Fruits and Votes » Prof. Shugart's Blog

It has come to my attention that Winston Churchill once described the Alternative Vote (or instant runoff) as:

The child of fraud and the parent of folly.

I do not know the precise context in which he would have said it.

68 ideas sprouting »

Interestingly, your blog post and several places syndicating it are the only mentions on Google of the phrase “The child of fraud and the parent of folly” paired with either Churchill, vote, or voting.

Seed planted by James Joyner — 28 May 2010 @ 11:15

Or, indeed, minus any qualifiers.

Seed planted by James Joyner — 28 May 2010 @ 11:16

He wasn’t a fan of AV, but this sounds too pat — like something someone wished he had said.

Perhaps it’s “the child of plurality, parent of proportionality.”

Seed planted by Jack — 28 May 2010 @ 13:13

As the price for supporting a minority Labour government in 1929, the Liberals demanded and got the Alternative Vote as part of the government’s program. The legislation got through the Commons but was blocked in the Lords, then overtaken by events.

The Conservatives opposed the legislation, of course, and Churchill’s comment probably dates back to that time and he was probably making a partisan argument.

Seed planted by Ed — 28 May 2010 @ 14:55

Churchill is also quoted as describing STV in 1931 as deciding elections ‘the most worthless votes of the most worthless candidates’.

I would have thought all votes were equal so his first premise is aprioristically wrong and, moreover, an admission that FPTP biases in favour of the 2 dominant parties. His seconf premise also fails. It is for the electors, not the voting system, to decide who are the most worthless candidates.

Just goes to show that great throwaway lines do not always equal deep understanding.

Seed planted by Alan — 28 May 2010 @ 15:38

IIRC, the 1929-1931 deal would have had AV in single-seat rural constituencies and STV in multi-seat urban constituencies. One can see why this might be sub-optimal. I seem to recollect reading (Hoag & Hallett?) that Churchill was not against pure STV-PR, at least while he was a Liberal.

Expect to see this quote re-hashed to death in The Spectator, though.

Seed planted by Tom Round — 29 May 2010 @ 07:52

Interesting that the UK came close to getting a new electoral system 80 years ago. It is strange it hasn’t been mentioned more in the current debates that such a bill has already been passed in the House of Commons!

Seed planted by Norwegian guy — 29 May 2010 @ 13:18

Go with Approval Voting. Voters can vote for or against as many candidates as they want.

Seed planted by Derek — 31 May 2010 @ 00:34

Well, yes, they can. But they also risk having their fifth-preference tick count against their first-preference tick.

I am intrigued that so many Americans have rediscovered Approval Voting two hundred years after the generation after their Founding Fathers deleted it from the US Constitution via the Twelfth Amendment. From 1788 to 1808, the “each Elector votes for two candidates” system required parties to coordinate their Electors so the Vice-Presidential nominee got one less vote than his Presidential running-mate, or else the tie would throw the election into Congress. The Twelfth – the earliest amendment affecting the structure of the new federal govt – replaced this with a form of truncated preferential voting, with the first and second candidates ranked in order.

(No offen[c]e, Derek, I don’t mean to call you American; it’s just that no one else in the world seems interested in Approval. I blame the influence of Brams and Fishburn, whose objections to STV/ AV seem to boil down to: “well, it may work very well in practice, but how does it look in theory?”

Seed planted by Tom Round — 31 May 2010 @ 03:07

I’ve never understood the fascination that some folks have for approval voting. I could see a potential value for it in intra-party preference voting–maybe. But never for inter-party choice.

Seed planted by MSS — 31 May 2010 @ 04:59

Tom, thank you for the great line, “it may work very well in practice …” Love it.

MSS, aside from Brams and a handful of other academics, the fascination with approval voting on the part of armchair social choice theorists is mainly (1) it’s not IRV; (2) it’s the degenerate form of range (or score) voting where the possible scores are 0 and 1; and (3) it might elect the Condorcet candidate more often than IRV does, without all the complexity of pure Condorcet methods. (I think that whether [3] is actually true depends on what kinds of strategic voting people do.)

Since some of the fascination with range voting also boils down to the fact that it’s not IRV, (1) and (2) may overlap to a degree. The fascination with the Condorcet criterion predates IRV and has always been a basis of opposition to IRV, so I can’t make the quite the same statement about overlap between (1) and (3).

Prepare yourself for several thousands words of haughty rejoinders from said armchair theorists.

Seed planted by Bob Richard — 01 June 2010 @ 01:05

I can’t wait!

(And, Bob, you had to mention range voting!!)

Seed planted by MSS — 01 June 2010 @ 03:43

The Commonwealth of Nations narrowly avoided having two (2) Prime Minister Howards after Britain’s 2005 election. But now it looks like HM will have two (2) Prime Minister Abbotts after Britain’s 2011 election…

Seed planted by Tom Round — 04 June 2010 @ 13:48

Is there an opposition leader named Abbot somewhere other than Australia and Britain?

Seed planted by Alan — 04 June 2010 @ 14:22

Bob,

In a recent online post, you said “no voting rule in single member districts is going to elect legislators from more than two parties — not IRV, not approval, not score voting.”

This is simply false. Duverger’s Law (one of the most well-known and oft-cited things in election science) observes that ordinary top-two (not “instant”) runoff elections tend to escape duopoly — in single-member districts. Here are Duverger’s exact words:
http://scorevoting.net/DuvTrans.html

Virtually all of your other arguments in favor of IRV over Score/Approval Voting are similarly mistaken. It would be nice to see you attempt a reasoned rebuttal to us “armchair theoreticians” instead of calling us names.

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 05 June 2010 @ 17:31

Tom Round,

Yes, with Approval Voting, support for your 2nd favorite candidate can help that candidate defeat your favorite candidate. But it may still maximize your expected value to support your 2nd favorite candidate anyway. Two general scenarios are:

1. Your favorite candidate isn’t a “front-runner”, so supporting your 2nd favorite candidate is more likely to help you get your 2nd instead of your 3rd (an improvement) than get your 2nd instead of your 1st (a “backfire”). E.g. say you prefer X over Y, but would have tactically supported Y in a plurality election — then in AV you would want to *also* support X. If enough voters prefer X to the “front-runners”, then X can win even if no one thinks X has a chance.

2. Your 2nd favorite candidate is worth more to you than the average of the other candidates. E.g. you think X=10, Y=8, Z=0. Obviously you will vote for X, but then you must decide whether to also vote for Y. That may cause you to get Y instead of X, in which case you lose “2 points” of happiness. But it may also cause you to get Y instead of Z, in which case you GAIN 8 points of happiness. So it’s economically/strategically advisable to support Y.

AND IN BOTH CASES… you never have to betray your sincere favorite candidate, even if you think he has no chance.

But with IRV, if you prefer X>Y>Z, and X is not a front-runner, then you want to betray X, and instead top-rank your favorite front-runner. The mathematical reason why is really quite simple. Say X=Green, Y=Democrat, Z=Republican. You know that, even if the Green surprisingly does much better than expected, he’ll be much more likely to defeat ONE of the major parties than BOTH of them.

If he defeats the Republican in the first round, and then loses to the Democrat, then your tactical choice to rank Y in first place didn’t hurt you anyway.

If he defeats the Democrat in the first round, and then loses to the Republican, but the Democrat would have lost against the Republican anyway, then the tactic didn’t hurt you.

If he defeats the Democrat in the first round, and then loses to the Republican, but the Democrat would have beaten the Republican, then the tactic HELPED YOU to get the Democrat instead of the Republican.

If he loses to the Democrat, but would have won if you had been sincere, then the tactic BACKFIRED and HURT YOU.

It is a statistical/mathematical fact that the third scenario is more common than the fourth, so it is tactically advisable to bury non-front-runner candidates with IRV. And if enough voters do this, then IRV behaves almost identically to plurality voting.

