<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 9:40 AM, Jameson Quinn <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jameson.quinn@gmail.com">jameson.quinn@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
I just can't quit you...<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I won't quit you... </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br><div class="gmail_quote">
<div class="im">2012/2/1 David L Wetzell <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:wetzelld@gmail.com" target="_blank">wetzelld@gmail.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 11:03 PM, <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:election-methods-request@lists.electorama.com" target="_blank">election-methods-request@lists.electorama.com</a>></span> wrote:<br>
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">dlw: In the FPTP case, it trims the ability of dissenters to move the de facto center towards the true center. In the IRV case, it does the opposite, it penalizes the major parties when they do not move enough towards the true center.<br>
</blockquote>RBJ: again, that was not the case in Burlington. the center party was "squeezed" (as Jameson would say). the candidate in the center received nearly all of the 2nd-choice votes from voters who ranked one of either the left or right wing candidates 1st. it was relatively rare that the left-wing voter ranked the right-wing candidate as their 2nd choice and also vise versa. but the center candidate did not benefit from that because IRV is opaque to your 2nd choice if your 1st choice has not been eliminated. but, under Condorcet-compliant rules, the center candidate would have benefited greatly (and would be elected), so it can be said that Condorcet tends to favor the center candidate more (than either IRV or FPTP) whereas IRV tends to favor the largest subgroup (i.e. the Progs, in Burlington in 2009) of the majority group (liberals). and, we know, that FPTP gives the minority candidate the best chance they have of winning (they need a 3rd-party or 3rd independent candidate to draw votes away from what would be their majority opponent if the spoiler was not there).<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>dlw: But it is the case when you consider the incentives to vote strategically. If in FPTP, dissenters are under pressure not to spoil, in the IRV case, it's the supporters of the R party who are under pressure not to spoil. </div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div></div><div>Replace "IRV" with the plurality in the following two sentences. The argument remains just as valid. Since it demonstrably doesn't work for plurality, it won't work for IRV (and the same goes for IRV3).</div>
<div class="im">
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>IRV favors the "major party" (herein defined as one of the top two for an area) that is closest to the true center. It thereby goads the two major parties to move towards the center, where it is easier for minority groups to play them off of each other to get attention to their reasonable demands. </div>
</div></blockquote></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Yes, it sort of is true for FPP and this is the only reason we're able to get electoral reform, but that doesn't mean it won't work better for IRV. The number of voters whose votes count is increased so that there's less rope between the true center and the de facto center. And when both major parties are tending to position around the true center, as influenced by everyone, it is easier for minorities to play them off of each other. </div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="im"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">dlw: Most rational choice models implicit here take as fixed the position of candidates/parties on the spectrum, when in real life, this can be changed somewhat. This reduces the "badness" of strategic voting. It becomes less important thereby to devise an election rule that doesn't give any incentive to anyone to vote strategically.<br>
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the reason why i have never agreed with that is because people *resent* being saddled with the burden of voting tactically and particularly resent finding out ex-post facto that their sincere vote served their political interests more poorly than the tactical vote (the most common tactic is "compromising"). that resentment has consequences, one of which is a cloud hanging over the elected candidate as not being entirely "legitimate", not being the "true" choice of the electorate. but the worse consequence is that of holding back what would otherwise be viable independent or 3rd party candidates, sometimes leaving the voters with a choice between Dumb and Dumber. that is the *main* evil we're trying to avoid with voting system and ballot reform.<br>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>dlw: I think the main evil is the way the de facto center can get so detached from the true center. If a major party refuses to adapt, it's voters are not going to be happy. But regardless of whether they vote strategically or not, the momentum will be for the de facto center to approach the true center. At the end of the day, what matters is who gets elected(how close they are to the center) and the momentum caused by the election, not whether everyone votes sincerely and is happy with the outcome. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Single-winner elections will always tend not to elect 3rd party candidates. That's why we need a mix of single and multi-winner elections to sustain 3rd parties that give more exit threat to minorities and check the influence of $peech on both the major parties. </div>
