[EM] St. Louis and Pushover (Re: Reply to Rob regarding RCV)

Tue Sep 26 21:39:35 PDT 2023

Hi Chris

Regarding former St. Louis resident Lewis Reed's preference of voting
system, I'm not sure.  I suspect he was selling his preference to the
highest bidder, and since he was still the President of the St. Louis Board
of Aldermen, he presumably had influence in STL politics (until the bribery
case in court made him politically radioactive).  Whatever remaining
influence Reed may still have is waning with every day he spends in an
Arkansas prison, where I believe he lives today. Something tells me that
electoral reform is the least of Reed's worries in 2023.

Regarding approval's potential vulnerability to pushover when used in a
top-two primary, I'm personally not very concerned about the theoretical
possibility.  Perhaps in the far future, we'll have really sophisticated
voters who understand how to strategically influence the primary in a way
that causes top-two approval to fail in a way that causes problems.  My
sense is that St. Louis (which uses top-two approval) has bigger problems
than sophisticated attempts at "pushover"

I believe that St. Louis voters just wanted a good mayor in 2021, and
approved many competitors to Lewis Reed (including Tishaura Jones and Cara
Spencer).  From my analysis, it looks like the wealthier voters in the
southern portion of St. Louis (i.e. the type that pay handsomely for
produce at farmers' markets in mall parking lots on the weekends to assuage
their guilt for the collapse of the independent farming in the United
States) voted for Cara Spencer.  The voters in the northern part of the
city (in the floodplain at the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi
Rivers, which USUALLY doesn't flood very much) voted for Tishaura Jones.
Given the demographics of St. Louis (43% Black, 42.9% non-Hispanic White,
5.1% Hispanic, 4.1% Asian, 1.0% Hispanic White), it seems like a Tishaura
Jones was a great choice to succeed their longtime White mayor.  Northern
St. Louis is largely Black and Hispanic, and it's in really rough shape,
despite having some fantastic old brick houses and lots of fantastic real
estate that is available for very little money (see <
https://youtu.be/SPyjYQALnrE>).  Jones is the first Black mayor of St.
Louis since 2001, and third Black mayor that the city has ever had (and the
first Black woman in the role).

Based on my cursory research, I'm not sure the "pushover" phenomenon is
well known outside of the jargon-speaking electoral reform community (and
perhaps not even here).  Note that the electowiki section about pushover
has no citations, and the "push over" section of a similar article on
English Wikipedia even has the infamous "citation needed" tag:

   - https://electowiki.org/wiki/Tactical_voting#Pushover
   -
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_manipulation_of_runoff_voting#Push_over

Note: the "Push over" section appears to have had the "citation needed"
banner on it since 2009, which means that said banner is almost old enough
to get its driver's licence in many places.  I have a hard time taking the
criterion too seriously given that it doesn't seem to warrant its own
article on English Wikipedia.  It seems all of the important ones have
articles:

   -
   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_electoral_systems#Compliance_of_selected_single-winner_methods

A question for Chris (anyone who cares to answer), what's the best
explanation of pushover at a public URL that seems reasonably academically
rigorous (e.g. something that seems like it would pass muster as a citation
on English Wikipedia)?

Rob

p.s. having driven through St. Louis many times (and even stayed there a
couple of nights), it's not hard to guess where the powers-that-be drew the
red lines:
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/366759e8b76c46efbf6ff9e8fff3ac0b

On Mon, Sep 25, 2023 at 6:53 PM C.Benham <cbenham at adam.com.au> wrote:

