[EM] Approval Voting and Long-term effects of voting systems

[Michael Ossipoff]

 I'd said:


>

>
>
>> But, for some electorates, maybe ours here, there's a _psychological_
>> need for rankings. Some overcompromisers (as I said) would insist on
>> approving Hillary, along with Jill.
>>
>> But some of those, if they had a rank-method, would be content to rank
>> Hillary a little below Jill. For them, the rank method improved their
>> voting. For that type of overcompromiser, a rank method softens their
>> voting errors.
>>
>> Ranking can likewise soften the voting errors of rival parties who are so
>> inimical (though close in policy proposals) that they'd refuse to approve
>> eachother in Aproval.
>>
>>

> You replied:
>



> Don't know if I care about such cases.  Maybe we should punish (or not
> reward) all the rival parties who are so inimical even though they are
> close in policy proposals.
>

Well, the voting error resulting from their rivalry is bad for everyone
too, and so it's desirable to avoid it--by giving the rival parties the
option to rank eachother below top, but still above worse candidates.


>
> Again, I think it is useful to think where Approval Voting, or other
> systems, are likely to take us.  What we have currently is widely
> recognized as an aberration
>

Yes. And it won't improve until there's near unanimous realization of the
complete phoniness of the elections and media, and the version of the
social-situation that they have people believing. It doesn't even at all
resemble the media portrayal. But wasn't it Goebbels who boasted that any
lie will be publicly-accepted if it's big enough and repeated consistently
enough. NPR understands that, and has learned well from Goebbels.




> , which is, I believe, a repeated result of the application of Plurality
> Voting
>

...it takes a bit more  than just Plurality to achieve that. But, sure,
Plurality is a component.


> , which creates two dominant parties that concentrate more and more over
> time, as they increasingly ignore the rest of the people until they can't
> stand it any longer.
>

Well, doesn't it appear is if there's no limit to what they'll tolerate,
submit to, and believe in? ...No scam too brazen, ridiculous or extreme? No
lie to big or brazen to believe

That great social scientist P.T. Barnum said that there's a sucker born
every minute.

The corollary,  the famous and officially-well-followed Fields Policy
Principle says, "Never give a sucker an even break."

That sums up the situation

But there's always the possibility that maybe someday people will catch on.
Don't count on it, but it's always possible.

I'm not saying that the public won't someday surprise us and catch on.
That's always a possibility

Jill Stein's investigation of count-fraud in the 2016 presidential election
is a hopeful sign, but never let anything get your hopes up. It's a good
start, something done right, good for its own sake. Just regard it as that.
Don't worry about results.

You wrote:

So we shouldn't judge Approval Voting, or other systems, strictly on how
they would respond to our current situation.

[endquote]

Currently, voting-system proposals for municipal elections should be
methods that would be good in elections for state and national office,
under current conditions.  And if they're good for those more demanding
applications, then they'll be fine for municipal elections too. And, if
they're good for the peculiarly-demanding (phony) current conditions, then
they'll be fine for conditions in a better world.

Approval, Score, Bucklin, or MDDAsc would be fine.

There's good consensus at EM about MDDAsc being the best deluxe
ranking-method.

I'd suggest that those 4 methods should be offered in proposals for
municipal and state voting-system reform. Let an initiative committee, &/or
the public (vial polls & focus-groups) choose among them, to choose the
best proposal for an initiative or referendum, or a legislated
voting-system reform.

[Replying farther down] :


>
>
>> So rankings can soften voting errors, for rivals and for some
>> overcompromisers.
>>
>> ...but not for all overcompromisers. Some overcompromisers are so
>> overcompromising that the only thing that can keep them from voting
>> Compromise over Favorite is if they have an opportunity to rank them both
>> at top, with the assurance that top-voting Favorite can't possibly hurt
>> Compromise. ....in other words, for them, the method must allow equal
>> top-voting, and must meet FBC.
>>
>
> As I suggested above.  Yeah!
>
>
>
>> So, what kind of method would meet the needs of both of those 2 kinds of
>> overcompromisers? It would be a method that allows equal top-voting, meets
>> FBC, but also allows ranking.   ...and preferably it should give good
>> protection of higher-ranked candidates against lower-ranked ones.
>>
>
>
>> There are a number of good methods that have those attributes. Bucklin is
>> the familiar one, During the Progressive Era, Bucklin was used in at leasts
>> 39 cities.
>>
>> There are others too.
>>
>
> I'll have to think about it some more, but I am not sure the complexity of
> more than one level of ranking is worth the trouble and risk, especially
> for the current level of society.
>

