[EM] Rebuttal to article by Mike Ossipoff

[robert bristow-johnson]

i s'pose it's about time for me to write something and send it to 
Adrian.  is it too late?  it would be an analysis of what we, in 
Burlington Vermont, wanted to accomplish with the adoption of IRV in 
2005 and how it failed in 2009.


On 5/5/12 11:05 PM, Richard Fobes wrote:
>
> You ask for evidence to support my claim that most election-method 
> experts do not regard the Favorite Betrayal Criterion as being as 
> important as the Condorcet criterion.  On the election-method forum my 
> observation is that far fewer participants have expressed support for 
> FBC compared to Condorcet compliance.  We could conduct a poll here on 
> the forum if you think I am mistaken.
>

the reason that it is silly and undemocratic to elect someone who is not 
the Condocet Winner is simple: if you do that, you have elected to 
office a candidate when *more* of us voters marked explicitly on our 
ballots that we wanted someone else.  if more of us voters agree that 
Candidate A is a better choice for office than those of us who agree 
that Candidate B is better, then what sense of democracy is upheld by 
electing Candidate B?

everyone, even the dumb First-Past-The-Post reactionaries, agree in a 
simple two-candidate race, that the candidate with the most votes (the 
"simple majority") wins.  if a CW exists and you elect someone else (as 
we did in Burlington in 2009) you fail that fundamental criterion.

that's why i hold the Condorcet criterion higher than FBC or whatever 
alphabet soup Mike tosses out.  it's a proof by contradiction.

> On 5/5/2012 12:00 AM, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
>> back to Plurality.
>> I'm embarrassed to have to repeat this again:
>> If, in Plurality, you really vote for your favorite, then you will or
>> should approve only hir in Approval.
>> If, in Plurality, you instead vote for a less-liked "lesser-of-2-evils",
>> then, in Approval, you'd probably approve hir, and, additionally,
>> everyone whom you like better, including your favorite(s).

perhaps it's appropriate to be embarrassed.

do you propose to post these suggested instruction for voters at the 
polls?  do you expect that any decent proportion of voters would go into 
the booth, pull the curtain, and strategize thusly?

besides the experience that Burlington Vermont has had with IRV, it 
seems interesting to me to note that the state senate district that 
Burlington is in is the largest multi-seat legislative district in the 
country (most number of seats).  that was confirmed again in the news 
yesterday when they were discussing the new legislative district maps 
that were just enacted in consequence to the 2010 census.  and it 
remains a 6 seat district.  there are 6 nominees each from the major 
parties (the Progs put in a few, but maybe not 6) and our voting 
instructions are to vote for no more than six.  but people have figured 
out that the Democrat candidates are not just running against the 
Republicans or Progressives, they are running against each other.  no 
one i know votes for all 6.  if voters do not exhaust the number of 
votes allowed on this single race, then it is essentially Approval 
voting.  and it's *full* of strategizing.

perhaps these are perfectly good tactics to take into the booth in an 
Approval election, but it's unreasonable to expect voters that are any 
less savvy than the most sophisticated to know about, think about, and 
take these tactics into the voting booth.  *and*, as a matter of general 
principle, we want to *remove* any burden of tactical voting from the 
general electorate.  we want them to not have to worry about their 
contingency vote acting to harm their favorite.

>> In other words, the only difference is that people are supporting
>> candidates whom they like more. A more liked candidate is being elected.
>> Richard neglected to tell us how that would make people want to go back
>> to Plurality.
>> It would be difficult to try to argue that it's bad to elect to an
>> office the candidate who has been approved for that
>> office by the most voters.
>> Someone could say, "But what if some approvals are _strategic?"  No,
>> it's still true that that winning candidate has been approved for the
>> office by the most voters. It isn't for us to question their motives.

the issue is not about questioning the motives of voters.  again, the 
issue is about saddling them with a burden of strategic voting that 
*might* force these voters to betray their favorite by also approving of 
a contingency candidate.  it's only when the contingency candidate beats 
the favorite, especially when both the favorite and contingency 
candidate turn out to be unchallenged by the hated candidate that voters 
may actually choose to cast a tactical vote against (the tactic called 
"compromising") that voters experience regret.

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r b-j                  rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."