[EM] Re to Mike O.

[David L Wetzell]

Mike O.-

DLW wrote:

Not everyone thinks having a two-party dominated system is bad.

[endquote]

Quite so. The Republicans, the Democrats, and the media owned and run by
the same
corporate rich families that own the Republocrats don't think two-party
domination is
bad.

[end quote]

It is a bad system currently.  That is not in contest.  The issue is where
a two-party dominated system is necessarily bad.  I argue a two-party
dominated system could be okay if there were more competitive elections,
meaningful diffs, and dynamism due to how the duopoly is contested by minor
parties and LTPs that specialize in contesting "more local" elections,
while voting strategically together in "less local" elections along with
other public attempts to move the center on key issues.

I continued:

Good
luck getting electoral reforms in a two-party dominated system tilting to a
single-party dominated system that level the playing fiield for all parties
100%.

[endquote]

You wrote: You're quite right. Voting system reform may never happen. If it
does, then maybe the
children of our great grandchildren will benefit from it.

[endquote]

Or we eschew perfectionism and play political jujitsu with election reforms
that decentralize influence more so than power.

You wrote:That's why our immediate effort should be devoted not to getting
a better voting system,
but rather to best using the voting system that we already have. Plurality
may be the worst
(or maybe the 2nd worst, after Borda, or the 3rd worst, after Borda and
IRV),
but its full badness depends on more than just the voting system. It
depends on worthless polling,
maybe even combined with falsified polling. (Falsified poll-results have
sometimes been caught).

[endquote]

dlw: The implics of the import of electoral reform and FPTP being in use is
to devote our efforts to strategically support the most likely alternatives
to FPTP to succeed in the near future.

You wrote:That's why suggest that we should be putting most of our effort
into polling, to inform Plurality voting.

dlw: I'm cool with pluralizing polling, but I'd rather put a lot more
effort into supporting FairVote's upcoming push for American forms of PR.

You wrote: As I've said, our Plurality elections are zero-information
elections. The right strategy for 0-info elections
is to just vote for one's favorite. Voters should be informed of those
facts.

This lesser-of-2-evils defensive stragegy could be valid, if it were the
result of good information. But
it isn't.

Quite aside from that, tell people about these valid sayings:

"If you vote for a lesser-evil, then you get an evil."

[endquote]

strategic voting can only work if it effects changes in behavior among the
parties.
I myself plan to vote strategically in the upcoming prez election for the
major party candidate who receives significant negative campaigning on tv
in the last couple weeks of the election.  I take this sort of perverse
behavior as a signal for the side who is greater-evil, unable to win on its
stands on the issues.   there's nothing wrong with voting strategically if
it's bundled with others so as to affect changes in bhavior on behalf of
the greater good and ourselves.

You wrote: Ideally, it should be rank-balloting, nationwide, with the
national results of each local poll weighted
by the quotient of the population of the region represented by that poll
(probably much more than the city polled)
divided by the number of voters in the poll.

The resulting national set of ballots should then be counted to look for a
Condorcet Winner (CW).
The CW is a candidate who doesn't have a pairwise defeat. X has a pairwise
defeat if there is some Y such that
the number of voters who rank Y over X is greater than the number of voters
who rank X over Y.

That CW is the candidate that Plurality voters need to come together on. If
you want to avoid the election of
someone worse than that CW, than you (and everyone who agrees with you on
that) should vote for the CW in the
Plurality election.
[endquote]

dlw: Interesting idea, but if all of the candidates are not ranked then
there tends to be lots of ties and there often isn't a CW candidate.  As I
argued earlier with others, I hold that options among candidates are
inherently fuzzy and so the CW is not as useful of a criterion since our
rankings will inevitably be somewhat noisy or ad hoc.

You need to take seriously the Limited Information problem of voters and
the shifting nature of polls and preferences, often easily influenced by
the way the choices are presented or issues are described.

MO:So everyone, all the progressive parties, all the progressive political
organizations, all the progressive
media, should be told about that CW.
But let's do more polling this time, among the candidates (Starting
immediately with all who've declared or might
declare). Then, poll again after the nominations.