Approval Voting avoids this disaster.

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 05 June 2010 @ 17:50

Clay,

I’ve cast votes under IRO in about a dozen elections – both State elections in Queensland, which had (in those years) a fully-fledged three-party system, and federal House of Representatives elections, which (where I lived) were basically two-way races.

I’ve spent many hours talking with activists of large and small parties about their preference-directing strategies.

The much-repeated fear raised by Approval supporters are not on the radar here.

… Unlike the fear of a “wasted vote” which is a major factor in every US and UK election I’ve observed.

I fully agree that Approval is far superior to single-shot plurality. It would be a step forward for the UK or US. However, it would be a step backwards from IRO/ STV. Why would I trade away the right to rank 10 candidates in 10 levels of support in return for the right to rank them in only 2?

I also support (unlike a few other IRO/STV proponents) the option of giving equal preferences, which would remove the only area in which Approval can claim an advantage. Again, as an empirical matter this isn’t an issue in Australia. (If anything, most voters I’ve anecdotally polled seem to think what they’d like most is some hybrid of STV and Approval – the right to specify ranking among the candidates they support, and then to cast negative votes against some or all of those left un-numbered. Sometimes I suggest this, other times lay people come up with it un-prompted, but it does seem the consensus model among people who are politically aware but not party activists).

I could live with Approval in non-partisan contests – small local councils, club committees, intra-party primary elections, intra-party-list candidate votes. It also works tolerably as a default rule for deciding which of two contemporaneous referendums has legal priority (the Californian rule). But in contests among organised parties or factions, its claimed benefits are illusory. Green supporters would tick the Green and also the Democrat or Labo[u]r candidate, so as to have some influence on who gets elected. But Labou[u]r or Democrat voters have no incentive to give a preference to a Green candidate. (This is assuming Greens have 6-12% support and Dem/Lab has 40-45% support. If the Greens are clearly larger, the same principle applies. If the two parties are roughly equal, then it is true that STV can reward tactical voting – or be seen, in hindsight, to reward it, which is not the same thing as saying it creates an incentive ex ante whether subjective or objective – but so too does Approval).

Seed planted by Tom Round — 06 June 2010 @ 05:57

Approval Voting would be ideal if we emphasized on letting voters vote for and vote against candidates. Not the typical system where you vote for 2 candidates but you can’t vote against any. Besides, voters have gotten so used to end up voting against a candidate? For example, how many voters voted against Bush in ’04? There’s no such thing as a perfect system, but if you give the voter the chance to not only vote for Nader and Gore, but also vote against Bush, then it changes.

Seed planted by Derek — 06 June 2010 @ 20:53

You could have two elections at the same time with the same candidates, the normal one where you vote for a candidate, and a separate one where you vote against a candidate.

A candidate who “wins” the second election is declared ineligble for the office, even if he also wins the first election. In cases where the same candidate wins both elections the office is simply declared vacant and there is a by-election to fill the vacancy. I’m not sure if you want to make getting a majority, as opposed to a plurality, a requirement for either election.

Seed planted by Ed — 07 June 2010 @ 15:14

Tom Round,

One of my major points is that IRV incentivizes voters to top-rank their favorite frontrunner, regardless of who their sincere favorite is. This counters the myth that IRV makes it safe for voters to be sincere, as well as the (in my opinion disingenuous) claim by e.g. Rob Richie that tactical scenarios in IRV are too convoluted and/or unpredictable to exploit. Further, that tactic would obviously maintain a two-party system, much as Plurality Voting does.

It may be that few voters are aware of this, but there are some indications that IRV voters are largely tactical, even if they have no understanding of the underlying mathematics or efficacy of tactical exaggeration in IRV. This is evinced by the fact that both the NatLibs (the coalition that is effectively AU’s conservative party) and Labor advise, on their “How to Vote” cards, that their members rank the opposing major party below the Green, Family First, and Australian Democrat parties. That appears to be similar to a scenario where the Republicans advised their members to rank the Democrats below the (even more liberal) Greens. It seems probably insincere. But IRV is immune to “burial”, so the fact that this happens supports our theory that people exaggerate “naively”. This doesn’t seem to be specific to IRV per se. It may just be that human beings tend to naively do this with ranked ballots in general. And it just happens to be a generally good strategy with IRV.

Either way, IRV countries (e.g. Australia, Ireland, Malta, Fiji) has empirically maintained duopoly everywhere used, unlike ordinary runoffs for example, regardless of whether this theory correctly accounts for that.

Why would I trade away the right to rank 10 candidates in 10 levels of support in return for the right to rank them in only 2?

Mainly because IRV simply discards a huge amount of that data that you feel so happy about getting to express — whereas Approval Voting doesn’t.
http://scorevoting.net/IgnoreExec.html

This is a common fallacy. You expect that a more representative ballot equals a more representative election outcome. But the expressiveness of a ballot is only one of three critical factors determining the representativeness of the election outcome. The other two are

- the amount by which that ballot data is distorted because of tactical incentives, and
- the efficiency of the tabulation algorithm

I believe that IRV users tactically exaggerate reasonably often, but I acknowledge there is a lot of anecdotal evidence behind that belief. The more important (and certainly less contentious) consideration then is the efficiency of IRV’s tabulation algorithm which, as described in the previous link, is actually quite poor.

Approval Voting may allow you to express less information on your ballot, but

1) 100% of that ballot data is actually counted instead of ignored
2) That information is less distorted by tactical behavior (a tactical AV ballot is more similar to its sincere form than with IRV)

Therefore if you use Approval Voting, you get much better average satisfaction from election outcomes (http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html), and probably break out of two-party domination, and probably see a decreased importance associated with cash and major party endorsement (and other indicators of “electability”). And it’s just cheaper/simpler to implement, and better with regard to near-tie election recount nightmares, and less prone to ballot spoilage and fraud (can be precinct subtotaled, unlike IRV).

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 07 June 2010 @ 19:37

It is true that the major parties in Australia sometimes issue ‘insincere’ how-to-vote cards,but it is not universal and is heavily effected by inter-party agreements before each election It is also true that their electors do not have to follow those how-to-vote cards and to an increasing extent do not do so. Labor preferences, for instance, tend to flow to the Green candidate in spite of party directions. The anecdotal evidence fails.

Moreover the Liberal Party, Nationals, County Liberal Party and Liberal National Party are not a single party and contest each others’s seats at times. As Tom has mentioned Queensland went through an extended period where then separate National and Liberal parties were as competitive to each other as they were to Labor. Queensland also elected 11 One Nation MLAs in a house of 89 in 1998. Until recently the government in South Australia was a Labor/National/independent coalition.

The empirical evidence also fails. Ireland uses STV and Fiji is a military dictatorship. There is no major party duopoly at the state/territory and local government level in Australia. PNG, which does use IRV, has 19 parties in the National Parliament. All the state IRV chambers in Australia include MHAs and MLAs who are not from the major parties.

I suspect Australia will see a number of Green MHRs in the near future. PNG rather vitiates the duopoly claims and suggests the Australian duopoly is a product more of historical factors than the electoral system alone.

IRV is inferior to proportional representation. If you have to have single-member districts, the evidence offered so far for Approval Voting is unpersuasive and does not address the experience with professional organisations that have used it where it quickly defaulted to FPTP.

If IRV how to vote cards are the crux of your argument then you need to show why major parties in an IRV system would not try to direct their electors to cast FPTP ballots under an approval system.

