[Election-Methods] Elect the Compromise

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 01:07 AM 8/27/2007, rob brown wrote:
>On 8/26/07, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax 
><<mailto:abd at lomaxdesign.com>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....

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that one can buy an 
election with secret ballots, in fact. It can be done now, there are 
legal ways to do it. But what you can't do is to buy it *in a corrupt 
manner* with secret ballots. You have to do it openly. The vote 
trading mentioned would involve a payment or performance of whatever 
is agreed upon based on the *result* of the election, not on any 
specific vote. And, of course, this makes it fair.

If expensive. However, given the conditions we were working on, *this 
kind of fair vote trading or buying would be affordable." *By 
definition.* The value is there, there are large numbers of voters 
who presumably see that value -- that's what the ratings must mean if 
they are other than word salad -- and so it is merely a matter of 
organizing them to make the offer, and of letting the other side 
know. And of course, it would be best to *negotiate* the deal, so 
that you aren't just wasting your time.

This is why I'm so interested in Free Associations with Delegable 
Proxy. They could pull off this kind of trick. It could radically 
transform politics. And the kicker is that it would work with 
Plurality. You don't need Range do do it. But you would get Range 
results, or even better (i.e., the compensatory payments or 
agreements would more evenly distribute the benefit of social utility 
maximization).

>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.

No, it's not only not impossible, it is done all the time! But we 
don't think of it as vote buying. We think of it as convincing the 
public that something good will happen if they vote a certain way. 
Shall the Town approve the big shopping center? The developers not 
only promise jobs and the like, they also offer to fund certain town 
projects. It moves the voters to approve the project, perhaps. If the 
measure doesn't pass, they don't fund the project. Simple.

>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.

*This* only works if your payments are secret. If they are public, it 
can quite easily backfire, and you end up paying out what you 
promised -- or defaulting -- and getting nothing.

Private payments are graft and corruption. The kind of payments I'm 
suggesting could be looked at -- and which are legal *now* without 
changes in law -- would be public, or at least not secret or hidden, 
nor would they be payments for a vote, as such, but for a result. 
(And I use "payments" as a convenient term, here, to cover any kind 
of compensation.)

Private payments in close elections can shift the result toward 
something desired by the payer, often utilizing the votes of people 
who would not even bother voting without the payment. The vast 
majority of voters get nothing.

But in this case, if we suppose the initial conditions described, the 
A voters could, for example, agree to accept a payment from the B 
voters, collectively. The B voters can afford it! (Unless they are 
collectively impoverished and not merely somewhat so, seriously so. 
They receive four times the benefit of the choice of C as do the A 
voters. There's a lot of room for disparity in ability to pay there. 
And, indeed, next time it might be other voters paying *them*. 
Generally, we would be talking about such large numbers of voters 
that single individuals with great wealth could make a dent, but not 
dominate. As the old saying goes, God must love the poor because he 
made so many of them. The "poor," collectively, are not all that 
poor. Consider some of the most impoverished third-world countries in 
the world, with corrupt leaders extracting great wealth from them. 
They have to have it for him to extract it! If they could pool their 
resources, if that were practical, they could outspend him. But .... 
they don't have the tools, so they are isolated and thus effectively 
powerless, except for unintelligent mass movements that are more like riots.)

>   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.

Of course. In what was proposed, though, if you don't offer enough, 
you have not been harmed by making the offer. You only have to pay if 
you get the outcome you wanted. Of course, you would want to know if 
you needed to spend the money! That takes accurate polling!

If the supporters of A really want to profit from this, they might 
exaggerate their support for A, in the polls. However, as with any 
auction, this can backfire. The other side can say, "too expensive," 
and walk away. In any case, this problem is faced and solved all the 
time in business....

> >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).

Whereas humans won't? What planet do you live on? It's *instinctive.*

Yes, it's not exactly like honeybees. We have a far higher level of 
independence, but we are still social animals, with, *normally*, 
great concern for others. Hey, if you are so selfish, what in the 
world are you interested in election methods for? For personal gain? 
There are much easier ways to find personal gain!

>   This sort of thing is pretty much unheard of in non-eusocial 
> animals, as it would quickly be selected against.

No. Not if it enhances the survival of the gene pool.

>   Sure there have been kamakazi pilots and various suicide bombers 
> among people, but they are extreme exceptions,

One might note that suicide bombing has become far less of an 
exception, of late. However, that's distorted by some serious 
religious propaganda, feeding into widespread ignorance, among 
supposed Muslims, of actual Islamic law -- which is often 
misrepresented both by supporters of suicide bombing and by those who 
consider it contrary to Islam. "Suicide bombing" is not actually 
suicide, for some. For others, it is. Suicide is clearly unlawful in 
Islam. But undertaking a mission in the legitimate defense of the 
community, with an extraordinarily high risk to self, isn't suicide, 
the goal is not to die, it is to accomplish the mission. If the 
mission is lawful, so is it.

What is seriously unlawful is the wanton and careless slaughter of 
innocents, the murder of noncombatants merely because they are 
wearing the wrong hats, or not wearing the right ones, as the case 
may be, the rebellion against constituted authority without having a 
community consensus, all this is directly and clearly forbidding what 
*usually* happens today with "suicide bombing," which have been 
renamed by these heretics "martyrdom operations," though deliberately 
"martyring" yourself is actually suicide. If the goal is to die (and 
presumably collect a reward), it's suicide. And that is what these 
people are taught to do.

