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An Analysis of Various Election Methods
An anonymous reader writes "David Cobb talked about Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) as the best choice in electoral methods in his interview here, but is it really? The folks over at electionmethods.org seem to think it isn't. They favor Condorcet voting, which is another ranking style method using simulated one on one elections. Here is an evaluation of various methods, including IRV and Condorcet."
Speaking of voting methods, how about giving us soldiers in Iraq a chance to vote. Read this: http://www.thetoxic.com/a_soldiers_opinion.html
What I want to know is, where is a url for the Michael Badnarik and David Cobb debate. Not a url for a webpage about it or any lame streaming link. Just the damn file over http or ftp, please?
I'm not sure this is a problem (or I'm missing something here). The nice thing about Condorcet, is that you can vote for as many or as few candidates as you like. If you are only interested in 2 candidates, choose those (the system even works if you rank them the same). If you know precisely the order you'd like 100 candidates, rank them 1 to 100.
Actually, it is the US with the obsolete voting system. Check out most of Europe, Australia, just about anywhere that has a newer democracy than the US. That's where you find such inovations as party list for legislatures and ranking systems or approval for presidents.
If you must moderate, please moderate as irrelevent, not something bad, because I'm sure someone will find this interest
Mod parent up! The Slashdot story covering the Libertarian and Green debate says that Freemarketnews will be "streaming it and providing a download afterwards". Great. Click on the "Click here for schedule of all upcoming programs", and you are told to "JOIN NOW [...] its FREE". Fine, I'll register, verify my damn email address, and sign in. The schedule links to http://63.223.15.84:443/freemarketnews/09-30-04-pe oplesdebate.wmv. Hope this helps. (A non-SSL HTTP server on port 433, odd.)
Talk about inaccessible. The Republicrat debate was inescapable; streamed live on just about every station and rebroadcast several times. You have to jump through all these hoops to find the minor party debates. I can understand that it won't be as easy to find as the major debate, but this sort of inaccessibility is inexcusable.
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There supposed advantage of IRV is that its a more of a grey scal e vote that allows voters to vote for a wider spectrum of candidates without worrying about voting for a spoiler. It supposedly remedies the complaint that we have a bistable system that only supports two parties.
In actual fact there is no evidence that a bistable system is bad. Indeed the entire point of our electoral system in that the winning person enters witha strong mandate to govern, not be voted in as the lesser of multiple evils as a third choice candidate everyone could agree upon. You want a candidate that can enter office and govern with a single uncompromoised point of view for an effective period of time. You get the balance between point of views ergodically over time not by having a compromise up front. There is an old sayng that there is the right way, the wrong way and the army way. Its a joke and a truth. What it means is that in war waiting for the perfectly thought out plan is not effective--its better to have an acceptable plan than none at all even it it sometimes is couter productive in specific instances.
one can contrast and compare our 2-party system with another gray scale system: parlimentary systems. in parlimentary systems there is more of a grey scale of representation, however that is not how the voting occurs. What happens is that a consenus coalition forms a govenrment and rules with complete authority. compromise happens only within the coalition not the entire body of elected officials. So once again a strong leadership emerges and can govern effectively. In our system the same sorts of intra-organizational consensus happens but it happens at an earlier stage. If the greens get too powerful the democrats move to co-opt their positions. That might piss off the greens as a party but basically it means the greens won if your opponents adopt your platform issues. So assimilation at an early stage replaces overt inter-party consensus at the end stage. In some ways this is better. For example, a single issue minor party that joins a parlimentary consenus can in return giving up all other issues create disporotionate havoc if it does not get its way on its single issue, say mandatory prayer in schools. In contrast a two party system is less beholden to fringe elements.
A final system is our electoral college. Many people mistakenly believe it somphow is wrong that someone could win the popular vote and lose in the electoral college. Wrong. To govern effectively a president has to be able to pass bills in both the house and the senate. there is a deliberate small-state bias in the senate. Therefore the best candidate for president is not the most popular one but the one whose popularity is spread out over the greatest number of states. willing a large popular vote in CA, NY, Ohio, texas and florida might win the popular vote but would make for an awful presidency. the person who is favored by in more states is actually going to be able to work more effectively with congress.
SO basically, while I support IRV systems because I like the idea of getting more diversity in candidates, I also recognize that it is not gaurentteed to produce a more stable or more representative or more efffective from of government.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
The ancient Greeks used to fill a lot of their governmental positions by lottery. Also, Bill Buckley is famous for noting that you'd getter better government out of the first 200 names in the Cambridge phone book than you would from the faculty at Harvard. These two things got me thinking -- Could you really construct a workable modern system around that concept?
Imagine, just for fun, a legislative body chosen by lottery.
* You'd probably want to exclude felons and the legally insane.