Plurality with Condorcet polling is equivalent to Condorcet.

Condorcet for 2012!

[endquote]

You'd need a whole lot of people to rally behind it for it to work.
 There'd be problems w. the timing and structure of the polls, which of
course can and would get heavily politicized.  Moreover, you have a
selection bias due to the relatively few people who'd understand Condorcet
criterion for elections.  This would hamper your ability to get a bandwagon
effect going for you.

dlw wrote:

I view voter preferences as endogenous, more so than exogenous and fuzzy.

[endquote]

If they don't matter, then there's no need for elections.

[endquote]

I didn't say they didn't matter.  I said I don't want to treat them as
exogenous or fixed  and readily ascertainable.
This is ecause of reality and it is one of the reasons that democracy is
always an ongoing experiment...

MO wrote: And if voters are feeling the need to bury their favorite, then
no one will ever know
what voters really want. That's the worst state of affairs that a voting
system can
create.

It makes a joke of voting.
[endquote]

elections are relatively weak at signaling folks "preferences".  This is
why there's gotta be more trust in the politics of Gandhi that move the
center and make those in power accommodate those out of power.

The world will not end if I vote strategically.  In single winner election,
there's always going to be an effective limitation of options given to
voters and so some are likely going to need to vote strategically.

dlw wrote:

I don't think we need to nail the center, so much as we need to have it
moved via extra-political cultural change-oriented activities.  This lets
me deemph these purported flaws in IRV.

[endquote]

IRV forces voters to bury their favorite. De-emphasize that.

[endquote]

When a small fraction of voters bury their favorite, all of democracy
becomes a complete farce.


I wrote: Some may think that this is wise.  IRV doesn't leave no party
behind.
But they'd be voting like that a lot more often with plurality.

[endquote]

MO:So that's all you can say for IRV--comparing it to Plurality? That
isn't saying a whole lot, is it.

[endquote]

I'm not a perfectionist.  I do not claim there is a right election rule for
all elections.  I do not wish to defend IRV as such.  It is significantly
better than FPTP and it's got a first-mover and marketing advantage over
all the alternatives, of which there is no heir apparent as the one to
replace FPTP.

For when FPTP is in place, it is rational to be strategic in one's advocacy
for electoral reform.

dlw wrote:

Ultimately, though if folks want to change things, they need to do more
than try to get the right party into power.

MO:Do we want a method that needs that?  Do we want that when there are
plenty of methods that don't force
that favorite-burial strategy?
[endquote]

Maybe it's inevitable and it's chimerical to think that the right election
rule will make things a lot better....

I wrote: Do most people care?  Not really.
At the end of the day, it's just not that key of a facet of an electoral
rule.

[end quote]

That's an astonishing thing for someone at EM to say.

[end quote]

I am an iconoclast wannabe, remember?
My angle is that what matters most is the right mix of multi-winner and
single-winner elections a lot more so than getting the sorts of options
given to voters right.

MO wrote:Most people care very much about electing a compromise. They've
shown that they'll do
anything in order to do so. That includes burying their favorite, which
they regularly do,
calling it "pragmatic", to not "waste their vote".

If you're saying that most people don't care about getting a voting system
that doesn't
force favorite-burial, do you really think that "most people" know that
there are such
voting systems?

[endquote]

I think most people don't think that vote-burying by some is that big of a
problem or the most important
thing that needs to be changed to make things better.  Or they judge their
chances of vote-burying as low enough that they don't have any incentive to
switch to an election rule that would prevent it altogether "ideally".

dlw wrote:

IRV is a signicant improvement over FPTP.

[endquote]

Depends on what you call "significant". And you can define "significant" as
weakly as you
want to. But most would agree that a method that strongly, often, forces
favorite-burial
is not significantly better than Plurality. I posted about the common and
ordinary scenario
in which many people's compromise will lose in IRV unless they
favorite-bury by voting Compromise over
Favorite.

