[EM] hello from DLW of "A New Kind of Party":long time electoral reform enthusiast/iconoclast-wannabe...

[David L Wetzell]

Hello Jameson,

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 6:28 AM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>wrote:

> Others have already responded to most of your points.


Walabi got to some of them.   But that's it so far...


> I just wanted to say one thing:
>
> 6b. I think that IRV3 can be improved upon by treating the up to three
>> ranked choices as approval votes in a first round to limit the number of
>> candidates to three then the rankings of the three can be sorted into 10
>> categories and the number of votes in each category can be summarized at
>> the precinct level.
>>
>
> I am not a big fan of IRV, though I find it better than plurality. Your
> "improvement", however, would remove its primary selling points. There
> would be incentives to truncate --- not use lower rankings --- and to bury
> --- use the lower rankings to dishonestly promote easy-to-beat turkeys. I
> suspect your proposed system would be opposed by many here as well as by
> many inside FairVote --- two groups which don't agree on much.
>

dlw: I disagree that there is an incentive to truncate.  If one's second
and third are comparable in "utility" with one's third then all things
considered, one would prefer for either of them to have a better chance of
being among the three finalists.
As it is, since only a small fraction of votes get reassigned, many
people's second and third choice votes end up not counting at all.   And
then there's the delays, like the 48 days delay for the statewide judicial
election last year.  And finally, a lot of the vote counting and tabulating
can be done at the precinct level, which has its advantages.

IRV3/AV3 will reduce the number of candidates to 3 on election night and
then it'll have the final winner the next day, most of the time.

It is a hybrid between AV and IRV.  As such, if one's preferences are
AV>IRV3 then one should expect that IRV3/AV3>IRV3.   Or if one prefers
IRV3>AV then one would prefer IRV3/AV3>AV.

>
> In general, it is often tempting to "improve" a voting system with ad-hoc
> extra steps. Doing so successfully isn't impossible, but it is not as easy
> as it looks.
>

It's not ad hoc.  It solves a problem.  How to expedite the vote-counting
process when the number of possible permutations gets unwieldy.

>
>
>> 7. Moreover, I believe that the number of political issues, their
>> complexity, matters of character bound the rationality of voters and make
>> choices among candidates inherently fuzzy options.  So there's no cardinal
>> or ordinal utility for any candidate out there and all effective rankings
>> of candidates used to determine the Condorcet Candidate are ad hoc.
>
>
> Yes, I believe that this is true. However, I don't think that you should
> stop trying to do better just because you'll never attain perfection.
>

It does relativize the importance of debating over single seated elections.
 What we need much more so is to push for American forms of PR than trying
to work out the rankings of single-seat election rules.

Moreover, if we put more of our trust in the politics of Gandhi then it
takes the edge off of getting Electoral Reform perfect.  We can push to
diversify our electoral system by insisting that one election rule does not
fit all elections and FPTP is especially inappropriate for "more local"
elections that then become rarely ever competitive due to de facto
segregation.

>
>
>>  8. This is why I believe a lot of the debate over the best single seat
>> election rule is unproductive.
>>
>
> Again, qualified agreement. I certainly think it's worthwhile to hash out
> details here, among people with patience for that stuff. And I was the
> instigator for the collective statement that Richard Fobes linked; so as
> you can see, I think the best way to avoid wasting time on debate is not to
> supress it (which doesn't work), but to keep it minimal and in its place.
>

sure.  I'll be sure to check out your statement.

>
> We can agree to disagree, while agreeing that plurality is the main enemy.
>

I'd go further and argue that the near-exclusive use of FPTP/plurality is
the main enemy.

If we introduced American forms of PR into "more local" elections, it would
inevitable affect single seat elections for the better, even if FPTP were
still in use.  It would do this by handicapping the rivalry between the two
major parties so that more of their single-seat elecitons became
competitive and third parties could exert more potential spoiler influence.
 This should then give them the leverage to get FPTP replaced in
single-seat elections.
dlw
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