[EM] MO

[David L Wetzell]

I see you've adopted more or less my proposal for y'all with the
replacement of Approval-Voting enhanced IRV with Approval Voting.

I guess I'm flattered.

dlw

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 3:25 PM, <
election-methods-request at lists.electorama.com> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
>
>   1. Propose plain Approval first. Option enhancements can be
>      later proposals. (MIKE OSSIPOFF)
>   2. Re: Re et al Chicken and Egg (David L Wetzell)
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: MIKE OSSIPOFF <nkklrp at hotmail.com>
> To: <election-methods at electorama.com>
> Cc:
> Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:13:55 +0000
> Subject: [EM] Propose plain Approval first. Option enhancements can be
> later proposals.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> The enhancement consisting of voting options in an Approval election
> should only be mentioned when there’s plenty of time to talk, and when
> talking
> to someone who is patient or interested enough to hear that much. And the
> enhancements should only be mentioned as possibilities, when speaking to
> someone to whom the whole notion of voting-system reform is new.
>
>
>
> Maybe that goes for SODA as well. Don’t propose too much
> change, when talking to someone new to the subject.
>
>
>
> So the method to propose first is ordinary Approval.
>
>
>
> If, in some particular community, there is a committee of
> people interested in working on a voting-system reform proposal, then,
> though
> the enhancements might be mentioned to that committee, the suggestion to
> include them in a public proposal should come only from other members of
> the
> committee, people new to voting systems. That’s a measure of their
> enactment-feasibility in that community.
>
>
>
> For AOC, MTAOC, etc., I’ve spoken of two kinds of
> conditionality :conditionality by mutuality, and conditionality by
> top-count.
> In an Approval election in which the conditional methods are offered as
> optional ways of voting, any particular voter could choose which of those
> two kinds
> of conditionality s/he intends to use for any particular conditional vote
> for
> any particular candidate. There’s no reason why a voter couldn’t specify
> different kinds of conditionality for conditional votes for different
> candidates.
>
>
>
> In the count, the conditionality by top-count should be done
> first, and then, when those conditional votes are established, the
> calculation
> for conditionality by mutuality, as described in the MTAOC pseudocode,
> should
> be done.
>
>
>
> Of course, if SODA’s delegation is also an option in the
> same election, then after the entire count is completed (including AERLO’s
> 2nd
> count if AERLO is offered), then the work of the delegates would begin,
> just as
> it would if SODA’s delegation were the only option enhancement in the
> election.
>
>
>
> Of course, for SODA to work as needed, mutual approval
> agreements among candidate-delegates, whether made before or after the
> pre-delegate-work count(s), should be public, officially-recorded, and
> binding.
> Of course, one would expect that there would be no need for delegates to
> make
> agreements before the pre-delegate-work count(s).
>
>
>
> Since the current poll’s voting period doesn’t end till zero
> hours, one minute, on February 1st (Wednesday), GMT (UT), or, in
> other-words, at a minute after midnight, Tuesday night,  GMT (UT),
> which is 4:01 p.m. Tuesday, Pacific Standard Time in the U.S., and 7:01
> p.m.
> Tuesday, Eastern Standard Time—then I’ll mention that of course the
> above-described variety of conditionality options should be available in a
> mock
> election too, including the current one.
>
>
>
> Yes, I’ve noticed that no one’s participating in the
> poll. I was glad to provide you the
> opportunity to try out the methods that you advocate.
>
>
>
> On a related subject: The other thing lacking at EM, in
> addition to mock elections, is support for claims that a criterion is
> important. We hear, “I consider this criterion to be very important”. But
> such
> assertions need to be supported by explanation of _why_ you consider that
> criterion important.  Why should others
> consider it important? What practical problems are present in non-complying
> methods but not in complying methods? What would it be like to vote in a
> non-complying method?
>
>
>
> That kind of criterion-discussion would make EM a useful
> resource for people comparing the merits of voting systems.
