US Election eve

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  • Telford wrote: »
    For those who are unable to get to vote in he traditional way, the postal vote allows them to vote. It does not prevent them from voting.

    Alan and I have both told you that we were prevented from voting by the fact that the postal ballots were not distributed early enough. That is a system failure.

    So how do you think it could be improved ?

    I can't recall reading or hearing that we have a big problem.
  • Amanda B ReckondwythAmanda B Reckondwyth Mystery Worship Editor
    How do people campaign when there are multiple elections so close together? How do you avoid the national elections swamping the local issues?

    You don't. You get to endure endless TV commercials, many of them quite nasty and bitter and filled with half-truths and downright lies. Thank God for the mute button and channel flipper.

    You also get to endure roadside signs, erected on every street corner and on every available space within the block itself, again filled with half truths, e.g. "Vote NO on Prop. 207. Eliminate unsafe drivers." Prop. 207 was about legalizing recreational marijuana. It had nothing to do with unsafe drivers except perhaps peripherally. In Arizona, state law makes it a Class 2 misdemeanor to "remove, alter, deface or cover" any such sign.

    The only saving grace is that in Arizona, state law also requires the removal of all such signs within 24 hours of the end of voting, or else the the campaign is fined.

    That said, some candidates, especially for the more obscure offices, don't bother to campaign at all, leaving the voter wondering just who these people are who are listed on the ballot. "Oh, he has a sexy sounding name. I'll vote for him." Or "No woman should be doing that job. She won't get my vote!" (Personally, Miss Amanda doesn't vote for any candidate whose name she doesn't recognize.)
  • Miss Amanda: The use of the Mechanical Voting Machine in New York ended in 2009 by court order. The main reason why they were discontinued was, well, they were mechanical and subject to breakdowns. Moreover, they were cumbersome, not easy to set up and takes up a lot of storage space.

    An interesting story was why did the United States determine "the Tuesday next after the first Monday in the month of November" to be election day. Basically November is right after the harvest season has been completed. Tuesday was selected because it did not violate the Sabbath and everyone would be able to take one day to get to the poll--usually the county seat--by horse buggy. Election day used to be quite an outing traveling to the poll on Monday, staying overnight partying, buying new supplies. Voting the next day. Waiting for the Results and returning home the next day.

    Many, many years ago, my wife and I experienced this ourselves. We lived in a rural county in South Dakota. Everyone came to the county seat to vote, and there was quite a bit of partying and marketing the day before. We voted at the county courthouse, and then returned later that evening to watch the tally be posted. It remains the only way to get local results quickly in many rural count,|

    In the United States, about the only acceptable way of voting by proxy is if you are a stockholder of a company and are selected the board of directors.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    Gee D wrote: »
    I don't really understand your last sentence. All voting here is by hand and AFAIK all elections for Federal and State parliaments (and possibly also for local government, I've no idea) are by either the preferential or proportional systems and counting is by hand. Preferences are only counted after all primary votes have been, as it may not be necessary to distribute them. It would almost* always be necessary to go beyond the first choice in a proportional ballot.

    The thing you're talking about here "distributing preferences" is how IRV works, which you can reasonably count by hand. But of the ranked-preference voting schemes, I consider IRV to be about the worst. My preference is the Tideman method (Ranked Pairs), although I could go for several other Condorcet methods.

    But a feature of basically every ranked-choice system I like is that to compute the winner, you have to make pairwise comparisons between each pair of candidates, which whilst you can do it on paper, it's significantly more computation than IRV, and people would be unlikely to want to do it on paper.

    I'd still like to know why you consider IRV to be "about the worst". In general, preferential voting is used here for lower houses and proportional on the Hare-Clarke system (or some small variation on that) for upper houses. In Tasmania it's the reverse, and Queensland is unicameral.
  • Golden Key wrote: »
    Vote by proxy??? No offense, but having trouble wrapping my mind about that.

    I searched a couple of ways for info. All I saw was about whether members of Congress could do their work-voting by proxy; and also about shareholders voting by proxy.

    The closest think I know of here is getting assistance with physically filling out a ballot if you're unable due to health/disability. I think that's for either mail or in-person voting. IIRC, the helper has to fill out contact info on the return envelope, and sign it.

    I had no idea you could vote by proxy in other jurisdictions. As a politics fanboy, I now intend to attempt to cast a proxy vote in as many jurisdictions as possible.

    Note that the word "fanboy" is carefully chosen. I am not a politics nerd or junkie, because that requires the gathering of detailed knowledge. I'm in it for the silly costumes, the paraphernalia, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

    As a side-note, I am expecting my Trump Victory over the Coronavirus commemorative coin to arrive any day now.
  • Did you make that up? Because anything seems possible. Maybe disinfect it before handling it?

