[Election-Methods] A Better Version of IRV?

[Chris Benham]

At 02:01 AM 7/13/2008, Chris Benham wrote:
>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.

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote (Monday, 14 July, 2008) :

"First of all, if we are talking about elections of representatives of 
some kind, the voter isn't going to be  "in full control of his/her 
vote" no matter what. At the point of the election, or later, when 
the representative casts votes, individual control is lost."
I'm afraid this is a typical bit of sophist blather from Abd. The type
of office that the election is for is completely irrelevant to the issue 
of whether or not voters in that election are fully in control of their
votes in that election. 

"The equal power issue is spurious. The voting power is in the hands 
of those who cast ballots, originally, and they may choose to 
delegate that power or not. More about this below. The original 
"candidate proxy" or "Asset Voting" proposal was actually an STV 
proposal by Lewis Carroll, aka Charles Dodgson, in 1994."
In the proposal from Forest Simmons that I was addressing, the only
way a voter could choose not to "delegate that power" is to fully rank.
Any truncated ballots would be filled by the voter's voted favourite.

>"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).  How many 
>or few voters choose to exercise their right to not follow their favourite's
>ranking advice is no argument for removing that right.

"Compulsory full ranking, Dodgson noted, was a problem for voters who 
may not be sufficiently informed to understand how to rank *all* 
candidates. Obviously, full ranking only works when candidate count 
is limited, and even then donkey voting seems to be fairly common. It 
would be interesting to see statistics on straight sequence voting 
(which wouldn't be visible in Australian results because of Robson 
Rotation, one would have to look at actual ballots or true ballot images.)"

Robson Rotation isn't used in any Australian IRV elections. As far as I
know it is only used in STV elections for multi-member districts in the 
state of  Tasmania and in the Australian Capital Territory.

> > 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.

That is done in Queensland and NSW, it's called "Optional 
Preferential Voting," but, of course, in that there is no remedy for 
ballot exhaustion.
"Ballot exhaustion" isn't a problem, so doesn't need a "remedy".


>
> > 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".  
>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.

Problem is that the "good" property, Later No Harm, is actually a 
*terrible* property, see Woodall's original paper that coined the term.
Abd, thanks for the exact reference.
http://f1.grp.yahoofs.com/v1/UN16SP5h2KfHUAJcGXRtesX3hXxYWb9jBDf0yhOsY3xRy2NwboQ4Of2Ky67hAOHsd0xJ9c6iTYK1qZzZzVyKmJLN1lN_SFM/wood1994.pdf
In that paper there is nothing but a reference to the fact that "not everyone agrees" 
that it is desirable.  
Also, note that I wrote "properties" plural. 


"There are other possible tweaks: for example, allow multiple votes in 
each rank."
Abd, as I've pointed out to you before this just makes IRV much more
vulnerable to Pushover strategy.
 
>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.

"Once again, LNH compliance is a mark against a method, in my view, 
and apparently in the view of at least one of Woodall's referees. 
It's the kind of thing that sounds good, until the implications for 
democratic process are considered. It treats signaling a possible 
compromise as a weakness. Only compromise if you are going to die 
otherwise, would be the equivalent. In order to avoid "betraying" a 
favorite by making it possible for our total vote to help someone 
else to win, we choose a method, if we insist on LNH, that kills the 
candidate, instead of leaving the matter open for a broader 
determination. That eliminated candidate, my favorite, might have won 
if not for the LNH compliance of the method."
Abd seems to wrongly assume that LNHarm is only met by methods that eliminate
candidates and is incompatible with Favourite Betrayal. MinMax(Pairwise
Opposition) meets both.
http://nodesiege.tripod.com/elections/#methmmpo

"Further, LNH cannot be satisfied by any method that requires a 
majority, unless the majority is artificially created, either by 
eliminations *of votes* or by requiring full ranking, which amounts 
to coerced votes."
Something like that might be true, but the phrase "requires a majority"
doesn't really mean anything.

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/20080714/98550e20/attachment-0003.htm>