[EM] (3) How Each Citizen’s Vote Can Fully Count in the Legislature” – no votes wasted

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 05/10/2017 07:20 PM, steve bosworth wrote:

>      *From:* Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de>
>     *Sent:* Sunday, April 2, 2017 1:00 PM
>
>     [….]
>     K:  I've been very busy of late, so I haven't been able to respond
>     to your
>     other mail, but I'd like to note a few things.
>
>     - You could use MJ instead of IRV. Since APR prior to weighting is
>     basically "elect candidates by IRV a bunch of times", and you've stated
>     that MJ is better than IRV, APR should be better if you replace it with
>     "elect candidates by MJ a bunch of times". All you need is another way
>     of counting which voters contributed to which candidates' election. My
>     party list-type Bucklin method will do the job, for instance.
>
>
>
>     S:  I agree that MJ is much better than IRV for electing a
>     single-winner, but unlike ARP, it does not allow the electorate to
>     segment itself into up to 435 group who separately support up to 435
>     somewhat different worldview present in the population most
>     enthusiastically.

As I mentioned in the previous mail, I have constructed a multiwinner 
generalization of Bucklin/MJ. It can be used both for STV-type methods 
and weighted vote-type methods. See 
https://github.com/kristomu/voting-scripts/tree/master/new_methods/bucklin_range.

In essence, you count the number of Excellent votes alone first. If any 
candidate has more than a threshold's worth of Excellent votes alone, he 
is elected with weight equal to the number of votes he got, and the 
votes are removed from consideration. Then you count the number of 
Excellent and Very good votes, and repeat the logic. You choose the 
threshold to be the lowest number so that the number of elected 
candidates comes out right (to 435 or whatnot). For a single-winner 
election, the threshold ends up being half the number of voters, so that 
the candidate with the greatest majority score wins. (Because if 
candidate X has a majority at Very Good or above and Y doesn't, X is 
elected before Y gets a chance to be elected.)

>     K: - Due to the cloning problems I've mentioned before (e.g. Libertarian
>     example), it's advantageous to a party to field multiple candidates and
>     spread the votes among them, because doing so will push competing
>     candidates with less support off the council, in effect reducing their
>     weight to zero. If everybody does that, you get plain old STV. So it's
>     not clear that weighted votes buys you anything in the face of strategy.
>     (E.g. two seats:
>     X1: weight 100
>     X2: weight 100
>     is preferable to
>     X1: weight 200
>     Y1: weight 80
>     from the point of view of party X, because the former outcome pushes
>     party Y off the council entirely.)
>
>
>
>     S: Starting with your example of countrywide ordinary STV, the
>     electorate of 280 citizens perhaps ranked the candidates as
>     follows:  100: X1>X2; 100: X2>X1; 80: Y1>Y2.  Consequently, 80
>     citizens’ votes would be wasted. The same problem would remain even
>     if an APR like primary election were also used earlier to allow all
>     citizens to rank their corresponding applicant organization to
>     become official “electoral associations” as follows: 100: aX1>aX2;
>     100: aX2>X1; 80: aY1>aY2.  Again, the only 2 organizations that
>     would become “associations” would be aX1>aX2.  Again, some voters
>     would not be represented at all in the legislature.
>
>     However, I would like to explain how this “problem” would
>     predictably evaporate if APR were applied instead to the election of
>     a legislature, e.g. the countrywide election of the US House of
>     Representative.  In this case, the least popular “association” would
>     have to have no more than 1/435 of all the voter in the country
>     expressing their preference to become a registered voter through
>     that “association”.   If all the organizations ranked by a citizen
>     happened to failed to meet this requirement, he or she would, by
>     default, remain a registered voter within her local geographically
>     defined “association” (i.e. here Congressional District).  Still,
>     like all other APR voters, she could still rank any number of
>     candidates in the whole country whom she sees as reflecting her own
>     priorities.  Therefore, her one vote would be added to the “weighted
>     vote” of the one congressperson ranked highest on her ballot.  In
>     the event that none of the candidates she had ranked were elected,
>     the APR ballot still allows her to require her first choice but
>     eliminated candidate to transfer her one vote to the congressperson
>     he sees as most likely to represent both him and her most
>     faithfully.  This means that no citizen’s vote is wasted with APR.
>     Thus, it is highly likely that each American citizen would see at
>     least one of the 435 congressperson in an APR House of
>     Representative as reflecting his or her own hopes and concerns.
>     Again, that congressperson’s voting power in the House would have
>     been increased by that citizen’s one vote.

My point is that in an election like

100: aX1 > aX2
100: aX2 > aX1
80: aY1 > aY2

the X-association has managed to push out Y entirely by splitting into 
two formal groups. Even if the Y voters can choose *which* of the X 
groups to favor, they still have no choice but to favor one of them. And 
from the X-association's point of view, that's good enough. X1 and X2 
both belong to them, so the Y voters can choose any color so long as 
it's black.

So it's in every association's advantage to do this in order to push 
competitors off the bottom of the list. If X can get supporters of Y to 
have to choose among the non-Y factions they most like instead of 
getting their own Y representative, X wins.

In the worst case, the Y-voters will support some association in 
opposition to X, but that's no worse than the power going to Y itself if 
Y is in opposition to X.

If every association plays this game, what you get is a more unstable 
variant of STV. So why not just use STV to begin with?

If it's the Asset stage that makes APR IRV not vote-wasting, then well, 
it's easy to copy that Asset stage to STV too. Just give each elected 
candidate relative power equal to the Droop quota times the number of 
seats he got, plus the number of voters giving their power to him by 
indirect means.