    "Trump Victory over the Coronavirus commemorative coin"

  • The most complicated elections I have voted in were those for Students' Union officers. It was done by Single Transferrable Vote, and I had a policy of putting No Further Preference or Reopen Nominations (a vote against) when it got to the point on the list where the candidates hadn't bothered to submit a manifesto.
  • Did you make that up? Because anything seems possible. Maybe disinfect it before handling it?

    "Trump Victory over the Coronavirus commemorative coin"

    read it and laugh. I shall soon have one in my possession to go with my Trump/Kim Singapore Summit medallion, which I ordered when it looked like the thing would fall over.
  • Oh dear. Mr Anthony Giannini, who is apparently responsible for these artistic monstrosities (and some florid, florid prose which has NOT been proofread) is apparently expecting to switch his attentions from his current idol to Biden and Harris momentarily. I fear the shock may be too much for him.
  • Simon Toad wrote: »
    Did you make that up? Because anything seems possible. Maybe disinfect it before handling it?

    "Trump Victory over the Coronavirus commemorative coin"

    read it and laugh. I shall soon have one in my possession to go with my Trump/Kim Singapore Summit medallion, which I ordered when it looked like the thing would fall over.

    That website raises Poe's Law-related issues, until you find out that it is, in fact, real and sincere, but is simply a privately owned business, masquerading as its former version as a government outlet.

    He says that "tens of thousands" of people in North and South Korea bought those coins, which seems a little odd, given that I personally have never heard of anyone buying one. Though I guess "tens of thousands" could include a number as low as 20 000, so I guess it's not impossible.
  • Pendragon wrote: »
    The most complicated elections I have voted in were those for Students' Union officers. It was done by Single Transferrable Vote, and I had a policy of putting No Further Preference or Reopen Nominations (a vote against) when it got to the point on the list where the candidates hadn't bothered to submit a manifesto.

    It's always fun when there are multiple vacant positions. Double the fun if at least half of the positions have to be held by women.
  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host
    According to Wikipedia
    Originally named the White House Flower Fund, the gift shop is now privately owned and has no connection with the White House and is not associated with the US federal government.
  • stetson wrote: »
    Simon Toad wrote: »
    Did you make that up? Because anything seems possible. Maybe disinfect it before handling it?

    "Trump Victory over the Coronavirus commemorative coin"

    read it and laugh. I shall soon have one in my possession to go with my Trump/Kim Singapore Summit medallion, which I ordered when it looked like the thing would fall over.

    That website raises Poe's Law-related issues, until you find out that it is, in fact, real and sincere, but is simply a privately owned business, masquerading as its former version as a government outlet.

    He says that "tens of thousands" of people in North and South Korea bought those coins, which seems a little odd, given that I personally have never heard of anyone buying one. Though I guess "tens of thousands" could include a number as low as 20 000, so I guess it's not impossible.

    Hey hey now. These are investments. The Trump Kim coin is up to $35 on e-bay. :lol:
  • How do people campaign when there are multiple elections so close together? How do you avoid the national elections swamping the local issues?

    You don't. You get to endure endless TV commercials, many of them quite nasty and bitter and filled with half-truths and downright lies. Thank God for the mute button and channel flipper.

    You also get to endure roadside signs, erected on every street corner and on every available space within the block itself, again filled with half truths
    Thanks for this, and the other people who commented on the question about campaigning when several different elections are being run. I can see how familiarity would make things easier. Plus, the apparent lack of spending, and other, restrictions during a campaign make it easier to spend the money on TV adverts (banned here, excluding a limited number of political broadcasts) and other adverts (limited here mainly because of the cost of commercial advertising when candidates have strictly limited spending) may make getting multiple messages across easier.

    There are obvious cultural and legal differences which means that in the UK the primary means of campaigning is still delivery of leaflets and knocking on doors to talk to people, though we're having to get to grips with online campaigning now and alien concepts such as phoning people to ask how they'll vote etc. And, what the media choose to cover is important too. In 2017 we were just getting into top gear for the local elections when Mrs May called a snap general election - and then all people would know about was Brexit, Brexit and more Brexit, with a side order of Independence ... which are totally irrelevant for local elections. Whether many people put down their preferences for local councillors thinking about the views of that party on Brexit and Indy I don't know, but the last few weeks of the council campaign was dominated by these questions both on the door step and the TV news cycle.
  • Telford wrote: »
    Telford wrote: »
    For those who are unable to get to vote in he traditional way, the postal vote allows them to vote. It does not prevent them from voting.

