[Election-Methods] Why truncation resistance is important (RE: [EM] Re: Rob: MDDA vs BeatpathWinner)

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 03:07 AM 10/9/2005, Rob Lanphier wrote:
>On Sat, 2005-10-08 at 21:30 -0500, Paul Kislanko wrote:
> > All of the gobblydegoog aside, to Rob - we don't care what you want, us
> > voters want to NOT have to rank all altertantives. I want to list only the
> > ones I find acceptable in the order I prefer them. Any method that
> > "encourages" me to rank all alterntatives whether I know anything 
> about them
> > or care about them will just encourage me to not vote.
>
>Paul,
>
>Here's the problem with that philosophy.  Let's say there are three
>credible front-runners: "mediocre", "bad" and "worse".  I would hope
>many voters would like to be able to express both that "bad" and "worse"
>are unacceptable, while also expressing their preference of "bad" to
>"worse".

That's one view. The other is that giving weight to the election of a 
terrible choice is offensive. That is, perhaps Josef Stalin is better 
than Adolf Hitler. (Tough debate, actually, but obviously a lot of 
people thought that way, and the U.S. supported the Soviets in their 
fight with the Nazis.) Now, if I've voted for Josef Stalin, I've cast 
a vote. I've helped determine a bad election outcome, even though it 
might be better than the alternative. If the choices are bad enough, 
I'd rather abstain, and if only those names were on the ballot, it 
could be a reasonable response to not vote, but, instead, to figure 
out how I could move out of this very dangerous jurisdiction.

Standard in democratic process: a result should be supported by a 
majority of those voting, or it should not be accepted. Truncating is 
a way of expressing a perfectly legitimate vote: "I would rather this 
election fail and we do it over, than elect any of the remaining 
candidates." And if enough people vote that way, and a runoff is 
triggered, we then can consider what kind of runoff is best.

Standard democratic process is that there is simply a new election. 
No eliminations. Eliminations and such are rules devised for 
efficiency, not for democracy. Given that there is an alternative, 
that's a bad choice. The alternative was first described, to my 
knowledge, in 1886 by Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). Asset Voting. It's 
really a variation on the older proxy voting. A simple election rule 
for it would be Plurality, and, in fact, Plurality works quite well 
if a majority is required and voters are knowledgeable. It's 
plurality *without* majority required that can break down so badly. 
So... with Asset/Plurality, vote for your favorite, the candidate you 
*most* trust. Could be anyone, really, but it makes it easier if you 
vote for someone who is also trusted by at least a few others....

My version was FAAV. Fractional Approval Asset Voting. If a voter 
votes for more than one, the vote is divided equally between them. 
Simple. A little harder to count, though still precinct summable, and 
it gives voters flexibility, allowing them to create a virtual 
election committee rather than a single agent. I personally prefer 
the single vote, but intensely dislike the practice of discarding 
ballots due to overvotes, when they have a perfectly simple 
interpretation. Straight Approval voting would not work with Asset, 
because no votes are wasted, so voting for two would give the voter 
double power. (In regular Approval, voting for two, if the votes were 
divided, would halve the voter's voting power, since, in the end, 
only one vote counts, one cast for a winner, all others are moot, 
they could be struck from the ballots and all it would affect is 
victory percentage. In fact, doesn't IRV do that? Discard ballots so 
that they can claim that they found a majority?)

>The sad fact of the matter is that when there's genuine disagreement
>about candidates, we have to compromise.  The only way to accurately
>find the compromise is if voters are actually encouraged to state what
>they'd settle for to avoid their worst outcome.

Sure, we have to compromise. But "no result" is a perfectly 
legitimate result. And then maybe we'd get together and make the 
necessary compromises to find a better than "bad" winner. Range is 
very good for that, if we must squish it all down to a single-ballot 
process, but it is much, much better, if winners can be negotiated 
democratically.

>As to whether "we don't care what you want", who is the "we" you think
>you are speaking for?

The people who think like him. Isn't that what people usually mean? 
There are a lot of them. I'm one, in fact. I don't want to have to 
dig down and try to figure out which is worse, Huckabee or Romney, 
for example. Fortunately, I don't have to.

Election theorists, and Rob Lanphier is one of them (well known and 
quite knowledgeable), don't like truncation because it screws up nice 
neat election methods. We forget that the goal of a good election 
method is to empower the voters to make decisions *they* want to 
make, not decisions *we* want them to make. Here, Rob, "we" means you 
and me and the rest of us who write so many words on these subjects. 
It's a collective pronoun that doesn't necessarily include every 
member of the group, but which, hopefully, expresses some general truth.