[EM] IRV ballot pile count (proof of closed form)

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 05:33 AM 2/10/2010, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>
>"Who says organization, says oligarchy". One has to be careful not 
>to have the organization become undemocratic, because the default 
>tendency is for it to turn so, since it is (initially) more effective that way.

That's right. The Iron Law of Oligarchy. Nice Wikipedia article on 
it, last time I looked. Oligarchy is inevitable and necessary, but 
the trick is to contain it and keep it responsible, to members who 
have means to be informed, information that is generally trustworthy, 
and who retain as much individual power as possible.


>>Yes, it's quite likely that they will stay this course right into 
>>the ground. Hitching proportional representation (a very good idea) 
>>on to single-winner STV (a quite bad idea) may have seemed like a 
>>good idea at the time, perhaps because of the "brilliant" invention 
>>of the name, "instant runoff voting," which itself suggested a 
>>strategy to spread the idea by attacking a vulnerable institution, 
>>but it was, in fact, not sustainable.
>>Some of the reasons why it is not sustainable were not necessarily 
>>known then. Who would have expected that IRV would closely imitate 
>>Plurality in nonpartisan elections? Lots of people seem to be 
>>surprised that IRV doesn't produce real majorities, but that one was known.
>
>I think there's somewhat of an "improvement no matter how small" 
>aspect to it, as well. "IRV handles the spoiler problem with minor 
>third parties, woo hoo!" and then they stop there. But how much of 
>that is after-the-fact justification (means for the ends that is 
>STV) and how much of that is truly believed is hard to tell.

The original goal still exists for FairVote, but has largely been 
eaten by the IRV monster. That the preceding organizations to 
FairVote co-opted the PR movement was noticed early on, by the 
original PR proponents. If Richie realizes the problems, he doesn't 
let on. He's a dedicated, bulldog political activist, and, in 
general, I consider his "office" to be part of the problem. It's 
necessary in an adversarial system, far less so in systems that 
attempt to find social consensus.


>>And the prior history of IRV in the U.S. should have been a clue. 
>>What was it replaced with? Often -- not always -- with top two 
>>runoff. Because of the desire for majorities....
>
>For multiwinner STV, you could argue that the reason it was replaced 
>was not because it did so badly, but because it did too well. 
>Consider New York. After STV, there were many parties, not just the 
>Democratic stranglehold. What did the Democrats do, seeing their 
>power being diluted? Since they didn't want to share, they started 
>employing red-scare tactics, with such rational appeals as calling 
>the method "Stalin Frankenstein".

Yes. The same is true, by the way, with Bucklin. It worked; when it 
"failed' it had simply reverted closer to Plurality due to bullet voting.

>As for IRV, the single-winner method, you're probably right. In some 
>situations, the reason is that it seems to provide no different 
>results than Plurality. In others, there's complexity (which is made 
>no better by that IRV isn't summable).

FairVote has sold IRV most successfully in jurisdictions that were 
using top-two runoff with nonpartisan elections, and in that 
environment, it's clear that dropping TTR for IRV is quite 
equivalent, in practice, to simply running Plurality, which is a lot 
cheaper. I have seen one fairly clear exception, the Ed Jew District 
4 Supervisor race in San Francisco in 2006, and in that race, we had 
visible markers (the names of the candidates) that identified ethnic 
affiliation, apparently quite similar to partisan affiliations in 
partisan elections. It stands out like a sore thumb in the vote 
transfers, and apparently Jew actually only campaigned to Asians and 
advised them to rank all the Asian candidates. Since the district has 
a high Asian population.... So this "exception" actually proves the 
rule. Nominally non-partisan, but, in fact, highly partisan.

Top Two Runoff is an improvement over Plurality, and is the 
most-established election reform in the U.S. And FairVote has been 
shooting it down with its efforts. It's tragic, in fact.

In the long run, though, it will probably prove to have been 
suicidal, as results from all these trials accumulate and are 
analyzed by people who aren't nailed to the FairVote agenda.

>>Well, Asset bypasses the whole shebang, by making what we think of 
>>as "elections" irrelevant. At least in theory. Everyone wins in an 
>>Asset election, or, if not, then there is someone very specific for 
>>the voter to blame: the candidate the voter voted for in first 
>>preference. (Asset may be STV with the Asset tweak for exhausted 
>>ballots, or it could just be vote-for-one. I, personally, would see 
>>no need or desirability to rank more candidates, provided my choice 
>>has a backup (a proxy should be allowed in case of incapacity), but 
>>some people seem to think otherwise. I'd rather not yank my vote 
>>away from my most-trusted candidate to put it in the hands of this 
>>less-trusted candidate, but then to return it to the most trusted 
>>if the less-trusted drops out somehow. .... rules in STV/Asset have 
>>not much been delineated.)
>
>Dissolving the problem - making it irrelevant - is the best 
>solution, when it can be done, yes. However, I feel unsure about 
>Asset because it hands power to someone who may hand power to 
>someone who may ... and so on.

