[EM] British Colombia considering change to STV

Terry Bouricius terryb at burlingtontelecom.net
Thu Apr 30 12:48:14 PDT 2009


While Abd and I regularly bump heads on certain issues, I am quite 
sympathetic to his core concept of Asset voting (essentially a super-proxy 
system). But for near term adoption for North American governmental 
legislative elections,  STV is the best option out there.

And contrary to Abd's concern about "premature election reform" the BC-STV 
plan was the result of one of the best deliberative processes I have ever 
seen (the BC Citizens Assembly). By the way, Abd has an error or typo 
where he miss-states the Droop quota as 1/(N-1), but I assume nearly 
everybody on this list who read his message already noticed that.

Terry Bouricius

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Abd ul-Rahman Lomax" <abd at lomaxdesign.com>
To: <kathy.dopp at gmail.com>; "Terry Bouricius" 
<terryb at burlingtontelecom.net>
Cc: <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
Sent: Thursday, April 30, 2009 1:18 PM
Subject: Re: [EM] British Colombia considering change to STV


At 10:18 PM 4/29/2009, Kathy Dopp wrote:
>STV has *all* the same flaws as IRV but is even worse. It is
>unimaginable how anyone could support any method for counting votes
>that is so fundamentally unfair in its treatment of ballots and
>produces such undesirable results.

I don't think Ms. Dopp, who has put quite a bit of effort into
exposing the problems with IRV, has really studied the situation with
STV. Obviously, the problems of IRV are the same as single-winner
STV, they are the same method.

However, multiwinner STV, particularly forms that use fractional
votes to deal with reassignments, is quite good *with early choices,*
and only breaks down when there are too many candidates, such that
eliminations start before there is fair assessment.

I'm going to describe a variation of STV that isn't necessarily
what's being used, and, in fact, I don't think it's being used
anywhere in details. But the Droop quota variation may be in use, more or 
less.

That is, STV chooses winners according to a quota, and were it the
Hare quota, and if it were required that a candidate receive that
quota to be elected, it's clear that every STV winner is reasonably
fair, if certain conditions obtain. The conditions: lower rank votes
aren't coerced (as they are in Australia), and voters never choose a
lower ranked candidate when they won't be reasonably satisfied with
that candidate as a winner. Under these conditions, every winner is
reasonable as a representative. Every winner chosen before
eliminations begin is also *ideal* as a winner.

In the first round of counting, every candidate elected is the first
choice of a quota of voters. Only those candidates are eliminated
from the subsequent rounds (before eliminations begin) who are
already elected. Let's assume that a candidate got double the quota.
The Hare quota is 1/N * (total valid votes) with any choice shown. If
there are ten seats in an assembly to be elected, and a candidate
gets, as a first choice, one-tenth of the vote, that candidate is
obviously a good representative for one-tenth of the electorate.

But what if the candidate gets two-tenths of the vote? If the ballots
electing that candidate are eliminated, the *faction* "led" by this
candidate is under-represented. So the idea is to eliminate half the
votes and to then reassign the rest to lower ranked choices. How is
this done? Some places use methods like random elimination, and I
don't know the details. But the fairest method to me seems to be to
revalue the votes, all of them, and look at second-rank votes. In
this case, each ballot would then be worth one-half of a vote. So,
second round, if all these voters voted the same second rank, they
would then elect their second choice.

This then would proceed iteratively until all ballots have been
assigned to a winner, or eliminations would need to start. So far,
every choice has been clearly a good representative.

Problems begin with eliminations, where votes cast are set aside and
replaced with lower rank votes, not having been used to create a
winner. Further, the Hare quota isn't used, rather the Droop quota is
used. It's assumed that some ballots will not contain a countable
vote, and that some ballots will not end up choosing a
representative. Maybe the first vote is for some unpopular candidate,
and there were no second choice votes. That one ballot would prevent
the election of a full assembly, because a Hare quota couldn't be
found for the last seat. So the Droop quota is used, the fraction,
instead of being 1/N, is 1/(N-1). This, then, allows a supposedly
realistic compromise to be found. In addition, (I'm not sure about
actual practice), the quota may decline, being revised according to
the number of remaining seats and the number of "unexhausted" ballots.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson) realized the problem and invented
what we now call Asset Voting to deal with it. Asset Voting doesn't
allow ballots to be exhausted, publishing a pamphlet in 1884. It's
not at all clear that Dodgson realized all the implications, he was
just thinking about politics being more or less the same as it was,
and that voters would vote in more or less the same way. He was
concerned that many or most voters don't really know much more about
the various candidates except to know who their favorite was.

So his idea was to assign an otherwise exhausted ballot to the
favorite, and this vote becomes, as it were, the "property" of the
favorite, to be reassigned at the discretion of that candidate. With
this fix, which converts a raw election method into an input stage
for a deliberative process, and with a Hare quota (to a slightly less
extent with the Droop Quota), totally fair method of choosing
winners, not subject to most of the normal election pathologies. But,
to my knowledge, it's never been tried.