    Alan and I have both told you that we were prevented from voting by the fact that the postal ballots were not distributed early enough. That is a system failure.

    So how do you think it could be improved ?

    I can't recall reading or hearing that we have a big problem.

    Alan gave a good answer to this, with which I concur completely. The basic answer is that there currently isn't enough time, so you have to either start earlier or finish later. Start earlier is probably a better fix.
  • Leorning CnihtLeorning Cniht Shipmate
    edited November 2020
    Gee D wrote: »
    I'd still like to know why you consider IRV to be "about the worst". In general, preferential voting is used here for lower houses and proportional on the Hare-Clarke system (or some small variation on that) for upper houses. In Tasmania it's the reverse, and Queensland is unicameral.

    "Of the ranked voting systems" IRV is about the worse.

    In all single-winner ranked voting systems, voters do the same thing - they list the candidates in order of preference. The choice of voting system determines what you do with those ordered preferences to generate a winner.

    Essentially, each system is trying to achieve a result that will be most acceptable to most people, but they go about the process in slightly different ways, and so get different results. IRV is, in my opinion, bad at finding compromise. Here's an example. Suppose you have an election with three candidates - A is fairly far to your local right, B is some sort of local moderate, and C is fairly far to your local left. Suppose that your local voters' first preferences are A:35%, B:30%, C:35%.

    With IRV, the first thing you do here is eliminate the moderate candidate B, and you elect whichever of extreme candidates A and C the majority of B voters ranked second. But I'd actually like to elect B in this scenario, because B is at least tolerable by the whole electorate - B will be the second choice for both A and C voters.

    Let's suppose that those B supporters liked A more than C, so the whole vote distribution looks like this (first preference listed first)

    35%: ABC
    20%: BAC
    10%: BCA
    35%: CBA

    Ranked Pairs scores it this way:

    Consider a pairwise comparison between A and B. A is preferred to B by 35%, B to A by 65%. So we rank B > A.
    Now consider A and C. 55% prefer A to C, so we rank A > C
    Now consider B and C. 65% prefer B to C, so we rank B > C.

    Combining all these rankings, we see B > A > C, and so elect B.

    (B here is the Condorcet winner, so all Condorcet methods will select B. The differences between the various Condorcet methods arise when you don't have a consistent ranking: in that case, you get a loop, and you have to throw away a preference in order to produce a consistent winner. Different methods have slightly different ways of doing that; the differences between most of them tend to be fairly minor.)


    If you start with a political distribution that's fairly central, so the extremists have little support and get eliminated early, then IRV does OK. It also does fine at letting people flag up support for single-issue parties. But a Condorcet method works for those cases too.
  • Let's look at that vote distribution again.

    35%: ABC
    20%: BAC
    10%: BCA
    35%: CBA

    We've seen that under IRV, B is eliminated and we elect A. But all those C voters really hate this outcome. So if they knew (or suspected) that the moderates were likely to skew towards A, then rational C-voters would do better to insincerely list their preferences as BCA rather than CBA. Suppose a few of them did that, so you now have

    35%: ABC
    20%: BAC
    10%: BCA
    5%: BCA (but actually think CBA)
    30%: CBA

    Now, under IRV, C is eliminated first, and B is elected. So those C voters who lied about their preferences got a better outcome by doing so.

    Condorcet methods such as Ranked Pairs aren't completely immune to these sorts of shenanigans, but they tend to be harder to exploit because they require more knowledge about the preference distributions (and the very act of seeking a compromise candidate tends to be more robust).

    IRV is also not monotonic, for which I'll add another post.
  • Wikipedia has here an analysis of the 2009 election for mayor of Burlington, VT, which was conducted under IRV.

    There were four candidates who achieved a significant number of votes: Bob Kiss (progressive), Kurt Wright (Republican), Andy Montroll (Democrat), Dan Smith (Independent).

    Under IRV, Mr Smith was eliminated first, followed by Mr. Montroll, whose votes mostly transferred to Mr. Kiss, so Mr. Kiss was elected. This is more or less the A, B, C example I gave above, with Mr. Montroll, the Democrat, occupying the center ground, with the Republican and the Progressive on either side.

    Condorcet methods would have all elected Mr. Montroll as the compromise candidate. Plurality would have elected Mr. Wright, if the voters all selected their first choice.

