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

[steve bosworth]

To everyone:

I would like to respond to the different posts (from Kristofer Munsterhjelm and James Gilmour) that commented on my post: No Wasted Votes (03/25/2017).  My comments will be marked by “S:”.  Firstly, I will offer an improved version of my post, hoping that this will make my later comments more easily understood.  I look forward to your feedback.

Because I want a more complete democracy, I want to explain: “How Each Citizen’s Vote Can Fully Count in the Legislature” – no votes wasted.  Using California’s legislative Assembly as an example, the system I call  Associational Proportional Representation (APR) would allow each citizen to guarantee that their one vote will be added to the “weighted vote” in the Assembly of the elected member they trust most. The details of exactly how APR would work in practice are available the article I will send you upon request (stevebosworth at hotmail.com).  However, please let me briefly describe it in the next paragraphs.

APR elects all the winners at one time, and in effect, uses the whole state (country or nation) as one electoral district. Its special “associational” structure allows this.  No matter through which one of APR’s “electoral associations” a citizen is voting, she can rank any number of the candidates running in the whole state (nation or country).

APR uses a greatly strengthened development of IRV (or Single Transferrable Voting (STV)). From their local polling stations, each citizen would rank 1-2-3 ... as many of the candidates in the whole state (or nation, or country) as they might wish. Each member would have a “weighted vote” in the Assembly exactly equal to the number of citizens who had helped to elect them. Well before the general election, APR’s “associational” element would be provided by APR’s special primary election. This “primary” would discover society’s most popular voluntary organizations through which all citizens will rank candidates during the later general election. During the “primary”, citizens’ would rank any number of these organizations (e.g. political parties, districts, and interest groups) who had applied to the state’s electoral commission to be allowed to send at least one member directly to the Assembly. Each citizen would be able to rank any of these organizations seen by her to reflect her own worldview, and thus seen as most likely to nominate attractive candidates for her to rank in the general election later. The more non-geographically defined “associations” so discovered, the fewer but larger would be the average size of the existing geographically defined “associations” (i.e. districts).

APR’s strengthened STV would

1. allow each citizen to rank any number of the candidates running in the state. This much wider choice of candidates makes it more likely that each citizen’s vote will help to elect a member who is as close as possible to her ideal, and thus her one vote is much less likely to be wasted qualitatively;

2. give each member a “weighted vote” in the assembly exactly equal to the number of citizens who have helped to elect them. This helps to ensure that no citizen’s vote will be wasted quantitatively; and

3. if and when none of the candidates a citizen has explicitly ranked is elected, the APR ballot allows her to require her first choice but eliminated candidate to transfer her one vote to the elected candidate seen by him to be the one most likely to represent both him and her most faithfully.



These features of APR allow each citizen to guarantee that their one vote will fully count in the assembly, one way or another, both quantitatively and qualitatively. It also guarantees complete party proportionality in the legislature.

At the same time, the average quality of APR candidates in the eyes of voters is likely to be higher than offered by any other electoral system. This quality is likely to be supplied by APR’s special “primary” election which

  1.  discovers all the “electoral associations” (geographically defined or not) through which all citizens would elect all the members of the assembly, and
  2.  determines through which “association” at their local polling station each voter will be voting during the later general election, i.e. her most preferred “association”.

Each citizen could rank any number of these applicant organizations according to how closely each reflects their own worldview. She would see her first choice as being the one most likely to nominate the most attractive candidates for her to rank later in the general election. These rankings would determine the most popular group of these organizations that together are both proportionately supported by all the voters and are able to elect the whole assembly. It is each of these organizations that would be officially recognized as an electoral “association”.
After the primary, each “association” would nominate candidates to represent its interests and concerns, i.e. candidates for citizens to rank during the later general election. These arrangements would entirely remove the anti-democratic effects of any gerrymandering or safe-districts.
Therefore, in contrast to all the other ways to elect a legislature, APR:
1. would not waste any citizens’ votes, quantitatively or qualitatively,
2. would entirely remove the anti-democratic effects of any gerrymandering or safe-districts,
3. would help make each member see that each of his electors who becomes disappointed with his performance in the assembly will be easily able to reject him during the next general election in favor of a candidate she sees as more trustworthy.

S: Please also feel free to request me to send you any of the appendices listed at the end of the above mentioned article, e.g. APPENDIX 2: Optimal Quality Representation Provided, APPENDIX 6: Working Majorities are Likely in APR Legislatures, APPENDIX 7: Strategy for Introducing APR into the USA.  Also, please send these ideas to anyone whom you think might be interested.
What do you think? I very much look forward to your feedback, questions or criticisms.

Steve (stevebosworth at hotmail.com)

 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.

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.



From: James Gilmour <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk>
Sent: Thursday, March 9, 2017 12:18 PM
To: 'steve bosworth'
Subject: RE: "How Each Citizen's Vote Can Fully Count in the Legislature"
Steve,
J: Thank you for the copy of your paper.  I have seen proposals for “proportionately weighted voting” before, but I’m afraid none of them grab me.  I don’t think any proposal of that kind would have much traction in taking forward practical voting reform, certainly not in the UK ….  I think most UK electors would expect “one person, one vote” (in the election) and then “one representative, one vote” (in the assembly).
I am not concerned with achieving the highest possible degree of proportionality.  Other factors have to be taken into account.  I do not seek the degree of proportionality that could be achieved by aggregating votes over the whole country. [….]
S:  Thank you for reading my article and making it clear both that you are not personally "concerned with achieving the highest possible degree of proportionality" and that you believe that it would not "have much traction" in the UK or Canada.  Correctly, you also say that "other factors have to be taken into account".  However, exactly what "other factors" do you have in mind?  How do these require or justify not giving each citizen's one vote equal power within the legislature?  Does this rejection only stem from APR’s departure from the existing traditions and practices that you “like”? Can you or anyone else also justify your rejection of APR’s “highest possible degree of proportionality" using a rational argument based on principle?
I look forward to all feedback.
Thank you,
Steve
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