[EM] Approval voting and incumbents

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 11/15/2012 04:25 AM, Richard Fobes wrote:
> On 11/13/2012 3:29 AM, aGREATER.US wrote:
>> Incumbents have a huge unfair advantage in that corporations
>  > (including unions) pour money into their reelection campaigns.
>  > ...
>
> Easily overlooked is the fact that corporations elect their board
> members using single-mark ballots, and labor-union members use
> single-mark ballots to elect their union leaders.
>
> Keeping in mind the unfairness of elections that use single-mark
> ballots, the consequence is that corporations are not under the control
> of shareholders, and labor unions are not under the control of voting
> labor-union members.
>
> As a consequence, the Republican party is not controlled by individual
> investors, and the Democratic Party is not controlled by labor-union
> workers.
>
> Instead, both parties are controlled by the biggest campaign
> contributors using lots of money that was given to them by people who
> are not well-represented by those "elected" corporate/union leaders.
>
> If better ballots and better counting methods were used in corporate
> board-member elections and labor-union-leader elections, the Republican
> and Democratic parties would come closer to representing the majority of
> voters (even without any improvements in governmental elections).

I've thought that one way to get reform starting is to use the advocated 
methods in organizations - a sort of bottom-up approach, if you will. 
Why should we expect the voters to jump right onto something untested 
when they don't know how it's going to act? Some kind of precedent would 
be very useful.

In Fa!rvote's case, they're trying to establish that precedent by local 
elections, to varying degrees of success. Quite a number of these local 
areas seem to have voters that discover what IRV is doing, and rather 
than try to salvage it by adjusting their ballots to be less harmful, 
throw IRV out.

Schulze's precedent is somewhat different. It consists mostly of 
technically minded organizations, as one may see in the Wikipedia list, 
(although someone seems to be quite determined to remove these links 
from the Schulze method article at the moment). I suppose the influence 
here originated from Debian. Debian decided to use Schulze, then other 
technically minded organizations decided that if it's good enough for 
Debian, it's good enough for them. However, that may not necessarily 
carry weight with the voters at large, and I've heard that it is in some 
cases being misused for multiwinner elections.

Approval is the simplest improvement upon Plurality, but I'm not 
familiar with any organizations or companies using it internally. It is 
in use on "user-facing" parts of certain well-known websites, like 
Youtube (whose maintainers switched from Range to Approval, presumably 
because just about everybody voted min or max).

In any event, switching to a more advanced voting methods would seem to 
provide only benefits to a new organization. Unlike a nation or a large 
established organization, they don't have to fight an enormous amount of 
inertia to get there, and if the advanced methods really are as good as 
they say, they'll almost immediately be better off for it. It sounds 
like a no-brainer.

However, there might be a hidden reason for why they don't. When an 
organization is small, things can be done informally. After it has 
grown, inertia becomes a problem. Perhaps in that in-between state, the 
organizations or companies (corporations) simply tend to go with what 
either has been used before or "seems obvious" until it's too hard to 
change?

I'm not an administrator, so I wouldn't know. If there are any among the 
EM readers, perhaps they could explain why organizations rarely use more 
advanced things than Plurality or the cumulative vote :-)