    It's worth noting that IRV methods usually do elect the Condorcet winner, because of the way the preferences happen to fall. So these cases (the majority of real examples) don't tell you anything about IRV vs Condorcet, because both ranked voting methods would have picked the same winner. You explore the question of whether Ranked Pairs (or some other Condorcet method) is better than IRV by looking at cases in which they disagree on the outcome.
  • Simon Toad wrote: »
    Hey hey now. These are investments. The Trump Kim coin is up to $35 on e-bay. :lol:

    It's like bitcoin only physical.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    Leorning Cniht - thank you for your detailed explanation. Your position seems to depend on your argument: But I'd actually like to elect B in this scenario, because B is at least tolerable by the whole electorate - B will be the second choice for both A and C voters.. That assumes that B is going to be the second choice of all when that may very well not be the position. It also ignores the clear position that B is not the choice of 80% of the population. I'm happy to continue with the use of the preferential and proportional methods.
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    Gee D wrote: »
    That assumes that B is going to be the second choice of all when that may very well not be the position. It also ignores the clear position that B is not the choice of 80% of the population.
    I don't think Leorning Cniht's example where B is the second choice is so outlandish: I would guess it happens quite often in moderately polarised political systems like the UK.

    I suppose it depends how much you weigh a candidate being the first choice of some voters against the candidate being moderately acceptable to everyone. FTTP style systems value only the former and Condorcet the latter; IRV type systems are it seems a compromise between the two.

  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    Dafyd wrote: »
    I suppose it depends how much you weigh a candidate being the first choice of some voters against the candidate being moderately acceptable to everyone. FTTP style systems value only the former and Condorcet the latter; IRV type systems are it seems a compromise between the two.

    I like that.
  • orfeoorfeo Shipmate
    edited November 2020
    Gee D has left the Australian Capital Territory out of his descriptions a couple of times now. As I reported at the time (early October), I voted electronically this year for the first time.

    It actually had the advantage that you can't accidentally wreck your preferences by duplicating or skipping numbers. The computer knows what number you're up to.

    Oh. And we have Hare-Clark like Tasmania. And we're unicameral.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    Thank you - I shall tuck that away for future reference.
  • Dafyd wrote: »
    I suppose it depends how much you weigh a candidate being the first choice of some voters against the candidate being moderately acceptable to everyone. FTTP style systems value only the former and Condorcet the latter; IRV type systems are it seems a compromise between the two.

    Yes, it does indeed depend what you want your electoral system to do. "Elect the best candidate" doesn't have any meaning until you know what you mean by "best". In my opinion, Condorcet systems encourage consensus-building, and I consider that a significant advantage.

    I don't think IRV does that, and so in that sense, it's not an advantage. I see why you might say that IRV is somehow a compromise between FPTP and Condorcet, but I don't really see picking a different sub-par winner as an advantage.

    It's true that IRV will pick the Condorcet winner more often than FPTP, so perhaps I should prefer it on those grounds, but I don't think IRV provides the nudge towards consensus politics that Condorcet methods do, so I'm not keen to support it for a single-winner system.

    Gee D wrote: »
    That assumes that B is going to be the second choice of all when that may very well not be the position. It also ignores the clear position that B is not the choice of 80% of the population. I'm happy to continue with the use of the preferential and proportional methods.

    This was a simplification, but it's a reasonable match to what actually happens. In English politics, for example, you could make A the Tories, B the Lib Dems, and C Labour, and you wouldn't be surprised if that ordering of preferences dominated.

    The statement "the clear position that B is not the choice of 80% of the population" does rather get to the point of the decision, though. It contains the assumption that "the choice" is a thing, which is a bit of an assumption. You're right - 70% of the people in my example have as their first choice a candidate other than B. But why should that be particularly important? Why is having a candidate that is the favorite of more people more important than having a candidate that is acceptable to the largest number of people?

    Hare-Clark and other proportional systems reduce the impact of this problem. If you have whatever method of multi-member proportional allocation, then the impact of the details of your voting system is almost always restricted to questions of who gets the final seat in a multi-member constituency. So the fact that Hare-Clark is basically multi-member IRV, and so shares its weaknesses, is of less significance because it mostly just affects who wins the final seat.

    (My favoured Ranked Pairs method for single winners has a multi-winner extension known as CPO-STV ("Comparison of Pairs of Outcomes by the Single Transferable Vote.") In probably all realistic cases, if you're electing N representatives for a proportional multi-member area, both methods will select the same first N-1 people, but will often disagree on who gets the last place, by basically the same biases as the single-winner methods show.)
  • @Leorning Cniht, would your ideal legislature have single-member or multi-member districts?
  • Has any place ever tried to do preferential voting with party lists or with mixed-member proportional representation? It could work this way:

    1. With only party lists, people rank the party lists in order of preference. Seats are allocated proportionally among the lists based on voters' first, preferences, then, if no party list gets a majority, a winner is determined using whichever system you like (which could be Condorcet). The winning list gets extra seats until it has exactly one seat more than half of the seats, while all the other party lists' seats remain the same. This would mean that the number of seats in the legislature might be different every election, because of the extra seats given to the winning party.