> Rob,
>
> I was recently made aware of a paper published by researchers at Yale that
> suggests that RCV makes polarization and extremism even more likely:https://isps.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/di-pb-2-3-23-v3.pdf
>
> I haven't read the paper yet, and I could be summarizing it incorrectly,
> but it matches my intuition about RCV.
>
>
> Unfortunately that is probably true.  The conclusion of the paper includes
> this weird absurd statement:
>
> When a Condorcet Loser exists, RCV may weaken her electoral prospects for
> some primitives, but we unearth contexts in which the candidates’ strategic
> choices offset RCV’s  benefits from second preferences to such a degree
> that a Condorcet loser’s victory prospects may increase, relative to
> plurality.
>
>
> Lewis Reed was one of the first on the bandwagon to repeal approval voting:https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/effort-underway-to-repeal-approval-voting-in-st-louis-replace-it-with-new-system/article_2c3bad65-1e46-58b6-8b9f-1d7f49d0aaeb.html
>
> I got to read that Lewis Reed was in favour of repealing Approval voting
> in favour of "a new system", but not any more unless I wanted to subscribe.
> Is that "new system" RCV?
>
> If so, that would be a big improvement over Approval Top-Two-Runoff.
> That is much more vulnerable  to Push-over incentive than RCV.  It loses
> compliance with Favorite Betrayal, which is one of
> plain Approval's main selling points.
>
> It would be much less bad if the runoff was between the Approval winner
> and the candidate most approved on ballots that don't approve the Approval
> winner.
>
> Chris Benham
>
>
> [EM] Reply to Rob regarding RCV *Rob Lanphier* roblan at gmail.com
> <election-methods%40lists.electorama.com?Subject=Re%3A%20%5BEM%5D%20Reply%20to%20Rob%20regarding%20RCV&In-Reply-To=%3CCAK9hOYk%2BKZJ4Ms5ygvaLXw9iKxc_GQAQhjAvaaK%3DB8-0PgG-ag%40mail.gmail.com%3E>
> *Sun Sep 24 23:00:58 PDT 2023*
>
>
>    -
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Hi Michael,
>
> I've been letting this thread go without me, even though my first name is
> in the title (and presumably doesn't refer to the ED of Fairvote or the CEO
> of RealNetworks).
>
> I think I largely agree with Kristofer Munsterhjelm and Forest Simmons in
> this thread, but admittedly, I've only skimmed the conversation
> (which...has a lot of words).  Earlier this weekend, was inspired to copy
> over some prose from English Wikipedia to create the following page because
> of your mention of "L02E":https://electowiki.org/wiki/LO2E
>
> It would seem that you are deep into the community/tribe of the Greens
> based on this quote:
> "Greens win all of our non-mass-media polls."
>
> I don't think the Greens are a mainstream party.  They seem to be quite
> happy being a niche party complaining about how the Democrats are not as
> pro-socialism and pro-environment as they are.  I'm going to guess that the
> Greens are fighting for fully compostable voting booths right now, and for
> all of the weapons used by the police and the military to be fully
> compostable.  You know, the important stuff  ;-)
>
> I have two sets of recommendations based on whether discussing
> single-winner reform or mult-winner reform.
>
>    - STV for multi-winner elections -- I like the proportional aspect of
>    STV, and the biggest problems of STV are masked by its strength at
>    selecting multiple candidates proportionally.  I suspect that's why the
>    Greens are super into it.  The Greens probably look at European democracies
>    and at Australian/New Zealand politics and believe that STV is FANTASTIC.
>    But if one imagines a circular, 2D space where voters' beliefs are
>    scattered throughout it, then I would suggest that STV is great at
>    selecting candidates near the perimeter of the space (proportionally
>    equidistantly around the edge), but does a poor job of picking candidates
>    in the middle of the space.
>    - Approval, STAR, or a Condorcet-consistent method for single-winner
>    reform -- this is how we plug the donut hole created by STV, and get .
>    We're polarized enough as a country (here in the U.S.) such that it's going
>    to be difficult for people who identify as Democrat/liberal/left-wing are
>    going to have a difficult time trusting anyone who is
>    Republican/conservative/right-wing.  I'm cautiously optimistic that Dr.
>    Nicolaus Tideman's Condorcet group will actually start a well-funded
>    organization to match the organizations behind Approval (the Center for
>    Election Science) and STAR (the Equal.Vote Coalition).  Very cautiously
