[EM] Scientific American and the "Perfect Electoral System"
Richard Lung
voting at ukscientists.com
Mon Nov 6 01:17:12 PST 2023
My response to this "perfect system" issue has nearly always (apart from
the generosity of Forest Simmons) beeen ignored, or occasionally
denigrated in various ways.
The paradox of social choice theory, as Scientific American refers to,
is that it disproves what it fails to define. The result of democracy as
dictatorship is Orwellian. Theorem Arrow does not define democracy but
what JS Mill (and Lani Guinier) called maiorocracy or the tyranny of the
majority. This is the basic problem of the American debate. It is
fixated on single-member systems, which cannot be democratic, and cannot
achieve more than the barest sufficiency of democracy, let alone
"perfection." No matter how many times Joe Biden repeats that the US is
a democracy.
In scrambling for these single-seat dominations, Anglo-American debate
has become candidate-centred and not voter-centred, as it should be.
America is an undignified two-party divide, rather than the proud union
it intended to be. And this is a direct result of the obvious method of
a non-transferable vote for one winner. As was predicted over a century
ago (by HG Wells) this was bound to gravitate to a two-sided system.
The same is true of the party list systems, their non-transferable party
proportional votes leading to first party past the post systems, in
forming coalitions, on the back of relative majorities of as little as
20% odd or 30% odd of the votes cast.
Regards,
Richard Lung.
On 06/11/2023 07:29, Rob Lanphier wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I just wrote a letter to the editor(s) of Scientific American, which
> I've included below. My letter was in a response to the following
> article that was recently published on their website:
> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-how-math-could-design-the-perfect-electoral-system/
>
> Y'all may have other thoughts on the article.
>
> Rob
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: *Rob Lanphier* <roblan at gmail.com>
> Date: Sun, Nov 5, 2023 at 11:22 PM
> Subject: Regarding using math to create a "Perfect Electoral System"
> To: Scientific American Editors <editors at sciam.com>
>
>
> To whom it may concern:
>
> I appreciate your article "Could Math Design the Perfect Electoral
> System?", since I agree that math is important for understanding
> electoral reform, and there's a lot of good information and great
> diagrams in your article:
> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-how-math-could-design-the-perfect-electoral-system/
>
> There's some things that the article gets wrong, but the good news is
> that the article title and its relation to Betteridge's law. This law
> states "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by
> the word /'/no/'/." The bad news: the URL slug
> ("see-how-math-could-design-the-perfect-electoral-system") implies the
> answer is "yes". The answer is "no"; Kenneth Arrow and Allan Gibbard
> proved there is no perfect electoral system (using math).
>
> I appreciate that your article highlights the mayoral election in
> Burlington, Vermont in 2009. That is an important election for all
> voters considering FairVote's favorite single-winner system
> ("instant-runoff voting" or rather "ranked-choice voting, as they now
> call it). When I volunteered with FairVote in the late 1990s, I
> remember when they introduced the term "instant-runoff voting". I
> thought the name was fine. After Burlington 2009, it would seem that
> FairVote has abandoned the name. Regardless, anyone considering
> instant-runoff needs to consider Burlington's experience.
>
> Sadly, your article describes "cardinal methods" in a confusing
> manner. It erroneously equates cardinal's counterpart ("ordinal
> voting") with "ranked-choice voting". Intuitively, all "ordinal
> methods" should be called "ranked choice voting", but during this
> century, the term has been popularized by FairVote and the city of San
> Francisco to refer to a specific method formerly referred to as
> "instant-runoff voting". These days, when Americans speak of "RCV",
> they're generally referring to the system known on English Wikipedia
> as "IRV" (or "Instant-runoff voting"):
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
>
> There have been many methods that use ranked ballots, including the
> methods developed by Nicolas de Condorcet and Jean-Charles de Borda in
> the 1780s and the 1790s. I'm grateful that the Marquis de Condorcet's
> work is featured so prominently in your article. Condorcet's work was
> brilliant, and I'm sure he would have become more prominent if he
> hadn't died in a French prison in the 1790s. Many single-winner
> methods that strictly comply with the "Condorcet winner criterion" are
> probably as close to "perfect" as any system (from a mathematical
> perspective).
>
> Most methods that pass the "Condorcet winner criterion" typically use
> ranked ballots (and thus are "ordinal"), but it's important to note
> that almost all "ordinal" methods can use cardinal ballots.
> Instant-runoff voting doesn't work very well with cardinal ballots
> (because tied scores cannot be allowed), but most other ordinal
> systems work perfectly well with tied ratings or rankings. Even
> though passing the Condorcet winner criterion is very important, there
> are many methods that come very, very close in reasonable
> simulations. I would strongly recommend that you contact Dr. Ka-Ping
> Yee, who is famous in electoral reform circles for "Yee diagrams":
> https://electowiki.org/wiki/Yee_diagram
> (a direct link to Yee's 2005 paper: http://zesty.ca/voting/sim/ )
>
> Note that "approval voting" and "Condorcet" provide pretty much the
> same results in Yee's 2005 paper. "Instant-runoff voting" seems a
> little crazy in Yee's simulations.
>
> Though Arrow and Gibbard disproved "perfection", I prefer to think of
> Arrow's and Gibbard's work as defining the physics of election
> methods. To explain what I mean, consider the physics of personal
> transportation. It is impossible to design the PERFECT vehicle (that
> is spacious, and comfortable, travels faster than the speed of light,
> fits in anyone's garage or personal handbag). Newton and Einstein
> more-or-less proved it. However, those esteemed scientists' work
> didn't cause us to stop working on improvements in personal
> transportation. Buggy whips are now (more or less) recognized as
> obsolete, as is Ford's "Model T".
>
> Now that Arrow and Gibbard have helped us understand the physics of
> election methods, we can hopefully start pursuing alternatives to the
> buggy whip (or rather, alternatives to "choose-one" voting systems,
> often referred to as "first past the post" systems).
>
> This gets me to the statement from your article that gets under my
> skin the most::
>
> This is called cardinal voting, or range voting, and although it’s
> no panacea and has its own shortcomings, it circumvents the
> limitations imposed by Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which only
> applies to ranked choice voting.
>
> People who study election methods refer to "cardinal voting" as a
> /category/ of voting methods, of which "range voting" is just one
> (which is called "score voting" on English Wikipedia):
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Score_voting
>
> The conflation of "ranked choice voting" with all ordinal voting
> methods is also highly problematic (though I don't entirely blame you
> for this). As I stated earlier, there are many methods that can use
> ranked ballots. While this article may have been helpful for those of
> us that prefer ranking methods that are not "instant-runoff voting"
> back when FairVote switched to "ranked-choice voting" in the early
> 2010s. Note that before the fiasco in Burlington in 2009, FairVote
> pretty consistently preferred "instant runoff voting":
> https://web.archive.org/web/20091111061523/http://www.fairvote.org/
>
> I appreciate that you're trying to explain this insanely complicated
> topic to your readers. When I edit English Wikipedia (which I've done
> for over twenty years), I would love to be able to cite Scientific
> American on this topic. However, I'm not yet sure I'd feel good about
> citing this article.
>
> Rob Lanphier
> Founder of election-methods mailing list and electowiki.org
> <http://electowiki.org>
> https://robla.net
> https://electowiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RobLa
>
> p.s. back in the late 1990s, I wrote an article for a small tech
> journal called "The Perl Journal". It's out of print, but I've
> reproduced my 1996 article about election methods which I think holds
> up pretty well:
> https://robla.net/1996/TPJ
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - seehttps://electorama.com/em for list info
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