[EM] (21) APR: Steve's 20th dialogue with Richard Fobes

[VoteFair]

On 11/3/2015 9:16 AM, steve bosworth wrote:
> In this 21^st dialogue, let's return to the question of whether APR or
> VoteFair provides the fairer system for electing multi-winners, e.g. the
> 80 members of California’s legislative assembly. In this post, I wish to
> focus only on one element of your reply to our 20^th dialogue, namely,
> the question of whether or not your ‘VoteFair representation ranking’
> needlessly wastes votes:
> [... see below ...]
> In this context and in the light of this clarification, do you accept
> that APR is ‘fairer’ than VoteFair?

If politics were one-dimensional – which I'll explain shortly – then 
your APR method would work well.

But first let's clarify a possible misunderstanding.

> S:I have read these chapters again and now more exactly understand both
> of these elements. I agree that they provide great improvements on the
> existing system. Yes, these elements reduce the scope for gerrymandering
> and for safe-seats produced by chance. They also make accurate
> representation more likely, especially since you also add the election
> of 2 ‘statewide seats’ (without using statewide districts).
>
> However, unlike APR, each of your larger electoral districts from which
> 2 ‘districtwide’ seats are elected do not entirely eliminate the
> possibility of relatively safe- seats being produced by gerrymandering
> or by chance. I understand (by using ‘cross-district popularity ranking’
> (page 5/20 of Chap. 20) that VoteFair representation elects the 2
> statewide seats by discovering the most popular candidates for the
> largest party underrepresent by the district elections alone.

VoteFair ranking is not vulnerable to gerrymandering, of either the 
intentional or unintentional type.  Any change in a district boundary 
that helps one political party within a district will be offset by a 
corresponding loss in the statewide seats.

Later you refer to an example in my book and then refer to a quote in my 
book:
> ... 'This leaves the 10 Democratic voters
> appropriately unrepresented ….’ A similar flaw is repeated later on page
> 10/20 of Chap. 20 when the ‘10 voters for ‘White party’ receive no
> representation. Here, you again admit that this application of ‘VoteFair
> representation’ has not ‘proportionately’ produced the ‘ideal match’
> between ‘voters with their party preferences’

All the examples in my book were chosen for use in the United States 
where politics is very multidimensional (which I'll get to in a moment) 
and where too many political parties would lead to a different kind of 
corruption (compared to the kind that now exists).

If a large number of political parties were appropriate, then increasing 
the number of statewide seats increases the closeness to a mathematical 
"ideal."  Near the end of the book I point out that if VoteFair ranking 
were used in European nations where such mathematical idealism already 
dominates, then the number of statewide seats should be increased (which 
results in a corresponding decrease in the number of district-specific 
seats).

The comments above apply to your term "safe seat" when it refers to 
political-party safe seats.  The other kind of "safe seat" refers to a 
specific politician getting reelected easily.

VoteFair ranking intentionally specifies fairer ballots and fairer vote 
counting in primary elections, and this fairness prevents any politician 
from getting reelected easily, which is the politician-specific kind of 
safe seat.  Expressed in a different way, the only reason a specific 
politician now wins repeatedly in spite of opposition is that primary 
elections in the United States (and political-party nominating 
conventions in other nations) currently use unfair vote-counting methods 
(and corruptible procedures).

In other words, candidate-specific "safe seats" can only exist when the 
primary election (or nomination process) is unfair.  Both VoteFair 
ranking and your APR method eliminate this kind of unfairness.

Now I'll explain the one-dimensional versus multidimensional issue.

Using your example of electing representatives to the California 
legislature, an example of one-dimensional politics would be if 
everyone's only political concern was about one issue.

To borrow a high-profile issue from current Presidential-campaign news, 
let's suppose that the one issue facing the California legislature is 
whether or not to build a wall between California and Mexico.  In this 
case your APR method would produce very fair results.  That's because it 
simply transfers each voter's preference onto the voting that occurs 
within the legislature.

VoteFair ranking would also handle this situation well, although for 
this one-dimensional situation I would recommend increasing the number 
of statewide seats.

In real-life politics, there are many, many issues.  This is what I 
refer to as multidimensional.

Even if each issue were simplified into one dimension (which is, alas, 
what many people do in their minds), those multiple issues still create 
a multidimensional political situation.

To better understand the jump from one-dimensional (single-issue) 
politics to multidimensional politics, let's consider two-dimensional 
politics.

In the United States -- and most European nations -- there is a 
left-to-right dimension, and an up-versus-down dimension.  These can be 
thought of as a two-dimensional situation, although each of the two 
dimensions is actually multidimensional.

The left-versus-right dimension mostly corresponds to ethical and 
religious issues such as gender inequality, immigration, sexual 
orientation, marijuana usage, access to assault weapons, etc.

