[EM] Last call for edits to consensus statement

[Jameson Quinn]

We have now edited the whole statement from over 4000 words to under 3000;
and the executive summary from over 400 to under 300. (The table of
contents/section headers constitute just over 200 words, and are only
counted once as section headers.) Recent edits include:

   - Separating out material on "additional references" (ie, wikipedia and
   the EM list) and on IRV into their own sections
   - Including a pledge to focus more attention on opposing plurality than
   IRV, and a call for IRV supporters to do the same.
   - General pruning down to size

Here's the latest proposal: first the "executive summary" (located near the
bottom of the google
doc<https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oyJLxI9dciXBbowM5mougnbGHzkL3Ue1QkD8nnMwWLg/edit?hl=en_US&pli=1>)
and then the body of the statement. We currently have 10 (pre)signatures,
and I hope to make it to at least 30.

Jameson Quinn

-----------

[suggested] Executive Summary
This declaration, which has been signed by election-method experts from
around the world, publicly denounces the use of plurality voting (also known
as First Past the Post, FPTP), especially in governmental elections. Among
other major flaws, plurality voting suffers from vote splitting, which is
what impels voters to focus on only two nominees in each election, ignoring
even other candidates they prefer.

As replacements for plurality voting, this declaration recommends four
significantly fairer election methods, namely: Approval voting, any
Condorcet method, Majority Judgment, and Range voting.  These methods all
replace plurality's primitive single-mark ballot with improved ballots that
collect more information. All endorsed methods support the principle that a
majority of voters, not just a plurality of voters, should approve or prefer
the winning candidate.

The signers take no common position the use of instant-runoff voting (IRV),
which is also known as the alternative vote. Opinions differ on whether this
system’s disadvantages outweigh its advantages.

As a consequence of adopting fairer election methods, this declaration's
signers expect many direct benefits in government. They also expect indirect
society-wide and/or economic benefits, just as replacing monarchies and
dictatorships with plurality voting has produced dramatic and widespread
benefits. The signers of this declaration vary in political orientation, and
are confident that the recommended election reforms will be fair to all, not
biasing results towards any particular political parties or groups.

The signers urge broader discussion of the flaws of plurality voting and the
reforms which would fix them. We also urge immediate adoption of the
supported voting methods in any governmental or private-organization
elections which currently, yet inappropriately, use plurality voting.

Note: The statement is divided into 12 short sections, each of which begins
with a one-sentence summary also included in the table of contents.

Contents
Introduction - It is time to change our voting system.
Unfairness of plurality voting - Plurality voting is a bad method that is
used far too often.
Better ballots - With better information from the voters, we can elect
better winners.
Fairer counting methods - Signers agree that any of these four voting
methods would give more-democratic results: (1) approval voting, (2)
Condorcet voting, (3) majority judgment, and (4) range voting.
Additional considerations:

Instant-runoff voting - We have differing opinions on a system that has both
advantages and disadvantages.

Proportional representation - Legislatures should represent all the voters,
not just a bare majority.

Using the fairer methods in organizations - Private organizations are a
great place to start voting reform.

Rounds of voting - Good voting methods can reduce the need for extra rounds
(primaries and runoffs), or give even-better results when combined with such
extra rounds.

Separate reforms - Reforming the voting system helps with other democratic
reforms.
Benefits for all - Voting reform is truly a win/win solution that will help
all political groups.
Further resources
Taking action - We urge you to help promote better voting methods wherever
you are active, both by spreading awareness and by doing what you can to
implement them.

Introduction
It is time to change our voting system.

We, the undersigned election-method experts and enthusiasts from around the
world, unanimously denounce the use of plurality voting in governmental
elections. In this declaration we offer several ready-to-adopt replacement
election methods that we agree will reliably produce much fairer results.

We are confident that adopting any of our recommended methods will reduce
the gap between what voters want and politicians do. This increase in
government accountability will arise from increasing the influence of
voters, and decreasing the currently excessive influence of campaign
contributions. In other words, adopting any of our supported election
methods will increase the fairness of election results.

We agree that there are no significant political or economic risks
associated with adopting the election methods recommended here. In fact, we
believe that the indirect benefits of better government will be substantial.
Just as democracies tend to be more prosperous than monarchies, we expect
that higher levels of democracy will lead to higher standards of living,
reduced conflicts, and widespread increases in prosperity.

Unfairness of plurality voting
Plurality voting is a bad method that is used far too often.

