[EM] The meaning of a vote (or lack thereof)

[matt welland]

On Sun, 2011-08-28 at 23:24 -0400, Michael Allan wrote:
> Matt, Dave and Fred,
> 
> > > > The meaning of an individual vote is mostly irrelevant ...
> > >
> > > The individual vote itself is irrelevant?  We know that the vote
> > > is the formal expression of what a person thinks in regard to an
> > > electoral issue.  Do you mean:
> > >   (a) What the person thinks is irrelevant in reality?  Or,
> > >   (b) What the person thinks is irrelevant to the election method?
> 
> Matt Welland wrote:
> >     (c) Discussing the meaning of an individual vote is mostly
> >         pointless
> 
> I can understand why you might want to dodge the question.  You've
> taken a position that is difficult to defend.

Huh? Nothing to defend, if you continue to think that the "meaning of an
individual vote" is worthy of analysis then more power to you. The (a)
and (b) answers completely missed the point of my original statement so
I added (c).

> > > The election method cannot tell you, "there are ten thousand
> > > people who share your values and will vote as you vote" ...
> > 
> > Here in the US we have these things called "polls" which happen
> > periodically prior to the real election. ...
> 
> I know.  Stuff happens outside of the election and beyond the reach of
> the formal method, even (sometimes) unexpected stuff that the original
> designers had no experience or understanding of.  Maybe later we can
> say something about these.  For now, if you agree, let's return to the
> topic and look at the meaning of a vote (or lack thereof).
> 
> You claim that the vote has little meaning, and I claim it has none at
> all.  In either case, I think we can show that the election method is
> consequently flawed.  Once we recognize the flaw and understand its
> nature, then we can attempt to trace its consequences, including the
> work of the polsters.

I did not say that a "vote has little meaning", I said that it is
meaningless to discuss the individual vote! Those are two vastly
different things.

In my original response I voiced the opinion that analyzing a vote in
isolation is meaningless. Well, mostly meaningless. I then had some fun
contradicting myself and went ahead and gave some simple mathematical
meaning to a single vote and illustrated how approval gives the voter N
times more voting power than plurality where N is the number of
candidates.

In my opinion your claim that an individual vote has no meaning is wrong
and all one has to do is look at the real world to see that. What is
interesting is that I think it may be possible to show the relative
value of a vote for each system. 

Value of a vote per system:
V=number of voters, N=number of candidates

Plurality: 1/(N*V)
Approval:  1/V
Condorcet: 1/(2*V)
Range: 1/V

etc.