[Election-Methods] A Better Version of IRV? (Forest)

[Chris Benham]

> Forest,
> "The voter ranks all she wants to and the remaining candidates 
> are ranked (later, i.e. below) by the voter's 
> favorite or perhaps, as Steve Eppley has suggested, by the 
> voter's specified public ranking. 
> 
> Since IRV satisfies LNH, what's the harm in this?".
> The harm is that voter's votes are used to help candidates that 
> the voters may not wish to help.
> It offends the principle that the voter should be fully in 
> control of his/her vote.
> Giving some voters (candidates) the power to fully control their 
> own vote and also to complete the rankings of some of the truncators 
> offends the principle that as far as possible all voters should have equal power.

Forest Simmons wrote (Wednesday, 16 July, 2008 ):

"This is easy to fix: just make it optional.

> "In Australia, where (in single winner elections) most of the 
> voters copy candidate cards, this would save 
> them a lot of bother."
> In Australia the only significant "bother" stems from compulsory 
> full strict ranking (for the vote to be
> counted as valid).  

Suppose that compulsory ranking were removed.  In the multi-winner case, "above the line" voting would 
still be a great practical help.  Help me find the best single winner analog of "above the line" voting."
Why are we talking about the "multi-winner case"? "Above the line" voting should be abolished. Yes, in
the multi-winner case it is of some "practical help" to voters who are happy to follow their favourite's 
ranking advice, probably more-or-less mindlessly and even blindly.  Why should those voters be
privileged (compared with those that don't)?  
In the multi-winner STV races, normally the candidates of the same party are grouped together on the
ballot paper under the name of the party. It isn't that difficult to find them and number them in order of
preference. The STV algorithm can readily handle truncation.

> 
> 
> >This particular horrible idea would create a strong incentive 
> >for the major power-brokers to sponsor the nomination of a 
> > lot of fake candidates just to collect votes for one or other
> >of the major parties.
> 
> "Am I mising something here?"
> Yes, but I'm not sure exactly what.

"Why do you think parties would run fake candidates?".
Suppose there are two big front-runners A and B, and no-one has any doubt that all and any other
candidates will be eliminated before these two. In Australia the voters' big-2 pairwise preference
is called the "2-party preferred vote".
Now, sticking with your original compulsory "ballots completed by voter's favourite" proposal,
supporters of  A have incentive to nominate a candidate F who will attract truncating voters who
would otherwise not vote for A.  Note I didn't say "parties", I said "powerbrokers". It doesn't
work so well  if  F is clone-like similar to A, because then the people who would vote for F
probably would have voted  directly for A anyway, and those that would stay home or vote 
for B because they're not impressed with A wouldn't likely want to vote for F.
F is a fake candidate who may pretend to be hostile to A and closer to B, but F's only purpose
is to be eliminated and then hand his/her truncated votes to A.
Juho has pointed out that something like this was a problem in Fiji IRV elections. In Australian
multi-winner STV elections, the combination of compulsory voting, very easy mark-one-box
above-the-line voting and very difficult below-the-line compulsory full strict ranking, create incentive
for the nomination of fake micro-parties with  often misleading party-names on the ballot paper
just to gather a few extra preferences for one of the competitive parties.


 
> I'm not impressed with embracing some evil definites in exchange 
> for some vague "mights".

This thread is an appeal to brainstorm, not a finished proposal.

> >And what do you have in mind as "Australia's worst problems 
> >with their version of IRV"?
> 
> "It has degenerated into a defacto second rate version of Asset 
> Voting."
> To the extent that that is true it can (and should) be fixed by 
> simply allowing truncation.

Warren's page on the subject 

http://www.rangevoting.org/AusAboveTheLine07.html

gives the impression that allowing truncation would not fix the problem.  It is most clear in the multi-
winner case, but the same psychology applies in the single winner case."
I certainly didn't get that impression from reading it.

> 
> >Why do you want to "stop" IRV? Do you agree with Kathy Dopp
> >that IRV is worse than FPP?
> 
> "I would stop IRV if we could get a better method in its place.
> 
> If we cannot stop IRV, why not search for acceptable tweaks that 
> would improve it?"
> The short answer is because IRV isn't really amenable to 
> "tweaks".  

"How about if the only tweaks are to facilitate the gathering of voter preferences in a way that makes it 
easier for the voters to vote?"
Maybe something technical like the voter can fill out a "ballot" at home, take it to
the polling booth where a machine scans it and copys it and then prints out an official
ballot and the voter's receipt.

> In terms of  positive criterion compliances it isn't dominated by any other method, 
> and has both good and quite bad properties (averaging in my judgement to a "good" method).  
> "Tweaks" generally muck up its good properties  without enough compensation in terms of 
> fixing or patching up its bad properties.

> I think Smith (or Shwartz),IRV is quite a good  Condorcet method. It completely fixes the
> failure of Condorcet while being more complicated  (to explain  and at least sometimes to
> count) than plain IRV, and a Mutual Dominant Third candidate can't be successfully buried.

> But it fails Later-no-Harm and Later-no-Help, is vulnerable to  Burying strategy, fails 
> mono-add-top, and keeps  IRV's failure of  mono-raise and (related) vulnerability to
> Pushover strategy.
> 
> 
> "It is better than FPP in some ways and worse in others, 
> especially in complexity."
> With separate paper ballots for each race, I don't accept that 
> IRV is all that "complex".
> I think that you have somewhat dodged my question.

"It doesn't seem too complex to you, but how about to the voters in public elections? Most of the ordinary 
voters that I have talked to agree with Lewis Carroll.  They would rather not have to fill out rankings."

Truncation should be allowed, so no-one has to "fill out rankings" if they don't want to.
Chris Benham


      Start at the new Yahoo!7 for a better online experience. www.yahoo7.com.au
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20080717/167d2588/attachment-0002.htm>