[endquote]

What you mean instead of voting candidate K as my no. 3, I vote K as number
5 on my list?
When you're ranking umpteeen candidates, you're obviously more likely to
"bury" somebody further down the list than you'd ideally like to have done,
presuming of course you've done your homework on all of the candidates on
all of the key issues (which ever issues those might be) in the formation
of your ideal ranking of them all...

dlw wrote:

t's got a first-mover and a marketing edge over all other alternatives to
FPTP in the US.

[endquote]

MO:Translation: It's being heavily promoted by a well-funded organization.
IRVists have been jetting around
the country to attend expensive banquets, and probably wine, dine, and
power-lunch important small party
leaders and other progressive political leaders.

To what extent has Rob Richie's personal family wealth funded that IRV
promotion?
[endquote]

dlw: Who gives a shit?  Electoral reform is on the move, unless it gets
stifled by perfectionism.

MO: That's explicitly said by IRVists, often. I don't know if they say it
when they promote IRV to the
public :-)  If not, then the IRVists are dishonestly trying to foist a bad
voting system off on the
public because of a different agenda, for STV.

endquote

dlw: All that matters is that we get more competitive elections, less
cut-throat competition between the two major parties and give more voice
for minorities by increasing their chances to be the swing voters.  STV in
more US elections would do that.  IRV paves the way for STV.

I wrote:

There is no self-evident oft-used alternative.

[endquote]

MO:IRV has been "often-used" in Australia, where people express a need to
bury their favorite
to help a big-two lesser-evil.

Nothing will become "often-used" unless we start using it. If we stick with
what's been
"often-used", then improvement is impossible, isn't it.

[endquote]

If you are Australian, you are welcome to get your country to use IRV(or
what-not) to choose among FPP, IRV and other electoral rules....
I am US_American.  I work in a FPTP dominated system that makes it wise to
support the rule most likely to replace FPTP in the most elections...

dlw wrote:

You all proffer four
possibilities.
That's not going to help rally folks around electoral reform.

[endquote]

I daresay it's a lot more than four possibilities. Yes, that's a problem.
If EM is to be a helpful resource for the public to look at, to decide about
voting system reform, we've got to emphasize _why_ we like certain
criteria. ...How
we justify our criteria in terms of their guarantees for the voter. Voters
want to
defeat a greater evil. Tell them how various methods help them do that
without
burying their favorite.
[endquote]

Thankyou for reaffirming my point that there's no self-evident alternative
to IRV as the main alternative to IFPP.
I don't like elevating your criteria as decisive because I think its
consequences for having a functioning democracy are over-stated.

dlwYou wrote:

IRV+(PR in "More local" elections) is a sound prescription for making the
US's political system a lot better

[endquote]

MO:No, not really. IRV won't make anything better, for the reasons I've
given.
[endquote]

Your reasons do not imply IRV won't make anything better.  It merely says
that IRV won't make everything perfect according to a specific criterion
for "perfection".

MO:As for PR, that would be even more difficult to achieve in the U.S. Yes,
it was
tried for a while in a few cities. So have some rank-balloting systems,
including Bucklin.
[endquote]

dlw:If it's 3-5 seat and used for "more local" elections in ways that do
not challenge two- party domination, it'd be easier.
It solves a problem of chronicially non-competitive elections due to de
facto segregation by characteristic correlated with political preferences.


dlw wrote:

, especially when coupled with even more
critical political cultural changes, like what #OWS is trying to accomplish.

[endquote]

I don't know what #OWS is. I'm not saying that voting system reform is
everything. In fact,
I've said that making good use of Plurality is much more imporant, right
now, than working
for a better voting system.
[endquote]

Occupy Washington.

dlw wrote:

This is what's going to be on the front-burner and so do you want to get
behind it or do you want to try shoot its tires?  Cuz, unless you got a
clear alternative that is easy to market to US voters

[endquote]

We have plenty of alternative voting systems, all much better than IRV.
Methods that meet
FBC, SDSC and 3P or UP. And all or nearly all of them are more briefly
stated than IRV.
[endquote]

dlw:having plenty of alts is not the same as a clear alternative.
And if the reason they're better is an alphabet soup of acronyms then
you're going to have a hard time marketing any of them to US voters...

dlw
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