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

[Jameson Quinn]

2011/10/31 David L Wetzell <wetzelld at gmail.com>

> 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.
>

Look, this isn't a matter of opinion. IRV's advantages include LNH, which,
as a reassurance to voters, loses all its power if it isn't perfect; its
disadvantages are many. Approval's advantages include simplicity; its
disadvantages include the fact that there is no clear definition of
"honesty", which among other things means a strategic truncation incentive.
In pure approval, the strategic incentives combine to give a good result;
but combined with IRV, that is not true. So your combination has lost some
advantages of both base systems.

 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.
>

I understand the advantages of your proposal. I still oppose it on balance.


>
> 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.
>

Disagree. In some ways it is clearly "worst of both worlds".


>
>> 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.
>

Being ad hoc and solving a problem are not contradictory; quite the reverse.


> 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.
>

I believe that PR is important. But also, talking about single-winner
reform allows a head-on attack on all of plurality's defects, something
that is much harder when talking about PR. Also, it is very easy to sound
like a whiny loser when talking about PR (either a third-party loser or
local-minority-party loser). So there's no way single-winner issues should
be put on the back burner. We can walk and chew gum here. (Gum on back
burner ... eewww)
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