[Election-Methods] Challenge: Elect the compromise when there're only 2 factions

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 09:16 AM 8/25/2007, Jobst Heitzig wrote:
>I don't think nearly half of the electorate should pay the other 
>half for getting what is the more just solution in my eyes. Perhaps 
>that is a difference in culture?

No. It's an understanding of what utilities mean. If A does not win, 
the supporters of A lose something. They are in the majority. If each 
of them grabs a B supporter and wrestles with him, or her, I suppose, 
the excess A supporters can then arrange things the way they like. A 
drastic picture, but actually part of the theory behind majority rule.

If C wins, the B supporters gain 60% utility, that's large. If they 
pay the A voters the equivalent of the A loss, 20%, they are still 
way ahead. It is a very good deal for the B voters and, in fact, the 
A voters might hold out for more, knowing this. Why shouldn't 
everyone benefit from the improved result?

A free negotiation would effectively generate a "bid" based on the 
*real* utilities, and these have been posited as stated. A free 
negotiation collapses what might be incommensurable utilities into 
whatever medium of exchange is used. Money is only one option, others 
are possible.

(And, strictly speaking, if it were a Clarke tax, the "payment" is a 
reduction in taxes, effectively.)

I'm not suggesting that this is practical, but rather pointing out 
that it is far more fair than we might, with certain knee-jerk 
responses, assume. We think of plutocracy when proposals like this 
are floated, but the scale is such that the truly large sums of money 
that are available to be transferred are mostly contributed by the 
average person.

Jobst regards it as unjust that the majority should be paid by the 
minority to get an outcome he regards as more just. However, he isn't 
looking at the utilities, he is simply regarding these numbers as 
representing, perhaps, some degree of consent. The actual 
consequences of the election are irrelevant to him.

Suppose this is not candidates for office being considered, but 
actual choices for the community. There are three projects, and it is 
considered that the community can only afford to build one. Let's 
even say that there is one project but three *sites*. Which site 
shall be chosen? If site A is chosen, the majority will find it 
maximally convenient, site C is almost as good, and site B is 
terrible. The B faction, the minority faces the reverse situation,

Sure, if we have an assumption of equal taxes and all the rest, and 
if the stated ratings are based, say, on travel cost and value of 
time spent driving, then site C is the best choice.

But this is a democracy. Sure, one can imagine systems where majority 
rule is not sufficient for making decisions, and many communities use 
them. Contrary to what Jobst might assume, I have a lot of experience 
with consensus communities, both positive and negative. My comments 
about majority rule proceed from that experience, they are not merely theory.

However, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of a system, 
*including how the system is implemented,* majority rule has proven 
itself to be practical *and* sustainable. Consensus systems get 
people all excited at first, particularly when they discover that 
obtaining full consent is not as difficult as many would think, it is 
exhilarating to sufficiently satisfy *everyone*. However, over years, 
going through what becomes tedious meeting process to do it gradually 
exhausts many members of the community, and, further, they start to 
discover what happens when the status quo favors a minority. Perhaps 
a decision was made some years back that did not anticipate the full 
impact it would have. It can't be changed without full consensus. I 
have seen this be literally oppressive, causing direct harm to a 
substantial minority (I've never seen it seriously harm the majority, 
probably because there are certain natural restraints. People can 
walk away from consensus communities and create standard ones, and 
sometimes the consensus rules are not legally enforceable. But I'm 
not aware of any legal tests of that.)

Point is, when you don't have majority rule, you have decisions being 
made by something *other* than the majority, even if it is only the 
default "decision" to change nothing. And a determined minority can 
then hold its right to withhold consent over the rest of the 
community, in order to get what it wants. Again, it would never, in 
that context, blatantly do this, but it happens, social dynamics do 
not disappear in consensus communities.

There is nothing magic about 50%, it is simply the point where there 
are more people on one side than another, there are more saying Yes 
to a motion than No. Or the reverse. In real communities, other than 
seriously unhealthy ones, the majority is restrained. It does not 
make decisions based on mere majority, ordinarily, it seeks broader 
consent, and deliberative process makes this happen.