* You couldn't, of course, compel anyone to serve, but you'd want to make serving an attractive proposition, so you'd have to make the experience a financially rewarding one.
* Bribery would be a big problem. You'd have to try to ameliorate through a combination of a healthy salary, draconian punishment, and probably a healthy guaranteed pension for life for those chosen to serve.
* Currently, legislatures are full of strong personalities which tend to cancel each other out. In a randomly selected body, strong personalities would have a much greater tendency to influence the weak.
* Legislators would (at least at first) need to rely to a greater extent on professional bureacracies of expert wonks. On the other hand, the U.S. government is sufficiently complex that it's not like any one legislator can master all of it anyway, so I think it's arguable as to how much of a change this would be.
* Randomly choosen legislators would not be accountable through the mechanism of elections, though I suppose they could still be impeached.
* One could make the case for choosing members of one house by lottery, and members of the other (presumable the Senate) by election. But that's no fun.
* You would probably want to hold the lottery every year, but not for every seat, so members would hold overlapping terms.
* You might also want your selectees to serve a one-year period of apprenticeship, learning how the system works before they're actually able to vote or anything.
Anyway, it's kind of a fun idea to toy with. It would certainly have its drawbacks, but I'm not convinced those drawbacks would be anything worse than what we have now. At least it would stop everyone from bitching about the influence of money on elections.
- Alaska Jack
There is a live Condorcet Presidential Poll. Source code is available too.
Seastead this.
Yes, it would, but so would Condercet Voting. IRV itself on the other hand can be wiggled around the constitutional requirements, which is why Greens support it as the _first step_ to a fairer electoral system -- understanding that it's not perfect, but an incremental improvement that can be done without much tweaking of the seat structures.
One way to implement Choice Voting at the state level though that might be both constitutional and something that can be done on a state-by-state method would be to do one election for all the state's House seats as an STV election. States with more seats in the house would have a gradually lower election threshold. This would effectively make the arbitrary political divisions of house districts not needed, and as they are only useful to the elites as a form of gerrymandering, they aren't particularly useful to the electoral system anyways, so we might as well dump them. Instead of requiring all the Greens to move to a single representative district to get representation, all they have to do is mark Greens as first place on their ballots. Greens and Libertarians would pick up a few California and New York representative seats that way and the "Free State" takeover of New Hampishire would be moot.
A sibling post mentioned Borda, and he is correct, this maps to Borda.
Another issue with Borda-type systems is voting strategy.
If you run a scare campaign, you can convince people that it is vital your campaign succeed. Of course, your opponent will do likewise.
Of course, just about every presidential campaign in memory has been that way: vote for me OR ELSE.
So how does Borda deal with this? If it's vital that your opponent lose, you have to put the maximum vote on a candidate likely to defeat him. In your system, that would mean putting all 5x the available options onto one candidate. Any other option would reduce the strength of your vote.
So, Borda devolves into our current system.
You want to use a system that does not punish you for stating a preference. Condorcet does this. IRV does this better than the current system, but not as well as it could. Approval voting doesn't punish, either (though you could argue that it doesn't reward).
A large part of the issue with any voting system is you have to consider how it will be used. You will have some very intelligent people out there attempting to manipulate those votes.
In disclosure, I believe in doing either Condorcet or Approval voting, preference to Condorcet in the future, Approval today.
The winner of the debate was... Cowboyneal?!?!?!?
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
The dilemma you mention is a serious one: do our voters know what's best for the country?
Our system of voluntary association and contract was established because it was decided that no one really knew what was best for the country, only what was best for themselves. So leave the people free to do best for themselves (within certain rules), enforce the rules, and people will do as best they can.
I don't think we should be using our votes to decide a "direction" for the country. I believe our individual actions will decide a direction. Our votes should be regarding what ground rules we want, and who we wish to enforce them.
"Only slaves pull as a team. Free men pull in all sorts of directions."
If I could wave a magic wand, I'd make the President of the U.S. elected via Condorcet, Senators also elected per state via Condorcet, and the House of Representatives elected proportionally. For the House, I'd use Single Transferable Vote (STV) and it wouldn't be one big nationwide proportional pool, but rather, multimember districts of 5-9 seats.
Rob
(who's lying...if he could wave a magic wand, there's a lot of other things that would be too much more fun to do than change the electoral system)
I agree there can be some improvements to the voting system, but I think these issues are less significant than the more important problems plaguing the structure of power in the United States.
This may not seem obvious until you examine a country like Switzerland and their democratic process and power structure. In the U.S., we vote for a President, who in turn appoints people in charge of key areas of government: defense, transportation, agriculture, education, etc. More often than not, these appointees are not even modestly qualified to hold the positions they're given. The president doles out these assignments as rewards for those who are loyal in their service to his campaign.
