[Election-Methods] Elect the Compromise

[rob brown]

On 8/26/07, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
>
> At 02:59 AM 8/26/2007, rob brown wrote:
> >Vote trading generally means the ballots can't be secret, so
> >elections would be inherently corruptible by anyone with money.
>
> This is commonly assumed. But it probably is not true. First of all,
> the ballots don't have to be personally identified, all that is
> necessary is that the winner be known.


Ok, so here you seem to be saying that, it is not necessary to keep ballots
secret to prevent buying an election....

If I'm agreeing to pay $X if A
> wins, I'm paying for a result, not for a vote. Who do I pay it to?


That's a good question, isn't it?  Well, the answer is simple...you don't.
It doesn't work.  You've just shown why, counter to what you suggested
above, buying large elections is near impossible when the ballots are
secret.

Obviously, in a non-secret ballot election, you would pay individuals to
vote for your candidate, not pay all of the voters for the final result.  It
is up to you to calculate whether or not your payments to individuals would
be likely enough to get your candidate elected to make it worth your money.

>Obviously range voting would solve this problem perfectly, if only
> >humans were eusocial animals -- most of us being sterile
> >worker-people, whose only Darwinian interest was the good of the
> collective.
>
> We are far more that than seems to be realized. Not sterile, to be
> sure. But very much social animals. Most of us, most of the time.


Social animals and eusocial animals are totally different things.  Worker
bees, by virtue of their anatomical design and their behavior, will give
their own lives for the sake of the hive (they sting and die).  This sort of
thing is pretty much unheard of in non-eusocial animals, as it would quickly
be selected against.  Sure there have been kamakazi pilots and various
suicide bombers among people, but they are extreme exceptions, that only
seems to happen in the most desperate of situations (and we find it notable
and disturbing specifically because it seems so counter to human behavior).
The vast majority of humans and other non-eusocial animals act as an
evolutionary biologist would expect them to, which is to prioritize their
own interests, and that of very close kin, at the top.

Social animals tend to cooperate when it is in their individual best
interest to do so (even if very indirect, such as doing the "right thing"
when others are watching, possibly in hopes of reciprocity, or in hopes of
the indirect reciprocity that tends to come with increasing one's repuation
for trustworthiness).  Fundamentally different from eusocial animals.

It's ironic, really. Range Voting *to some degree, not completely,*
> collapses to Approval Voting, under certain conditions with allegedly
> "selfish" voters. This is a feature, not a bug! Approval Voting is
> quite a good method!


I'm not against approval voting, I agree it is a fairly good method
(although I think it can unfairly give an advantage to those who have the
best information about how others are likely to vote).

I AM against systems that create a conflict within people, between voting in
a way that is "most in their interest", and in a way that "feels honest".
Range voting blatantly creates this conflict (because voting at anything but
the extremes in range voting is not in your interest), while approval
doesn't.

I didn't have time to read the rest of your post, or much of your other
posts on this thread.  Too many words, and none of them I've read so far
(from any of the range voting people) has been compelling enough to make me
want to throw away the basic concepts of "rational self interest" that most
economics and game theory are based on.  Sorry.

(this is something I wrote some time ago that addresses the very logical
flaws I see in all of your posts:
http://karmatics.com/docs/groupmotivationfallacy.html . It's kind of wordy
itself, I suppose...).
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