>
>
>
> As I said, I’ll be putting some definitions of methods,
> voting-options, and criteria on the electowiki, and will continue to check
> EM
> and reply when appropriate during that time.
>
>
>
> Mike Ossipoff
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: David L Wetzell <wetzelld at gmail.com>
> To: Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at lavabit.com>
> Cc: EM <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
> Date: Sat, 28 Jan 2012 15:25:33 -0600
> Subject: Re: [EM] Re et al Chicken and Egg
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 11:34 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
> km_elmet at lavabit.com> wrote:
>
>> I think we're reaching the end of this thread, as I'm not all that
>> interested in continuing further. It's relatively clear that changing your
>> position will take a lot of work, and to put it simply, "I'm not getting
>> paid enough for this" :-) I have recently had other things to focus on, as
>> you may have noticed in my lack of posting to EM of late.
>>
>
> I've really enjoyed your posts.  You are clearly my better in electoral
> analytics and knowledge of worldwide electoral reforms.
>
> My main claim behind my dissent is an intuition for the situation of my
> country and the crucial importance of what my academic mentor described as the
> Problem of Order<https://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=problem+of+order+warrent+samuels#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=%22problem+of+order%22+warren+samuels&psj=1&oq=%22problem+of+order%22+warren+samuels&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=7868l15935l0l16852l3l3l0l0l0l0l91l238l3l3l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=53e6a49898365d40&biw=1490&bih=905>,
> or the need for working out both order and equality, continuity and change
> in how we govern ourselves, which I believe entails that analytics and
> precedents do not *per se* settle the matter in dispute of how to bring
> electoral reform to the USA.
>
>>
>> You say there is something to American exceptionalism, so it isn't
>> unreasonable to put the US on one side and everything else on the other
>> side of the PR line.
>> There might have been a case for American exceptionalism in 1787, but the
>> United States is now hardly unique in having a presidential system, or even
>> a strong presidential system. Other nations have been inspired by the
>> United States' form of government, and so presidentialism has spread
>> (although, to my knowledge, there are still more parliamentary nations than
>> there are presidential ones).
>>
>> Let's look at the Wikipedia list of republics considered to have a
>> presidential system of government (https://en.wikipedia.org/**
>> wiki/Presidentialism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidentialism>).
>> From the beginning, we have "Afghanistan, Argentina, Armenia, Azerbaijan,
>> Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Dominican
>> Republic, Ecuador", and so on.
>>
>> Intersecting Wikipedia's list with the PR list of my previous posts gives
>> an intersection of Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cyprus, Dominican
>> Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru, Sri Lanka, Suriname, and
>> Uruguay. Thus, I don't think you can justify putting the United States on
>> one side of your historical specificity line and all the PR nations on the
>> other.
>
>
>> These are not weak presidential republics either. In Colombia, a favored
>> approach of past presidents (like Lleras Restropo) was to construct
>> autonomous quasi-gove
>
> rnmental organizations, and then give them power. These organizations were
>> designed to be accountable to the executive, but not to the legislature. A
>> similar approach was used in Brazil. Again, quoting Wikipedia: "In Brazil,
>> presidents have accomplished their objectives by creating executive
>> agencies over which Congress had no say". So I do not think you can say
>> they only have figurehead presidents and so don't count, either.
>>
>> Where they do differ (whether they're Latin American, like Colombia, or
>> not, like Cyprus), is that they don't have two huge parties and a bunch of
>> tiny parties looking for scraps at the table. I think that is a point where
>> the United States is genuinely different, but I also think that the reason
>> they are is because the US has neither PR not a good single-winner method.
>>
>
>  I do not contest that it's possible to have a presidential system +PR
> such that there'd be different dynamics that 2 major parties, an indefinite
> number of minor parties and a lot of LTPs.
> Columbia used to have a two party dominated system.  Now, the strength of
> the president and the large margin with which he was elected, seems to
> imply that they have a contested single party dominated system.  When they
> tried to move away from 2 partidism in the early nineties, they saw a
> proliferation of parties, most having one or two seats.  This is not unlike
> what I wrote about.