Well, as I always say, when organizations, parties & activists advocate
voting-system reform, they nearly always want rankings. And the electorate
might need rankiings (or at least Score) to soften the voting-errors of
overcompromisers & rival parties.

Aside from that psychological need for rankings, Approval is better.

But, regardable as a deluxe Approval version, a method (like MDDAsc)
meeting FBC, and free of chicken-dilemma, could be used as Approval.
...people advised to top-rank their strong top-set, not rank their strong
bottom-set, and 2nd-rank & withhold approval only when needed for
chicken-dilemma defection-deterrence.



> But I wouldn't want to exclude it, if there is value and it can be applied
> reliably.
>

Approval, Score, Bucklin & MDDAsc are reliable and solid.

[Replying farther down] :


>
>
>
>
>> But I've only been talking about the _psychological_ need for ranking.
>> But I mentioned earlier that, disregarding that psychological need, there's
>> really only one genuine practical use for a rank-method: Avoiding chicken
>> dilemma.
>>
>> Chicken dilemma protection is very costly in terms of problems that come
>> with it, to the detriment of other properties. ...especially to the
>> detriment of the method's general protection of higher middle-ranked
>> candidates against lower-ranked ones and unranked ones.
>>
>> But, because the chicken dilemma is a genuine reason to use rankings, and
>> the only genuine reason, I'd prefer to have chicken dilemma protection,even
>> at the cost of general protection of middle-ranked candidates.
>>
>
> Again, I am not sure the chicken dilemma is necessarily as severe a
> problem as you make it sound
>

I call the chicken dilemma a nuisance, rather than a problem, for Approval
& Bucklin, because of the mitigations and solutions that I described in my
previous message.

But it would be even nicer to be able to outright just avoid it, as can be
done in MDDAsc.



> , once we stabilize around new political patterns that result from years
> of Approval Voting
>

I feel that a big difference then, with genuine democracy, in a better
world, would be the absence of a strong bottom-set.

Then, yes, the chicken-dilemma would lose a lot of its strength if there
isn't a seriously odious "candidate C", that the A & B voters have to fear.

Michael Ossipoff

(This concludes the 3rd part of this 3-part reply)

(I don't have a way to delete text. All of my replies in this message are
above this point.)



