[EM] Clarity of principle.

[Michael Ossipoff]

But I guess that Congress could enact a House so big that even the smallest
state proportionally qualifies for a seat…but that doesn’t really help,
because we still have to have a Senate in which each state has exactly 2
seats.

So, national PR would remain nonsense.

On Sun, Oct 15, 2023 at 12:41 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Richard—
>
> I must confess that it isn’t entirely clear what you’re talking about.
>
> I didn’t say that the Constitution explicitly bans PR.
>
> I said that it’s requirements would make nonsense of any attempt at PR in
> national government.
>
> As for your Condorcet vs Borda issue, perhaps you aren’t aware that CTE &
> Duncan ( like MinMax(wv) & CW,Approval) are Condorcet methods. They use
> Borda as part of their mechanism to disqualify the buriers’ candidate in
> order to deter burial strategy.
>
> On Sun, Oct 15, 2023 at 09:06 Richard Lung <voting at ukscientists.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>>  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 Laplace
>> requirement 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 that  all 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.
>> ----
>> Election-Methods mailing list - see https://electorama.com/em for list
>> info
>>
>
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