[EM] The worst about each system; Approval Preferential

[Kathy Dopp]

Abd ul,

I agree with virtually everything you say here. However, I would also
consider that an excellent system for electing one winner would be
"approval, every voter votes for up to two candidates, followed by a
runoff of the top two vote getters".  It solves some of the problems
of a simple runoff election, avoids the spoiler effect I think, and is
very fair.  Although it does seem to always require a runoff election.

Kathy

> Date: Wed, 26 May 2010 20:09:50 -0400
> From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd at lomaxdesign.com>
> To: robert bristow-johnson <rbj at audioimagination.com>,  Jameson Quinn
>        <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>
> Cc: EM Methods <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>, clay shentrup
>        <clay at brokenladder.com>
> Subject: Re: [EM] The worst about each system; Approval Preferential
>        Voting (new name        for an MCA-like system)
> Message-ID: <20100527002856.A051B8DB009D at zapata.dreamhost.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed
>
> At 02:30 PM 5/26/2010, robert bristow-johnson wrote:
>
>>On May 25, 2010, at 1:20 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>>
>>>What are the worst aspects of each major voting system?
>>>
>>>-Plurality: Everything. It routinely requires dishonest strategy
>>>from a large minority, or even a majority, of voters. Enough said.
>>
>>except some unnamed folks here (whose posts i don't see anymore) think
>>that it's better than IRV.
>
> I am *so* relieved that Mr. B-J doesn't have to suffer through my
> posts any more. He should have done this long ago.
>
> Is Plurality better than IRV? Under some conditions.
>
> You are a small town. You hold nonpartisan elections, with a small
> number of candidates. Plurality is better than IRV. Why? I'll just
> start with a few:
>
> 1. IRV under the general conditions of nonpartisan elections almost
> never changes the result from Plurality. People don't realize this
> because they tend to think of "spoiler effect," which usually depends
> on partisan elections and a small party or independent candidate
> pulling off a few votes that flips the election. IRV can fix that,
> but at huge cost, and, notice, it is turning a victory for one
> almost-winner into that for the other almost-winner. Many imagine
> that IRV would have rescued the nation from George Bush, but it is
> far from obvious. It might have made a difficult canvass into a
> totally insane impossible one. The fact is that in nonpartisan
> elections, that phenomenon seems to almost never influence the
> outcome. IRV doesn't flip results in nonpartisan elections.
>
> 2. When the method is plurality, people know that if they vote for
> their favorite, if their favorite is not going to win, they are
> wasting their vote. IRV can create that impression, but it is a false
> one under center squeeze conditions. By voting for their favorite and
> thus concealing their preference for the candidate who would be the
> majority winner, underneath their favorite who runs second in
> first-preference votes, and who maintains that until the last round,
> they have wasted their vote, they might as well have stayed home.
> Just like Plurality. But they know it, so they can make an intelligent choice.
>
> 3. Plurality is much easier to canvass. It's also, in a small town,
> easier to vote. Just vote for your favorite, hang the "strategy."
> People do accept plurality results as fair, and in small town
> government, when Plurality is the method, not very many offices have
> three candidates, so it's moot. The problem in small towns is more,
> sometimes, in getting *anyone* to run!
>
> But I personally believe that finding a majority is important,
> because it is more unifying. IRV, quite simply, doesn't do this, the
> majority it manufactures is, too often, faux. Since top two runoff
> has some of the same problems as IRV -- but it functions better in
> terms of results than IRV -- I suggest using a better advanced method
> for the primary, one that is actually designed to seek true
> majorities, unlike IRV, and that certainly does it better than IRV.
> And that's Bucklin, and it is easy to vote and canvass, and there are
> no reports in the historical record otherwise. It was tried in
> approximately ninety towns in the U.S., in roughly 1910-1920 (a far
> wider application than FairVote has managed, without the central
> organization pushing it), and it was used for party primary
> elections, apparently, for much longer. It's alleged "failures"
> disappear if it is used in its best application, as a way of finding
> majorities without a runoff. It does it, often. And when it fails to
> do so, instead of using it to elect by plurality, just hold the
> runoff! Compared to plurality, you have not lost anything, and you
> have gained a great deal.
>
> In particular, Bucklin does very well at allowing sincere first
> preference expression. That is very important to voters! It is very
> flexible for voters in how to add additional approvals, and this
> becomes much less of a worry in a runoff system. Voters can make
> their decision on adding second preferences, or third preferences,
> with a simple question: which do you prefer, to add lower preferences
> or to have this election go into a runoff? If you don't mind a
> runoff, you are completely free to truncate, if that makes sense to
> you. Most people, historically, in major Bucklin elections, did add
> additional preferences. But we don't have a lot of data. There is a
> project for an enterprising student!