The up-versus-down dimension corresponds to economic fairness, where the 
voters are up above all the political parties and want economic 
fairness, and the biggest campaign contributors are below all the 
political parties and those biggest campaign contributors want to 
preserve economic advantages for the businesses they own.

(As a clarification, all of the biggest campaign contributors are rich, 
but not all rich people are in the group of people who supply the 
biggest campaign contributions.)

As is currently happening in the U.S. presidential campaign, politicians 
talk about the left-versus-right issues for the purpose of hoping to 
inspire voters.  However, after getting reelected, the elected 
politicians take action based on the up-versus-down issues because they 
must remain obedient to their biggest campaign contributors (or else 
their funding will disappear in the next election).  The result is that 
many voters mark their ballot based on their left-versus-right 
orientation, and yet those voters end up electing politicians who behave 
exactly opposite to the voters' up-versus-down (economic) preferences. 
This is a huge lack of representation.

A big weakness of your APR method is that politicians would find it 
easier to play this game of talking about left-versus-right "positions" 
and then acting according to unpredictable preferences (such as their 
own opinions, the preferences of their biggest campaign contributors, or 
the opinions of the people they associate with).

Why can this occur in your APR method?  Politicians can behave as 
"mavericks" without needing to be at least partially aligned with a 
well-understood political party whose actions have been watched for many 
years.  Yes, politicians under APR would be aligned with organizations, 
but as I've explained before there would be "too many" organizations for 
the voters to keep track of.

This too-many situation occurs in U.S. politics where minor political 
parties are mostly focused on a few would-be politicians whose views 
dominate the party.  In other words, minor parties are difficult to 
characterize compared to large political parties where lots of 
politicians have to work together in a coordinated way.

VoteFair ranking is intentionally designed to limit the number of 
political parties who actually get their candidates elected.  But it 
does this in a way that lists a greater number of minor political 
parties on the ballot.  Those small parties continually have an 
opportunity to demonstrate a growing popularity (which occurs when a 
major political party becomes less popular).  Those small political 
parties don't get to have candidates on the ballot until one of them has 
gained popularity at the expense of a previously popular major party.

> [...] At both of these points, your
> meaning of ‘fair’ seems to conflict with the more usual meaning you
> appropriately seem to give to it in other contexts (and which I also
> endorse), namely, each person must be treated equally and represented as
> accurately as possible.  [...]

Both VoteFair ranking and your APR method "treats each voter equally."

As for "[representing] each person as accurately as possible," in my 
biased opinion, VoteFair ranking produces more representative results. 
Of course "representative results" is an ambiguous term, yet I can 
imagine that it's possible to measure "representativeness," although I 
don't know exactly how this would be done.

A measure of representativeness should NOT be done -- as it now is done 
in Europe -- by simplistically assuming that each voter's position on 
multiple issues can be categorized as fitting into one of the existing 
political parties.

It should be obvious that existing legislatures and parliaments around 
the world are not producing "representative results."  Specifically, 
most voters in most nations want widespread economic prosperity, yet the 
biggest campaign contributors use their influence to pass laws that 
undermine economic prosperity.

Alas, those biggest campaign contributors don't realize that they are 
the cause of the current, worldwide economic depression.  They only 
think they are getting what they want in terms of economic advantages 
for the businesses they own, without realizing that their employees, 
their customers, and even many of their shareholders are suffering 
economically as a result of their greediness.  Ironically the biggest 
campaign contributors wonder why their employees are dissatisfied with 
what they are getting paid, and they wonder why there aren't more 
customers for their products, and they don't realize that most of their 
shareholders have bought shares mostly because other investment 
opportunities (such as the ones previously offered by banks) pay 
virtually zero percent interest.

If we were looking at our current crisis from the future, we might be 
laughing.  Or maybe just shaking our heads in wonderment, as we do when 
we think about the foolish corruption that brought down the Roman Empire.

Why am I offering this non-mathematical perspective?  Because the 
mathematics of voting is directly linked to much of the suffering going 
on around the globe.

What is my political perspective about the current U.S. Presidential 
election?  All the candidates currently running for U.S. President say 
things that are so very laughable.

Sigh.  Did we not learn from history lessons that the corruption of the 
Roman Empire, combined with a change in climate, led to its downfall? 
It continues to amaze me that so few people recognize the link between 
the unfairness of single-mark ballots and the current worldwide economic 
depression we are in.

Sigh.

Thank you Steve and other participants here, and readers of this forum, 
for understanding this important link.