Seed planted by Alan — 07 June 2010 @ 23:40

Obvious typo: ‘why major parties in an Approval Voting system would not try to direct their electors to cast FTPTP ballots…’

Seed planted by Alan — 08 June 2010 @ 00:17

Alan,

In case my (apparently moderated) response to your recent post is not published, I re-posted it here.

http://groups.google.com/group/electionsciencefoundation/browse_thread/thread/9e2e14dfdbaa5cdf

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 09 June 2010 @ 16:36

I’m impressed with two anti-single seat majority (as opposed to single seat plurality) arguments. The first is that it depresses the chance of minor party representation as there is a chance of their reaching the 40% threshold usually needed to get a seat under SMP but not the 50% threshold needed to get a seat under SMM. We have empirical evidence from Australia on this but we need more examples (and France is inconcousive).

The second is that under SMP voters tend to self-sort and switch their votes to their second or third choices when it is clear the chances of their first choices are fading, and the rump that still vote for minor parties really, really, do not want to vote for either the first or second place finishers. So why make them?

That said, I don’t “get” approval voting and am almost prepared to rule it out on the grounds that voters should be able to have a reasonable grasp of the electoral system (which is an anti-PR argument, but its empirically shown that voters do understand how PR works once its been introduced).

Seed planted by Ed — 09 June 2010 @ 17:06

Ed,

What don’t you get about Approval Voting? In some sense it’s actually simpler than Plurality, because you just remove the one-candidate-only constraint.

And the basic strategy with Approval Voting is as simple as with Plurality, because you just vote for the same candidate as you would with Plurality, plus everyone you like better.

Voters may understand the principle of proportional representation, but that by no means they understand the specific implementations of the concept. Take a poll of voters in e.g. Australia, and see how many of them can accurately describe how reweighted STV works. Not that it’s incredibly complex, but certainly more so than Plurality/Approval/IRV/etc.

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 09 June 2010 @ 20:14

Ed said: “The second is that under SMP voters tend to self-sort and switch their votes to their second or third choices when it is clear the chances of their first choices are fading, and the rump that still vote for minor parties really, really, do not want to vote for either the first or second place finishers. So why make them?”

You have just reminded me of exactly what happened in the Philippine elections last May.

Seed planted by Ren Aguila — 10 June 2010 @ 01:32

Clay

I don’t plan on replying in detail to your claims here or elsewhere. They just do not met any serious empirical or logical test. You cite IRV how-to-vote cards as proving that IRV does not work but give no reason why Approval Voting how-to-vote cards would not have the same effect. You ignore the example of PNG outright.

If you google ‘NatLibs’, which you claim is a common phrase in Australia, with the search restricted to Australia, you get precisely 82 results. The small number of cases which actually refer to the coalition parties come from Queensland where there is a single LIberal National Party. If you remove the restriction from your search the top relevant example is from rangevoting.org. a statement which is then quoted on your own site.

I personally have never heard this expression in my life, although admittedly I do not live in Queensland.

You want to prove that IRV=duopoly, to do that you have to ignore the example of PNG, look only at the ceremonial Irish presidency and ignore the PR legislature, and lastly establish that the coalition parties in Australia are a single entity, despite the fact that the town-based party of resistance has collapsed and had to be refounded no less than 3 times since the introduction of MPV and that, in those states where the National Party is a separate entity, the coalition parties do compete for parliamentary and cabinet seats.

Inventing an Australianism that does not exist may appear to advance your cause, but somehow I think you would do better to abandon it.

Seed planted by Alan — 10 June 2010 @ 02:30

There is nothing simple about the strategy under a hypothetical public election using “approval voting.” Where, as a voter, do I draw my line to mark the dichotomy between those candidates of whom I “approve” and those of whom I “disapprove”?

It is much easier for a voter to determine “I like this one more than the others” (plurality) or “I like this one the most, but this one the second most,” etc. (AV).

In general, while I think simplicity is a virtue in electoral systems, I don’t think voters need to grasp the mechanics of the systems (e.g., reweighting, etc.). But it is vital that their voting strategy be easy to understand. Approval voting flunks this test.

In any case, this was really meant to be a discussion of whether the Alternative Vote was a good alternative to FPTP (and perhaps to STV). Frankly, because “approval voting” has never, to my knowledge, been considered for adoption for any public election, discussing it is nothing more than an academic exercise. Not that those can’t be fun, invigorating even…

(And I’d love to know what quip Churchill would have come up with!)

Seed planted by MSS — 10 June 2010 @ 04:20

A couple of comments about approval voting and strategy.

MSS asks where the voter is supposed to draw the line. There is a fairly clear answer to that question, but stating it reveals a major weakness of the method. As Clay said previously, you vote for your favorite between the two front-runners, plus all the candidates you prefer to your favorite between the two front runners. This assumes that (a) there are exactly two front-runners, and (b) everyone knows who they are. When both of these assumptions are met, approval might (I don’t know) perform in practice more or less as advertised in theory. Provided, further, that (c) real live voters grasp the strategy. I suspect that everyone reading this blog can grasp it, but I question whether real voters in real elections would find it intuitive enough to use.

Characteristically of the people I call armchair social choice theorists, there is in the pro-approval argument an assumption of close-to-perfect information, shared equally by all voters. But not all elections are accompanied by professional opinion polls. The opinion polls don’t always produce clear favorites, much less exactly two of them. Knowledge of the poll results and knowledge of the right strategy are not equally distributed across segments of the voting population.

I don’t think enough is made of the last point. If the performance of a voting counting rule depends on voters having knowledge of strategy and poll results, over and above their knowledge about their own preferences among the candidates, then that rule is undemocratic, in my opinion.

Seed planted by Bob Richard — 10 June 2010 @ 15:17

Bob’s critique is especially cogent when the major parties are certainly going to argue that casting votes for candidates other than themselves is likely to harm their chances of election. For once, their arguments would actually be sound. If Florida had used Approval Voting in 2000 it takes quite a lot of imagination to say that it would have been in Bush’s or Gore’s interest to say anything but: ‘Vote for me and only for me’.

Seed planted by Alan — 10 June 2010 @ 16:59

If we can’t have Yes/No Voting, I’d be OK with IRV if it includes the following:

a) Double ballot requirement, where voters can rank the candidates they like the most and the candidates the dislike the most.

b) Equal preferences requirement

c) Top-n Instan Runoff, where the top n candidates make the instant runoff or those that have the backing of a % equal or greater to the total the runner-up has.

Seed planted by Derek — 10 June 2010 @ 22:00

Alan,

..look only at the ceremonial Irish presidency and ignore the PR legislature

Their legislature uses STV, not IRV. You seemed to be aware of that when you said “Ireland uses STV”. Can I presume you conceded the point regarding Fiji?

As for your argument that the NatLibs aren’t effectively one party, please tell me how many of the 150 seats in the AU House exhibited competition between coalition parties in e.g. the 2007 election. You cite a handful of exceptions, but the dominant trend seems to be that they are effectively one party. This Wikipedia article says, “From time to time, friction is caused by the fact that the Liberal and National candidates are campaigning against each other, usually without undue long-term damage to the relationship.”

Papua New Guinea only instituted IRV in 2007. It generally takes countries several years to settle into two-party domination. This was true in the USA with plurality voting. But we eventually got the Democrats and Republicans. It’s also noteworthy that PNG has a history of large fields of candidates, fractious races and ethnic/family feuds, which can have counter-duopoly effects greater than IRV’s (or even Plurality’s) pro-duopoly effects. The fact remains that IRV has consistently maintained duopoly in sizable elections, once left in place for a while.

You missed the major point about the How-to-Vote cards. It’s not about whether the voters follow the recommendations, it’s about the apparently intended-to-be-tactical “burial” of the opposing major party, even though IRV is immune to burial. This is just one more piece of evidence which supports the theory that people exaggerate the frontrunners, regardless of whether they even understand the tactical efficacy of doing so. And again, even if that theory doesn’t correctly explain why IRV maintains duopoly, it’s an empirical fact that it does.

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 11 June 2010 @ 20:27

Bob Richard,

The general strategy with Approval Voting is to just vote for the same candidate you would support if you were a tactical Plurality voter, plus everyone you like better. It is thus really no more complex than Plurality Voting.