In contrast, Switzerland divides the management of the government into a set of distinct areas and there is a vote for the best-qualified person for that particular specialization. This is the Federal Council and it allows the people to select the best-qualified person to manage defence, foreign affairs, communications, etc.
Thanks for the comment, as former elections administrator and secretary for the Oregon Greens, I try to stay up-to-date.
;)
To answer your question, Arrow completely ignored porportional representation as a criterion. The Condercet rebuttal then ignored it as well. Arrow certainly wasn't exhaustive in his search for criteria.
I agree though that monotonicity presents a problem to IRV, depending on what you are looking for, but the reason why monotonicity breaks is _because_ of the property that allows proportionality to be emphasized. Once your vote works to elect somebody whom you are closest to, you no longer get further choices beyond where your vote fell to elect that person. In other words, if "minority A" elects their "favorite son" candidate, then another candidate whom they may like also may not get elected whereas if their "favorite son" candidate dropped out of the race, the other candidate may be more likely to tip above the election threshold. That we would want the other candidate elected instead of the strongly favored (but favored by not as many people) favorite son is merely bias against proportional representation.
Another problem with IRV is that you can vote and have your ballot exhausted by not ranking all the candidates and seeing all the people you prefer get eliminated. If you fill out the whole ballot with all candidates (especially those most likely to win) you have can avoid that problem, so I consider it a pretty weak problem.
I just like to think that there's a bias in every election method; you just have to pick the one that works best for what would pass all the criteria that you want it to pass. Of course some methods are truly bad, like first-past-the-post elections without runoffs where there really is no majority candidate elected especially in two-party systems with close races and strong third parties who act as "spoilers". That's almost as bad as widely implemented condercet voting for proportional representation.
One thing that many city dewllers seem to forget is just where all the food comes from.
And most supporters of the "farming lifestyle" seem to forget that farming wouldn't exist unless the city dwellers were paying for that quaint old farming to be kept around. You're acting like the farmers are the one providing a service to the cities, but it's in reality the other way around. The cities could buy their food overseas and save money. Farming in america isn't kept around because it's useful, it's kept around because it's politically sensitive. Europe is much the same.
You also seem to forget that the US is a unites group of states. The idea, and the law as written in the constution, is that the states have a great deal of rights and powers. They are unified and subordinate to a federal government, but still very free. Well, that requires the states to ahve equal power. If larger (either population or landwise) states got all the votes, they could simlpy dictate to smaller states, thus destroying the idea of states rights.
Belgium called, since they're a sovereign nation they think they deserve equal power to the US inside the UN, and they want a permanent seat on the security council. You do agree we should give it to them, right? Or are you trying to destroy the rights of sovereign nations?
During the time period of the Great Depression, many economies around the world were suffering greatly, and the agricultural sector in particular was hurt globally. Countries responded by passing extremely harsh anti-trade legislation to try to protect their own economies through "screw-your-neighbor" terms of trade. After WWII, politicians wised up and starting relaxing these trade barriers, but many countries were afraid to expose their agricultural sector to greater risks. Effectively, farmers had suffered enough, and they hadn't gotten a big jumpstart from the industrial war effort. As such, trade liberalization occurred primarily in the manufacturing sector.
All the crap you see today with agriculture is a legacy of that ultraprotectionist era, and developing countries still pay the price today. There is some hope with the latest Doha round of trade talks, but don't expect any major changes soon.
Actually, this is one of the mystifying things about democracy. The plain truth of the matter is that we don't *know* exactly why more people don't vote. There are a number of theories, but for each of them there is a body of data suggesting they are wrong. Which is to say, for every piece of evidence suggesting people don't vote because they are disaffected, or whatever, there is another piece of evidence suggesting people don't vote because they generally think things are fine the way they are.
Last week a news article briefly appeared on Yahoo concerning a study on what Americans thought about their leaders and their government. A record 68% had little faith in either, felt that their vote wouldn't change anything since the government as a whole didn't represent them, and identified themselves as 'disenfranchised'.
When two-thirds of your electorate says the government and their leaders can't be trusted, you know you have a problem. This is not what people say when they "think things are fine the way they are".
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
This isn't a problem with STV. In fact, it is what it is designed to address.
With STV, if the rural people exceed the election threshold (which in California would be around 2% of the vote), they get at least one seat. For each candidate they've got, they'll get more seats until the rankings run out or the candidates run out -- it's proportional representation even of local interests if that's important enough to get people to vote for people based on that interest, not _just_ local interests, but _any_ interest. It accomplishes PR without parties, although I would probably prefer a party-based ballot for the sheer simplicity.