    2. With mixed-member proportional representation, voters vote both for a person to represent their constituency and for a party list that they would like to govern. You could even have the representatives from the constituency seats be elected with a preferential system. If that is the case, voters would rank both the candidates running in their constituency and the party lists running nationwide. The constituency seats could be single-member or multi-member. Party-list seats would be awarded to each party based on voters' first preferences in ranking party lists such that each party has at least as many seats as the proportion of first preferences it received. Then, if no party has a majority of seats, a winning party would be determined by looking at all the second, third, etc., preferences of the voters in ranking party lists. The winning party would be awarded extra seats until it had a majority of one seat.

    I like these systems because, especially if the preferences are calculated in a Condorcet way, they let a government be formed by a party with policies that a broad consensus of voters finds acceptable and that party is given enough seats to put those policies into place without having to give up on the promises it made before the election in coalition talks. The small size of the majority given by the preference system, though, would allow for any government that was generated by bonus preference seats that started acting tyrannical to be brought down by just a few defections of its members in the legislature (in this system party-list members that leave their party would be allowed to keep their seats, although they probably won't be on their party's list in the next election!). Some way could be found to make the party lists "open" so voters have a say as to which candidates on the list get seated in the legislature first, but I'm not sure how to do that in a preferential system.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    It's true that IRV will pick the Condorcet winner more often than FPTP, so perhaps I should prefer it on those grounds, but I don't think IRV provides the nudge towards consensus politics that Condorcet methods do, so I'm not keen to support it for a single-winner system.

    The statement "the clear position that B is not the choice of 80% of the population" does rather get to the point of the decision, though. It contains the assumption that "the choice" is a thing, which is a bit of an assumption. You're right - 70% of the people in my example have as their first choice a candidate other than B. But why should that be particularly important? Why is having a candidate that is the favorite of more people more important than having a candidate that is acceptable to the largest number of people?

    Hare-Clark and other proportional systems reduce the impact of this problem. If you have whatever method of multi-member proportional allocation, then the impact of the details of your voting system is almost always restricted to questions of who gets the final seat in a multi-member constituency. So the fact that Hare-Clark is basically multi-member IRV, and so shares its weaknesses, is of less significance because it mostly just affects who wins the final seat.

    Your first quoted paragraph - is there a value in nudging towards consensus politics?

    Real problems with the second paragraph I quoted. In your example, there was no candidate who was the choice of the majority, the favourite of more people if you want to put it that way. Both preferential and proportional voting systems deliver a candidate who is acceptable to a majority if not the first choice of many.
  • edited November 2020
    orfeo wrote: »
    Gee D has left the Australian Capital Territory out of his descriptions a couple of times now. As I reported at the time (early October), I voted electronically this year for the first time.

    It actually had the advantage that you can't accidentally wreck your preferences by duplicating or skipping numbers. The computer knows what number you're up to.

    Oh. And we have Hare-Clark like Tasmania. And we're unicameral.

    Come to Canada, all provinces are unicameral.

    Oh, wait, you've already been here.
  • Leorning CnihtLeorning Cniht Shipmate
    edited November 2020
    Gee D wrote: »
    Real problems with the second paragraph I quoted. In your example, there was no candidate who was the choice of the majority, the favourite of more people if you want to put it that way. Both preferential and proportional voting systems deliver a candidate who is acceptable to a majority if not the first choice of many.

    Yes, in the example I quoted (and in very many real-life cases) there is no single candidate who is the first choice (not "the choice" - there's no such thing as "the choice") of more than 50% of the voters. Both IRV and Condorcet methods attempt to provide "a candidate who is acceptable to a majority if not the first choice of many" - but they do it in different ways.
    IRV tends to pick whichever popular candidate is best tolerated by supporters of less popular candidates, whereas Condorcet methods tend to pick a consensus average from the whole voter pool.

    And I explicitly prefer a compromise candidate to one who can just scrape 51% of the support.
    @Leorning Cniht, would your ideal legislature have single-member or multi-member districts?

    I like proportional legislatures, because I think there's a lot of value in having minority voices in the legislature. And you can't get a proportional legislature without some kind of multi-member district. I quite like the Scottish approach, where there are single-member constituencies, and top-up members from larger regions, which keeps a lot of the benefits of having one-member-per-modest-sized-constituency, whilst also providing minority voices (eg. the Greens) a seat at the table.

