[EM] Fwd: 2008 election fiasco is preventable
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
abd at lomaxdesign.com
Fri Jul 13 19:22:02 PDT 2007
At 04:35 PM 7/13/2007, Jonathan Lundell wrote:
>On Jul 13, 2007, at 12:56 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>
> > Yes, it does not solve all problems. But Approval Voting is a very
> > good system, one of the best. Higher resolution Range is better. In
> > the other direction, Condorcet methods are arguably better in some
> > ways. Approval is *clearly* better than so-called Instant Runoff
> > Voting, and it is a whole lot simpler to implement.
>
>"Better" only if you don't care that voting for your second (or
>lower) choices hurts the chances of your first choice.
"Better" is with reference to social utility simulations, the best
information we have about the comparative behavior of election methods.
When I wrote that Approval does not solve all problems, I was
referring to the obvious lack of discrimination in the method, such
that there are no ranks within the Approved and Disapproved classes.
Range addresses this, as to ranked methods.
Of course, I can also be alleged about Range that "voting for", i.e.,
rating highly, your second choice "hurts the chances" of your first
choice. However, what must be noted here is that the "hurt" is
relatively small. After all, this *is* your second choice.
In any case, the first and most serious problem we must address is
the so-called spoiler effect, which creates serious harm within a
two-party environment, where third party candidates have little
chance of winning, no matter what the election method. (We note that
IRV, "Alternative Vote," is not associated with strong multiparty
systems, it seems to, like Plurality, encourage two party dominance.)
In this environment, voting for your second choice has no significant
effect on the "chances of your first choice."
Unless you happen to Approve both major party candidates. One wonders
why you even bothered to vote!
Indeed, what we would expect to see with Approval is that supporters
of major party candidates would mostly continue to vote as they have
been voting, for one candidate. It is the effect on third party
candidates that is important; it allows them to participate in the
real election while still indicating support for their true favorite.
Obviously, that support is not as clearly established in simple
Approval as it would be in Range, or, in a different way, in IRV or
other ranked method.
In short, Mr. Lundell's comment is about a matter which has little
practical effect in the short run, which is why I did not explain it
in detail in my post, but only alluded to it.
In any case, the real comparison is not between Approval and Range or
ranked methods like IRV -- or better ones--, but between Approval and
Plurality or FPTP, the status quo in the U.S. What Mr. Kok is
proposing is a very simple and fast reform that does not raise the
cost and other objections that are practical obstacles to deeper
voting method reform; all that we have to do is to Count All the Votes.
As stated, it doesn't provide for every need. But it does remarkably
well for such an obvious and simple step. After all, why *shouldn't*
we count all the votes? Why assume that voters made a mistake if they
voted for more than one?
(And if you look at justifications for discarding overvotes, that's
what you will find. Allowing overvotes does *not*, under any
circumstances, allow a voter more than one effective vote, which can
easily be proven by looking at any election where overvotes were
allowed. Discard all the "extra votes" which were cast for losers,
and there is no effect on the election. Those votes were moot. They
are, in fact, "conditional votes," just like the "extra votes" in
IRV. They only affect certain pairwise contests.)
Those of us who are working for immediate adoption of Approval mostly
do not think that it is the ultimate voting method. However, if we
*do* get Approval, there will be, we think, an appetite for being
able to express finer distinctions, and there are simple and measured
steps to get there from an Approval base. Approval allows equal
ranking, and the best ranked methods also allow equal ranking. It's
quite feasible, with a little extra ballot and counting complexity,
to add ranks to Approval; then the question is how these ranks are interpreted.
Most of us (the Approval supporters) prefer to use Range methods
rather than ranked methods, but there is, in fact, a compromise which
I've come to think is ideal.
Quite simply, a Range ballot, with its rankings of candidates, can be
interpreted as a ranked ballot, equal ranking allowed. It is then
possible to determine if there is a candidate who beats the Range
winner pairwise. Because the Range winner is the prima facie social
utility winner, it would not be correct to simply award the election
to the pairwise winner. However, neither do we have a clear
democratic choice when there exists a candidate who, by rank
analysis, would have beaten the Range winner in a direct contest.
So we would have an actual runoff. My analysis leads me to think that
the Range winner would *ordinarily* be confirmed by this runoff,
except when various election phenomena have caused the Range winner
to not truly be the SU winner (such as strategic voting, perhaps
based on misinformation or deception).
It should be noted that simulations show that the Range winner is
*usually* the Condorcet winner, so runoffs would not be the norm. As
to the contingency that there is more than one candidate who pairwise
beats the Range winner, I am at this time only noting that this would
be quite rare, most likely; we could use any of the good Condorcet
methods to pick a ranked winner; and the matter, in my opinion,
deserves further study.
Simulations have shown that Range with a top-two runoff has somewhat
higher SU results than simple Range; because of normalization error,
Range isn't perfect. Merely very good.
The elephant in the living room of ranked methods is, of course, that
pure ranked methods take no account of preference strength; and, as a
result, can clearly choose seriously suboptimal winners. If you
really care about "hurting your first preference by also approving
your second preference," then perhaps you shouldn't approve your
second preference! The rational choice will depend on preference
strength and the election context, i.e., the estimated probability
that an election is going to be close, between the relevant pair of candidates.
If a person prefers pepperoni pizza, but also approves of mushroom
because the preference is not strong, yes, adding the second
preference vote can "hurt" the chances of getting the first
preference, but we make compromises like this all the time when we
act jointly with others. In healthy environments, especially where
some have weak preferences and others strong ones, we quite properly
go for what is most broadly acceptable. Approval is the simplest way
to achieve this goal, and I've seen it used that way; I've seen it
used to make a choice where there was a clear preference of a
majority, but not strong enough to cause the majority to disregard
the strong preference of a minority; there were a series of optional
actions presented, and members were asked to state which ones were
acceptable. While one choice, we knew, had been vigorously defended
by some members -- it was the status quo -- and words like "over my
dead body" had been used, when the Approval results were in, it was
clear that there was one option which was acceptable to almost all.
And the majority stepped aside; that one option was presented for
adoption and the vote was *unanimous* to accept it.
(There were religious issues involved. The majority apparently
decided that holding to what had been traditional for many years was
not worth avoiding offending a minority, perhaps twenty percent of
members. In other words, the approval vote for the status quo was
about 80%, and for the new option, 98%.)
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