[EM] Clarity of Principle

[Michael Ossipoff]

Incidentally, of course Congress would never make such an effort. For some
reason 🤩our “leaders” would never make such an effort, because, for some
reason, they don’t like PR.

…which was why Bill Clinton fired his cabinet-member for mentioning PR,
because, he said, PR it antidocratic.  :-)

…more generally, similarly, N. Dakota legislature canceled the initiative
enactment of Approval Voting, & outlawed Approval & rank balloting, saying
that they did so to protect the rights of the people who had tried to get
the right to express Yes/No ratings on more than 1 candidate & have them
counted.

On Sun, Oct 15, 2023 at 13:07 Michael Ossipoff <email9648742 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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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