That problem is fundamental to representative democracy, though. Some 
kind of representative democracy is necessary in order to handle 
scale, but two approaches ameliorate the problem. First of all, make 
sure that the choices of people for representatives are respected and 
implemented as accurately as possible, so that, as far as possible, 
representatives are chosen instead of being elected, so that the 
original voters are truly represented, accurately, and not through 
major compromise.

In the end, some kinds of compromise may be necessary, but it turns 
out that the impact of compromise can be so minimized that it becomes 
of far less importance.

>  The closest thing to it around in governmental elections is where 
> parties (or candidates) specify an inheritance order, and your vote 
> follows that order; what results is that the candidates might 
> transfer your vote in the wrong direction.

However, this, then, confines voters to representation by political 
parties, essentially. It leaves independent voters more or less out 
in the cold.

>  For instance, if you vote for X because of Y, and X also likes 
> some property Z that you don't, then if he transfers to Z, that is 
> not what you want. Asset's logic is that you don't have to do that 
> (because you can vote for a minor player and your vote will still 
> not be wasted), but why doesn't that logic hold for vote 
> inheritance orders? It seems like it would, yet we see the effect 
> mentioned above...

Voting for inheritance orders prevents the negotiation of shared 
representation. The beauty of Asset is that it allows intelligent 
negotiation, with minimum constraint. And when Asset is used in a 
hybrid system, not merely as an election method, *representation in 
decisions of an Assembly is absolute,* the only compromise that has 
been made is in *deliberation,* i.e., it is the minimum compromise. 
Just because you voted for yourself in an Asset election does not 
mean that you can stand up in the Assembly and take up everyone's 
time with a speech, or that you can introduce a motion. You will have 
to find someone with a seat to do these things, or at least to ask 
the Assembly for permission for you to do it (i.e., the speech).

The separation of deliberative rights from voting rights that I 
propose is not entirely new, it exists when an Assembly submits a 
question to the voters, but in a general election, guaranteed, there 
will be lots of voters who don't understand the issues and are just 
reacting to appearances, or to media impressions that can be created 
by skilled marketers.

The real election in Asset is immediate: electors are chosen with 
certain powers that are unconditional.

(If there are security concerns, it's possible to require that 
electors receive some minimum vote count, which would be large enough 
to allay the concerns. Under truly difficult conditions, this would 
be the minimum number that allows the State to provide some level of 
security for electors who are publicly announced. In this case, 
electors would submit a sealed ballot before the public election, 
with a list of alternates to serve if they cannot serve for some 
reason. But under more settled conditions, the number could be one 
vote. If there are concerns about vote coercion, it could be three. 
As to vote buying, in systems that are thoroughly representative, 
vote buying, to be effective, would have to be so widespread that, 
especially if it's illegal, it would be more cost effective to simply 
make an offer to the State of compensation for whatever you want to 
do. Legal, too. Buying votes in an Asset election strikes me as quite 
a waste of money, because to exercise much power that way, you'd have 
to buy a lot of votes!)

"Absentee voting" on actual questions before an Assembly, i.e., where 
an elector submits a vote on a question without at least being 
exposed to the debate results, I would not allow. Rather, an elector 
would either have to be present at the Assembly to vote, or could 
vote on-line through a web site which contains the record of debate, 
committee reports, etc. If the elector votes, it then weakens the 
vote of any seat that has been chosen to represent the elector. I 
would not allow proxy voting by seats, unless through an entirely 
separate system. I.e., the seat would always vote (or abstain) 
personally and would not separately cast votes for different factions 
of electors. But a system might exist where an elector may designate 
a revocable proxy to vote in the elector's place. But I've mostly 
been assuming that an elector either allows the seat to vote and 
leaves it at that or votes directly.

I'm also *not* assuming delegable proxy as a legal system, at least 
initially, where transfers are binding and not revocable. When an 
elector votes in the seat election, the elector registers the vote. 
It's public. The elector may assign any number of votes, including 
fractions of a vote. A "contract" of transfer may exist, providing, 
for example, that votes are returned proportionally, if excess (if 
the receiving candidate has more than the quota), or, alternatively, 
that the seat may transfer excess votes personally.

I'd probably allow a seat I vote for to transfer. The reason? The 
candidate I transfer to is probably in a better position to know the 
other candidates than I am.