>
>>>-Approval: divisiveness.
>>...
>>>-Range: Strategy is too powerful.
>>
>>i couldn't get the guys at ESF to even acknowledge the obvious
>>strategic considerations a voter would face with Approval or Range.
>>they just say that "it's mathematically proven" to be better than
>>anything else.  Clay Shentrup needs to get on this list and start
>>defending his position rather than expecting me to do the same on his
>>list.
>>
>>Clay, i'll take you on here on EM, but not on ESF.  it takes too much
>>time and is a far less objective context.
>
> The arguments are the same regardless of the list. On the ESF list,
> you'll get more participation from experts in Range, that's all.
> Here, you'll get a bit more from people who don't like Range. But
> your arguments don't get better in one list vs. the other. To B-J,
> though, it's personal, and personal face is involved, hence his preference.
>
> I've seen approval in real use in a real organization, to make
> choices efficiently. It was the opposite of divisive. The proof was
> that a ratification vote, where the approval results had been
> something like 98%/65% for the top two (out of many options,
> plurality and repeated ballot would have taken much longer to find a
> majority, or would have chosen the 65% immediately, it was the status
> quo and was very popular before the discussion, and remained about as
> popular), was unanimous. The 98% became 100%.
>
> This election was a good example of how the majority criterion can be
> defective. Before the polling, first preference would have been the
> 65%. Not only a majority, almost a supermajority. But once it was
> seen how much more acceptable the 98% option was, the 65% voters
> changed their minds. They no longer preferred their original first
> preference because, guess what? People actually consider the benefit
> to the organization of unity. If every time you have an election, you
> offend a third of the people, the organization gradually gets weaker.
> If the election had been Range, it would have been even more obvious.
> Those who preferred the status quo were familiar with it and did not
> realize the depth of opposition. The opposition was actually offended
> by the status quo, and it was a religious issue. Classic Range voting
> Condorcet criterion failure.... I.e., classic Range voting success.
>
> Range and Approval are basically the same method, Range just allows
> finer distinctions to be expressed. Strategy in Range is no more
> powerful than in Plurality. Indeed, Range and Approval default to
> Plurality if voted that way. Except that I don't like them as
> plurality methods, I prefer, greatly, that majority approval is
> required. And that requires that sometimes there be at least two
> polls. In pure democratic practice, the number of polls is unlimited,
> and that's the standard for elections under Robert's Rules, which are
> certainly widely used.
>
> Voting systems are not just for political application, they are general.
>
> And, in any case, listing the systems like this is narrow-minded. The
> best systems are probably hybrids of some kind. It is entirely
> possible to have a hybrid Range/Bucklin system that is also
> Condorcet-compliant. It merely takes, probably only in a fraction of
> elections, a runoff.
>
> (Usually, the Range winner and the Approval (Bucklin) winner and the
> Condorcet winner will be the same. Runoffs are only needed, perhaps,
> to deal with majority failure or the rarer multiple majority problem,
> that a multiple majority might not actually reflect wider approval,
> but poor strategic decisions.)
>
> What Approval can do for small organizations that can vote directly
> is to make the repeated ballot procedure (which is normally
> vote-for-one) more efficient. The only problem with Approval in a
> repeated ballot contest is the contingency that a ballot comes up
> with two majorities, and there is a simple fix: ratify the result! In
> public elections, there is already the tradition and law that if two
> conflicting ballot questions pass, the one with the most votes
> prevails. If people don't like that, they could hold a runoff.
> Nowhere have I seen that done with conflicting ballot questions,
> though. It was assumed that the most widely acceptable result was better.
>
> It is claimed that more advanced systems are harder to vote. There is
> no evidence for that. A hybrid Range/Bucklin/Condorcet system would
> be, probably, easier to vote than Plurality, because it is not
> difficult to pick favorites and to rank. This is actually an argument
> that FairVote makes, and it's often true, it is simply not the whole
> truth. In particular, if it's hard to rank two candidates, it should
> be simple to equally rank. A Bucklin voter can simply bullet vote, if
> anything else is difficult for the voter, and voters should know that
> this is perfectly okay, and, in a runoff system, it's also quite
> safe. Ranking candidates according to what is easy, and not ranking
> the rest, with good ballot and system design, then uses the ranking
> as evidence of clear -- i.e., relatively strong -- preference, and
> the not-ranking as lack of preference. Isn't that what it means?
>
>
-- 

Kathy Dopp
http://electionmathematics.org
Town of Colonie, NY 12304
"One of the best ways to keep any conversation civil is to support the
discussion with true facts."

Realities Mar Instant Runoff Voting
http://electionmathematics.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf

Voters Have Reason to Worry
http://utahcountvotes.org/UT/UtahCountVotes-ThadHall-Response.pdf

View my research on my SSRN Author page:
http://ssrn.com/author=1451051