If location interests aren't important to you, it lets you pick where to focus your minority representation. In the district-based system, you don't have the choice anymore, you don't have the freedom to get representation if you're in the minority, and you're pretty much tied to how your locality votes.
Worried about the cost of state-wide campaigning? Campaign locally, and ask your area to vote for you in first place. If they care to vote for you in first place (or high up), they'll effectively get local representation at the cost of not being able to influence the rest of the candidates as much.
Maybe locality is a stress that you _do_ want, a bias that you do care to integrate into the voting system. You can stress that if you want. I can't support it though.
About the back room deals, not much to comment -- I'm from Oregon, not California, and I'm not a Republicrat. It happens; you fix it in your state; I'll work on mine.
However, I cannot imagine where a circular preference really makes sense - I know it come about e.g. if you rate a candidates on 3 topics, and every candidate beats another on two topics and loses in one.
Example, topics are A, B, C
Every candidate beats another here. Still, I feel people should get their preference straight and assign weights to topics.
After all, this is something for the Simpsons: Better to have Bush than Rush. Well, then better to have Lush than Rush, well then better to have Bush than Lush, etc. etc.
I think the condorcet system simply allows circular preferences because the matrix of preferences is the tool used to compute the winner, and circular preferences emerge anyway, even with several voters where every single one votes in order of preference(just replace topic A,B,C with voters A,B,C).I must say a voting system which does not even allow to determine a winner of the voting when there is only one persons voting(with circular preferences) doesn't seems to make sense in practice - I guess this would need to be hacked(fixed).
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
But that's a good thing. When states start "wasting" their votes, it means that the system is working and we're moving away from the two-party system that first-past-the-post encourages.
No reason why that rule couldn't be passed by all states.
I would also like to see a limit on contributions from outside the politician's district. Say a limit of $3000 for residents and $1000 for non-residents. And if corporate contributions are allowed, then each corporation has to choose one and only one district to be its "home".
sPh
What about combining this system with the Condorcet method:
In a first step, use only the relative order of candidate votes to get the preferences of candidates, and calculate the Smith set (just as you'd do with the Concordet method). If that gives a clear winner, then we are ready. Otherwise, for all candidates in the Smith set, add the preference numbers, and the one with the highest vote wins. If there are two or more candidates with the same total vote, apply the Concordet method to the set of those (by eliminating the non-higest vote candidates, you most likely have broken a cycle; otherwise use your favourite cycle-breaking method).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Punch cards have many other problems, are well documented, so probably we shouldn't be doing that. Scantron ballots are a little worrisome, but if you make people bubble in the "unapproved" too it fixes that nicely. Machines and touchscreens, it doesn't matter.
The topic raises a very good point. Depending on your voting hardware, there is no direct way for you or the voting council tell if the ballot has been modified after the fact if you were just specifying your approved candidates. Specifying unapproved candidates, or total candidates approved, helps a little, but complicates the procedure and is prone to error.
The question is how easy is it to enact WIDE-SCALE tampering - the only kind that matters. The key thing is that the best strategy in approval is to vote for your choice of the two front-runners, and any third party candidates. That means that in an election, the winner will likely be receiving more than 50% of the votes, because in a closely contested race everyone will want to specify their lesser of two evils, since they can also specify their true choice. Simply adding approvals for the loser on ballots would mean that BOTH were getting better than 50% - a highly suspicious situation where some voters voted for both. If NO votes were approved by more than 50% under approval (but were close), then tampering becomes attractive. But frankly in that range tampering is attractive under any system. Just ask Florida.
I'm not sure how approval would be affected if there is no clear front-runner, or if somehow both front-runners really ARE approved of by majorities of the people. Frankly, the divisive tendency of plurality has warped our approach to candidates so much it's hard to say how people might vote if they were free of the two-party control over the whole system.
If the ballots deviate too much from the polls and from the general populous's will, people will notice and cry foul. Only closely contested or poll-free elections can get away with it. And to get away with it when you're only able to tamper with existing ballots, you need to be able to delete votes rather than just add in any system.
In the end, ballot integrity for ANY system depends primarily on a corruption-free voting administration. Checking an extra box on a ballot is possibly the easiest way to corrupt a vote, but like all tampering it requires allowing people or hardware to access and tamper with the votes, either before (software) during (electronic and lever) or after (paper of any kind; counting machines) voting. And pure mechanical or electronic systems can tamper however they want - so long as the end result looks plausible and doesn't contradict the paper trail if there is one.
So on that basis, I think that Approval voting is no worse off than any other voting system in terms of corruptibility.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
One of the benefits of being ostracised from political life is that they now had to find something to do with their time. If I remember right, Herodotus was exiled from the greek city of Halicarnassus, and as a result he wrote the history of the Greeks which we now know in large part because of him
The sending of this message pretty much inconveniences everyone involved.