[EM] Open letter to STAR voting promoters

[robert bristow-johnson]

> On 06/06/2024 12:55 AM EDT Chris Benham <cbenhamau at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> 
> > What rhyme or reason is used to determine where the Approval cutoff is?
> 
> The idea is to give the voters as much freedom to rank among unapproved 
> candidates as among approved ones.
> 
> Also it is supposed to be analogous with grades children are given at 
> school, where A B C is a "pass" and D E F is a "fail".

Gee, that's a good reason to base legislation for grown-ups on.

>  It shouldn't be kept a secret from the voters that this is how 
> their grading will be interpreted.

Yeah, but it's not so much about communicating the rules to the voters, but imposing or defining the rules.  Just because we can communicate the rule to the voters does not make it a sensible rule.

Here's a rule I like: FPTP ballots, but we elect the candidate with the second-greatest number of votes.  Let's communicate that clearly to the voters, so they can well consider their well-informed vote.  That transparency inoculates it from being a bad rule.

If multi-winner, we elect the candidates with most votes *except* the single candidate with the plurality of votes.  That won't bring on any strategic or tactical voting.  Voters can just vote sincerely and not worry about regretting their vote.

> I'm not necessarily a huge fan of this particular balloting rule. I find 
> it a bit too restrictive.  If there are five candidates I should be free 
> to strictly rank all of them and approve all but one.

I think you mentioned earlier the idea of counting *any* ranked candidate an approval.  Only candidates completely unranked are not approved.  This criteria makes a little sense because of some consistency in meaning.

But I would be at the other end, where I would count only the two highest-ranked candidates as "approved".  That's the first non-trivial expansion of inclusion over just the top-ranked candidate as "approved", which is equivalent to Condorcet-Plurality.  It's just that I think it's unlikely that you would approve anyone below your second-favorite, whom you might not really approve, anyway.  It's that they're the lessor evil.

But I dunno that I would like Condorcet-Approval at all.  It has to simple to explain in legislative language.  Maybe it should be MinMax.  But I still think that Condorcet-Plurality or Condorcet-TTR would be easiest to explain to legislators as to clear intent and function in the language that they are legislating.  The law should say what it means and mean what it says.

> But I do very much like the idea of Condorcet methods using some sort of 
> unlimited ranking ballot with an explicit approval cutoff (and meeting 
> the Double Defeat criterion).

I want it to be simple: "If more voters prefer A to B, let's not elect B if we can, at all, avoid it."  If we cannot avoid it, some other measure of voter support must be used.  The manner of that measure should make sense to the policy makers and the voters.  This is so that when someone loses, that candidate and the voters for that candidate can understand and accept why they lost.

I'm starting to think that Condorcet-TTR will be the easiest to explain to people why the candidate elected was the candidate with the most consistent voter support.

> But you are apparently allergic to that idea.  Do you think this 
> attitude of yours would be widespread in the US?

I think this, elections in non-corrupt participatory democracies should have these principles:

1. Equality of citizenship and wide enfranchisement to citizens
2. Well-warned elections
3. Equal and unhindered access to the polls for everyone
4. The secret ballot
5. One-person-one-vote, the equality of the value of our vote
6. Majority rule
7. Process transparency, deterministic outcome
8. Peaceful transfer of power, rule of law. 

Them's be principles.

Also...

A. Voters and policy makers understandably are skeptical about changing the rules to a system that has been in use for centuries.  They need to understand *why* a change makes things better.  And they may wonder if the change is a sneaky maneuver by some interest group to make new rules to help themselves out.  Like let's change the rules to require a $40 poll tax.  Who's that gonna help?

B. I am unabashedly in favor of strict equality of our franchise and vote and every angle of the notion "One-person-one-vote".  That's why Condorcet.  Whenever someone is elected that is not the Condorcet winner, then, for certain, some minority group of voters had their votes counting with more effect than a larger group of voters that preferred someone else for election.  And then, for certain, the election was spoiled (there is a loser whose presence in the race materially changed the outcome).

C. I don't want voters to have to think that they gotta calculate how to vote to promote their own political interests.  Who do you most want elected?  Mark that candidate #1.  Now, if that candidate wasn't around and you had to choose from the remaining pool, then who do you most want elected?  Mark them #2.  It shouldn't be any more complicated than that.  And voters should be able to rest easy that they didn't shoot themselves in the foot by coming to the poll and voting.  Voters should feel confident that if they cannot get their first choice elected, their *full* voting power will go toward their second choice.  It shouldn't matter what chronological order candidates are "eliminated".  There should be no chronological elimination.

D. For process transparency, we need a redundancy of tabulation of the vote in elections with the public, the media, competing campaigns able to also determine the winner of an election quickly (like election night) from publicly available data posted at the source (the precincts).  At the precinct level, the ballot box (this would include the tabulator machine that the ballots go in) must be the only section in the data path that is opaque.  It must be opaque to provide for the secrecy of our individual vote.  (Can you imagine of candidate totals were displayed on a board and we could see them increment just after a ballot was inserted?).

So the precinct posts vote tallies that can be publicly inspected and this essentially commits the government to those numbers except for a very few provisional ballots that are later adjudicated to be valid and counted.  We all know what those numbers are and they won't change much.  This prevents any corrupt high election official from "finding, uh, 11780 votes".  There is no way that they can pad the numbers without someone else noticing.  This is Precinct Summability and the decentralization of the tabulation of the vote.

Only the section of the data path where the ballots go into a box and, at the end of the day, a printout of tallies comes out of the box, *only* there is process opacity.  And that can be scrutinized with courts ordering recounts and ballot bags can have their seals broken and be opened and ballots recounted to verify what was originally posted at any specific precinct.  But after the precinct posting summable tallies, then no other part of the process should be opaque.  It should all be transparent.  If all precincts report tallies on election night, no one should be surprised about who is later certified the winner by authorities (unless it's extremely close and a recount including adjudicated provisional ballots flips the outcome).

E. The methodology should also be transparent.  The law should say what it means and mean what is says.  This is why I'm for the two-method Condorcet where the first method is simply applying the Condorcet criterion.  And the contingency method (if no CW) should also be transparent that voters and policy makers understand and agree to the basis or measure of voter support used to determine which candidate has the most voter support.  Then the application of the method should be mindless - just an algorithm.

Really, the reason I'm for Condorcet RCV is simple basic principles of democracy.

> Haven't a lot of people got accustomed to giving out simple 
> "Like/Dislike" binary ratings on the internet?

But it's not about what (or who) we like on the internet.  It's about a collective decision to choose who we give the keys to the government to.

--

r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj at audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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