>
> It's also noteworthy in Brazil that gov'rs and presidents are elected via
> a two-stage election rule that I have argued is a hybrid approach that
> supports a proliferation of parties, especially when combined with
> federalism.
> According to Wikipedia, According to sociologist Marcelo Ridenti,
> Brazilian politics is divided between internationalistic liberals<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism>
>  andstatist <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statism> nationalistics. and
> the two basic groups cycle in and out of power.   So even if it's not
> formally two major parties, it's two major coalitions of parties, neither
> of which is able to dominate the other, just as I predict would occur in
> the US if we adopted PR.
>
> But, as you acknowledge, the US is genuinely different with its 2 huge
> parties.  This means that electoral reformers in the US who are trying to
> push PR (and single-winner) reforms that would encourage a multi-party
> system will face a lower short-term P.  My arg is that we can and should
> push for forms of PR that don't challenge 2 party domination, which in turn
> makes the sort of single-winner alternative to FPTP marketed to the US
> general public not matter as much.
>
> So I promise not to push for any IRV variant in Brazil, with its
> multi-party system...
>
> I will consider the other countries you listed though, so thank you.
>
>>
>> To claim that the United States can't use PR or advanced voting methods
>> because it has two+tiny parties while the rest of the world does not is to
>> confuse cause and effect.
>
>
> Cause and effect are not so clear-cut here.  It can go both ways in real
> life.
>
>
>> The reason there are two parties is because so few people want to throw
>> their vote away in such an important contest as a Presidential one is. That
>> is an artifact of the Plurality system. As a consequence, it becomes
>> vitally important for parties and candidates to appear to be electable, and
>> the way they accomplish this is to spend lots of money on very expensive
>> media coverage and on the whole primary and electoral circuit.
>
>  Thus, it takes a lot of money just to overcome the barrier of
> he-won't-be-elected-anyway. Any method that goes wrong when third parties
> enter the scene would keep this bug (to the extent that it does go wrong
> with third parties present), because the candidates still have to spend a
> lot of money to signal the strategic voters that they are electable -- that
> the strategists should rank at least him honestly.
>
> dlw: Thus, the wisdom of playing political jujitsu by not challenging how
> the system is rigged in favor of two major parties, and encouraging LTPs
> who can take advantage of the diseconomies of scale in forming community
>  to rely much more on volunteer power than $peech to check the influence of
> $peech on both major parties who may have to change or die in the face of
> nascent minor parties.  This could include increasing intra-party democracy
> in both major parties through the use of more party caucuses, as used by
> the DFL in MN.
>
>>
>> In concluding the above: Presidential, even strongly presidential systems
>> with PR do exist. That they don't have extremely expensive primary and
>> presidential races should not be used to claim historical specificity,
>> because that is specificity of the influence of monied interests - part of
>> the what we're trying to change. Instead, it should be used as evidence
>> that strongly presidential systems don't need to waste money on a grand
>> scale; and that multipartyism helps keep the need for such waste down.
>>
>
> dlw: Call it path-dependence then.  Yes, theoretically things could have
> developed differently, but that doesn't make a switch from the US's status
> quo to a multi-party system a realistic evolutionary path.
>
>>
>> =
>>
>> So, my voters' argument. I'll focus on the people in general and the
>> people-as-voters in particular, because it is for the sake of the voters
>> that we're doing this. It is the people that benefit when the system elects
>> representatives that represent them. It is the people that benefit when a
>> single-winner method picks a good winner; and it is the people that
>> ultimately benefit from better governance less encumbered by plutocratic
>> influence, as well.
>>
>> I'll argue that multiparty democracy is more in line with what the voters
>> actually want. To add strength to my claim that the voters do not prefer
>> two-party situations, I'll go in two directions. First, that non-official
>> results show that people "vote" (express their opinions) in a way
>> significantly less polar when they don't have to compromise to elect the
>> lesser of two evils; and second, that where proportional representation
>> methods have been used, both nationally in other countries and locally in
>> the United States, the result has been a growth of many parties, consistent
>> with multipartyism.