    I'm not terribly enthusiastic about the party list system, because I'd rather the voters, rather than the parties, got to pick which people they elect. The Hare-Clark system used in bits of Australia invites voters to rank all the candidates for a multi-member constituency - I don't really see why Scotland's voters couldn't be asked to do the same, although I'll admit that it makes a ballot paper look significantly more challenging than the current system.

    But I'd preserve the single member constituencies - just have the top-up members selected in the order that the public votes for them, rather than the order that the party places them on the list.

    So my ideal ballot would:

    1. Ask voters to rank the candidates for their single-party constituency, and perform a Ranked Pairs election to determine the winner.
    2. Ask voters to rank the candidates for their multi-member region (Scottish regions elect seven additional members; you'd expect the main parties to offer a full slate of candidates, and minor parties to offer fewer candidates, so this might be as many as 50 people, grouped by party affiliation.
    3. Perform a multi-winner election, by for example modified CPO-STV, to pick the additional members. The parties who won the single-member seats in 1 will see their votes deweighted at this stage in order to target overall proportionality in the results.

    The net result of this method will be to elect constituency representatives who tend to be consensus candidates (probably some sort of moderate average of whatever the local constituency politics is), and additional members who will tend to come from nearer the political edges.

    In a thee party A-B-C setup like I described earlier, you'd be electing B members for the single-party constituency, and roughly equal numbers of A and C members from the region.

    ETA: @stonespring - I think what I describe here and what you describe in your 2 end up being pretty similar. We're certainly trying to do the same thing - mixed member proportional representation with the voters determining the ordering of the party lists. I think the thing I described is less vulnerable to shenanigans than the thing you described, but that's a claim I make based on gut feeling and intuition rather than a detailed analysis.

    Fixed broken quoting code. BroJames, Purgatory Host
  • Leorning CnihtLeorning Cniht Shipmate
    edited November 2020
    I like these systems because, especially if the preferences are calculated in a Condorcet way, they let a government be formed by a party with policies that a broad consensus of voters finds acceptable and that party is given enough seats to put those policies into place without having to give up on the promises it made before the election in coalition talks.

    I'm not much of a fan of this - and now I read this again, we're not really describing the same thing. I don't see coalitions and negotiation as things you need to avoid. It seems especially odd to create multi-member constituencies to try and get proportional representation, and then throw away the proportionality in order to eliminate the need for compromise.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    So how do you pick your compromise candidate? Your A, B andC example breaks unless you assume that the B candidate with 20% has policies which are midway between A and C. That may very well not happen, and B can be an extremist candidate totally unacceptable to supporters of A and C.
  • HuiaHuia Shipmate
    Has any place ever tried to do preferential voting with party lists or with mixed-member proportional representation? It could work this way:

    2. With mixed-member proportional representation, voters vote both for a person to represent their constituency and for a party list that they would like to govern.

    NZ has Mixed Member proportional Representation (MMP). Candidates can stand for an electorate only, or for the List only - but most opt for both. The party then ranks its candidates as to where they are on the Party's list. If someone who is on both wins their electorate seat they are the electorate MP. If they don't but are high enough on the Party list they may still end up in Parliament as a List MP. An MP of longstanding recently lost his electorate seat, but is still in Parliament as he was second on his Party's list, being the Deputy PM at the time of the election.

    One of the major parties (National) has a strategic arrangement with a minor party (Act) that they will ask their supporters to give their electorate vote to the minor party's leader so that they will have an ally who will possibly bring in with him other list candidates. For years Act party only won enough party votes so the leader was returned to parliament, but this year there are ten MPs from Act's list in Parliament.

    But there was a Labour landside, (Jacindamania) so neither party is in government.
  • orfeoorfeo Shipmate
    Has any place ever tried to do preferential voting with party lists or with mixed-member proportional representation?

    The Australian Senate gives the option of simply voting for a party and then your preferences go down the party candidates in order.

    I never use that option. But then the ballot paper for the ACT Senators is far smaller than the ballot paper you get in some of the States.

  • Gee D wrote: »
    So how do you pick your compromise candidate? Your A, B andC example breaks unless you assume that the B candidate with 20% has policies which are midway between A and C. That may very well not happen, and B can be an extremist candidate totally unacceptable to supporters of A and C.

    If B is an extremist unacceptable to A and C supporters, then A and C supporters aren't going to rank B in second place.