<div><br></div><div>But as shown by Burlington, with IRV there can be turnover wrt who are the major parties and that is a significant improvement. </div></div></blockquote><div><br></div></div><div>????? Are you saying IRV prompted the Progs to collapse and the Dems to replace them? Because that would have happened without IRV. Or are you saying that it made the Progs relevant? Because that seems to have aborted, even though given that they won the last election it would make more sense for the Republicans to collapse.</div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I'm saying that if IRV had been continued the R would collapse and the Progs and Dems, perhaps reshuffled somewhat due to an influx of moderate Rs into the Dems, would have been the two major parties. Thus, there is turnover and it is more meritocratic who are the two top parties. </div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="im">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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we are *now* experiencing some of these consequences in Burlington. the Progs have decided not to run a candidate (the current mayor is or was a Prog and is not running for re-election). it looked for a while that there would be only two (Dem and GOP), but recently an independent candidate emerged and her political appeal is a lot like a Prog candidate (the Progs are not ashamed of sticking up for the poor and powerless whereas, ever since Reagan, Democrats have modified their rhetoric to be for "the middle class" so as not to sound "socialistic" or too "liberal", both were bad words and continue to be used disparagingly in American politics). so we are going to have an interesting test case for the election coming up March 6. we might very well get an elected candidate with 41% of the vote.<br>
<br>
now the Progressive party in Vermont is declining *rapidly*. Burlington is the most populous town in the state (but Vermont has the the least populous largest city of all 50 states) with a population of about 42000. we have about 9000 voters in a mayoral election. the Democratic caucus had over 1000 valid voters showing up. the Prog caucus (which i attended as an observer, so also did another EM lister, who i just discovered has a Wikipedia page: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_Bouricius" target="_blank">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/<u></u>Terry_Bouricius</a> but he was a voting attendee) easily had less than 2 dozen voting members. 2 of the 14 Burlington city councilors are Prog. *any* of the state legislators have been forced to identify themselves as dual affiliated, Dem/Prog, in order to get elected.<br>
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i truly fear the demise of what was once identified as the most successful third party in the United States.<br>
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i'll keep you guys informed. we have an interesting real-world election laboratory here.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>This is why we need to forge a working consensus on electoral reform to rally around people who don't want a contested monopoly that pretends to be a duopoly to remain in our state and nat'l politics. </div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div></div><div>US national politics is a contested monopoly? That's news to me, given that it's rare for one party to control any branch of government for too long and rarer for one party to control all of them.</div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>There's a strong tendency towards that direction, more so at the state level. Both sides have been striving for "permanent majorities' that fit the notion of contested monopoly. </div>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="im">
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_quote"><div> It seems like common sense that we should take inspiration from our limitations and push for electoral reforms that do not challenge duopoly but that do make it a contested duopoly. </div>
</div></blockquote><div><br></div></div><div>Duopoly is what we have, and it doesn't work.</div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>It's a duopoly that ain't contested and is fragile so that both sides are pulling out all the stops to come on top or to keep the other from coming out on top. This ain't the only sort of duopoly possible. There can be a hybrid between the status quo US duopoly and an EU-style multi-party system. If it uses PR strategically, meaning in "more local" elections that tend to be less competitive with single-winner elections then it should be more dynamic than the system that exists in AU where they use PR in their "less local" elections, where it is not needed as much and tends to reduce rather than increase the no. of competitive elections.</div>
<div><br></div><div>dlw </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_quote"><div><br></div><div>Jameson </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<div><br></div><div>dlw</div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: Bryan Mills <<a href="mailto:bmills@alumni.cmu.edu" target="_blank">bmills@alumni.cmu.edu</a>><br>
To: David L Wetzell <<a href="mailto:wetzelld@gmail.com" target="_blank">wetzelld@gmail.com</a>><br>Cc: <a href="mailto:election-methods@electorama.com" target="_blank">election-methods@electorama.com</a><br>Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2012 00:02:47 -0500<br>
Subject: Re: [EM] STV+AV.<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
> Why STV? The original poster wanted elected representatives to have votes<br>
> proportional to their electoral support yes? There's no need for fractional<br>> transfers from elected candidates then.<br>> ><br>><br>> IRV is a form of STV, but it's not my favorite. Some of the other STV<br>