The same underlying math goes for IRV too! Except with serious negative consequences. The IRV tactic is to top-rank the same candidate you would support if you were a tactical Plurality voter, and no one else. This it has the same problem as Plurality Voting, that if voters are tactical, the appearance of not being “electable” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That makes money and endorsements inordinately important to the political process.

Characteristically of the people I call armchair social choice theorists, there is in the pro-approval argument an assumption of close-to-perfect information, shared equally by all voters.

I have never heard an Approval Voting advocate make such an assumption. Nor are any of the typical pro-approval arguments in any way contingent upon that premise.

This argument can be applied to IRV just as well as to Approval Voting. The difference is that with Approval Voting, once you support the “tactical choice”, you can fearlessly support everyone you sincerely prefer to that choice. With IRV, you can’t. The bottom line is that with IRV, a third party is more likely to defeat one of the major party candidates (or “frontrunners”) than both/all of them (obvious, since the probability of the latter is a subset of the probability of the former).

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 12 June 2010 @ 01:46

Alan,

If Florida had used Approval Voting in 2000 it takes quite a lot of imagination to say that it would have been in Bush’s or Gore’s interest to say anything but: ‘Vote for me and only for me’.

Of course. If your sincere favorite candidate is one of the frontrunners, then you might as well vote for just that candidate. It’s not a problem to have a candidate win because he really was strongly supported by the voters.

But if your sincere favorite candidate is Nader, and you voted for Gore, you can vote for Gore and Nader. Not only does Nader than get a more accurate representation of his support, but if it turns out he was preferred by a majority of voters to the apparent frontrunners, then he can still win — even if people assumed he couldn’t (say because he didn’t get enough special interest money or what have you). This means voters can be concerned more about whether a candidate SHOULD win that about whether he CAN win. And the importance of cash and major party endorsements (and other indicators of “electability”) decreases.

And if you are one of the approximately 10% of Nader supporters who stuck to your guns and gave him your sincere vote with Plurality Voting, but you still wish you could have helped Gore defeat Bush, then you can give Gore a vote too, without sacrificing the ability to do so. Gore lost the official Florida tally to Bush by a mere 537 votes. 97,488 votes were counted for Nader. So if a little more than half of one percent of Nader supporters had done that, then Gore would have won against Bush. Approval Voting thus mitigates the spoiler problem.

IRV is much worse in both regards. In the first scenario, the tactical voter should rank Gore in first place, just to be on the safe side. This isn’t so obvious when the third party is weak like Nader. But if you look at the last IRV mayoral race in Burlington VT, where there were three strong candidates, you can see that one bloc of voters were hurt by being (apparently) sincere.
http://scorevoting.net/Burlington.html
http://www.electology.org/debate/IrvPlurality

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 12 June 2010 @ 02:14

Clay

Rather than respond to even more claims and factoids, I would simply ask whether you still contend, against the evidence, that ‘NatLibs’ is a common expression in Australia.

Seed planted by Alan — 12 June 2010 @ 02:23

Alan,

I just did a Google search for this:
australia “nat lib” coalition

Excerpts from the pages I found include:

..the Nat Libs were like that towards the end (Hesseltine ran as a Nat Lib when he was first elected and switched to being elected as a Conservative without it being noteworthy at the time that he didn’t make a grand announcement of defection)..

If you want to move gun laws forward, then I urge you to vote Nat/Lib.

..would we have seen the fishing reforms we have seen under a coalition (nat/lib) state govt?

Liz Cunningham in Gladstone backed the Nat-Lib coalition from 1996 to 1998..

That’s your birth right as a nat/lib supporter.

2008 result – Nat retained (2PP Nat-Lib 67.34%).

The Nat/Lib Coalition in Queensland could hold a party meeting in a phone booth..

..preferences were distributed in the last two NAT/LIB contests..

Now can you please stop changing the subject and nit-picking the auxiliary details, and instead focus on the material issue of IRV’s correlation with two-party dominance?

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 12 June 2010 @ 03:26

From “Adam Tarr explains why IRV leads to 2-party domination”:

‘… The phenomenon in this example goes a long way toward explaining why it is that all three IRV countries are (and historically have been) 2-party dominated. Voters figure the third party has no chance and they are best off exaggerating their view of the top two parties so as not to “waste their vote”….’

Granting for the moment, for the sake of argument, that one can treat Liberal/National and Fine Gael/ Labour as a single one party of two parties, I am curious who these “voters” are. Can’t speak for the Irish, but I have never come across an Australian voter who thinks like that. Not ever. I did come across a few voters – very few – who talk about “wasting your vote”, but that’s because they think we still use FPTP. I have never come across any who say “Well, we have IROV, but there’s still the chance of a ‘Goldwater Pyrrhic victory’ [win the primary on your side, but lose the final contest], so better vote tactically to avoid that.” As an empirical matter, this does not arise in Australian electoral calculations.

I find it very odd that many US electoral reformers are so keen to push Approval or some version of Borda that they will slag off IROV. If “it won’t help minor parties win seats” is your touchstone, then providing ammunition that opponents can use to shoot down an STV-PR initiative (if one is ever put) seems an own goal. The idea that any single-winner system is going to let the Greens (or whomever) with 12% beat the Dems/ Labour and Repubs/ Conservatives with 44% each seems far-fetched, as long as there is only one seat.

Granted, if one’s objection to IROV/ STV is of the Brams-Fishburn mathematical sort, then this is irrelevant (even if it seems to me like arguing “car travel is not any more convenient than bicycle travel, because if your car ever breaks down, you need to get it towed”). But a lot of the anti-IROV work on the Web seems to come from people who think it is a plot by the Big Two to lock up more seats for themselves. And that two-round runoff is less repressive because people can vote sincerely on each round. (Yep, just like France in 2002… Chirac and Le Pen the two “most popular” candidates, and 80% “approved” Le Pen).

Seed planted by Tom Round — 12 June 2010 @ 09:41

@Bob Richard,

By the way, are you ready to recant your claim that single-winner voting methods can’t break free of duopoly? Or do you think Duverger was wrong (and thus, deny the numerous examples of TTR countries that are non-duopolies)?

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 12 June 2010 @ 21:34

Again, Duverger was not wrong about the impact of two-round systems, but he was clearly not thinking of situations in which parties had no control over the use of their labels, and the first round would have multiple candidates bearing a common label.

In any case, he was referring to majority-plurality, not top-two runoff.

Seed planted by MSS — 13 June 2010 @ 04:56

As so often, Clay, you are changing the terms of the discussion. The claim on your website is ‘NatLibs’ not ‘Nat Lib’ coalition.

Seed planted by Alan — 13 June 2010 @ 06:06

Clay,

In Australia (can’t speak for the US) one often sees restaurants and pubs/ bars advertising a “reef/beef” menu. If consumers thought this term indicated a single merged entity (“reefbeef”) instead of two closely associated but separate entities, their appetite would diminish.

Back to the original Churchillian quote… I am intrigued by Sir Winston’s implication/imputation that (a) second, third and fourth preference votes are “[more] worthless” than first preferences; (b) the thirds, fourth and fifth placed candidates are “[more] worthless” than the Big Two; so (c) therefore, by extension, worthless votes originally cast for worthless candidates must be doubly (or perhaps logarithmically) worthless.

Whereas, in fact, mathematically his statement has the self-canceling logic of a double negative. By the time their third and fourth preferences are counted (and a fortiori, of necessity by the time their second-last preference is reached), the votes cast for third- and fourth-placed candidates will almost certainly have returned to one of the Big Two and been “parked” there for good. Since the major-party candidates are (in the Great Commoner’s view) “worthy”, surely this means that (say) a [1] for Screaming Lord Sutch or the BNP becomes “worthy” again when it returns home to the Conservatives or Labour, even if the latter is a 9th or 10th preference.

