for the family today may well be a quite non-competitive
>election.

That's true. And one might ask why. Certainly it's understandable in 
a family. But it is also understandable in any functional 
neighborhood or community organization. Why does this 
"non-competitiveness" break down, and under what conditions?

My point in bringing up the pizza example is that I find it odd to 
expect that an election method will bring good results in a 
competitive environment when it miserably fails in a non-competitive 
one. That is, a group of people want to quickly find which of a 
number of solutions is maximally satisfactory. Isn't this the problem 
of elections?

Somehow it is believed that this doesn't apply to politics. In 
politics, the thinking goes, people only want to win, to see "their 
side" be the victor. Could it be that the *system* -- which includes 
plurality elections -- actually encourages this?

What we see about Range is that it works quite well under competitive 
conditions, it is certainly not *worse* than FPTP, and, many of us 
would argue, than Condorcet methods. It usually finds the Condorcet 
winner, anyway, in examples which stick close to real-world 
conditions. And when it doesn't, it finds a *better* winner.

The argument against Range typically goes: in competitive elections, 
where people really want their favorite to win, they will bullet 
vote, thus reducing the election to Approval.

It's probably false. Sure, *partisans* will vote that way, we can 
expect, but many, many voters consider themselves independents. There 
is a cost to bullet-voting. It is essentially an abstention from 
every pairwise election other than those involving the favorite. In a 
strong two-party contest, where third parties are essentially 
irrelevant, we can expect partisans not to care about that. And, 
indeed, many of them may *not* bullet-vote, but will assign some 
value to one or more third party candidates. It is a way for them to 
express their leanings without risk of "losing."

It's important to realize that Plurality *often* chooses the correct 
winner, i.e., the candidate who will win under either Range or a 
Condorcet method. It probably does this more often than not, though 
strong two-party systems tend to shift positions and match each other 
so that they remain close to parity.

The problem is in the few percent of nonpartisan voters and 
third-party voters, what can *they* do? Range and Approval (and IRV, 
though not as safely) bring them in out of the cold, eliminating the 
immediate spoiler effect. That alone is well worth, with Approval, 
simply dropping the no-overvoting rules, which in one fell swoop and 
with minimum fuss and no cost turns elections into the most basic Range method.

The IRV promoters here have Proportional Representation as a 
long-term goal. They don't really talk about their strategy, as far 
as anything we have seen, they are *not* people who believe in 
democracy in reform movements, they are one-pointed and, as far as we 
have seen, quite inflexible. But I suspect that their strategy is to 
bring IRV, which is, of course, single-winner STV, and then, they 
might think, the path to PR is open.

But STV and IRV are actually worlds apart. The offensive effects 
possible in IRV, particularly center-squeeze, which can easily defeat 
a strong Condorcet winner (who will also win under Approval), is far 
less damaging in the multiwinner context. STV is quite a reasonable 
method, multiwinner, though we think there may be better. The 
strategy could backfire, if there is a prominent election failure. 
That is, the bad taste generated as a result of IRV defects could 
attach to STV and thus to PR.

But the IRV people (by which I mean the political activists, there 
are some theoretical analysts who favor IRV who are exceptions) won't 
actually discuss the issue. It's a shame, actually.