As an example of how majority rule is modified in practice, to close 
debate under Robert's Rules requires a 2/3 vote. Hence the 
"filibuster," where a faction, believing that it will lose the vote, 
and desiring to block legislation, can simply wait and continue to 
vote no on the motion for the Previous Question, which closes debate 
and proceeds to vote.

The majority *does* have the power to set the rule aside, but it 
rarely does so, because it knows the hazard of doing this. Truly, if 
the Previous Question cannot pass without suspending the rules or 
resorting to other procedures that can bypass it, the community is 
not read to make a decision.

Most sane people know that the community will not always give them 
their preference, so filibusters are generally reserved for major issues.

> > The original conditions assume commensurability of utilities,
>
>No, definitely not! I would never propose such a thing! I only said 
>that those who believe in such measures may interpret the given 
>numbers in that way...

If the utilities are not commensurable, then there is no way to know 
who is the best winner. If Jobst does not understand that, if he does 
not understand how normalization -- and these are clearly normalized 
utilities, can distort the results, we could explain it for him.

Essentially, the C-election 20% preference loss of the A voters could 
have an absolute value greater than the 60% gain by the C voters. A 
negotiation would expose that, because a negotiation, "You give us 
this in exchange for that" causes the utilities to be translated to 
commensurable units, the units of the negotiation. As I mentioned, it 
does not have to be money.

Consider the site choice question. There is no doubt about it, if the 
utilities are accurate as stated, the B voters benefit more greatly 
by the choice of site C than do the A voters, overall, who lose 
value. Parity would be at some level of compensation whereby all 
voters share equally in the benefit of making the optimum choice.

The assumption that Jobst easily makes, that the C option is more 
just, is based on an assumption of commensurability of utilities -- 
or whatever he wishes to call the ratings. And we aren't talking at 
all about sincere voting, or the meaning of it. (Normalized utilities 
are not fully sincere, which is part of the problem, and he clearly 
has normalized utilities.)

Without commensurability, utilities are only expressions of relative 
satisfaction. Suppose for the B voters, there really is very little 
difference between all of the sites.

Consider this scenario that explains the utilities given:

Distance to site, km.

A voters: A 0, B 100, C, 20

B voters: A 10, B 0, C, 2.

This explains the utilities given. However, the absolute preference 
strength for the A voters is 20 km in the A/C pair, and for the B 
voters, it is 10 km in that pair.

Let's sum the distances and multiply by the percentages:

A       B       C
0       55      11 for the A voters, 55% of the electorate
4.5     0       0.9 for the C voters, 45% of the electorate
------------------
4.5     55      11.9

These are inverted utilities, the lowest number is the best outcome. 
Clearly, the best site, with the information we now have, is site A, 
it results in less than half of the driving for the whole community 
as does site C, supposedly the "just compromise" as stated by Jobst.

So, to make sense of the conditions of the problem, we must assume 
that the utilities are commensurable, as I stated. Otherwise we have 
no basis at all for what he now claims, that C is the "just outcome."

The objections to Range and to utility analysis are sometimes based 
on the commensurability problem. However, there are good reasons for 
setting that problem aside and assuming that, in large public 
elections, commensurability will usually average out. Nevertheless, 
situations like this one, where a minority gains substantial value in 
its own perception, whereas a majority loses a smaller value, as it 
seems from what might be sincere Range Votes, can exist where testing 
the true preference strengths, essentially by asking the consent of 
the community for the decision, will improve utility.

If negotiation between the factions is possible, that negotiation 
could add in factors that cause the utilities to shift, thus 
equalizing the situation. Measures can be linked (though usually 
independent decisions cannot be combined into a single ballot 
decision, there are ways around this, such as with budgets_, so that, 
say, the A faction gets something in return for its loss of utility, 
something that balances it out so that the overall result is fair for 
both factions.

My position is that free people, through standard deliberative 
process, can work all this out. And they will, and do, given the 
opportunity. The problem is that when the scale is large, doing 
directly, as in Town Meeting democracy, becomes impossibly tedious. 
Hence my great interest in Delegable Proxy, which can theoretically 
reduce the scale on which negotiations take place. It's not a mere 
voting method, it is a *communication* method designed to be fully 
scalable, to any size.