>>
>
> dlw: Yes, there is significant dissent from the "orthodoxy" of the two
> major parties and if encouraged there'd be a supply of multiple parties.
> But even if we want multi-parties, we can only have one gov't at a time.
>  So it's imperative that that gov't reflect the changing center of our
> politics, while being respectful of those dissenters who themselves are
> respectful of the center in their attempts to move the center.
>
>
>> Since IRV does not give multiparty democracy (and you have said as much,
>> and that it isn't what you want anyway), and the voters express their
>> desires in a way as to support multipartyism, that counts against IRV.
>>
>
> dlw: It tends to encourage for there to be two major parties centering
> themselves around the moving center.  It gives scope for minor parties to
> move that center. This is another form of multi-partyism, one that retains
> the hierarchy of there tending to be two major parties.  The preference for
> your form of multipartyism vs my form could be a matter of political
> culture.  As such, IRV may be more appropriate alternative to FPTP for the
> US, while not necessarily the ideal single-winner rule for Norway et al.
>
>>
>> KM:Then I'll refer to that the advanced methods don't have the center
>> squeeze problem of IRV. I'll go further and state more general conditions
>> where the advanced methods do well, so as to support that the advanced
>> methods don't act as a patched-up IRV ("IRV 1.1") that just hides the most
>> immediate problem of IRV the way IRV acts as a "Plurality 1.1" that hides
>> the most immediate problem of Plurality.
>>
>
> dlw: If in "real life" the center is always shifting then is the center
> squeeze problem germane?  Isn't that a way of describing the dynamic that
> tends to make the system's two biggest parties move to surround the moving
> center?
>
>>
>> Finally, I'll conclude that, based on the above, IRV requires that voters
>> twist their votes into an IRV shape merely to get an acceptable result in
>> just the setting where third parties are growing large, whereas the
>> advanced methods do not; or that third parties have to intentionally decide
>> to stay minor to spare the voters of this, whereas that is not the case for
>> the advanced methods. Further, I'll point out that IRV can't justify
>> demanding this of the voters and parties, because it doesn't produce
>> results closer to the multipartyism the voters want than does the advanced
>> methods. Therefore, IRV is worse than the advanced methods twice over, and
>> so I cannot support it even if the other arguments not detailed here were
>> to be invalidated.
>>
>
>  In the case of the third party growing, it may theoretically "spoil" an
> election.  Yet, the underlying dynamics are to either force the existing
> two major parties to move or for the third party to replace one of the two
> major parties.  This makes the duopoly contested.  The only ones it doesn't
> work for, as with the Republicans in Burlington, are the supporters of the
>  major party that refuses to move along with the center.
>
>>
>> Without further ado, the meat:
>>
>> 1.1. According to their preferences, the people prefer multipartyism to
>> two-party rule.
>>
>> This is where my reference to the Orsay exit poll, the other French and
>> German studies, as well as the two United States exit polls, all shown on
>> Rangevoting, come into play. The Orsay exit poll (but also the other exit
>> polls) show that the people of France and Germany vote in a manner
>> consistent with multiparty preference, while the United States exit polls
>> and studies show that while the United States voters don't vote for third
>> parties to the extent that those parties would win, they nevertheless vote
>> (or express preference) for third parties and candidates to a much greater
>> extent than in the official count.
>>
>> When I direct your attention to the Approval voting polls (telephone
>> polls, etc.) in the United States, my point is not that Anderson came
>> second. As you say, you don't get a seat for coming in second. My point
>> *is* that the voters vote in such a way as to show that candidates not
>> officially blessed also have some popularity. Stripping away the strategic
>> distortion caused by Plurality, we see that "no-hopers" have some support.
>> What is keeping them down is a catch where they have to be seen as
>> electable to win or gain further support, but can't be seen as electable
>> unless they have a great chance of winning.