    The fact that A-voters rank ABC and C-voters rank CBA tells you that A and C voters consider B some kind of compromise. If B is a "totally unacceptable" extremist, they wouldn't rank B second.
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    A problem with any ranked order of preferences is that it tells you nothing about absolute levels of support. If I rank my preferences Green Blue Indigo that tells you I prefer Blue to Indigo but says nothing about whether I think Blue is nearly as good as Green or whether I'm voting Blue through gritted teeth to keep Indigo out.
  • Dafyd wrote: »
    A problem with any ranked order of preferences is that it tells you nothing about absolute levels of support. If I rank my preferences Green Blue Indigo that tells you I prefer Blue to Indigo but says nothing about whether I think Blue is nearly as good as Green or whether I'm voting Blue through gritted teeth to keep Indigo out.

    The real problem with it is that it's complete BS. It may be fun as game theory, but absolutely no-one spends that much time agonizing over who they should rank second for dog catcher. Get real.
  • Dafyd wrote: »
    A problem with any ranked order of preferences is that it tells you nothing about absolute levels of support. If I rank my preferences Green Blue Indigo that tells you I prefer Blue to Indigo but says nothing about whether I think Blue is nearly as good as Green or whether I'm voting Blue through gritted teeth to keep Indigo out.

    If there's an appetite for more nuanced voting, you could give people five votes to spread around. Probably allow a maximun of three for one candidate to encourage voters to show their preferences.
  • Leorning CnihtLeorning Cniht Shipmate
    edited November 2020
    tclune wrote: »
    The real problem with it is that it's complete BS. It may be fun as game theory, but absolutely no-one spends that much time agonizing over who they should rank second for dog catcher. Get real.

    Because nobody really gives a toss about who gets elected dog catcher, and because you currently don't get to express a second choice, so thinking about it would be a futile exercise.

    But I will bet you anything you like that you can talk to people in any constituency in the UK, for example, and they'll be able to tell you their opinion of all the viable candidates in the race. And really, the effort required to rank candidates is not terribly different from the effort required to pick a top choice: in both cases, a responsible voter spends most of their time acquiring information about the different candidates in order to select the best one.

    ETA: And if you just want to pick your top choice, you can do that. Nothing stops you from only ranking a subset of the candidates, and by inference all the others as equally bad. If you don't want to pick a second preference for dog catcher, don't bother.
    Dafyd wrote: »
    A problem with any ranked order of preferences is that it tells you nothing about absolute levels of support. If I rank my preferences Green Blue Indigo that tells you I prefer Blue to Indigo but says nothing about whether I think Blue is nearly as good as Green or whether I'm voting Blue through gritted teeth to keep Indigo out.

    The same is true of FPTP! Are you voting Red because you like Red, or are you voting Red because you really hate Blue, and Red is the only viable alternative? At least a ranked system gives you an opportunity to show your belief in Green.

    You're right that a ranked scheme doesn't let you differentiate between reasonable support and grudging preference. There are, of course, scored schemes that allow you to express that, but a lot of scored schemes have what I see as a significant problem, in that expressing your honest preference isn't necessarily your best tactic.
  • I think it's been shown there isn't a perfect (single outcome?) system with regard to edge cases.
    That said, if they are comparatively rare, and the failures are relatively mild (any time there isn't a single outcome probably qualifies, anything under another authority likewise). It's probably ok for use.
  • .
    tclune wrote: »
    Dafyd wrote: »
    A problem with any ranked order of preferences is that it tells you nothing about absolute levels of support. If I rank my preferences Green Blue Indigo that tells you I prefer Blue to Indigo but says nothing about whether I think Blue is nearly as good as Green or whether I'm voting Blue through gritted teeth to keep Indigo out.

    The real problem with it is that it's complete BS. It may be fun as game theory, but absolutely no-one spends that much time agonizing over who they should rank second for dog catcher. Get real.

    No municipality is going to have ranked choice voting for dog catcher.
  • jay_emm wrote: »
    I think it's been shown there isn't a perfect (single outcome?) system with regard to edge cases.

    Yes, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says that no perfect voting system can exist, if you have more than two alternatives and more than one voter. The best you can do is make the edge cases comparatively harmless, and hard to exploit tactically.
  • mousethief wrote: »
    No municipality is going to have ranked choice voting for dog catcher.

    Not least because no municipality actually elects dog catchers. Duxbury, Vermont was the only town in the US that was holding elections for dog catcher, until it discovered in 2018 that you can only elect a specified list of local officials in a Vermont municipality, and "dog catcher" isn't one of them.
  • mousethief wrote: »
    .
    tclune wrote: »
    Dafyd wrote: »
    A problem with any ranked order of preferences is that it tells you nothing about absolute levels of support. If I rank my preferences Green Blue Indigo that tells you I prefer Blue to Indigo but says nothing about whether I think Blue is nearly as good as Green or whether I'm voting Blue through gritted teeth to keep Indigo out.

