[EM] Clarity of principle.

[Richard Lung]

Clarity on principles

Dear EM list,

If a thing needs doing, there is no point in complaining about it being 
hard. This was a point made by Winston Churchill.

The US Constitution could not ban an election system, not invented till 
the next century.

At least, those who introduced a quota-preferential bill to Congress 
apparently didn’t think so. And what the cities could do, surely the 
federal government also could.

State-level suppression of local autonomy in introducing proportional 
representation, notably Massachusetts state banning other cities, in the 
state, than Cambridge from using STV/PR, was not a constitutional 
decision, but only so far as brute force could go, by way of arbitrary 
self-will without principles.

Therefore, the way forward is a principled one. My advice, such as it 
is, to any electoral reform proposal, as that made by Forest, is that it 
needs to be clear on the principles on which it operates, so that 
politicians can be clear to the public, on the kind of election they are 
being offered.

The incorporation of the Borda method in a recommendation involves the 
first recognition (by Laplace) that lesser preferences count less.

This was in direct contradiction to the systematic elimination count 
offered by Condorcet. The advantage of this pioneering debate was that 
it offered a clear choice between all-inclusive weighted preference 
count and exclusive unweighted preference count. Only the former offers 
the Laplacerequirement to count preference order of importance.

One problem I had was that weighted Condorcet pairing, counting each 
margin of victory, was about as accurate as Borda method, as one could 
tell by inspection, even of a very narrow contest.

I have now come to the conclusion that weighted Condorcet pairing is 
effectively (on average) a weighted preference order count, first 
required by Laplace.

Each voters preference is not suitably weighted by order of importance. 
Instead, the lack of weighted orders of preference for each voter is 
made up for, firstly by the fact that all the votes (at any order of 
choice) are equally or indiscriminately treated in this manner, but, on 
average, a collective order of preference emerges, in the margins of 
victory for each candidate pairing.

However, what might be called Condorcet implicit preference weighting 
has its limitations. It does not reflect personal orders of preference 
for personal representation. And it changes with who votes in the 
electorate.

Never the less, weighted Condorcet pairing, to some extent vindicates 
(collectively) weighted order of preference. But in doing so, it 
reinforces the case against unweighted elimination counts. Hence 
weighted Condorcet pairing may be approximately as accurate as the Borda 
count, both in principle and in practise for the single member case.

An advantage of a Binomial count, a rational count for the exclusion, 
equally as well as the election, of candidates, is that it can apply to 
single-member as well as multi-member constituencies. (I.e. a binomial 
count offers the consistency of a general theory of elections.) The 
necessary practical consideration is thatall the preferences (including 
abstentions) are counted, so it is known how much the voters wish to 
elect or exclude the candidates. The consideration of principle is to 
introduce and uphold the law of conservation of (preferential) information.

Regards,

Richard Lung.
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