We use the term "plurality" voting to refer to the commonly used counting
method in which each voter marks only a single choice on the ballot, the
number of marks for each candidate are counted, and the candidate with the
most marks is regarded as the winner. In some nations this method is called
"First Past The Post" (and abbreviated FPTP or FPP).

Although plurality voting produces fair results when there are only two
candidates, the results are often dramatically unfair when this method is
used in elections with three or more candidates.

"Vote splitting" is a key weakness of plurality voting, so it is worth
understanding.  Vote splitting refers to similar candidates each receiving
fewer votes than a single opposition candidate when either similar candidate
alone could defeat that opposition candidate. Voters who like both similar
candidates split their vote between the two candidates, while the opposition
concentrates all of their voters' votes on a single candidate. Vote
splitting also happens in primary elections and nominating conventions.

In many countries which use plurality, vote splitting in general elections
is relatively rare, because almost everyone votes for the nominee of one of
the two “major” parties. To avoid splitting their votes, voters must choose
which of these two they like best, and ignore other possibly-better
candidates. Like vote-splitting, this two-party monopoly has serious
problems; it discourages serious opposition, narrows the debate, and reduces
accountability. In the end it can lead politicians and parties to grow
complacent or even corrupt.

In spite of its well-understood weaknesses, plurality voting is far too
widely used, especially in the English-speaking world.

Better ballots
With better information from the voters, we can elect better winners.
Unanimously we agree that the kind of ballot used in plurality voting —
which in this declaration is called a "single-mark” ballot — is not
appropriate in governmental elections. Its deficiency is that it does not
collect enough preference information from the voters in order to always
correctly identify the most popular candidate when there are more than two
candidates. This lack of information helps to conceal the unfairness of
plurality voting.

There are three kinds of ballots that collect enough preference information
to always, or almost always, correctly identify the most popular candidate.
The names and descriptions of these ballot types are, in alphabetical order:

   - Approval ballot, on which a voter marks each candidate who the voter
   approves as an acceptable choice, and leaves unmarked the candidates who are
   not acceptable



   - Ranked ballot (or “1-2-3 ballot”), on which a voter indicates a first
   choice, and optionally indicates a second choice, and optionally indicates
   additional choices at lower preference levels



   - Score ballot, on which a voter assigns a number or grade for each
   candidate. The most familiar versions of such voting are to rate something
   with 1 to 5 stars, or rate a choice with a number from 1 to 10, or to rate
   each choice at a named grade (such as "excellent", "good", "fair", "poor",
   or "reject"), but any range of numbers or grades can be used.



Adopting any of the three better ballot types would provide the information
that is needed for fair results. The additional information will also help
illustrate how unfair of plurality voting is and has been.

Fairer counting methods
Together we endorse four voting methods that would give more-democratic
results.

These three better ballot types can be counted in different ways to produce
different results. We, the undersigned election-method experts and
enthusiasts, have developed and analyzed many counting methods, and we now
agree on several that are worth adopting in governmental elections.

Here, in alphabetical order, are four counting methods that we agree will
produce significantly better results compared to plurality voting. Each
counting method is followed by the principal advantage claimed by those of
us who favor that method.

   - Approval voting, which uses approval ballots and identifies the
   candidate with the most approval marks as the winner.


Advantage: It is the simplest election method to collect preferences (either
on ballots or with a show of hands) and the simplest method (besides
plurality) to count and explain. Its simplicity makes it a good first step
toward any of the other methods.

   - Any of the Condorcet methods, which use ranked ballots, and elects a
   “Condorcet winner” who would defeat every other candidate in one-on-one
   comparisons. Occasionally there is no Condorcet winner, and different
   Condorcet methods use different rules to resolve such cases, although these
   rules still often agree on the best winner. The most-used Condorcet methods
   are Condorcet-Schulze and Condorcet-Kemeny. (The word Condorcet is a French
   name that is pronounced "kon-dor-say".)


Advantage: Condorcet methods provide what many see as the fairest result in
the common cases where there is a Condorcet winner.

   - Majority judgment, which uses score ballots to collect the fullest
   preference information, and elects the candidate who gets the best score
   from half or more of the voters (the best median score). This method is a
   form of Bucklin voting, which is a general class of methods that has been
   used for city elections in both late 18th-century Switzerland and early
   20th-century United States.


Advantage: Majority Judgment counts ballots in a way that reduces the
incentives to exaggerate or change your preferences, so it is arguably the
best system for finding out how the voters truly feel about each candidate
on an absolute scale.

   - Range voting (also known as score voting), which also uses score
   ballots, and adds together the scores assigned to each candidate, and
   identifies the winner as the candidate who receives the highest total score.


