[EM] Defeat Strength

robert bristow-johnson rbj at audioimagination.com
Sun Sep 4 18:49:38 PDT 2022



> On 09/04/2022 9:25 PM EDT Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> "Equity" was not the apt word. There are many kinds of fairness, as the subject of fair division makes clear, what I try to aim for is the kind  of fairness that minimizes reasonable people thinking that the rules were stacked against them from the start ... an admittedly nebulous concept.
> 

I think there are some democratic principles that ain't so nebulous.

> ...
> I once suggested something called "ranked rankings" that (like Borda) removes the burden of numerical quantification from the voter .. who is only required to supply a rough relative strength preference between alternatives:
> 
> A=B>C>D>>>E>>F=G, for example.
>
> A and B would both get 100% approval whileF and G would each get zero.
> The separation between B and C, and C and D would both be X, while the separation between D and E would be 3x, and between E and F would be 2x.
> 
> The total number of chevrons (the ">" symbols) is seven, so we must have
> 7X=100, which means x is 14 + 2/7 or approximately 14.3
>

How is this *not* a form of Score Voting?

This is where Condorcet and I differ from Borda (or Warren Smith).  I consider this a *principle*, not just a "desirable property" of elections in a democracy:

1. “One person, one vote”. Every enfranchised voter has an equal influence on government in elections because of our inherent equality as citizens and this is independent of any utilitarian notion of personal investment in the outcome. If I enthusiastically prefer Candidate A and you prefer Candidate B only tepidly, your vote for Candidate B counts no less (nor more) than my vote for A. The effectiveness of one’s vote – how much their vote counts – is not proportional to their degree of preference but is determined only by their franchise. A citizen with franchise has a vote that counts equally as much as any other citizen with franchise. For any ranked ballot, this means that if Candidate A is ranked higher than Candidate B then that is a vote for A, if only candidates A and B are contending (such as in the RCV final round). It doesn’t matter how many levels A is ranked higher than B, it counts as exactly one vote for A.
 
> The voter doesn't have to do any of this arithmetic, which allows the "ranked rankings" to be turned into ratings.
> 

How is it that the thoughtful voter, that considers the effect of their vote on the *count* of the votes that ultimately elects a candidate, can avoid this arithmetic?  I don't get it.

> If all of the rankings are of equal strength (one chevron each, say), 

Marks on a ballot don't have human rights (I liked how the North Dakota Supreme Court put it 111 years ago).  Enfranchised voters, as persons having equality under the law, must be the things that have equal strength.

> then the resulting ratings will agree with the normalized Borda scores. In other words, this way of counting "ranked rankings" style ballots is a precise generalization of Borda that satisfies clone independence (for all practical purposes).
> 
> In particular, there is no need to indicate strength of preference if they are all roughly equal in strength.
> 
> Does any version of this idea have any potential as a basis for a public proposal?
> 

I have a problem with Score Voting (or any cardinal voting) in public elections (and I know that Fargo ND, of all places, are doing Approval Voting).  I look at Borda as quasi-cardinal or "Score-Lite".

--

r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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