[EM] it's been pretty quiet around here...

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

robert bristow-johnson wrote:
> 
> ... my goodness!  it's been at least 2 weeks with no activity.
Yes. Other things have occupied my time, and that seems to have been the 
case for the other ones around here, too...

> just a little story: we are about to have our primary elections (August 
> 24) here in Vermont.  it's also a very small state where any old Joe 
> could waltz into the capitol in Montpelier, and make an appointment to 
> see the guv.  anyway, recently when i bopped into the Vermont Dem HQ to 
> pick up some signs, i happened to notice a candidate for Sec of State 
> (who has responsibility to carry out elections for state offices and 
> Vermont's contribution to the national offices).  in a recent debate, he 
> was debating his opponent about election policy and IRV came up (both 
> candidates were for IRV, as far as i could tell).
> 
> since he wasn't from Burlington, he was not as familiar with the 
> Burlington debate as he could have been (he knew we had IRV and that it 
> was repealed last March).  there have been a couple of bills to 
> introduce IRV to statewide offices (notably guv) since the Progs have a 
> statewide presence, not just Burlington.  he was thinking that the 
> problem Burlington had with the election was in the *software* (as if 
> the software "failed").  i told him that if that were the case, it would 
> likely wind up in court, not just a repeal question on the ballot.  
> anyway, it was interesting educating this leading candidate for the 
> primary official responsible for elections what *did* go wrong with IRV 
> in Burlington in 2009 and also what the problems would be if it were 
> adopted for a statewide election (namely that it's not precinct summable).
> 
> anyway, i like this candidate (better than the alternative), but it's 
> just a shame that, in the popular mind, there is no differentiation 
> between the concepts of Preferential Voting (the ranked-order ballot) 
> and IRV.

I like Condorcet and so a lot of this will be preaching to the choir (at 
least for you), but:

Since FV thinks IRV is so nice, it's to their benefit to link 
preferential voting, the concept, to IRV, the method, so that others 
thing "oh, either IRV or Plurality". Since IRV appears better than 
Plurality (at least until the summability issues are encountered), this 
makes it relatively easy to slip in IRV, and the theory then goes, to go 
from IRV to STV, which is much better.

It doesn't appear that we can change FV's minds from IRV to something 
better (like Condorcet). When you dig really far down, the issue boils 
down to "weak centrist! Condorcet winner! weak centrist! Condorcet 
winner!" and there you go -- and then they sprinkle LNHarm and *perhaps* 
burial resistance on top.

Cardinal ratings technically pass both because it can pass IIA since it 
doesn't care about universal domain. However, I think that CR (Range, 
Score, etc) will be hard to get passed, since it doesn't even pass 
Majority. Even if Warren is right and social utility comparisons are 
better than majority rule, most people associate democratic fairness 
with that if some candidate is preferred by a majority, he should win. 
There are also the tactical issues: CR reduces to Approval (as Youtube 
raters found out) and pretty soon voters who want their vote to count 
must haul around concepts like "maybe frontrunner, plus" (LeGrand's 
Approval strategy A), something which really should be inside the method 
rather than outside.

Thus we can't follow FV; and while we could advocate cardinal ratings, I 
don't think that would be very successful (and in any event, should be 
DSV instead). That leaves Condorcet, and so I think there should be an 
organization or group or at least some sort of coherent support for 
Condorcet.

(Alas, I'm not a very good organizer and I'm about 5000 km away.)

What should such a group do? First, it should state that the concept of 
ranked voting is different from what method may be used as its back-end. 
Second, it should have a clear and easily understandable name for 
Condorcet, or for the Condorcet method it settles upon. The former could 
be done more simply: "round robin voting", "maximum majority voting", 
"championship" or "tournament" voting (but beware of equating it with an 
elimination tournament), etc. The latter would be more difficult, as 
Schulze, for instance, is hard to explain.

For reasoning, it might point out that if you put all the voters on a 
line, and cancel out the leftmost with the rightmost until one voter 
remains, the candidate closest to that voter wins -- if that's not too 
advanced.
It might also show that if there's a CW, no recall by any of the other 
candidates can work against him, because a majority prefers him to each 
of the other candidates. That particular argument might be useful for 
those who dread a repeal, because if the method elects the CW, 
supporters of a single loser can't dress the complaint that the wrong 
candidate won up as a repeal of the method, simply because they don't 
have the voters required to make the repeal pass simply by that property 
alone. That is not what happened in Burlington, but it's similar - 
Condorcet minimizes this chance, and beatpath-based methods try to do so 
in the case of cycles as well.

It should also ask the actual people, voters, what they think is 
important with respect to an election method, if such can be done. If 
simplicity matters, Ranked Pair's relative simplicity may be more 
important than Schulze's track record, for instance. Asking in that 
manner could also help letting it know which arguments work - e.g. if 
the canceling-out phrasing of the singlepeakedness theorem gives a sense 
of fairness.