Seed planted by Tom Round — 13 June 2010 @ 10:46

In my (short) lifetime, relations between the Liberal and National/ Country parties in Queensland have spanned the spectrum from:

1. outright war (eg, 1983 and 1989, after the Coalition broke up and there was, many thought, a better-than-even chance that the enraged Liberals would have supported Labor to govern – if only to get equal electorates enacted – had they won the balance of power);

2. non-aggression pact (eg, 1992), ie no formal pre-election coalition but a high likelihood the two parties would unite on the floor of the Legislative Assembly to keep Labor out;

3. formal coalition (eg, 1980, 1995, 1998, 2001, 2004, 2006), as per the federal level; and

4. united into a single party at State level (2009), although their MHRs and Senators sit with either the Libs or the Nats in federal Parliament (following the Northern Territory Country Liberal Party’s precedent).

Here a some interesting quotes from The National Party: Prospects for the Great Survivors, ed Linda Courtenay Botterill and Geoff Cockfield (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009):

‘With a very few exceptions at State level [usually Victoria - TR], the National Party has not considered, and is highly unlikely to enter, a coalition with Labor. This reluctance is largely anchored in antagonisms born in the shearers’ strikes of the 1890s which have been perpetuated by farm organisation involvement in anti-union activities such as the Mudginberri Abattoir dispute of 1985 and the Waterfront dispute of 1998. This places the party as a wing [not a hinge] [half-]party in a two-and-a-half party system.”

- Linda Courtenay Botterill, An Agrarian Party in a Developed Democracy,” pp 25-26: citing Alan Siaroff, “Two-and-a-Half Party Systems and the Comparative Role of the ‘Half’,” 9(3) Party Politics (2003), pp 267-90.

However,

“The fact that the [Nationals'] decision has almost invariably been coalition with the Liberals does not rule out the theoretical possibility that the Party could trade its vote in order to achieve particular policy outcomes in coalition with either of the two major parties. In 2008, the National Party in Western Australia went to the State election as an independent party and negotiated with both Labor and the Liberal Party before deciding to give its support to a Liberal government.’ – Ibid, p 12.

Between 1984 and 2008,

‘One [National Party House of Representatives] seat [Gwydir, in NSW] has been lost in a redistribution, three have gone to independents, and five have directly fallen to the Liberals when the sitting Nationals retired and opened the seat to a “three-cornered contest’…”

- Dennis Woodward and Jennifer Curtin, “Beyond Country to National,” p 39.

Only five? Out of a massive 150 or so MHRs? Sounds like a “duopoly” to me. I’m sure many more seats have switched from, oh, say, the British Cooperative Party to its Labour coalition partners in three-way electoral contests. Surely…

Seed planted by Tom Round — 14 June 2010 @ 13:36

@Tom Round

I don’t know what Fine Gael and Labour have to do with anything. Regarding Ireland, I was just pointing out that the Presidency is dominated by Fianna Fail.

The major point of the TarrIrv page is that the generally correct tactic with IRV is to rank in first place the same candidate you would tactically support in a Plurality race. This runs counter to common claims by IRV proponents, e.g. Rob Richie, that IRV is free from strategy, or that tactical scenarios with IRV are “too convoluted” for IRV to be game-able. From a statistical game theoretical standpoint, that’s simply false.

You could be correct that this isn’t the reason for IRV’s “duopolism”, but regardless of the cause, a lot of people think duopoly is bad. Those same people often support IRV because they think it helps break free of duopoly. I think they deserve to know the truth. Another thing to consider is that people seem to naively exaggerate even when they aren’t thinking in these game theoretical terms. Say a voter prefers Green>Labor>Coalition, and it’s a tight race between Labor and Coalition. Some voters may just push Labor and Coalition as far apart as possible, intuitively thinking that this will make their vote stronger. Another possibility is that in instances where a minor party candidate occasionally is unusually strong, and an IRV spoiler scenario develops, they might then become more aware of it. The same logic is evident in the USA’s FPTP elections. I remember reading of voters who, for instance, supported Hillary Clinton, but were going to vote for Obama, because they thought he’d have a better chance against the Republican nominee. That is mathematically the same reasoning. Hillary would act as a runoff spoiler. Maybe the people you talk to don’t think in these terms because there is almost never a minor party challenger strong enough to even instigate such concerns.

“it won’t help minor parties win seats” is your touchstone

It’s certainly not. The biggest issue is that the voting method is as representative as possible (provided it is also simple enough to be transparent and cost-effective — some really theoretically great systems are insanely complex and politically infeasible). IRV has very poor Bayesian Regret, and Approval Voting is much better.
http://scorevoting.net/UniqBest.html

providing ammunition that opponents can use to shoot down an STV-PR initiative (if one is ever put) seems an own goal.

Proportional representation is federally illegal in the USA, and a two-party-dominated Congress will never change that law (Green Party member Cynthia McKinney tried at least 3 times). Thus I believe we have to start by getting a single-winner voting method that breaks out of duopoly. Then we can eventually change the anti-PR law, and possibly get a good PR method like Asset Voting or Reweighted Range Voting, or maybe even STV-PR (the poorest of these three).
http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html

The idea that any single-winner system is going to let the Greens (or whomever) with 12% beat the Dems/ Labour and Repubs/ Conservatives with 44% each seems far-fetched, as long as there is only one seat.

Of course. In a system satisfying the Favorite Betrayal Criterion, viable alternative parties would have to be more moderate/centrist. Such a party might take conservative economic positions and liberal social positions, for example. Then voters could consider issues independently, rather than having them all lumped together in two big bundles. Today’s minor parties are typically far from center because pragmatic and/or less impassioned candidates veer away from them, and just try to work within the entrenched two-party system. With a better system, you should have a choice among different types of moderate platforms, or even independent candidates (since party affiliation should matter a lot less).

a lot of the anti-IROV work on the Web seems to come from people who think it is a plot by the Big Two to lock up more seats for themselves.

Well, that’s not necessarily so far fetched, in theory. FPTP spoilers hurt major party candidates quite a bit. IRV can protect them from spoilers, without a realistic threat that their duopoly control will be thwarted.

And that two-round runoff is less repressive because people can vote sincerely on each round.

No, only in the second round. The IRV spoiler scenario applies to two-round runoff as well, meaning that it can easily be in a voter’s best interest not to be sincere in the first round. (Don’t vote for your favorite, but instead for the 2nd or 3rd polling candidate that you most want to make it to the runoff with the 1st polling candidate.)

France shows something closer to TTR’s “worst case scenario”, but its average performance may well be better than IRV’s.

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 14 June 2010 @ 20:39

@Alan

As so often, Clay, you are changing the terms of the discussion. The claim on your website is ‘NatLibs’ not ‘Nat Lib’ coalition.

Several of my citations use “Nat Lib” or “Nat/Lib”, not followed by the word “coalition”. For example:

If you want to move gun laws forward, then I urge you to vote Nat/Lib.

..would we have seen the fishing reforms we have seen under a coalition (nat/lib) state govt?

That’s your birth right as a nat/lib supporter.

2008 result – Nat retained (2PP Nat-Lib 67.34%).

..preferences were distributed in the last two NAT/LIB contests..

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 14 June 2010 @ 20:49

@Tom Round

If consumers thought this term indicated a single merged entity (”reefbeef”) instead of two closely associated but separate entities, their appetite would diminish.

I never said that the term NatLib was the reason to treat them as one party. I was just responding to Alan’s comment about whether the expression is common in political discussion.

I say they are treated as one party because for instance they rarely compete against one another for federal House seats. I’ve asked for evidence to the contrary if I’m mistaken about that. So far, nothing but some historical flukes.

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 14 June 2010 @ 20:54

@MSS (prof Shugart?)