>
> On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 1:08 AM, Daniel LaLiberte <
> daniel.laliberte at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This message is about two related subjects:
>>
>> 1. Factoring in the long-term emergent effects of each voting system.
>> 2. An example of how Approval Voting results in better long-term effects.
>>
>> Among the many criteria for evaluating voting systems (
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system#Evaluating_voti
>> ng_systems_using_criteria) I don't see any that address the long-term
>> effects of using each voting system.  In other words, the effect on one
>> election is certainly important, regarding the satisfaction of the election
>> results by voters and candidates.  But I would argue that it is even more
>> important to consider the long-term effects that emerge when applying a
>> voting system repeatedly over many elections.  A small bias one way or
>> another may not be very apparent if you only look at one election, but over
>> may elections, they can add up and perhaps compound the bias exponentially.
>>
>> There are many long-term effects to consider, but in particular, I am
>> thinking of one pernicious problem: the tendency for two major parties to
>> emerge and dominate all politics which results from the repeated
>> application of plurality voting.  This problem is fairly easy for most
>> people to understand, although I am surprised to see that there seems to be
>> a lot of denial about this effect as well.  Some would even defend having
>> only two major parties, or very few parties.  That is an interesting
>> subject to discuss, but regardless, I believe we should be aware of how our
>> choice of a voting system will affect things over time, how society is
>> likely to evolve based on the rules we lay down, and in fact, how it is
>> actually very likely that the dominant forces in society will quickly and
>> vociferously defend whatever rules resulted in their rise to dominance.
>>
>> But back to this one question, studies and long-term experience have
>> shown that other voting systems besides plurality, in particular IRV, also
>> result in the dominance of two major parties.  This may be more surprising
>> to people, but looking at the underlying cause, it seems we can make a
>> rather important simplifying argument about most voting systems regarding
>> this problem. I would assert that the underlying cause of this problem of
>> two-party dominance in any voting system is that it gives voters the
>> ability to rank or order at least one candidate higher than the rest.
>>
>> The reason this ability to rank candidates becomes a problem is the
>> spoiler effect, where voters will have a strong motivation to give their
>> highest rank to one of the leading candidates. If they don't, then they
>> weaken the chance of that candidate winning and therefore strengthen the
>> chance of the less preferred leading candidate.  Because one of the leading
>> candidates is likely to win, all the rest of the rankings of non-leading
>> candidates hardly matter at all.
>>
>> In any election, there will be two candidates who are the strongest in
>> terms of popular support, and thus the most likely to win. Consequently (to
>> grossly over-simplify the process) with any voting system that permits
>> ranking, groups of voters will tend to coalesce around support for these
>> two leading candidates to encourage everyone to support their preferred
>> leading candidate. Eventually two major parties arise, and everyone who
>> doesn't join one of these two major parties is excluded.
>>
>> So once voters and candidates figure this out, any such voting system
>> ends up devolving into the dominance of two major parties that we get with
>> simple plurality voting.  In fact, one might argue that plurality voting is
>> better just because it is simpler.
>>
>> But Approval Voting avoids this problem. Equal-rank approval votes mean
>> voters don't get the option to express their preferred ranking, but because
>> of that, they aren't at all motivated to bias their ranking dishonestly.
>> They only have to decide which candidates to approve, or where the cut-off
>> is between approval and disapproval.
>>
>> Given that there are, as before, two leading candidates, how does
>> Approval Voting affect whether one of those two leading candidates will
>> win?  One of the two leading candidates is likely to win even with Approval
>> Voting, so it would appear there is no benefit, but that would be a
>> short-sighted way to judge a voting system.  In subsequent elections, it
>> would seem likely that more candidates will run who have broader appeal to
>> ALL voters, not just a majority or plurality. Because the winning
>> candidates will be those who are most approved of by the most voters, there
>> will be no value in parties that typically focus on appealing to no more
>> than half of the voters.
>>
>> So I suspect the long-term use of Approval Voting would be
>> self-correcting toward better and better representation of ALL voters, not
>> just half the voters, because in each election, almost all of the voters
>> contribute to choosing the winning candidates, and that only gets better
>> over time as the candidates who decide to run get closer to receiving the
>> approval of all voters.
>>
>> Can any other voting system claim a similar long-term effect?  Even a
>> voting system with three ranks, e.g. Approve, Neutral, Disapprove, would
>> encourage voters to approve one of the leading candidates, and give neutral
>> or disapprove votes to the rest.  I wonder if Approval Voting might be the
>> ONLY system that has this long-term effect.
>>
>> What I am aiming for is a voting system that self-corrects over time.  No
>> matter what voting system we choose, there is probably always going to be
>> at least some small bias, some inequities or incompleteness.  So we need to
>> understand this and deal with it.
>>
>> But one important question should not be overlooked: What do we want to
>> self-correct toward? That is, what is the long-term goal? I believe we
>> should want to move toward a closer or better representation of society as
>> a whole, but there are other ways to look at that.
>>
>> Looking forward to reading your feedback.
>>
>> --
>> Daniel LaLiberte
>> daniel.laliberte at gmail.com
>>
>> ----
>> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list
>> info
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Daniel LaLiberte
> daniel.laliberte at gmail.com
>
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