Advantage: Simulations have shown that Range leads to the best voter
satisfaction if voters vote sincerely. And even every voter votes
strategically, exaggerating their vote, it still gives the same reasonable
results as Approval voting.

This list of supported methods may expand in the future, as we fully analyze
and test newly-developed methods. One such new method that some of us favor
today is Simple Optionally-Delegated Approval (SODA) voting, which combines
approval voting with vote delegation to simplify the voter’s task.

All of these methods are "single-winner" election methods, which means they
elect a single winner, such as a mayor or governor. All four of them have
been used to elect officers such as presidents, treasurers, and secretaries
in non-governmental organizations, and the fairer results have been widely
appreciated (except by some incumbents who were not reelected).

Why do we not support a single "best" election method? Different
election-method experts place different degrees of importance on the
relative advantages and disadvantages of each method. In the list of
signatures some of us indicate which voting method we most-strongly prefer.
It bears repeating, though, that despite our disagreements, we would not
hesitate to support any of these methods over plurality voting. In signing
this statement, we are uniting against plurality, not “splitting the vote”
by each supporting only our favorite method.

Additional considerations
Instant-runoff voting
We have differing opinions on a system that has both advantages and
disadvantages.
There is another counting method that is supported by some, but not most, of
the undersigned election-method experts. It is called "instant-runoff
voting" (or "IRV" or "the alternative vote"), and it uses ranked ballots.
The counting method begins by considering each voter's highest-ranked
choice, and eliminating the candidate with the fewest votes, and then
shifting the affected ballots to the next-most preferred candidate, and
repeating this process until a candidate receives a majority of votes.

The main advantage of instant-runoff counting is that it is easy for many
people to understand, especially because the counting process is similar to
the familiar process of runoff elections. However, this method can yield
unfair results because it is based on the mistaken belief that the candidate
who gets the fewest plurality votes is the least popular and should be
eliminated.

IRV has another possible advantage, called “Later-No-Harm”: under IRV, it
can never hurt you to rank an extra candidate. However, a few of us doubt
this is even a desirable characteristic, and we all agree the evidence shows
that Later-No-Harm is not a critical necessity for a good voting method.

Instant-runoff voting is used in some governmental elections throughout the
world, and most of us agree that usually the results are an improvement over
plurality voting. Yet when IRV has been used, it has sometimes eliminated
the candidate preferred by the majority, leading to a winner most voters see
as wrong. This problem, which is unlikely or impossible with the four
methods we endorse, has led voters to repeal IRV and, tragically, return to
plurality voting in several cases.

Most of us agree that the two advantages of IRV (its simplicity of counting
and its resistance to a specific kind of strategic voting) do not outweigh
its major disadvantage compared to the methods we support, which is that it
fails to correctly identify the most popular candidate in many elections.

Those of us who do feel that IRV is an improvement over plurality will
support it, even if we favor other methods more. Even those of us who feel
that IRV’s disadvantages are serious will try focus more attention on the
more-commonly-suffered disadvantages of plurality. We believe that this
common focus makes us more effective advocates, and we call on those who
principally favor IRV to extend the same courtesies to the methods we
endorse.

Proportional representation
Legislatures should represent all the voters, not just a bare majority.

Complications arise when an election fills a legislative seat, such as a
seat in a legislature, congress, or parliament. For this purpose many
nations use "proportional representation" because it matches the proportion
of legislators from each political party with the proportion of voters who,
on their ballot, associate themselves with each political party. Unanimously
we support the continued use of proportional representation in governments
that already use it.

If a government uses the "closed-list" version of proportional
representation, we unanimously support switching to either a
"candidate-centric" or "open-list" version. We oppose closed-list methods
because they disregard voters preferences for specific candidates, transfer
power to party insiders who are not elected, and reduce transparency.

Unlike the four voting methods we endorse, which are clearly better than
plurality in all significant ways, proportional representation can have
disadvantages as well as advantages. Many, though not all, of us believe
that the benefits outweigh the potential downsides, and thus support
adopting proportional representation in nations that do not yet use it.
Still, the decision of whether to adopt proportional representation, and
which specific method to adopt, is one that depends on the values of the
voters, and we cannot offer a blanket recommendation here.

Regardless of how legislative seats are filled, we unanimously oppose the
use of plurality voting in any aspect of filling legislative seats, and we
unanimously support replacing those uses of plurality voting with any of our
four supported election methods.

Using the fairer methods in organizations
Private organizations are a great place to start voting reform.

