[EM] Are apportionment academics as incompetent as voting system academics?

[Michael Ossipoff]

Are apportionment academics related to voting-system academics?

You have probably noticed a certain cluelessness about voting-system 
academics. I’ve been checking out some apportionment writing on the 
Internet, and apparently academics who write about apportionment share that 
cluelessness.

The emphasis seems to be on two-state transfer properties. You’re not going 
to believe this, but it never seems to occur to academic authors that maybe 
equal representation expectation could be a good thing, or that there’s 
anything wrong with systematically giving more s/q to states at one end of 
the population-size spectrum.

Alright, I admit that that conclusion is based on a limited look at their 
writing. But if academic interest in equal representation expectation is 
difficult to find, surely that says something unflattering.

Sure, the pair transfer properties sound plausible enough, if, by whatever 
standard, no two states could be closer. But what would you say about 
someone who scrutinizes transfer properties, seemingly ignoring the fact 
that it’s theoretically and empirically obvious that Hill’s method 
systematically gives more seats per quota to the smaller states? I mean, 
what kind of a person must that academic be? A bumbling comic character like 
Jerry Lewis’s Nutty Professor? Again, the term “head-up-the-ass” suggests 
itself.

The Constitution says that seats should be given according to population, 
and this is interpreted to mean proportional to population. Systematically 
giving more s/q to smaller states  (or bigger states) is obviously the most 
unfair violation of that proportionality requirement.

As you know from single-winner methods, all criteria sound plausible. But 
are the transfer properties so plausible as to justify systematic s/q 
disparity with respect to population? Someone has seriously lost track
of the point of proportional apportionment.

Webster is the divisor method that gives equal representation expectation 
for everyone, disregarding the effects of a non-uniform state-size 
probability distribution. Webster is the intrinsically unbiased divisor 
method, even if something extrinsic like the probability distribution could 
cause measured bias.

That can be shown as I described earlier. When I found out about my 
Bias-Free fallacy, I set out to find the intrinsically unbiased divisor 
method. Write expressions  for the total number of quotas possessed, and the 
total number of seats received, by the states in a some particular “cycle”, 
between two whole numbers of Hare quotas, such as the set of states 
possessing between 4 and 5 Hare quotas. Set those two expressions equal, and 
solve for the rounding point between those integers.

When I did that, I got (a+b)/2, which is a + .5   That’s Webster ‘s method.

Why doesn’t it occur to the bumbling, comic, clueless, head-up-the-ass nutty 
professors that it might be desirable for everyone to have equal 
representation expectation? And that there’s something seriously wrong when 
residents of smaller states systematically receive more representation than 
residents of large states?

I’ve suggested that measured bias caused by the distribution isn’t unfair in 
the sense that measured bias caused by the method is unfair. If that’s 
correct, then Webster could be all we need.

But it could be desirable to actually get rid of measured bias, whatever its 
cause, and that’s why I, and then Warren, have been looking at ways of doing 
that. I’ve proposed three such methods, and have named them Weighted 
Webster, Cycle-Webster, and Adjusted-Rounding.

Getting back to transfer properties, of course Webster has one.

Mike Ossipoff