[EM] Utilitarianism and Perfectionism.

[Juho Laatu]

As I earlier wrote, I think the US has many options on how to go forward with the reform. The presidential election is maybe the most interetsting one. If one uses Condorcet, that means that the president may come from a minor party or be independent. Let's say that there is an independent gentleman candidate whome republicans prefer to the democrat candidate and vice versa. That candidate wins. Now the problem is that this candidate has no supporting party machinery, and he is supposed to form a government and nominate numerous people to other major positions. It seems that the role of the president would change considerably from what it is today.

The softer approach is to use some advanced method but allow only representatives of major parties to win. One example of such a method is to first use a rankings based proportional method to pick two of the candidates, and then arrange a runoff between these two. This method would allow people to vote also for third party and independent candidates, just like in Condorcet. But the gentleman of the earlier example would probably not be elected. If there is a third party that has almost as many first preference supporters (or "above dem/rep" supporters), then the candidate of that party could win.

It's your choice anyway, whether to use a method that maintains the role of the 2+ strong parties or to use a method that allows any good compromise candidate to win. Some of the good properties of COndorcet methods can be kept also in the 2+ approach. (Same considerations with respect to proportional representation in the representative bodies.)

Juho



On 9.2.2012, at 18.49, Dave Ketchum wrote:

> On Feb 8, 2012, at 3:29 PM, Juho Laatu wrote:
>> On 8.2.2012, at 16.18, David L Wetzell wrote:
>>> ...
>>> At any rate, this is why I've argued that ascertaining the best single-winner election rule is nowhere near as important as pitching the importance of mixing the use of single-winner and multi-winner election rules, with the latter replacing the former more so in "more local" elections that are not competitive often in single-winner elections.
> 
> I disagree:
> .     We have single-winner purposes such as mayor or governor, unless we redesign the goals.
> .     And purposes such as legislator which can be packaged as single-winner or multi-winner, with the PR backers promoting multi-winner.
>> 
>> I think I agree when I say that the first decision (in the USA) is whether to make the current two-party system work better or whether to aim at a multi-party system. After that has been agreed, it is easier to pick the used election methods. Now, in addition to technical problems one has also a mixture of political higher level targets injected in the discussion, and that does not make it any easier.
>> 
>> At the top level there is the presidential system that is tailored for the two-party approach. If one would give up the two-party approach at that level one might move also e.g. away from the single-party government approach towards multi-party govennments.
> 
> Presidency is important, done in its own way.  It might continue as such handled here with minor changes per single-winner, or major changes in government that would fit multi-winner.
>> 
>> At the lower levels one might consider also two-party oriented methods that are allow also third parties to take part in the competition. I mean that if one wants to stay in the two-party model, one may not need full multi-winner methods at the lower levels. It would be enough to e.g. guarantee that also third parties can survive and get their candidates elected, and that some third party may also one day replace one of the major parties as one of the two leading parties in some states, and maybe at national level too. I think this more lmited approac to multiple parties is quite different from typical multi-party requirements that typically include requirements like proportional represnetation.
> 
> Here, such as Condorcet for single-winner, and PR by whatever method does well for multi-winner.  Likely Condorcet best for presidential.
> 
> Note that, unlike with TPTP, or even IRV, Condorcet voters can back, besides the "better" of the two-parties, those for whatever issues this voter considers important - and get their backing noted in the vote counts (the big difference between IRV and Condorcet). 
> 
> Dave Ketchum
>> 
>> Of course one may also adopt different models in the two layers, two-party system for the rop level and proportonal representation for some state level representative bodies. Above I also made the assumption that the strict tw-party approach where there are two fixed parties and that's it, is not considered acceptable / sufficient.
>> 
>> The message I'm trying to carry with this, is simply that after one names the targets, it is much easier to discuss what the best methods to implement those targets would be. Is it a two-party system, a flexible two-party system, or a proportional system, and are the targets different at different levels and in different bodies.
>> 
>> Juho
>> 
>> 
>> 
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