[EM] reply to a reply to IRV args by Mike Ossipoff

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

Dave Wetzel--

You 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. 

Neither do some voting system academics. For the explanation, a hint: "Follow the money".
Look at the books "Who Rules America?", and "The Powers that Be".

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

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).

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

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."

"It's better to vote for what you want, and not get it, than to vote for what you don't want,
and get it."

And, as I said, polling should be done, to inform Plurality strategy.

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.

So everyone, all the progressive parties, all the progressive political organizations, all the progressive
media, should be told about that CW.

Probably the CW will be a progressive, not a Republocrat.

Ralph Nader won pretty much all of the Internet polls for President, when Nader was a candidate.

It's sometimes said that there was selection bias. Yes, there was:

People with more money are more likely to have a computer. People with more money are more likely to vote conservatively.

Conservatives are more likely to vote.

And who is more likely to be dishonest enough to ballot-stuff?  Is a dishonest voter more or less likely to accept
dishonesty in his preferred candidate? More or less likely to be dishonest with himself about the honesty of
his candidate?

So yes, there was selection-bias. Nader won in spite of that selection bias, not because of it.

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!


MO:Theoretical or hypothetical? IRV's compromise-elimination problem is
blatantly obvious:

All it requires is that candidate-strength (favoriteness) taper gradually
away from the middle sincere CW.

That's hardly an unusual state of affairs.

You wrote:

dlw: Remind me what CW is?

[endquote]

CW is short for Condorcet Winner, defined above in this post.

You 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.

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.

You 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.




MO:Under those conditions, eliminations begin at the extremes, and
transfers send votes inwards, till the candidates
flanking that middle CW accumulate enough votes to easily eliminate hir.

We'll never know how often that happens unless the raw rankings are
available from IRV elections. But it
must happen quite often, given the common state of affairs that is its
reqirement.

Andy himself implied an admission that voters in IRV should be advised that
sometimes it's necessary
to bury their favorite, to top-rank a compromise.


You wrote:

dlw: 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]

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

You 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?

dlw: 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.

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? 

People think that the lesser-of-2-evils problems, the need for favorite-burial, is an 
inherent part of voting.


You 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.

You wrote:

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

[endquote]

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?

You know, Richie's great-uncle advocated IRV (by a different name). Might not Richie be promoting it
as family tradition? 

Of course another motive for promoting IRV is in order to use it as a stepping-stone to STV.

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. Again, STV, too, was promoted by Ritchie's great-uncle.
Family tradition influencing someone's goals?

You wrote:

There is no self-evident oft-used alternative. 

[endquote]

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.

You 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.

You wrote:

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

[endquote]

No, not really. IRV won't make anything better, for the reasons I've given.

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.

IRVists complain that Bucklin encouraged people to vote only for favorite. That's a good
strategy if favorite is the only acceptable candidate, or if favorite is felt to have a win.

And, if that's a problem, then "We should have that problem!". At least people were voting
for their favorite.

ABucklin, by which I mean Bucklin(= whole), meets FBC, meaning that it never gives anyone
any reason to vote someone over their favorite. No reason to not always vote favorite in 1st
place.


You 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.


You 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.

You wrote:

, the consequence will
be to retain FPTP in the US for even longer.

[endquote]

FPTP will be used in the US for a very long time. Partly because of the lack of
organization and lack of order in voting system discussion.  ...But mostly because
of the humungous large-scale efforts and accomplishments needed to get better voting
systems on the national scale. We're talking decades, but maybe centuries.

So let's try to make the best use of Plurality. 

By Condorcet polling.

By explaining to people that our elections are 0-info, calling for voting only for Favorite.

By advising people to vote for what they want, for a change. (Of course "for a change" is appropriate
there with two different meanings).

You keep voting for the same thing (Republocrats), you'll keep getting the same thing.

Plurality, properly used, especially with good polling, needn't give results as bad as we've
been getting.

I'm not saying to not also work for better voting systems, but I'm saying that most of the effort should
be on making better use of Plurality.

By the way, if people don't want to do rank-balloting, then even Plurality polling (asking for _favorite_!)
could be helpful.

Find the candidate who, in the left-right spectrum, has equal numbers of votes cast for voters to his left and
right.

Is that as good as rank-balloting and CW search? Of course not. But it's better than nothing.

Mike Ossipoff