    The real problem with it is that it's complete BS. It may be fun as game theory, but absolutely no-one spends that much time agonizing over who they should rank second for dog catcher. Get real.

    No municipality is going to have ranked choice voting for dog catcher.

    Your razor-sharp intellect has seen through to the real issue with unfailing perspicacity. Perhaps you could use that clarity to shed light on how far down-ballot you'd have to go before people have only the most rudimentary knowledge of the candidates. In my experience, it isn't very far. But perhaps you share @Leorning Cniht's view that that number would skyrocket if people had the opportunity to vote for more than one candidate per office. And perhaps you'd be interested in a NYC bridge that I own.
  • tclune wrote: »
    In my experience, it isn't very far. But perhaps you share @Leorning Cniht's view that that number would skyrocket if people had the opportunity to vote for more than one candidate per office. And perhaps you'd be interested in a NYC bridge that I own.

    If you don't want to express a second or third choice in a ballot, you don't have to. The election still works. We just interpret your vote as "I don't have a preference between any of those people". If you're unhappy with meaning that, it's on you to say something different. Very much like you can choose to not vote at all in an election, and we interpret that as you not caring who gets elected.

  • TukaiTukai Shipmate
    The Australian Senate is elected on a state by state basis, with each state (except regretably the ACT and NT) having an equal number of senators, let's say 5 for the sake of example, using a single transferable vote system. . You vote only in one state.

    Under the "old" rules (*) a valid vote required you to number each square all the way down, which was quite tedious as for most states there were often 50 or more names on the paper.

    I used to take malicious delight in selecting not only my top 10 or so (in order of preference) but also a botton 10 or so, who I despised the most. Usually this included any neo-nazis, any One Nation (pseudo trumpist) candidate, and any particularly hypocritical or obnoxious politician who I wanted to see out of parliament.

    (*) Under the new rules, the first para is still true, but you have the option of voting "above the line", which means you indicate your preferred party. Your vote is then allocated following the pre-declared order of preference of that party.
  • DafydDafyd Shipmate
    tclune wrote: »
    The real problem with it is that it's complete BS. It may be fun as game theory, but absolutely no-one spends that much time agonizing over who they should rank second for dog catcher. Get real.
    Yes. We're nerding out. If you're finding this discussion dull and would rather read a thread on kitten videos the button you want is Start New Discussion.

    There is the vending machine paradox, whereby someone will decide who they want for President in a second, but agonise for hours over third choice dog catcher.
  • Gee DGee D Shipmate
    Tukai wrote: »
    The Australian Senate is elected on a state by state basis, with each state (except regretably the ACT and NT) having an equal number of senators, let's say 5 for the sake of example, using a single transferable vote system. . You vote only in one state.

    Under the "old" rules (*) a valid vote required you to number each square all the way down, which was quite tedious as for most states there were often 50 or more names on the paper.

    I used to take malicious delight in selecting not only my top 10 or so (in order of preference) but also a botton 10 or so, who I despised the most. Usually this included any neo-nazis, any One Nation (pseudo trumpist) candidate, and any particularly hypocritical or obnoxious politician who I wanted to see out of parliament.

    (*) Under the new rules, the first para is still true, but you have the option of voting "above the line", which means you indicate your preferred party. Your vote is then allocated following the pre-declared order of preference of that party.

    Only 50? Senate papers in NSW often have close on 100. Since it became possible, we taken the easy way out of voting above the line. It eliminates the risk of an informal vote. On top of that, I really don't know the policies of some of the independents or small parties and as we want Labor to win as many seats as possible, we're just going to vote Labor.

    BTW, I'm not sure that it's regrettable that there is a smaller number of senators for the territories. The Senate already gives greater weight to residents of small States; there are 12 Senators for each State, regardless of the size of the population. That gives 12 Senators from NSW, which has a population of just under 8 million, and 12 from Tasmania with barely more than 500,000 inhabitants. The population of each Territory is considerably lower still.

  • tclune wrote: »
    Your razor-sharp intellect has seen through to the real issue with unfailing perspicacity. .

    Your fucking obnoxious sarcasm has seen through to being a total git.
  • BroJamesBroJames Purgatory Host, 8th Day Host
    Host hat on
    @tclune and @mousethief if you want to continue this line of personal attack and counter-attack you may do so in Hell, but not here.
    Host hat off
    BroJames, Purgatory Host
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