>>
>
> dlw: OR, the support for 3rd party candidates as expressed with the use of
> better single-winner election rule reveal their dissatisfaction with the
> bitter fruits of FPTP, since it permits the two major parties not to have
> to locate around the true political center, which then tends to change the
> de facto center in a more illiberal direction.  T.
>
>>
>> In my other posts, I have quantified this tendency in terms of effective
>> number of candidates, at least for the European polls.
>>
>
> If IRV(v2) is used then 3, 4 or 5 effective number of candidates would be
> comparable to IRV vs Oth with only 3 effective candidates.  IRV is quite
> close to other alternatives when there are 3 effective candidates.  It is
> only when there's a 3-way competitive election that pathologies can emerge
> and that is arguably not a stable situation, even if Approval/Condorcet
> method/Whatever were in use.
>
> Your evidence supporting multipartyism does not say they prefer a
> competitive 3-way election system.
>
>>
>> 1.2. According to the outcomes, the people prefer multipartyism to
>> two-party rule.
>>
>> Internationally, I need only point to the countries that have
>> proportional representation. If the people wanted a two-party situation in
>> a PR nation, they would only have to vote for the two largest parties to
>> establish that situation. That does happen in some places; most notably, in
>> Malta. Malta uses STV, yet has only two parties. In Malta, the voters only
>> make use of 5-seat STV's capacity for intra-party competition, but not of
>> the capacity for inter-party competition. See more at
>> http://aceproject.org/ace-en/**topics/es/esy/esy_mt<http://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es/esy/esy_mt>.
>>
>
> Or, multi-partyism could also be more supply-side driven.
>
> Generally, two-party systems have often gotten stuck.  This is why we need
> to make sure the duopoly is contested with plenty of competitive elections
> and with lots of scope for speech from third party dissenters of the Minor
> party or LTP varieties.
>
> Part of US "exceptionalism" has been the melting-pot effect.  I think this
> could become a "melding-pot", which would make it so we can act together.
>  It's not easy for folks who really disagree a lot to work together.
>  Things can get heated, as unfortunately our own exchanges have
> illustrated.
>
>>
>> KM:Even in elections for single seats, this pattern appears to be true.
>> When the voters are given a single seat method that can elect candidates
>> from multiple parties, the voters make use of that capacity. To avoid
>> appearing to construct a tautology or to beg the question, I will specify
>> that more clearly: the method is being used in more than ten nations (so
>> you can't claim one-nation micronumerosity), and in more than two thirds of
>> the nations where it is used, that nation has a multiparty democracy.
>> I am, of course, talking about top-two runoff voting. According to
>> http://rangevoting.org/**TTRvIRVstats.html<http://rangevoting.org/TTRvIRVstats.html>,
>> there are 27 runoff-using nations, and 21 of these are multiparty. (If you
>> wish to argue Warren is wrong, go ahead and do so.)
>>
>
> I believe that we've already agreed to disagree on the interp of the
> evidence here.  The use of the hybrid multi-single winner rule does
> increase the number of parties.  This results in there tending to be two
> major coalitions of parties, rather than two major parties.   Let's say
> there's the big GOP party and the Dems get split into Progs, Greens and
> Blue-Dems.  It's pretty clear cut GOP's candidates going to come in first,
> but it's a horse race to see which of the 3 minor party candidates comes in
> 2nd.  Cuz, of course all three party's supporters prefer each other over
> the GOP's candidate.  So we end up with more of a multi-party system and
> the Prog-Green-Dem coalition will need to hammer out their diffs to get
> anything done if they should happen to be in power.
>
> But differences in priorities don't require different parties to be sorted
> out.  There can be intra-party forms of democracy that make it so the deals
> get sorted out prior to the election, as opposed to after the election.
>  This involves giving party-members both more exit-threat to minor parties
> or LTPs and more voice within the party through the greater use of a caucus
> system.