In any case, he was referring to majority-plurality, not top-two runoff.

What do you mean? His exact words were:
“The 2-ballot majority system tends to lead to multipartism moderated by alliances.”
http://scorevoting.net/DuvTrans.html

How else can this be interpreted than plurality (ballot #1) followed by a runoff if there’s no majority (ballot #2)?

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 14 June 2010 @ 21:09

Get this. I just called the Australian Green Party here:
02 6140-3217

The guy said one of the most common calls he gets is, “why should I vote for the Green Party, when that’s just wasting my vote?”

Why would people ask such a bizarre question, since they have the preferential system (Instant Runoff Voting)?

He explains, there’s widespread voter miseducation on the preferential system. And the two major parties are happy to help that along by doing whatever possible to keep it obfuscated.

People even are confused about the above-the-line voting. They ask the GP how they’re “preferencing” in House elections. The Greens explain, “YOU are making the choice on your ballot, not us — it’s not above-the-line voting.”

And they get these calls frequently. He explained it was one of the most common calls he gets.

I wonder how Approval Voting would behave in similar circumstances. Say a Nader supporter casts a strategic vote for Gore. Does he then worry that casting a vote for Nader weakens/halves his vote for Gore? Does something about ranking inherently cause this weird voter mis-intuition?

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 15 June 2010 @ 01:33

Clay, your first example comes from the UK. Adding ‘australia’ as a search term does not restrict the results to Australian results.

Seed planted by Alan — 15 June 2010 @ 02:26

Clay, go phone the Australian Greens and ask them if they want IROV for the mainland lower houses replaced by a system where every [1] Green [2] Labor (or, more often, [1] Green [second-last] Labor) ballot becomes a ballot that says “I like both Labor and Greens equally!”.

I am puzzled by your contact’s statement about “just wasting my vote”. As I said, I have taught many Australian undergraduates (including some who were fuzzy about, eg, whether the House and Senate are the same thing or whether Canada is a republic) and yet 95% of more “get” the basic idea that you can give a first preference protest vote to a minor party yet still “put the Liberals last” (a common slogan on the Left, more palatable than “hold your nose and put Labor second”). Not just university students. Farmers I know “get” IROV because the National Party pushes it strongly to explain why a conservative can defeat a Labor candidate despite having fewer first preferences. Almost all trade unions in Australia use a preferential system (STV, AV or MPV).

Minor parties themselves use STV or AV for their own internal elections here, with the exception of the late Australian Democrats, who used Hallett’s variant on Condorcet for their own internal elections. None that I know of use Approval. None that I know of use range voting or other points systems.

And Liberal/ National competition in single-member electorates is most certainly not a[n] historical fluke. (The Liberals now hold more rural seats federally than the Nationals do).

Seed planted by Tom Round — 15 June 2010 @ 03:41

It strikes me that if Tom’s idea of an equal preference was incorporated into MPV it would enable an elector to use Approval Voting if they wanted to. The system as proposed merely conscripts votes from the majority in a desperate effort to elect minority candidates.

Seed planted by Alan — 15 June 2010 @ 04:31

Whether top-two or majority-plurality, the logic applies only under the assumption of one candidate per party, and parties strong enough to control the use of their labels.

I am aware of no writing in which Duverger addressed open-entry systems such as the Louisiana system (no longer used there for Congress, as discussed above) or the now-California system.

Seed planted by MSS — 15 June 2010 @ 08:42

@Tom Round

This is one of the most common fallacies in the debate between IRV and AV proponents. IRV advocates seem to think that a more representative ballot equals a more representative election outcome. Thus if they can express that they prefer e.g. Nader to Gore, that’s “better” than saying they support Nader and Gore.

The problem is that representativeness isn’t just a function of how much data the ballot holds. It’s also affected by

- the efficiency of the tabulation method, and
- distortions of the actual data, caused by tactical behavior

In the first category, IRV massively fails because it discards huge amounts of data, resulting in worse election outcomes. (E.g. it ignored the fact that a large bloc of Burlington voters who preferred the Republican also preferred the Democrat to the Progressive – it did not even consider/user that information.)
http://scorevoting.net/IgnoreExec.html

The result is, as I pointed out, bad election outcomes.
http://scorevoting.net/UniqBest.html

Australian Greens should want more representative/satisfying election outcomes just as much as any other voters.

Further, Greens should want a voting method where there is absolutely no reason to fear supporting the Green if you prefer the Green to the frontrunners. With IRV, that’s only the case if the Green already has no chance. If the Green does a spectacular job and shows some hope of winning, it then becomes unsafe to support him, because he’ll more likely be a spoiler than a winner. That’s just a statistically obvious fact.

Granted, the statement by this Green Party guy implies that voters fear supporting Greens not because they understand the strategy with IRV, but because they are ignorant of IRV. And maybe the same thing would happen with Approval Voting too. But at least we could be assured that math-savvy voters would never have to fear supporting Green because it might waste their vote.

95% of more “get” the basic idea that you can give a first preference protest vote to a minor party yet still “put the Liberals last”

Are you saying that these voters honestly think the Liberals are worse than all the other parties, including Family First and One Nation? You don’t think that’s actually exaggeration?

Minor parties themselves use STV or AV for their own internal elections here, with the exception of the late Australian Democrats, who used Hallett’s variant on Condorcet for their own internal elections. None that I know of use Approval. None that I know of use range voting or other points systems.

No big surprise since the Bayesian Regret calculations that shows the robust superiority of Score/Approval only came out in 2000, and were written about in popular literature only in 2008. And using a different system than the one used in the actual elections is probably unpalatable in general. I don’t see this as a judgment on the merits of the respective voting methods, as I’m sure most of those responsible for deciding such things don’t have expertise in voting theory. I’m willing to bet most of them couldn’t tell me the definition of monotonicity or Bayesian Regret — so such an ad populum arguments don’t seem convincing to me.

And Liberal/ National competition in single-member electorates is most certainly not a[n] historical fluke. (The Liberals now hold more rural seats federally than the Nationals do).

Please tell me how many of the 150 House seats exhibited competition between them in the last election, or the one before that, or the one before that. Examples?

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 15 June 2010 @ 19:06

MSS (#51), like Clay, I found your terminology in #39 a bit confusing — until I realized that you were incorporating by reference the separate thread on Lousiana/Washington/California Top Two (or jungle) primaries.

Clay is right up to a point, that Duverger made a distinction between plurality and two-round majority. But Duverger made an equally important distinction between two-round majority and PR. As Clays quotation makes clear, Duverger linked two-round majority with political systems in which minor parties exist in the shadows of the two major ones, as partners in two broad alliances. Might sound a little like Australia under IRV, actually.

Seed planted by Bob Richard — 16 June 2010 @ 01:21

Tom (#37): If “it won’t help minor parties win seats” is your touchstone, then providing ammunition that opponents can use to shoot down an STV-PR initiative (if one is ever put) seems an own [odd?] goal.

I think this becomes slightly more understandable (although not more sensible) when you link the zealous advocacy for range/score voting to it’s basis in utilitarianism. Suppose that (say) libertarian values are so important to the 10% who vote Libertarian that the “utility” of winning for them outweighs the “utility” to the rest of us of defeating the Libertarian candidate. In other words, those with more passionately held beliefs should have their votes given greater weight than those with less passionate beliefs. This is what range/score voting attempts to accomplish — or, at least, the political value judgment it reflects.

I think the indifference to PR derives partly from the fact that philosophically it weights votes equally. It doesn’t try to “maximize utility”. The fact that PR is a very hard reform to win gives these folks even more reason to hope against hope that their single winner method can give minor parties a piece of the action.

Seed planted by Bob Richard — 16 June 2010 @ 01:48

Bob – “own goal” = accidentally kicking the ball into one’s own goalpost area, which counts as a point for the opposing team anyway.

