[Election-Methods] Dopp: 2. “Requires cen tralized vote counting procedures at the state-l ev el"

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 01:54 AM 6/14/2008, Jonathan Lundell wrote:
>I don't think that the point is all that important wrt ranked 
>voting, though. The relevant question is whether there are clones 
>(which needn't be perfect clones) in the election. And the answer is 
>that the presence of clones is not dependent on the race being de 
>jure (or even de facto) partisan.

I think that something has been overlooked. There is an interesting 
phenomenon that I've seen, and it seems to be consistent in 
nonpartisan elections. Suppose we have three candidates, A, B, and C. 
C is eliminated in the first round. Where do C's votes go? It turns 
out that a pretty good prediction can be made from the existing votes 
for A and B. If vA is the vote for A and similarly with vB, whatever 
vote transfers are made from C come in the ratio of vA/(vA+vB) for A 
and vB/(vA+vB) for B. In other words, it is as if the voters who 
prefer C are a relatively unbiased sample of the voting population. 
So vote transfers don't alter expressed preference order.

That was not at all a result that I expected to find. But, once 
found, it seems to make sense in nonpartisan environments. Cloning is 
a different matter, somewhat. If equal ranking were possible, the 
clone issue would disappear.

>A case in point is the just-concluded Democratic primary for 
>California State Senate District 13. A primary is, for our purposes, 
>non-partisan. The election had three candidates with a chance of 
>election, a progressive incumbent, a challenger to the left, and a 
>challenger to the right who ordinarily would have no chance at 
>election in this district, but saw a shot as a consequence of a 
>split between the first two. (You'll agree that we can treat a party 
>primary as a nonpartisan election, yes?)

Perhaps. Ideological position tends to matter more with party 
primaries. I'd not expect a Kucinich supporter to fall back to 
Clinton, say. (By this I mean that most Kucinich supporters would 
prefer a different candidate than Clinton, who was relatively 
conservative. The lower the level of the office though, the closer 
the office to the people, the less this would be true and the larger 
would loom the personality and name recognition of the candidate.

The very fact that you can describe this election in terms of 
ideology indicates to me that it is, in this sense, a partisan 
election. So I thought I would agree with you, but, in fact, it's a 
partisan election with the "parties" being wings of the party.

"Our purposes" are not served by a narrow definition of "partisan" 
that refers to formally organized parties, but rather by an 
understanding of whether ideological categories are strongly 
meaningful to voters, as distinct from personalities and general 
consideration of trustworthiness and the like. Where there is this 
kind of ideological association in the minds of voters, then vote 
transfers from a candidate may go almost entirely to another 
candidate, whereas what is happening in the elections I've studied is 
that transfers are far more diffuse, and tend to not change the 
relative position of the remaining candidates.

The spoiler effect is a result of ideological association, in the 
examples I've seen. Nader didn't take votes away from Bush, for the 
most part, and Buchanan or Badnarik didn't take votes away from Gore. 
Where there are spoilers, the vote transfers can reverse the social 
ordering and we see a "comeback election."

>In the event, the left challenger pulled out a plurality win, but 
>it's easy to see how it might have been otherwise. Under IRV (or 
>approval, for that matter), the right challenger's supporters might 
>well have elected the incumbent; or the right challenger might have 
>beaten the incumbent and left challenger if they had more evenly 
>split the left vote.
>
>It's also easy to see how this real-world election could have 
>resulted in heavily strategic voting in an approval election, and 
>that either IRV or a Condorcet-compliant method would have likely 
>resulted in a better result, for some reasonable definition of "better".

"Strategic voting" is really a misnomer with Approval. No preference 
reversals are involved, as was always the case when strategic voting 
developed its bad name. If the election has a majority requirement 
(as is sometimes the case with party primaries), that "strategic 
voting" is simply voters experimenting with their approval cutoff. 
There is no insincere approval cutoff; the idea that there is comes 
from an incorrect and confused association with the idea that 
"approval" is some fixed thing, that it is independent of context, 
when, in fact, what we "approve" depends on what we think attainable.

Bucklin voting in primaries seems to have had, it's been claimed, 
about 10% usage of the lower choices. There really should be a lot 
more research done, there were many elections, and we simply don't 
know the results. 10%, though, is enough for minor candidates not to 
spoil the election. Much higher vote percentages were seen in the 
Duluth election that was reversed -- very unfairly -- in Brown v. 
Smallwood. Smallwood had won the election despite being second place 
in the primary round. That was a nonpartisan election, so comebacks 
can occur. But this was Bucklin, and what we see are not vote 
tranfers, but additional approvals.

>All that aside, my point is more narrow. The distinction between 
>(nominally) partisan and nonpartisan isn't particularly relevant to 
>the question of election method.

Explain the difference between elections where there is a comeback 
and elections where thre is not. Don't consider whether the election 
is partisan or not. IRV isn't showing comeback elections, and while 
the sample is still small, it's significant. Top two runoff does show 
that effect. The primary given as an example doesn't seem relevant at 
all. It was what might be called "semi-partisan," because of 
contending wings of the party, and it wasn't either IRV or top-two runoff.

I mention nonpartisan because of mechanism I see that explains why, 
contrary to expectations (including my own), IRV is reproducing the 
results of plurality: voters aren't associating the candidates 
together in some consistent spectrum of preference, as would happen 
more strongly in partisan elections.