>
>>
>> Within the United States, I point to New York under STV. In New York
>> under STV, the voters made use of the capacity of STV to provide for
>> multipartyism and voted (and got results) which let multiple parties get on
>> the assembly. This significantly weakened the party machines, who
>> immediately countered but only got STV repealed after battering down public
>> opinion by the card of red-baiting. This is why the New York STV example
>> matters more than your proverbial hill of beans, and this is why I am
>> surprised you do not look at it when you talk about historical specificity.
>> It shows that American voters also avail themselves of the capacity for
>> multipartyism when they have the instruments by which to do so.
>>
> Indeed, the leaders of the New York county Republican party had no
> illusion about this as they worked with Tammany Hall against PR, calling PR
> "a threat to the two party system" ( http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/**
> polit/damy/articles/kolesar.**htm<http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/polit/damy/articles/kolesar.htm>).
>
> dlw: PR as used in NYC did subvert the two party system.  But it need not.
>  And we'll get PR sooner, due to our historically specific situation in the
> US, if we focus on uses of PR(and single-winner reforms) that accept the
> existence of a 2 party system and tries to make such work more often for
> more people on more issues.
>
>>
>> -
>>
>> 2.1. The advanced methods (most Condorcet methods, as well as MJ,
>> Approval, and Range) do not suffer from center squeeze under honest voting.
>>
>> This is very easy to check. One may simply go to Ka-Ping Yee's
>> one-dimensional Gaussian vothing method visualization and push the wings
>> closer to the center. In Plurality, the center vanishes quickly. In IRV,
>> the center lasts a little longer, but first it splinters nonmonotonically,
>> and eventually it fails altogether when the center does not have enough
>> first place votes to outlast the wings. That happens even in a completely
>> symmetrical situation where the major parties are equally far from the
>> center, "clustered around it".
>>
>> In contrast, both the rated/approval methods and Condorcet methods elect
>> the candidate closest to the middle-most voter (in ratings, possibly as
>> weighted by strength of preference). This is a reasonably fair standard,
>> because one can imagine left-wing voters "canceling out" right-wing voters
>> until the centermost remains.
>>
>> In fact, Condorcet methods will always be impervious to center squeeze in
>> a left-right situations like the above. I'll get to that later. Some
>> Condorcet methods may behave strangely in higher dimensions (such as a
>> contrived "CW if there is one, otherwise the Plurality winner" method), but
>> most will degrade gracefully.
>>
>> The theoretical result can also be empirically verified in two cases.
>> First, the Burlington election of 2009: all the Condorcet methods picked
>> Montroll, as would Range under certain assumptions (of monotonically
>> decreasing ratings). Second, by ranked votes from a French exit poll in
>> Faches-Thumesnil and Nord in 2007, Condorcet methods elect Bayrou (as does
>> Range and MJ using the Orsay data from another exit poll in the same
>> election), whereas IRV sides with
>> Plurality and elects Sarkozy. See http://rangevoting.org/**
>> French2007studies.html <http://rangevoting.org/French2007studies.html>for more.
>>
>> I will point out that I am not talking about dynamics. This part of the
>> argument is about the voters not needing to learn to vote for the stronger
>> wing, or the minor parties not needing to stay out of the way if the voters
>> don't learn.
>>
>
>  This is where I quote |Xirv-Xoth| << Pirv-Poth.  If a "centrist" party is
> getting squeezed then the bigger parties that are squeezing it are not that
> far from it and so the pathology is not that great in the scope of things.
>  In the next election, the weak CW from the prior election will either be
> stronger or have merged with one of its rivals.  A Sarkosy who wins with
> IRV, vs FPP or 2-stage, knows his victory is weak and so he'll govern more
> from the center.  The same would be true with Burlington.
>
>>
>> 2.2. The advanced methods are significantly less impacted by adding or
>> removing candidates than is IRV and Plurality.
>>
>
> What about IRV(vs 2) that uses Approval voting in its first stage?
