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

[David L Wetzell]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
> 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;
>

dlw:Non sequitur.  Something doesn't lose all of its power if it isn't
perfect.  Things can generally be true and we can as a whole accept that
what really matters is changing our habits rather than trying to get our
election rules perfect.


> its disadvantages are many.
>

But the severity of these purported disadvantages in real life are open to
disagreement.


> 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.
>

The number of politicians one gives one vote to is indeterminate, as also
is the strategy used to decide who to approve.


> 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.
>

dlw: It's good result isn't as good when cardinal utility is relaxed.  Just
as in finance, investments are valued based on their return and their
volatility, we can value election rules based on their return and their
volatility.  AV is quite volatile.

It'd exchange some of the perceived advantages.  Whether the exchange was
worth it is an empirical question.

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

dlw: But pragmatically speaking if IRV3 is going to continue to have its
first mover and marketing advantage then wouldn't you prefer for it to be
enhanced by the use of AV3?

>
>
>>
>> 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".
>

You need to elaborate on the use of the word, "clearly".
I hardly think that making LNH no longer always hold is *clearly *worthy of
the label, "worst of both worlds."  And so far, that's all you've given me.


>
>
>>
>>> 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.
>

If one takes for granted the use of IRV3 then it's the simplest way to
solve the problems mentioned above.  What may seem ad hoc is the
presumption that we should take IRV3 for granted.  However, I think that's
quite a realistic assumption given the de facto pre-eminence of FairVote
among US electoral reform advocates.
Among those getting their hands dirty, which presently excludes myself,
there's a strong majority in favor of it.

>
>
>> 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)
>

dlw: We don't need to go off on all of plurality's defects to push for
electoral pluralism.  It's a much easier position to defend to say that one
election rule does not fit all elections and that if we don't mix the use
of winner-take-all and winner-doesn't-take-all, it's going to be too easy
for our country's democracy to go the way things were in Mexico with PRI
and Egypt with NDP in the past to Democracy In Name Only.

In recent history, from 1870-1980, the economically important state of IL
used 3-seat quasi-proportional elections for its state reps elections.
 This kept either major party from dominating its politics and so the
states in its economic hinterland were freed to exercise more political
freedoms than would have been the case if a single party had dominated IL
politics.  And so we can point to concrete examples from US history of how
the mixing of the two basic types of election rules made our democracy more
robust in the past.  And we can argue that the decline in the health of our
democracy in the last 40 years or so is partially attributable to our over
use of single-seat elections.

For if it's too easy for one party to dominate our state and national
politics then it's going to be a lot harder for them to work together to
make many much needed reforms.  This is what I get really passionate about.
 It is what leads me to conclude that there's a strong opportunity cost to
debating the multitude of single-seat elections.  I'd much rather join
FairVote's bandwagon of pushing for American forms of PR.

dlw
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