[EM] Scientific American and the "Perfect Electoral System"

Tue Nov 7 21:24:10 PST 2023

Hi Forest,

Thanks for the kind words!  I decided to create a blog post with my letter
to the editor in it:
<
https://robla.blog/2023/11/06/scientific-american-and-the-perfect-electoral-system/
>

I also recently posted about my blog post on reddit:
<
https://www.reddit.com/r/EndFPTP/comments/17qb6fx/my_letter_to_the_editor_of_scientific_american/
>

...and some conversation has started there.

As I noted in my blog post, I may have been a bit too harsh in my letter to
Scientific American.  As I noted, they do at least introduce Condorcet and
alternatives to RCV/IRV, and it seems like they TRIED to be accurate.
Election methods are an incredibly complicated topic, especially given just
how much motivated (and faulty) reasoning is out there in many essays
published by "respectable" sources.  I hope you're right that my letter may
clear a little confusion (and not introduce more confusion).   We'll see!

Thanks again!
Rob

On Mon, Nov 6, 2023 at 8:29 PM Forest Simmons <forest.simmons21 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Rob,
>
> Thanks for clearing up a lot  of the confusion... and for putting the
> current status in perspective.
>
> I like the comparison of the "impossibilities of voting" with the
> impossibilities of faster than light travel, etc.  The 2nd law of
> thermodynamics is especially relevant... because as Prigogene showed in the
> 70's, the impossibility of decreasing entropy in closed systems still
> allows for local pockets of possibility ... that make life possible ....
> until the "heat death" of our island space-time big bang remnant ... while
> miriads of new "inflationary bubbles" appear from random virtual quantum
> fluctuations.
>
> We used to "know" that the event horizon was a boundary of no return ....
> nut now evaporation of black holes through quantum tunneling is taken for
> granted.
>
> In the early 1800's Gauss proved the impossibility of trisecting an
> arbitrarily given angle .... inside the rules of classical geometric ruler
> and compass constructions.
>
> But it turns out that (as any first year topology student can show) any
> angle can be transformed into atrisectable one by an arbitrarily small
> perturbation.
>
> I'm fact, once you learn the binary point expansion of 1/3 ..., you can
> get within a relative error tolerance of 1/2^n precision with n
> bisections... bisections being the first constructions you learn in
> geometty.
>
> Pockets of possibility like these .... adequate "For All Practical
> Purposes" pervade mathematics ... including the mathematics of voting
> systems.
>
> Sometimes you have to discover new tools not included in the classical
> tool kit. In  the case of angle trisections, if you are allowed to make a
> few marks on the ruler... hen the general ruler and compass trisection
> suddenly resolves itself.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Forest
>
> On Sun, Nov 5, 2023, 11:34 PM Rob Lanphier <roblan at gmail.com> 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
>> 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 - see https://electorama.com/em for list
>> info
>>
>
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