In any case, people are willing to die for the community, commonly. 
Firefighters will risk their lives, routinely. So will police, so 
will ordinary citizens when the situation calls for it. That is, they 
are willing to *risk* their lives, some to the point that the risk is 
extremely high, others less so. But risk, from the point of view of 
evolutionary biology, is what counts. That the action is "successful" 
every time is not the point. The Japanese kamikaze pilots failed to 
protect their society, the action was foolish, in the end. But so are 
many actions. The bee stings and dies. If the bear is enraged and 
demolishes the hive, it failed. If the bear flees, it succeeded. That 
the bee dies as part of the stinging is not the reason why the bee 
stings. It just happened to be that it was not important enough to 
evolve mechanisms for allowing the sting and keeping the bee alive, 
there being plenty of bees and little relative need to sting. So the 
bee doesn't have to carry around a burden of processes and substance 
designed to sting and survive. Humans are, indeed, different, and we 
value individual life enough to seriously try to preserve it, each 
and every one.

And this, too, is a sign of our being social animals.

>  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.

Sure. First of all, on a small scale, this *is* the community. And 
what has happened is that our concept of community has expanded, and 
people can and do give their lives for a larger community, not just 
their immediate family, and it appears that we have been doing this 
for a long time. I've adopted two children now, and I can tell you 
that there are deep programs awakened. I feel as fiercely protective 
of these children as I do of my five so-called biological children. 
There is something highly instinctive about it; this experience is 
well known among adoptive parents. In some ways, the adoptive bond 
seems even tighter, but it's hard to compare.

>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).

The whole conception is off. Adaptation is driven by survival of the 
genes, not by survival of the individual. It is not necessary that 
the genes that survive be identical to the genes of the one making 
the sacrifice, and, it appears, we are increasingly looking at all 
life as sharing a common identity. That's pretty far out there .... 
but humans are, genetically, quite uniform, it turns out, the 
differences are quite minor. At least present humans are like that, 
and it's not clear that we would consider what came before "human." 
If we did, it would actually prove the point. It's a fairly broad 
gene pool that is being conserved.

>   Fundamentally different from eusocial animals.

Assertedly different, fundamentally.... not established by this line 
of argument.

>  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).

Any method does that. If individual voters have any power at all, 
then if that voter knows how everyone else has voted, and is the last 
to vote, the voter will, under some circumstances, be able to make a 
free choice.

However, it must also be recognized that the circumstances where a 
voter actually can change the outcome are rare. It's quite 
interesting to look at how voting strategy alters outcome, but it is 
rarely done in a comprehensive way. No example has been shown where 
voters gain some "unfair advantage" by "it." It was not specified. 
What is commonly shown is where some voters gain a better outcome by 
exaggerating their preference. Which boils down to, they have a 
choice, and they take the one they prefer. There is nothing wrong 
with this! Approval voting does not give such voters *unfair* power.

>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".

There is a real conflict, in the world, between naive sincerity and 
intelligent action. There is no way to get around this, we did not 
invent it with election methods.

The fact is that "honest" voting in Range is not crisply defined, 
there would be many Range votes for a given context which could 
easily qualify as "sincere." Including bullet voting.

Let me assert this: a "sincere" Range Vote is the one that most 
accurately furthers the voter's interest. Votes are *actions*, not 
opinions. My opinion is irrelevant, it is what I do with the opinion 
that counts.

>   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.

Again, this is quite incorrect. I'd suggest this: prove it. It is 
much more difficult than you might think. We've seen many attempts.

Let me set this standard: there must be a significant improvement in 
outcome for the so-called "strategic vote," over a simple "sincere" 
one, provided that this "sincere" vote is not naive -- such as not 
voting the full range because it would be "insincere," the voter 
thinking all the candidates are punk, but only some are more punk 
than others -- for it to be worth the effort and grief.

Generally, there are simple algorithms for Range Voting that are 
quite sincere and that are as advantageous strategically as voting 
Approval style, and that, overall, are better. Often missed is that 
Approval style voting is only advantageous under some circumstances 
or some candidates. If you know who the two frontrunners are, then, 
*of course* you will vote for one and not the other, generally. With 
full ratings. But what about all the rest?

*And all those other votes are important. Plus, of course, people are 
sometimes wrong about who the frontrunners are! If they vote 
sincerely, they don't risk disappointment if they were wrong. 
Approval style voting is risky, if you guess wrong!*

>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.

Don't apologize to me, apologize to your grandchildren who will read 
what you have written.... I'm not writing for you, I'm writing for them.

>(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>http://karmatics.com/docs/groupmotivationfallacy.html 
>. It's kind of wordy itself, I suppose...).

Cool. It's been invited. I'll take a look, for sure. And so, 
probably, will some others, and, since you've mentioned it here, your 
grandchildren.

(So to speak. I don't know if you will ever have grandchildren. It's 
not at all clear that it is in *your* interest to have children. Your 
genes may thank you for it, but, why should you optimize their 
survival when you can have so much fun and doing the gene survival 
thing is so much work?)