Seed planted by Tom Round — 16 June 2010 @ 03:08

@Bob Richard

First, I’d like to ask you once again, do you acknowledge that you were wrong when you said, “no voting rule in single member districts is going to elect legislators from more than two parties — not IRV, not approval, not score voting”? According to Duverger, that was false, but I’ve yet to see you firmly acknowledge that.

I think this becomes slightly more understandable (although not more sensible) when you link the zealous advocacy for range/score voting to it’s basis in utilitarianism.

There are several sound mathematical proofs that the social utility of a candidate is just the sum of the individual voters’ utilities, thus utilitarianism is mathematically proven to be the only tenable social utility function.
http://rangevoting.org/OmoUtil.html
http://www.rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns.html
http://www.rangevoting.org/PuzzlePage.html#p36 and #p37

Put more bluntly, if you suggest any alternative social utility function, I can prove with mathematical certainty that it sometimes picks the wrong outcome, and thus is not the correct preference aggregation algorithm. Your gut might tell you that utilitarianism is wrong or subjective, but the math says your gut is wrong.

Beyond that altruistic view of utilitarianism, there is the fact (pointed out by the economist Harsanyi) that a utilitarian social utility function gives a random voter the highest expected utility. So if you reject a utilitarian social utility function, you’re not only bad with math, you’re harming yourself by getting election outcomes which give you a lower expected value.

This is what range/score voting attempts to accomplish — or, at least, the political value judgment it reflects.

No, Score Voting doesn’t “attempt” to accomplish anything. Bayesian Regret calculations are an attempt to determine how utilitarian a voting method is. Score Voting just coincidentally happens to produce better/lower Bayesian Regret than the other common methods. Warren Smith didn’t know this would happen ahead-of-time; he just ran the calculations and the results favored Score Voting. Moreover, there are other (more complex) methods that are even more utilitarian than Score Voting (but generally thought to be politically infeasible).

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 16 June 2010 @ 19:38

I think the indifference to PR derives partly from the fact that philosophically it weights votes equally. It doesn’t try to “maximize utility”.

This is very wrong on many levels.

We aren’t indifferent to PR. I have no idea what would make you say such a thing. Warren invented a system called Reweighted Range Voting which is better and simpler than STV, and he invented Asset Voting (which he later discovered had first been proposed by Lewis Carroll).
http://scorevoting.net/RRV.html
http://scorevoting.net/Asset.html

I would argue that you are indifferent to PR, since it is federally illegal in the USA, and that won’t change unless we first repeal that law, which will obviously not happen until we implement a single-winner system which can break free of duopoly, which IRV doesn’t. I.e. if you want PR, you need to start by supporting Score Voting and/or Approval Voting.

There is no mathematical basis to your claim that PR methods inherently weight votes equally. For instance, all deterministic voting methods can exhibit cases where a voter gets a better result by being tactical — so tactical voters have more “power”. This is yet another case where hard scientific facts refute your unsupported (and apparently un-researched) assertions.

And we actually have spent some time thinking about how to do Bayesian Regret calculations for multi-winner methods. Again, your point that PR methods don’t try to maximize utility is incoherent. No voting method “tries” to maximize utility. Voting methods just do what they do, and researchers like Warren Smith try to calculate their utility efficiency.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RangeVoting/message/7706

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 16 June 2010 @ 19:47

@56, I think Clay’s comments just reinforce my point. Not only does he assert the superiority of utilitarianism, he also asserts it as irrefutable science rather than as a value judgment.

Give me John Rawls over Jeremy Bentham any day.

Also, it is silly to assert that Score Voting just coincidentally happens to produce better/lower Bayesian Regret than the other common methods.. No, this is not a coincidence. The “scores” in score voting are self-reported estimates of “utility”. To say that this method maximizes “utility” (at least assuming non-tactical voters and relative to other methods) is entirely circular. If Warren Smith was as surprised as he says he was by his simulation results, then he needed to take another look at the formulas.

Seed planted by Bob Richard — 17 June 2010 @ 02:36

@57. Over a period of about 90 years, many countries have switched from winner-take-all to proportional elections. How many of them adopted approval or score voting as an intermediate step? How many of them even found it necessary to adopt two-round runoff as an intermediate step?

Actually, the leading example of two-round runoff, France, did adopt PR for (I think) two brief periods since World War II and then reverted both times. No one counts France as a victory for PR, whether or not two-round runoff had anything to do with these adoptions (my guess is not).

Clay, there is valuable research and theorizing on the factors leading to the adoption of PR. Some of the most valuable contributions are by our host, Prof. Shugart (MSS).
Unfortunately for your point of view, this literature makes zero use of social choice theory, and has almost zero need for it.

Aside to MSS, tangentially on topic — have you had a chance to look at Alan Renwick’s new book yet? Any comments? Thanks!

Seed planted by Bob Richard — 17 June 2010 @ 02:57

@Bob Richard,

@56, I think Clay’s comments just reinforce my point. Not only does he assert the superiority of utilitarianism, he also asserts it as irrefutable science rather than as a value judgment.

I cited mathematical proof of that. Your response seems to me to be, “my gut says it’s a value judgment, so I’m not going to read or respond to the fancy math.”

Nevertheless, I invite you to put your money where your mouth is and actually show me what you believe to be the correct social utility function. If it’s not utilitarian (i.e. additive, anonymous, linear, and non-normalized), I will quickly show you concrete cases where it picks the wrong outcome.

But you just don’t want to believe me, so go ahead and try it, and I’ll show you.

Also, it is silly to assert that Score Voting just coincidentally happens to produce better/lower Bayesian Regret than the other common methods.. No, this is not a coincidence. The “scores” in score voting are self-reported estimates of “utility”.

Wrong. For one thing, tactical behavior distorts the actual utilities severely, causing most voting theory novices to naively assume that Score Voting falls apart under tactical behavior. For all Warren Smith knew, this was correct. It was actually a surprise to him that this wasn’t the case when he empirically tested it.

Beyond that, the scores are normalized, which an additional distortion away from the actual utilities. So the scores are functions of utility, not exact measures of utility.

It would be helpful if you would actually study these things before making continuous streams of inaccurate statements about them.

To say that this method maximizes “utility” (at least assuming non-tactical voters and relative to other methods) is entirely circular.

You again show that you are uninformed about the process. Even with no tactical behavior, normalization to a standard scale is a distortion of the actual utilities.

More importantly, we do not assume non-tactical voters. The superiority of Score Voting to alternatives actually increases in proportion to the number of tactical voters. As I have pointed out to you on innumerable occasions, Score Voting behaves as well or better with 100% tactical voters as IRV does with 100% sincere voters.

If Warren Smith was as surprised as he says he was by his simulation results, then he needed to take another look at the formulas.

This comes after you have just proved you have no idea how the “formulas” work.

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 17 June 2010 @ 03:48

Over a period of about 90 years, many countries have switched from winner-take-all to proportional elections. How many of them adopted approval or score voting as an intermediate step? How many of them even found it necessary to adopt two-round runoff as an intermediate step?

But in the USA, multi-member House districts are FEDERALLY ILLEGAL (and Senate seats are elected in staggered terms, thus forced to be single-winner).

In 1996, congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (who later ran as the Green Party candidate for US President) wrote, but failed to pass, bill HR 2545, which would have overridden previous 1967 US law that had outlawed multi-member districts, i.e. had made PR illegal. She re-introduced a similar bill, HR 1189, in 2001. It failed again. Then she tried again with HR 2690 in 2005. It failed yet again.
http://scorevoting.net/PropRep.html#mckinney

Regarding France, I don’t know what your point is. If they couldn’t get PR to stick under a top-two-runoff system, I certainly don’t think they’d get it with plurality or IRV, since those systems favor two-party domination, unlike TTR.