Richard Fobes



On 11/3/2015 9:16 AM, steve bosworth wrote:
> Re: (21) APR: Steve's 20th dialogue with Richard Fobes
>
>>  From: election-methods-request at lists.electorama.com
>>  Subject: Election-Methods Digest, Vol 134, Issue 1
>>  To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com
>>  Date: Sat, 1 Aug 2015 12:02:14 -0700
>>
>> > 1. Re: (20) APR: Steve's 20th dialogue with Richard Fobes
>>  (Richard Fobes)
>>  ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  Message: 1
>>  Date: Fri, 31 Jul 2015 17:07:34 -0700
>>  From: Richard Fobes <ElectionMethods at VoteFair.org>
>>  To: "election-methods at lists.electorama.com"
>>  <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>
>>  Cc: steve bosworth <stevebosworth at hotmail.com>
>>  Subject: Re: [EM] (20) APR: Steve's 20th dialogue with Richard Fobes
>>  Message-ID: <55BC0DC6.50903 at VoteFair.org>
>>  Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1254; format=flowed
>
> Hi Richard,
>
> In this 21^st dialogue, let's return to the question of whether APR or
> VoteFair provides the fairer system for electing multi-winners, e.g. the
> 80 members of California’s legislative assembly.In this post, I wish to
> focus only on one element of your reply to our 20^th dialogue, namely,
> the question of whether or not your ‘VoteFair representation ranking’
> needlessly wastes votes:
>
>
>>  On 7/16/2015 4:15 PM, steve bosworth wrote:
>>  >S: .... I see this as 'full' both because [APR], unlike VoteFair, allows
>>  > for no votes to be wasted, and gives each citizen's vote to a named rep
>>  > who she has directly or indirectly favored. In this sense only, APR
>>  > offers '100% percent proportionality'. As far as I understand it, your
>>  > 'VoteFair ranking' will still waste some vote and cannot guarantee that
>>  > each vote that counts will be added to the weighted vote of the rep each
>>  > citizen has directly or indirectly favored. Please correct me if I am
>>  > mistaken about this.
>>
>>  R: Apparently you don't yet understand VoteFair Ranking. If a voter does
>>  not support the winner of the first seat within a district, then that
>>  voter's influence [may] shifts to help choose the winner of the second
> seat
>>  within that district. If that voter also does not like the winner of
>>  the second seat, then that voter's first-party preference shifts to
>>  determine the number of winning candidates from that political party.
>
> S:I have read these chapters again and now more exactly understand both
> of these elements.I agree that they provide great improvements on the
> existing system.Yes, these elements reduce the scope for gerrymandering
> and for safe-seats produced by chance.They also make accurate
> representation more likely, especially since you also add the election
> of 2 ‘statewide seats’ (without using statewide districts).
>
> However, unlike APR, each of your larger electoral districts from which
> 2 ‘districtwide’ seats are elected do not entirely eliminate the
> possibility of relatively safe- seats being produced by gerrymandering
> or by chance.I understand (by using ‘cross-district popularity ranking’
> (page 5/20 of Chap. 20) that VoteFair representation elects the 2
> statewide seats by discovering the most popular candidates for the
> largest party underrepresent by the district elections alone.
>
> Yes, the choice of these candidates has been decided by their voters in
> their respective district, but they have not been chosen by the
> ‘same-party supporters’ in the other districts.In contrast, APR would
> elect all the 10 seats as ‘statewide’ members and would allow every
> ‘same-party supporter’ directly to help determine which candidates would
> be elected to represent each supporter.Each supporter could identify the
> one elected candidate among the 10 or more reps he had most favored and
> helped to elect.This would make it more likely that there would be a
> closer match between the views of each citizen and his representative
> than your proposal provides.
>
> Also, in contrast, each APR elected candidate would have a ‘weighted
> vote’ exactly equal to the number of voters who had helped her to be
> elected—no citizen’s vote being at all wasted.This contrasts with your
> page 18/24 in your Chapter 15:‘This leaves the 10 Democratic voters
> appropriately unrepresented ….’ A similar flaw is repeated later on page
> 10/20 of Chap. 20 when the ‘10 voters for ‘White party’ receive no
> representation. Here, you again admit that this application of ‘VoteFair
> representation’ has not ‘proportionately’ produced the ‘ideal match’
> between ‘voters with their party preferences’, i.e. a ‘match’ that would
> have been exact if APR had been used. At both of these points, your
> meaning of ‘fair’ seems to conflict with the more usual meaning you
> appropriately seem to give to it in other contexts (and which I also
> endorse), namely, each person must be treated equally and represented as
> accurately as possible.If so, surely it is not ‘fair’ for anyone to be
> ‘unrepresented’ if there is a practical system available (like APR) that
> would allow every citizen’s vote to continue qualitatively to count in
> the assembly through the one representative directly or indirectly most
> favored by each voter.
>
> In this context and in the light of this clarification, do you accept
> that APR is ‘fairer’ than VoteFair?
>
> Steve
>