> methods (e.g. Schulze-STV and CPO-STV) tend to produce better eliminations.<br>><br>> But the question of why not STV is a good one. Several reasons.<br>><br>> STV requires much more work on the part of the voter - ranking all the way<br>
> down to a candidate likely to be elected, instead of just one. That<br>> probably means a much larger ballot and/or an arbitrary cutoff between<br>> ballot-candidates and write-in candidates.<br>><br>dlw: If the number of possible rankings is the number of seats + 2 then<br>
it's not too bad. And nobody would be forced to rank umpteen candidates,<br>so the low-info voters could just vote for their favorite candidate.<br></blockquote><div><br></div><div>The number of possible rankings is quite a lot larger than S+2. Even if you don't transfer votes from elected candidates, there are still C-S candidates eliminated -- so you'd have (C choose C-S-1)*(C-S-1)! distinguishable rankings, and even more if you allow equal rankings. The only way out seems to be to pre-filter the set of candidates, so you basically have to drop to approval voting at some point -- candidate-registration petitions and the like -- and then we're back to an arbitrary cutoff.</div>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>dlw: You misunderstood me. If voters are only permitted to rank S+2 candidates then it's not as bad for voters. </div><div>. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>Partial rankings might be workable in a weighted-seat STV variant, though. If a vote only transfers in case of elimination (and not in case of surplus), one would only need to rank candidates down to the first candidate sufficiently likely to be elected, and you could split the ballot into manageable chunks by party. Determining a suitable cutoff candidate still has a cognitive cost, but it probably wouldn't be that bad in practice.</div>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>If there are 3-5 seats STV then the number of candidates won't proliferate too much and there'd be 5-7 places to vote. This would keep things reasonable. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div><br></div><div>But if we assume that partial rankings are effective, there's still the strategy/computation tradeoff to deal with: allowing truncated ballots still doesn't help with favorite-betrayal, and STV variants less susceptible to favorite-betrayal are also less susceptible to efficient counting.</div>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>dlw: Truncated ballots may not end favorite betrayal, but it'll help with it. </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div><br></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
> The STV variants that are less strategy-prone are computationally<br>> inefficient, and even those are not strategy-free.<br>><br>> And perhaps most importantly, the more resistant an STV method is to<br>> strategy, the more complicated it is to explain and understand.<br>
><br>> As deterministic methods go, I do like STV methods; but DS fixes a lot of<br>> the worries I have about them.<br>><br>dlw: One could also apply the same sort of approach to simplifying STV with the<br>
initial treatment of all of the rankings as approval votes to get the<br>
number of candidates down to N+2, where N is the number of seats.<br>As with IRV, it's easier to explain STV when there's relatively few<br>candidates to eliminate. And, it'll mitigate the strategy effects, which<br>
have to be examined more closely.</blockquote><div><br></div><div>The initial treatment of rankings as approval votes introduces some other problems, though.</div><div><br></div><div>With an explicit "approval threshold" in the ranking, it induces a substantial cognitive cost on the voter (determining the approval threshold strategically).</div>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>dlw: Once again, if the no. of seats isn't that great then they'd not have to sweat it too much. Do I rank 1, 2, 3 or 5 candidates? Who can I live with?I'd say it's an empirical question whether such would be a reasonable demand on voters. And I'd reckon they'd get the hang of it with some practice...</div>
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div>With an implicit "first-preference" approval, it has the same problem as traditional STV (i.e. IRV), namely of unduly rewarding favorite-betrayal.</div><div>With an implicit "all-ranked" approval, the overall system would likely violate later-no-harm with much higher frequency; by expressing a preference between two dispreferred candidates one might unintentionally put the higher of the two in contention.</div>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>dlw: I'd say empirically we'd see just how high of a frequency LNH would be violated. Jameson Quinn had a hard time coming up with a pathological example for IRV3/AV3 and I imagine it'd be similar for the above. The 1st stage would reduce the number of candidates to N+2 and it seems likely that the N+2nd and N+3rd candidates in terms of "all-ranked" approval are less likely to be among the N winners. </div>
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<div><br></div><div><br></div><div>It may well be that these issues are all less severe than in the deterministic alternatives to STV, but I still think they're enough to merit consideration of nondeterministic alternatives.</div>
</blockquote><div><br></div><div>In terms of the US's political culture, nondeterministic alternatives are not going to happen anytime in the near future and we need electoral reform ASAP!!!!</div><div><br></div><div>
dlw </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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