I am well aware that extensive historical information exists about the adoption of PR. I simply think your assessment of that data is severely flawed. You ignore serious political obstacles to PR in the USA. You also routinely make reckless claims about various voting science issues which seem to come from your intuition, and are totally out of line with established facts. For instance, you previously have stated many times that single-winner voting methods cannot break free of duopoly, contrary to Duverger. And you did not understand the simplest facts about Bayesian Regret calculations (namely, that scores are essentially normalized utilities, and that tactical behavior is incorporated), and yet you asserted that my reasoning was circular regarding the utilitarian-ness of Score Voting.

Prof. Shugart may have made some valuable contributions to the study of PR methods. But I am skeptical of his expertise, given his numerous logical/mathematical fallacies from previous writings.

For instance, he once complained that Condorcet and Approval, “have the further, and closely related, flaw of possibly allowing a relative unknown, who is the first choice of a small minority, to emerge victorious.” He ignores the fact that IRV can elect a candidate who was the favorite of just 2 voters, and was generally highly disliked compared to other candidates.

He argues, “I think a flaw that both Condorcet and approval share is the likely favoring of colorless, offend-no-one candidates.” If voters think being “colorless” is bad, then they can prevent colorless candidates from winning, by not voting for them.

I respond to a slew of his similarly illogical arguments here.
http://groups.google.com/group/socorg/web/shugart

Unfortunately for your point of view, this literature makes zero use of social choice theory, and has almost zero need for it.

This statement is highly irrational in my view. This is like saying that architects have no need to study architecture. They can just make unskilled imprecise drawings, and we shouldn’t be concerned with how well their designs hold up to earthquakes and such.

When you actually analyze different voting methods scientifically (instead of from Bob Richard’s gut), you find that there are serious differences between them, and they all produce different outcomes that will be more or less representative of the will of voters.

If you want to support STV because your gut just likes it, with no regard for its actual merits, then you will most certainly end up pushing a poorer system than you would have if you had decided to use science instead of your gut.

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 17 June 2010 @ 04:28

> ‘FPTP spoilers hurt major party candidates quite a bit. IRV can protect them from spoilers, without a realistic threat that their duopoly control will be thwarted.”

You are mixing apples and oranges here. Yes, spoilers are a nuisance to large parties under FPTP, but they result in Big Party A losing a seat, not to a minor party, but to Big Party B. Vote-splitting at any given election is a zero-sum tactic. If it helps one major party, it hurts the other.

Vote-splitting under FPTP does not, in general (Martin Bell and the Canadian aside) help minor parties win a single seat election. Indeed, for the Big Two to tell potential (eg) Green voters “you’re throwing your vote away and helping the Tories to win”, and to have this confirmed by reputable journalists and political scientists who understand how the system works, is a good way to drive down first-preference support for minor parties on election day. Look how many Britons told opinion pollsters they liked Nick Clegg, but then voted tactically for Lab/ Con on election day. Look how many “Nader traders” in the USA have met through vote-swapping websites.

Moreover, over time, vote-splitting’s advantage among the Big Two tends to cancel out. From 1955 to 1974, when the DLP was still strong in Australia, Labor politicians supported FPTP or at least making preferences optional, while the Libs and Nats defended exhaustive-preferential “number every square”. Now that the Greens are running at 15% in opinion polls and looking to take three Labor House of Reps seats (clearly they haven’t read enough Warren Smith), it’s Labor that’s defending compulsory preferences while a few Liberals (eg, Scott Morrison?) have started to wonder whether “voluntary” is as good when applied to voting systems as when applied to union membership.

If G*d grants me enough years of life I will address your other points. In a nutshell, any electoral system that can allow a candidate who is the first preference of more than 50.1% of the voters to be defeated by her own supporters’ second preferences is defective.

Seed planted by Tom Round — 17 June 2010 @ 05:10

What Toms aid, moreover the strength of your theoretical case might improve if your empirical evidence about Australia showed some ground in reality. You cannot prove your case by making empirical claims that are simply untrue (we are still looking for the famous NatLibs) and then proclaiming that your mathematics is indisputable. That’s counting angels on pinheads.

Seed planted by Alan — 17 June 2010 @ 06:42

“… Martin Bell and the Canadian NDP aside…” – may make more sense now!

Seed planted by Tom Round — 17 June 2010 @ 10:12

@Tom Round

any electoral system that can allow a candidate who is the first preference of more than 50.1% of the voters to be defeated by her own supporters’ second preferences is defective.

This is the opposite of the truth. Any voting method which always elects majority winners is defective. This is mathematically proven.
http://www.electology.org/criteria/majority

(This was the major reason why Arrow’s Theorem was so disconcerting.)

As for spoilers, they may hurt both parties equally overall. But when it comes to incumbents (the people with the power, who make the laws and executive orders), they are generally very safe. I’ve heard that (in the USA at least) they are more likely to be unseated by death or resignation than by electoral defeat. That may be an exaggeration, but even then, probably not much of one.

A major factor there seems to be that if they won, it was usually because their party was already dominant in their district, such that the “real” contest is their party’s nomination. Yet voters are unlikely to nominate someone other than the incumbent, because they fear losing to the other party, and the incumbent has already proved that he can win.

Spoilers may hurt the non-incumbent party too, but in these cases it doesn’t matter, since they were likely to lose anyway.

This is just a theory. I don’t know of any serious research into the subject. But I think it’s plausible, and it may be specious to conclude that spoiler-mitigating voting methods are inherently unfavorable to major parties.

Now that the Greens are running at 15% in opinion polls and looking to take three Labor House of Reps seats

AU has had IRV in the House since (I think) 1918, right? If this were to happen, it could be a great thing. But why do you think the House would remain two-party dominated all that time, and then finally break free? Does IRV just take 90 years or so to break out of duopoly? Is it related to the increased political awareness and distributed campaign donations brought about by the rise of the Internet? Surely you can understand why I’m skeptical.

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 18 June 2010 @ 05:35

@Alan

the strength of your theoretical case might improve if your empirical evidence about Australia showed some ground in reality.

First of all, mathematical proofs aren’t any less correct when a person who discovers them or discusses them makes other claims that you disagree with. The Poincaré conjecture is proven, and doesn’t cease to be true even if Grigori Perelman blogs that the moon is made of blue cheese.

we are still looking for the famous NatLibs

I cited several examples where that term was used. You said one was from the UK. Okay, my mistake, but that doesn’t discount all the others.

And besides, the term “NatLib” is irrelevant to the real issue, of whether the coalition is effectively one party. My study (including a phone call to the AU Green Party recently) has found that they are effectively one party, despite a few historical flukes.

Again, if you want to dispute that, show some EVIDENCE. Look at the 2007 House election, and show me some of the 150 seats which exhibited competition between the coalition parties. That would be a nice start. You know, actual evidence instead of allegories about angels on pinheads.

Regarding the proof that the social utility function is “utilitarian”, you could attempt to refute that by, say, showing an alternative one which cannot be refuted via reductio ad absurdum. I’m quite confident you won’t be able to, and thus you’ll have to stick with cute but academically meaningless allegories.

But I could be wrong. No way of knowing since you haven’t even attempted a rebuttal.

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 18 June 2010 @ 05:46

No, Clay, you cited several examples where a different phrase was used. Unlike me, you did not give a count of those terms or any other testable evidence. Continually making new claims, and altering old claims to evade intellectual responsibility, does not contribute to rational intellectual inquiry.

Nor does trying to define the argument in your own terms. The data about the house of representatives would be interesting, but essentially meaningless without data from the state parliaments.

Seed planted by Alan — 18 June 2010 @ 06:41

@Tom Round,

Do you have any evidence that failing the Majority Criterion is a flaw rather than a virtue? The mathematical case to the contrary seems cut and dried to me.

Seed planted by Clay Shentrup — 23 June 2010 @ 02:35

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