>
>>
>> For the rated methods of Range and MJ in particular, as well as for
>> Approval, this is also simple to see. When the voters are honest and rate
>> according to an objective standard, these methods pass a rated-version
>> variant of IIA. This means that if you add or remove a candidate X, that
>> doesn't alter the winner unless the winner used to be X (in case of
>> removal) or X is now the new winner (in case of adding candidates). Thus,
>> no amount of extra candidates can make the method misuse honest voters'
>> votes to squeeze out the center. I think that this
>> particular variant of IIA is stronger for MJ than Range, since MJ
>> suggests voters compare the candidates to a common graded standard and
>> gives less incentive for voters to deviate from that standard, whereas in
>> Range, normalization may be considered honest (and so the IIA variant would
>> fail).
>>
>
> I suppose it also matters whether the added candidate is "serious" or not.
>  If there are supply-side driven bounds on the no. of effective candidates
> then IIA becomes less important of a criterion for the evaluation of
> electoral rules.
>
>>
>> For the monotonicity-fixed SODA, as it is based on Approval, it passes an
>> analogous version of IIA. If a new candidate appears, either the old winner
>> will keep winning, that new candidate will win, or a candidate preferred to
>> the old winner on the new candidate's delegation order will win.
>>
>> For Condorcet, the details are more complex. In a left-right scenario, as
>> one might expect when third parties are just getting off the ground,
>> Black's single-peakedness theorem shows that the Condorcet winner will
>> always be the candidate closest to the median as defined above, no matter
>> the amount of other candidates and their positions. Since maximum
>> likelihood estimation over relatively simple error models imply Condorcet
>> while IRV can only be considered an MLE if you make the error model very
>> complex indeed, I think voter uncertainty will drag IRV further from this
>> in reality than it will drag Condorcet.
>>
>
> dlw: But if we effectively reduce the no. of candidates to 3 before using
> IRV and grant that they might vote strategically in favor of one of the
> more likely winners then this is not so big of a diff.
>
>>
>> But perhaps that is not enough. In that case, I refer to James Green
>> Armytage's paper on voting strategy, http://www.econ.vt.edu/**
>> seminars/seminarpapers/2011/**jamesgreenarmytage10142011.pdf<http://www.econ.vt.edu/seminars/seminarpapers/2011/jamesgreenarmytage10142011.pdf>In it, James proves that when there is a Condorcet winner, Condorcet
>> methods are vulnerable to neither exit nor entry (candidates being removed
>> or added). Furthermore, his computer simulation results indicate that
>> minimax (which is not even cloneproof, but is Condorcet) provides nearly no
>> incentive for strategic entry or exit, but IRV's incentive to strategic
>> exit increases with the number of candidates, and eventually reaches
>> Plurality's in the case of single-candidate exit.
>
>
> dlw: What if you only let voters rank up to 3 candidates and presume
> realistically that many will rank fewer than 3?  Does this model take into
> account the bounded rationality of voters and the costs of gathering the
> info needed to form meaningful rankings of all of the candidates in the
> field?
>
>>
>>
>> Thus, I reason that the advanced methods are not simply patches to IRV;
>> their improvements with regards to candidate exit and entry, and resistance
>> to center squeeze, are general (not specific), and don't lose power as the
>> number of candidates is increased further.
>>
>
> I agree Xcondorcet > Xirv.  My responses have been against the notion that
> Xcondorcet>>Xirv in the US, because it seems the fact that
>  Xcondorcet > Xirv makes Pcondorcet < Pirv, at least in the short-run (as
> opposed to the long-run when we're all dead), in the real-politik of
> electoral reform.
>
>>
>> -
>>
>> 3.1. IRV requires that either votes twist their votes into an IRV shape
>> to get an acceptable result, or that parties intentionally stay small to
>> avoid the conditions where the voters have to do so, or both.
>>
>
> dlw: Politics, like life, is a multi-stage game.  With IRV, A third party
> that seemingly ruins things by growing too much in one period may get an
> outcome it(and most voters) significantly prefers in the next period.  This
> presumes of course that the defenders of the status quo don't succeed in a
> misinformation campaign to end the use of IRV.