The big secret: if this were done, all votes would count. No votes
would be wasted. Voters would still be able to use a preference list,
if they prefer to control vote transfers before their ballot is
eliminated from direct use. Many people, reading about this for the
first time, seem to think that this gives too much power to
politicians, but they, I'd say, haven't thought it all the way
through. We are electing representatives who will exercise power;
this allows someone trusted with a vote to have a say in who gets to
actually exercise the power, counting and using votes that would
otherwise be *eliminated.* Don't trust a candidate to recast the vote
in a good way? Why, then, would you trust that candidate to directly
exercise the power? It makes no sense to me, having thought about
this for many years.

Now, actual STV? It's probably reasonably fair up until the choice of
the last seat, where the IRV problems kick in fully. Before that,
it's quite possible that eliminations result in less than optimal
choices, but still reasonable ones, unless full ranking is coerced.

My biggest problem with premature election reform is that instead of,
say, forming a commission to study voting systems, and making sure
that this commission hears and considers evidence about all possible
systems, and then presents a full report, in detail, of all the
implications, there usually isn't any kind of comparative inquiry at
all, there is only the raw choice of the present method or a single
proposed reform; and even when there is a study group, as in
Colorado, the decisions are made without adequate back-and-forth with
experts, and, further, recommendations may be made based on political
expediency (which method might actually be accepted, due to all the
complex considerations?) instead of on an accurate comparison of
methods (which would then leave the matter of practical expedience to
the experts on that, the elected politicians who actually make the
final decision).

STV should be on the table, but there are other proportional
representation systems, including variations of STV in use,
reweighted range voting, and, indeed, Asset Voting. Systems have been
proposed in the past which also use a quota to elect, but which don't
reassign votes; instead, they reassign voting power in the assembly;
this was proposed for, I think, one or two cities in the U.S. in the
first part of the last century. This is fairer, in fact, than STV,
and far less complicated, but it bucks the idea that we should elect
peer assemblies, where every member has the same voting power as
every other one. Asset Voting solves this problem by creating a peer
assembly, as we are accustomed to seeing, but, still, with every
ballot (within certain limitations) having served to elect a seat.

It's even possible for it to be known what each individual ballot
did, if when votes are reassigned, it's done by precinct; at least
every voter who voted for only one would know, quite well, what their
ballot did. (Because the precinct counts wouldn't be exact, but
merely close, it would be more accurate to say, if a precinct's votes
were one-tenth of the quota for a candidate, that 90% of the voter's
vote elected Candidate X. The voter knows what precinct he or she
voted in. However, the candidate doesn't know exactly which voters
elected him or her.)

What's truly interesting to me about Asset Voting is that it can
shade, one small step at a time, into a hybrid direct/representative
democracy that retains the best features of both. Deliberative
assembly with identified representatives with special rights: the
right to introduce motions and to address, by right, the assembly -- 
always the bugaboo of direct democracy because scale makes large
assemblies bog down; it's not *voting* that's the problem, it's
deliberation. Extended penumbra around the assembly consisting of
those who received votes, they are known and identified, but who
reassigned those votes to create winners. These can be considered
"electors," and could have the right to vote directly. Because they
are known, and the votes they recast are known, it becomes possible
for their votes, should they choose to vote, to be counted, and the
votes of those they elected then would be adjusted down accordingly,
fractionally.

My opinion is that these votes would only rarely affect an outcome.
However, that they are there in theory would act as a restraint on
the assembly, and, in addition, rapid and efficient recall could
become possible, but even more than this, the penumbra acts as an
advisory body for the assembly, directly representing, by free
choice, the electorate, no compromises.

You want to become part of this advisory body? You can. Just declare
a candidacy and vote for yourself. (Now, there might be some
restrictions, and you might have to declare a second choice, for
various reasons that I won't go into, there might be some minimum
threshold below which votes would not be reported, it has to do with
voting security and the possibility of small-scale coercion. I
personally think that the coercion problem is vastly overblown under
most conditions; it's only a problem on a large scale, which doesn't
apply to the problem that a candidate, say a wife, who demands that
her husband vote for her, and she doesn't get any votes except her
own.... So it's possible that singletons would not be recognized, or
there are other solutions.... I can think of some, but ... way ahead
of necessity!)

The assembly size can be chosen to be the most efficient at providing
the combination of best process (too many cooks spoil the soup) and
full representation. The direct voting option means that making a
compromise on assigning a vote to create a seat is less important,
for any elector can still vote directly, if matters that much.

The basic problem with all election methods that resolve with a
single ballot is that *it's impossible for a single ballot to make
sound choices under all circumstances.* Further, fixed terms create a
gap between a representative assembly and the people it represents.
Asset voting, where every voter can vote for the representative most
trusted, without compromise, and where all the electors thereby
created, should minimize or even eliminate the gap. Again, because
votes can be amalgamated on a very small scale with Asset voting, I'd
expect campaigning for office, as such, to practically disappear.
Rather, someone just starts by registering as a candidate, and could
take as many election cycles as necessary to build voting power, with
no waste. When a candidate has reached the point where their voting
power is a significant fraction of that necessary to hold a seat,
they become, in effect, a lobbying representative to the holder of
the seat, with real and tangible voting power behind it. They not
only can deliver votes through influence, they directly deliver
votes, it's all out in the open.

The real importance, though, isn't in voting and votes, it is in
creating a broad network that *deliberates* and *advises*.







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