[EM] Asset Voting

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 07:09 PM 2/6/2007, James Gilmour wrote:
>That of course, is the whole point of STV-PR  -  to give the voters what
>THEY want  -  which may not be what the parties want.  But then,
>elections are for electors.

Right. Asset Voting gives full freedom to the voters, and freedom is 
power. Voters can choose to essentially vote for a party by voting 
for a party leader or the candidate recommended by the party.

Or they can vote for a collection of party leaders, distributing the 
power. This represents trusting the party more than the individual 
candidate. Their choice.

Or they can vote for an independent whom they trust.

Asset Voting does not attack the party system. Parties will still be 
quite useful for campaigns and the like. But currently, one *must* 
have a party endorsement to have a shot at winning, exceptions are 
rare. Under Asset, it costs almost nothing to try (compared to 
present costs) and it does no damage. If you don't get enough votes, 
you simply become an elector in the next stage. You might still get 
elected if you can gather votes from other candidates who either were 
not elected, or, in multiwinner were elected but have extra votes to 
distribute. Being a member of a party might make that easier.

It's been pointed out that an Asset ballot could have ranks that 
would be used until and unless they are exhausted, in which case the 
vote would revert to the candidate(s) ranked in first place. Once 
again, we wee maximum freedom being accorded to voters.

It is maximally simple if it is just plain Fractional Approval Asset 
Voting, the ballot is just like a plurality ballot and it does no 
harm to vote it that way. But overvotes are also harmless, they 
merely distribute the revoting power (the election is then like Approval).

If the ranks are added, it gets a little more complicated. Some 
voters might become confused. I'm generally skeptical of the 
confusion argument, it is overused, but there is some merit to it. 
Even quite intelligent people can get confused by a ballot, maybe 
they had something for breakfast that disagreed with them or they are 
distracted for some reason. I personally would prefer to *not* have 
the ranks, though maybe I might use *one* additional rank. Sometimes. 
I just don't know if it is worth it. But if enough people thought it 
*was* worth it, i.e., they wanted the power to directly assign 
revotes, it could be done.

And this leads me to a new consideration. Asset can be used for 
proportional representation with floating, virtual districts; the 
result is that the voters know who, exactly, was elected with their 
votes. The candidates don't know the individual voters, but they do 
know the precincts that elected them and the proportion of the vote 
they received in that precinct.

It seems to me that this virtual districting could also be done 
automatically with STV. Call it auto-districting. When the election 
is done, the votes that elected the candidate are assigned by 
precinct, and the precincts amalgamated to form a close match to the 
actual quota in total. The remaining votes then go to the next rank down.

This would not be in any way binding on the candidates, for a 
candidate could represent the interests of someone who was not a 
voter in a precinct that elected the candidate, but it would create 
an effective districting in the assembly. I'd think that *most* 
winners would have reasonably tight districts if the algorithm were 
good. Because it is really only advisory (it has no effect on votes 
in the assembly except as the winner chooses to make it so), the 
algorithm doesn't have to be perfect.

I prefer the transfer to be done by a human. It creates a chain of 
responsibility. The voter knows who got the voter(s) votes and knows 
what was done with them. The candidate knows what precincts provided 
the votes for his or her election, and, as well, what other 
candidates, if any, were involved in gathering those votes.

Would this make candidates beholden to those who elected them? 
Certainly it would, in some ways. First of all, shouldn't candidates 
be beholden to the voters? I.e., have a sense of responsibility to 
them and an understanding that if they violate the trust, they will 
lose support. But a candidate who is elected, say, by vote 
redistribution by a party leader holding excess votes, can certainly 
attempt to directly serve his or her district well enough that next 
election, the candidate gets those votes directly. This is one huge 
advantage to having precinct assignments. The candidate can directly 
communicate with a defined constituency.

Now, a party leader could gum this up by assigning precincts 
randomly, so these new winners had scattered constituencies. But if I 
saw a leader doing that, I'd consider it a betrayal of trust. The 
leader would be making it difficult, not only for the winner created, 
but for the voters.

And, again, the district assignment isn't binding on anyone. A member 
might decide to serve some different district, primarily, might pass 
off remote precincts to another member.

I am a firm believer in democracy, that, given the right conditions 
-- and this is crucial -- freedom of thought and action are conducive 
to the best decision-making. Under the wrong conditions, too much 
power is quite dangerous; the classical distrust of "mob rule" is not 
silly. Mob rule, however, typically only comes into being when public 
institutions have massively broken down, most commonly through 
violent revolution or civil war, but also under some other conditions 
as well, such as class or racial divisions exploited by leaders with 
the power to inflame mobs. These latter conditions (Ruanda comes to 
mind) are facilitated by flawed electoral systems which give 
centralized power to party leaders and which encourage factionalism.