These better voting methods are not just useful for public elections. They
also can be used to elect a private organization's officers, to elect
corporate board members, to make voting-based group decisions, and to elect
delegates to political-party conventions. In addition to increasing the
fairness of such elections and decisions, these uses will increase the
number of people who realize that plurality voting is very unfair, and help
them learn how to achieve much fairer results.


Multiple rounds of voting
Good voting systems can reduce the need for primaries and runoffs, or give
even-better results when combined with such extra rounds.

Current elections commonly use multiple rounds of voting. This includes both
“primary elections” to narrow the field before the main vote, and
second-round “runoff elections” to ensure a majority if one is not obtained
in the main first round.

Some of us believe that improved voting methods mean that only one round of
voting is needed. Others of us believe that multiple rounds can still
usefully serve to focus attention on the most popular candidates and might
improve the outcome of the election. Like proportional representation, this
is a decision that should be taken by the voters.

Separate reforms

Reforming the voting system helps with other democratic reforms.

Most of us regard the adoption of our supported methods as merely one step
toward increasing the fairness of electing governmental representatives, and
believe that further steps, such as improved campaign-finance reporting
rules, are also needed.  Similarly, many of us believe that the governmental
process of making wise decisions can be improved, such as by using
decision-making aids such as deliberative polling.  The election-method
reforms we advocate here would be complementary with those other reforms,
both easing their adoption and multiplying their beneficial effects.

Benefits for all
Voting reform is truly a win/win solution that will help all political
groups.

Those of us signing this declaration have very different political views,
but in this statement we are looking beyond narrow, partisan interests. In
fact, we see no good reason to oppose election-method reform. Better
election methods can help all political groups: both conservatives and
liberals, both business and labor, both incumbents and upstart campaigners,
both centrists and extremists, both larger and smaller parties. We believe
that each of these groups can benefit in very concrete and specific ways,
and we are available (see below) to discuss how and why for each case.

Politics is often viewed as a “zero-sum game” in which one side can gain
only if another side loses. In contrast, we view election-method reform as
taking the next step up the ladder of democracy. Just as democracy has
proven to be much better than dictatorships, higher levels of democracy will
help us reach even higher standards of living across society. We do not
pretend to offer a utopia, where conflicts of interest disappear; elections
will always have winners and losers. But our proposals will help ensure that
the winners are a majority. And more importantly, we believe that current
political systems are often so dysfunctional that they serve no one well,
and therefore a healthier system will benefit all groups.
Further resources

The following Wikipedia articles provide detailed descriptions and
characteristics of our supported methods:

   - Approval voting
   - Condorcet method
   - Majority Judgment
   - Range voting



Some of us signing this statement edit these Wikipedia articles to keep them
accurate and unbiased. Also, many of us participate in the
"Election-Methods" forum at www.electorama.com/em, and we would be happy to
answer your questions about any of these methods.
Taking action

We urge you to help promote better voting methods wherever you are active,
both by spreading awareness and by doing what you can to implement them.

We address this statement to all citizens. Whatever your political leanings,
we urge you to help educate yourself, your friends, and your representatives
about the advantages of better voting methods, and to organize with other
like-minded citizens to multiply your effect. To people in specific
situations we offer these recommendations:

   - If you are a policymaker, you can better represent your constituents
   and reduce your need to constantly fundraise by introducing legislation that
   would adopt one of the election methods we support.
   - If you are active in a political party that uses plurality voting, you
   can increase your party’s chances of winning in the main election by using
   better voting methods to choose your party's candidates and your party's
   internally elected delegates.
   - If you feel that “your” political party wants your vote and your money,
   but doesn’t care about your priorities, you can move towards having a real
   voice by pledging to only donate to, or work for, candidates who support
   election-method reform.
   - If you do not identify with any political party, you can favor
   candidates who express support for election reform.
   - If you are involved in a small political party, you can urge the
   adoption of one of the methods here as part of your party platform and an
   important strategy for growing your party.
   - If you are a member of an organization that elects officers using
   plurality voting, you can help your organization increase election fairness,
   and run more smoothly, by requesting the use of better election methods when
   an election involves more than two candidates.



The unfairness of plurality voting has been known for centuries, but too
little has been done about it. That may be because plurality hides evidence
of the unfairness, because before computers other methods can be cumbersome
to count, or because election-method experts have not not united to speak
against plurality voting. Now it is time to begin putting this primitive
method where it belongs, namely in historical records as an early step in
the progress of democracy.

Signatures

We, the following election-method experts and enthusiasts, agree with the
statements made in this declaration.
....
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20110910/2c7c0794/attachment-0003.htm>