>    optimistic.  I think that ANYONE starting a new group may underestimate the
>    challenges of doing so.  I also generally trust that Dr. Ka-Ping Yee did
>    the analysis correctly in 2005 (<https://electowiki.org/wiki/Yee_diagram>),
>    and that Approval and Condorcet-consistent methods perform roughly
>    equivalently.
>
> Having met some folks I like from FairVote (they exist...or at least, they
> did in 2018 or so), I believe their analysis regarding
> Condorcet-consistency of past IRV/RCV (i.e. the vast majority have picked
> the Condorcet winner).  However, my fear is that we're going to see
> more-and-more close RCV elections in the very near future.  Most
> responsible political organizations hire quants to crunch numbers (if they
> have the money to do it), and/or listen to their quant volunteers who offer
> compelling data-backed advice.  EVERYONE is against corruption (right-wing
> voters and left-wing voters), and hence why I suspect Tishuara Jones and
> Cara Spencer both clobbered Lewis Reed in the first St. Louis mayoral
> primary using approval (<https://electowiki.org/wiki/2021_St._Louis_mayoral_election>).
>
> Lewis Reed was one of the first on the bandwagon to repeal approval voting:https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/effort-underway-to-repeal-approval-voting-in-st-louis-replace-it-with-new-system/article_2c3bad65-1e46-58b6-8b9f-1d7f49d0aaeb.html
>
> However, I wouldn't be surprised if it was an open secret among St. Louis
> voters that Lewis Reed was on the take (including Republican, Democratic,
> Green, and Libertarian voters among others):https://www.ksdk.com/article/news/politics/newly-released-photos-show-st-louis-aldermen-lewis-reed-jeffrey-boyd-john-collins-muhammad-taking-thousands-in-bribes/63-e17024ae-eba0-4f6a-af9c-adeaa1d2a04c
>
> I have no idea if it was corruption, incompetence, or both when it comes to
> Bob Kiss in Burlington Vermont in 2009.  I'm virtually certain, though,
> that the numbers show he primarily appealed to his base, and only threw his
> his opponents (even a substantial number of Democrats) a bone:https://electowiki.org/wiki/2009_Burlington_mayoral_election
>
> And mind you, this was with all of the advantages of incumbency.  If Kiss
> was any good at his job from 2006 until 2009, he should have won the 2009
> election in a landslide.  The fact that he won in 2006 (and was presumably
> Condorcet winner in that election), and then wasn't able to pull together
> THE SAME VOTERS in 2009 who ranked him first place in 2006 just goes to
> show that there was a lot of regret about him.  The biggest problem in this
> election was that many Republican voters ranked Montroll (a Democrat), Dan
> Smith (an independent), and even Jason Simpson (a Green) higher than Kiss.
> But because of the way the rules worked, their preferences with respect to
> all of the candidates other than Kiss were ignored BECAUSE Republican Kurt
> Wright made it to the last round.  They would have gotten one of their
> compromise candidates (e.g. Andy Montroll) if Kiss had not been as popular.
>
> I've thought about that election a lot, because I've put myself in the
> shoes of the Wright voters, and just imagine if Kurt Wright was the
> vaguely-left-of-center Democrat, and Montroll was a vaguely right-of-center
> Republican, and Bob Kiss was a far-right extremist who managed to get
> elected to his first term because of a new election method.  I would have
> been pissed if the same system RE-ELECTED the crazy right-winger, even
> though Kiss's support CLEARLY eroded since the initial election.  But
> (flipping the electoral spectrum back around) it would seem that Burlington
> repealed IRV because it didn't do its job (i.e. letting the opposition to
> the incumbent have some say).
>
> I was recently made aware of a paper published by researchers at Yale that
> suggests that RCV makes polarization and extremism even more likely:https://isps.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/di-pb-2-3-23-v3.pdf
>
> I haven't read the paper yet, and I could be summarizing it incorrectly,
> but it matches my intuition about RCV.  We discussed the paper quite a bit
> at Sass's weekly Open Democracy Discussion a week or two ago:https://electowiki.org/wiki/Sass_Open_Democracy_Discussion
>
> I'll probably be attending again this coming Tuesday as I often do.  All
> y'all are welcome to join, and if you join, you can learn more about it
> from some of the people who likely have read it (or you might learn about
> other research).
>
> Rob
>
>
>
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