[EM] 28 years of progress and a wakeup call

[robert bristow-johnson]

> On 05/22/2024 5:00 PM EDT Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
> 
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> 
> A very simple modification to IRV would be Condorcet//IRV. Do you think 
> that could work? Benham is better but needs more explanation.
> 

As I have said, I have sorta soured on the "modify IRV language to make it Condorcet consistent" approach.  The simplest Condorcet-consistent modification to Hare IRV is BTR-IRV.  I'm pretty sure that is.

Okay, I will try to stick with the semantics from Wikipedia:

* Condorcet methods fit within two categories:

** Two-method systems, which use a separate method to handle cases in which there is no Condorcet winner.
** One-method systems, which use a single method that, without any special handling, always identifies the winner to be the Condorcet winner.

I think that they call that "separate method" a "completion method".  At least this Canadian MP does: https://condorcet.ca/ .

No the advantage of a One-method Condorcet system is that it doesn't need a completion method in the legislative language and we're done with it.  If there is no CW, we just take what we get.  I think that BTR-IRV might be the simplest One-method Condorcet system to encode into law with words.  Probably the One-method system I would prefer most, if I were king of the world, would be Ranked-Pairs.  (Still agnostic about Working Votes vs. Margins.)  But I am not sure we can get Ranked Pairs passed into law.

But I think that transparency in marketing is important, because this is one of my biggest criticisms of FairVote.  So I see some value in the Two-method Condorcet systems because the first method is the simple application of the Condorcet criterion to examination of every single pairing of candidates:

1. Begin with every candidate not labeled as a loser.

2. For every possible pairing of candidates; if more voters mark their ballots ranking Candidate A higher than Candidate B than the number of voters marking their ballots ranking Candidate B higher than Candidate A, then Candidate B is labeled a loser.

3. After examination of every pairing of candidates, the candidate left not labeled a loser is the candidate elected.

4. If, after examination of every pairing of candidates, no candidate is not labeled a loser then the following Completion Method determines which candidate is elected:

(Condorcet-Plurality --- 5. Completion method: The candidate with the Plurality of first-choice rankings is elected

(Or Condorcet-TTR --- 5. Completion method: The two candidates with the most first-choice rankings shall face each other in a runoff in which the candidate that has more voters ranking that candidate higher than the other candidate is elected.)

Now this Condorcet-TTR is going to work very much like Condorcet-IRV, but it doesn't refer to all of the IRV semantics, just for the sake of a completion method.  Can't that be good enough?

I really don't want policy makers and public thinking that we're trying to pull a sophisticated scam over them.  I want these people to see that we're applying the Condorcet principle directly to the election tallies.

And then we simply have to explain to them that, when excrement hits the fan and there is no Condorcet winner, we do the best that we can and blame this on Arrow, et. al.  We make a decision, with simple principles, about which candidate has the best claim to having the most voter support, even though we know there is always going to be another more preferred and there will be a spoiler, no matter who we elect.

Unlike MO and CLC, I am not concerned about a "feeding-frenzy 🦈 of burial."  Cycles are going to be extremely rare and spotty.  And when they happen, there will be no little deception; we'll be clear that there is no Condorcet winner and that we have to elect someone who isn't the CW and that in this contingency there are prior agreed-to rules that spell out who that is.

See, the problem is FairVote advocates a simpler One-method system (that doesn't always elect the CW even when such exists).  Simple method (more complicated than FPTP), but no simple principle.  What's the one-sentence principle (that's actually true) that describes IRV?  There isn't any.  Why should we fight and die on the hill for IRV?  At least FPTP has a very simple principle: "Candidate with the most votes is elected."

Condorcet has a simple, one-sentence principle that defines it and it's a hard ethic to disagree with:  If more voters mark their ballots preferring A to B, then what possibly can justify electing B?  IRV or even STAR advocates have to answer that, and they cannot.  If we can, at all, avoid it, there is no good reason to elect B.  Doing so will directly inflate the effectiveness of votes coming from the B voters over those of the A voters and we will not have equally-valued votes.  Not One-person-one-vote at the end of the day.

So Condorcet expresses a better, clearer principle of democracy than does Hare.  Or Borda.  Or FPTP.  Or STAR.  Or Approval.  What is needed is legislative language that doesn't scare the policy makers nor the public away.  And IRV and STAR have also scared away some people because of the perceived complexity of the method in legislation.  I don't want Condorcet language to be unnecessarily complex and not opaque at all.  (Like Schulze and some of these other ideas of your, Kristofer, would be opaque.  They are not sufficiently concise.)  I want people to know exactly what they are getting with the language defining the method encoded in law.

--

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

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

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