But I also assume that procedures will exist for revoking transfers 
even after the Assembly is seated. And this leads to consideration of 
the use of Asset to handle recall. But, remember, I'm proposing Hare 
quota, which will often leave the assembly a seat short, or even a 
few seats short, depends.  If a few votes of a quota are rescinded, 
I'd argue, the seat could continue to serve, with reduced voting 
power, until and unless those votes were replaced, and voting power 
would have to fall below some threshold to actually result in loss of 
deliberative privileges. If, then, a few extra seats are elected, 
there is no harm. The electorate is still represented, and gaining 
extra seats with reduced voting power for each -- i.e., the same net 
voting power, simply decreases the efficiency of a faction. Seats are 
merely filters, preventing overwhelming deliberation with noise.

(And the Assembly can censure and sanction members who are 
disruptive, it is a traditional right of deliberative assemblies, 
necessary for them to be able to protect themselves.)

>The iterated variant (some times called "liquid democracy") has 
>another problem: the graph (who is a delegate of whom) is 
>transparent - therefore, vote buying and selling becomes very 
>simple. Now you may say that the voters won't accept a candidate who 
>sells his power and so will desert the candidate, but as long as 
>there's inertia (and reality seems to support that), the problem remains.

First of all, I'm not recommending delegable proxy (liquid democracy 
is an early name) for anything but voluntary organizations. Asset 
Voting, though, is close enough. When systems are as open as DP or 
Asset, "vote-buying" takes on different significance. I don't want a 
garbage dump in my neighborhood, I'd oppose it. But what if the 
proposed dump operator offers me $10,000 to withdraw my opposition? 
What I think about this is that it is only offensive if secret. Why 
shouldn't my neighbor get the same? Or at least the opportunity!

I've elsewhere detailed how an attempt to corrupt a proxy in a DP 
system could easily lead to a mouthful of hair for the would-be 
corrupter. They pay the money, they get the open support of the 
proxy, the proxy ends up looking very good to the constituents, who, 
on this issue, vote directly, bypassing the proxy's vote. I've 
recommended in DP systems that proxies *not accept* votes from large 
numbers of constituents, or, at least, that they understand the 
problems created if they do. If I got large numbers of requests to 
serve, I would instead recommend that they choose someone who has 
chosen me. And then I can communicate with all of them through direct 
(and private) communication with a handful of individuals. So I've 
been offered some huge sum to exercise my influence. Publicly, I 
promote the idea, using the best arguments provided to me, and 
perhaps I shut up about the reasons why it's a Bad Idea. But I'm in 
direct communication with my set of direct clients, and we discuss 
everything, routinely. And it would be very easy to make sure that 
they are aware of the counterarguments and that I'm voting as I vote 
because of, shall we say, special considerations. So I vote and argue 
as I'm paid to do, and my clients decide that they just don't like my 
opinion on this particular issue, so they vote directly.

Very expensive to corrupt a DP system. The corruption we are 
accustomed to is made possibly by narrow nodes of voting power, such 
as an elected representative, where one person being corrupted can 
shift a result, where it takes only a few to produce, say, a desired 
committee report. In addition, the requirements of electoral 
democracy, with contested elections, are such that candidates 
constantly need money for campaigning, so it's a perfect setup for 
corruption, and much of it is even legal.

>If I were to dissolve the problem of elections, I'd rather look 
>towards Gohlke's triad idea, or a larger PR variant. If the base 
>layers have some measure of randomization, it becomes hard to 
>influence the candidates ahead of time, because everyone (who's 
>interested) is a potential candidate.

I don't think that the power of direct representation has been 
realized. In an Asset system, every voter could look at the vote 
transfers and see exactly where their vote went, and how it was 
exercised on any question. There is individual responsibility and 
accountability. What I expect is that the Assembly would become "our" 
assembly, and any frustration left would be natural. I.e., if your 
position is in the minority, and you can't, even with reasonable 
representation, shift the opinion of the majority, well, you might be 
frustrated. But you'd have had ample opportunity to be heard, and 
many ways to get your message to the Assembly if the arguments are cogent.

>>>What's important is that we don't know of such a method; but also 
>>>that the stepping stone strategy itself might be dangerous - if 
>>>the base method is bad, then it may fail to dislodge those whose 
>>>interest is in less democracy, and so the objective of moving to 
>>>multiwinner never gains any additional strength by the so-called 
>>>stepping stone.
>>My own decision about all this is that it's best to begin with 
>>NGOs, voluntary organizations that demonstrate how advanced methods 
>>work. The Election Science Foundation held an Asset election for 
>>its steering committee. It was quite interesting....
>
>Would the various (smaller, usually technical) organizations and 
>groups using Schulze count in this direction?

Of course. STV is pretty good for PR, used properly. But Asset knocks 
the ball into a whole new park.