[EM] [RangeVoting] A Voter's Eye View

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 10:52 PM 2/21/2007, Dave Ketchum wrote:
> > Fusion Voting was on the ballot as an initiative this last November.
> > For some reason, there was not extensive public debate. The ballot
> > arguments presented by the opposition were the usual sound-bite
> > deception I've come to expect in ballot arguments in general. Voters
> > will be confused, we don't need this, etc. What is odd to me is that
> > Progressives and Libertarians here did not get noisily and 
> publicly behind it.
>
>Its complications limit its value.  Look above at Joe - he had to promise
>to obey two masters to get nominated, and the parties had to bend a bit to
>agree as to where they wanted to lead him.

There is no question that the value of Fusion Voting is limited. The 
question is not whether it is perfect but whether it is an 
improvement. It would be an improvement in Massachusetts, and it 
would be a loss in New York if it was eliminated, *unless* it was 
replaced by something better.

Candidates generally promise to obey as many masters as they can 
identify! And they are bound to obey none. If they are elected, what 
they said in their campaigns or promised privately has no legal 
effect. (Unless it amounted to unlawful influence, which is quite 
another matter.) So to get elected the first time, a candidate may 
promise the moon. Bush promised quite a lot that he later didn't 
give, and may have had no intention of giving. And this is perfectly 
legal *and should be legal.*

Essentially, don't elect someone to high office whose *record* you don't know!

The remedy of the public when a candidate doesn't fulfill campaign 
promises is to vote for someone else next time. There is also recall, 
but it is rare for things like breaking campaign promises, in fact 
I've never heard of it happening.

As to the parties having to bend a little, this is intrinsic in 
single-winner elections. The *public* must bend a little to select a 
winner, or if it doesn't bend a little, the winner can be disliked by 
most. So what is stated here as if it were a shortcoming of Fusion is 
actually intrinsic to the system, and Fusion does not make it worse.

Fusion, however, allows third parties to grow. If a third party 
manages to grow to the place where it has significant voting power, 
it has two options: it can threaten to withhold its nomination from a 
major party candidate (which can influence the selection by the major 
party under some conditions), and it can safely do this when the real 
choice is between two major party candidates and there is no 
overwhelming strong reason for the party to prefer one over the other 
(such as a liberal Republican and a conservative Democrat facing 
off), or it can run its own candidate. It will do the latter 
reasonably under two different conditions: when there is no chance of 
affecting the outcome, but it wants to make a point that may be of 
value in the future, and when there *is* a chance of winning.

Fusion gives third parties the power to make a mistake in ways that 
they really can't now. As they say, if you want to shoot the king, don't miss.

If Fusion gives a third party ballot position and public recognition, 
Fusion can help third parties win local races, thus building party 
power. Thus the decision of "roll your own" or accept another party's 
nomination can be made individually with many different races, and a 
sensible third party would run its own candidate, most likely, only 
when it judges it can win, and especially if trying to win is not 
likely to do great harm.

What all this boils down to is something I keep coming back to: 
political organizations need ways to make intelligent decisions. 
Voting methods are only the tip of the iceberg. If you must use a 
voting method, Range is quite likely the best, but that is a severe 
limitation, especially when it comes to a party primary, and 
especially in the situation of coming close to parity. In that 
condition, the judgement of how to proceed is quite complex and 
involves many factors other than the popularity within the party of 
the candidates. A third party is quite likely to prefer a candidate 
who can't win, by definition. Personally, unless I were an expert 
political consultant, I'd rather only make decisions about candidate 
desirability, in themselves, rather than about whether or not the 
candidate can reasonably win. How do we know who can reasonably win 
if voters, in primaries, consider who can win rather than who they 
would prefer to win?

No, what I'd prefer is to select the people who would make the 
decision. This is how such things are done routinely in most 
organizational life (when the organization is free and not a top-down 
hierarchy). It is how shareholders, in theory, control corporations. 
If I can freely select who represents me in making the decision of 
what candidate to run, then I have *maximum* confidence that the 
result will be the best choice.

And thus I'm led, inexorably, to some kind of PR in party structure, 
with Asset Voting or Delegable Proxy being obvious solutions. And 
Asset, in particular, would seem to be thoroughly practical and 
legally possible for use within political parties.