>
> Oh dear, the supporters of the major party that refuses to adapt are being
> given incentives to vote strategically....  What will become of all the
> angels who lose their wings when so many people vote strategically?
>
>>
>> This follows from the center-squeeze vulnerability shown in 2. In order
>> to avoid center squeeze, either the third parties can stay far enough away
>> that their votes can't make the wrong winner win, or the votes can vote as
>> if the third parties were that minor.
>>
>> Burlington provides an example of what happens when the voters don't and
>> the parties don't, either. You've said that it did, but you claim that
>> dynamics will fix it. Those dynamics don't counter this point, since the
>> dynamics take the shape of voters or parties altering their behavior to
>> accomodate IRV in a similar, though somewhat reduced manner, to how voters
>> or parties alter their behavior to accomodate Plurality.
>>
>
> dlw:  It's called learning.  The 3rd party won because they stood their
> ground and when they were treated as a minor party, it led to such an
> outcome as to change this wrong perception.  The presence of changing
> habits with plurality does not refute the fact that |Xirv-Xoth| is less
> than both |Pirv-Poth| and Xoth-Xfptp.  It only reduces somewhat the
> advantage that IRV gives over FPTP.
>
>
>> 3.2. IRV doesn't give multipartyism.
>>
>> This is not contended by you, and it is a simple consequence of the
>> nature of IRV. If IRV breaks to center-squeeze when third parties become
>> too large, and the countermeasure is for either the parties to be small
>> enough that IRV doesn't fail, or for the voters to act as if the parties
>> were, then the parties can never by themselves grow large enough to lead to
>> multi-party rule within the area of the IRV election in question.
>>
>
> dlw: It doesn't give your preferred type of multipartyism.  And it's not
> enuf on its own.
>
> Once more, you're failing to give third parties credit over the
> multi-period nature of the game of politics.
>
>>
>> KM: Further evidence can be seen, though scarce as it is, by that all the
>> nations that use IRV have two-party rule where IRV is used. Australia has
>> two-party (or two-and-a-half party, since the NatLib coalition is pretty
>> much a party) rule in its IRV body. You have not disputed this, but you
>> have argued that this would be countered in the non-IRV bodies that would
>> use PR but would not give multipartyism in general. Also, in Fiji before
>> the military coup, the system was coalescing to two-party rule despite
>> being in the context of a diverse nation, and despite ethnic quotas. See
>> http://rangevoting.org/**FijiPol.html<http://rangevoting.org/FijiPol.html>for that data.
>>
>
> dlw: And the absence of countries who use alternatives to IRV, apart from
> 2-stage, makes my contention not refuted yet by the evidence...
> For 2-stage is not a pure single-winner election rule.
>
>>
>> 3.3. Therefore, IRV fails twice.
>>
>> By 3.1., IRV imposes demands on voters and/or on parties that the
>> advanced methods do not. That counts once against IRV, but it wouldn't by
>> itself be so bad IRV could justify that demand by providing better outcomes
>> in return. However, it does not.
>
>
> It affects their strategies.
>
> It makes the 2 biggest parties adapt to the changing political center and
> penalizes them when they do not adapt, as shown with Burlington.
> It rewards successful third parties who capitalize on the changing center
> by giving them a chance to become one of the top two parties or to force
> one of the existing two major parties to merge with it, out of fear of it
> "spoiling" the outcome.
>
>
>> By 3.2., IRV fails to give the multiparty outcomes that voters appear to
>> want (as established in 1.). Therefore, at the very best, IRV is no better
>> than the advanced methods in bringing about multipartyism, and
>> realistically (supported by the presence of single-office voting rules that
>> actually do give multipartyism), IRV is worse than the advanced methods.
>>
>
>  There is a choice C, between an EU-style multipartyism and the deeply
> dysfunctional 2-party system of the US that is devolving into a 1-party
> system.  2 major parties, minor parties and LTPs constitute another kind of
> multiparty system that can give voters what they want.
>
> peace and thank you for your wonderfully researched and written
> email/post.
> dlw
>
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