On 1/8/2017 6:49 PM, Sennet Williams wrote:

My answer:

Less corruption, which leads to greater economic prosperity for a far
greater number of people.  And when there is greater economic prosperity
in a region/nation/state/province, then lots of "political" problems
disappear.

Expressed conversely, corruption is when just some people are able to
get oversized slices of economic pie for themselves, which leaves
everyone else more aggressively competing for what remains of the
economic pie.

Another way to say this is that the goal of fairer elections is higher
levels of democracy, which lead to higher levels of economic prosperity.

Richard Fobes

On 1/8/2017 6:49 PM, Sennet Williams wrote:

---------------------------- Original Message ----------------------------

Subject: [EM] What is the goal of a "better" election method?

From: "Sennet Williams" sennetwilliams@yahoo.com

Date: Sun, January 8, 2017 9:49 pm

To: "election-methods@electorama.com" election-methods@electorama.com

for me, the end goal of a "better" election method (like Ranked-Choice Voting decided by a Condorcet-compliant method) is FAIRNESS and INCLUSION.
Fairness for voters means

1. Level playing field
   for all voters ("One person, one vote")
2. No burden of tactical voting (therefore no punishment for voting sincerely) in a multi-candidate election. �No voter regret.�
3. Obtain and use contingency preference information from voter. Sincere voting is
   facilitated.��Should be obvious to voter how to vote for their second choice.
4. Minimum burden to vote. �No delayed runoff that
   Fairness for the candidates means
5. Level playing field for all candidates and parties. �The two major parties have no systemic
   advantage over the other parties or independent candidates. (Remove Duverger's law and give 3rd parties a level playing field with the major parties.)
6. No advantage realized for "swinging" voting strategy or "gaming" the system.
7. No punishing losing candidate (who
   runs sincerely) by making that candidate a spoiler and hurting their allies.
   Fairness for everyone means
8. No pathologies. �(No spoiler, no non-monotonicity)
9. Transparency for honest, authoritative elections that nearly everyone can accept and no one can rig. "Precinct
   summability" is part of this.
10. Tabulation method and identifying the winner is simple and comprehendable to everyone and generally accepted as "fair".
    �
    To this end, I support Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) (but not the Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) that is
    promoted by FairVote.org). �The tabulation method should be Condorcet compliant which means simply:
    "If more voters mark their ballots that they prefer Candidate A over Candidate B than the number of voters who mark their ballot to the contrary, then Candidate B is not
    elected."
    stated less precisely:
    "If a majority of voters prefer Candidate A to Candidate B, then Candidate B is not elected."
    I want this to be true whether there is a Candidate C in the election or not. �I don't want the presence of Candidate C to change the
    apparent preference of Candidate A over Candidate B.
    Condorcet is not perfect (Arrow's Impossibility Theorem says no system is perfect), but I think does better than any other system. �I believe that the Ranked Ballot requires just the right amount of information from the voters.
    �Score Voting requires too much information and Approval Voting requires too little information from the voters. �So also, of course, the traditional Vote-For-Only-One ballot requires to little information from voters.
    �

eligiible voters will be motivated by.�

well, one-party rule in government is the best. �as long as it's my party.

�-The Berkeley Daily Cal editorialized for IRV because "IRV lets you vote for who you really want"� (something to that effect, that was a long time ago and memory fades)
and the Burlington 2009 election (where the IRV winner, the Condorcet winner, and the plurality winner
were three different candidates) is a counter example. �there were about 1/6 of the voters that found out that simply by marking their first choice as #1, they caused the election of their least favorite candidate. �they voted for who they really wanted and they were punished for it in
the election result.

well, then let's take that to extremes and disenfranchise everyone except me. �whoever i cast my
vote for, that's the person who wins.

--
r b-j � � � � � � � � �rbj@audioimagination.com
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

As someone who claims to have invented a better voting method (Binomial
STV) I agree with the general drift of these rules.
I note that that there is an implicit support for proportional
representation (point 5) This rule can be generalised, not merely to the
fair representation of more than two parties and political independents,
to the fair representation of all social groups. My main example is the
UK NHS which formerly elected all white male GPs by FPTP to the GMC. In
1979, STV proportionally represented women, immigrants and specialists.
This is also the reason why STV is favored - treasured - in Cambridge,
because of the PR of gender and ethnic diversity, in the city. So the
League of Women Voters found on visiting. (This is a more substantial
reason than that, suggested by an EM member, that "nerdy" STV appealed
to MIT, however their academic brilliance may have helped STV prevail in
the city.)

A couple more points. In my estimate, Theorem Arrow deserves more
incredulity than the credulity it seems to attract. In a previous post,
I mentioned the widespread practise of trying to demonstrate the theorem
with examples of different voting systems, giving different results. The
one I picked-up on (in Beyond Numeracy by von Paulos) was an artefact of
different levels of information, giving different results. It had
nothing to do with the claims of the theorem. When I recalculated
Condorcet pairing by using the standard statistical technique of
weighting in arithmetic proportion, the extra information conformed with
the result for Borda method. This example was small enough to see by
intuitive inspection that the two most informative methods gave the best
result, in what was a highly contrived election example, to make the
result as ambiguous as possible.

Perforce admitting some informative value in the weighted Condorcet
pairing method, this was not the direction I chose to take, for reasons
I won't go into here.
Already, posts have given a few good and relevant reasons for better
voting method. The last century, of mainly abortive electoral reform,
has shown how determined rulers are to control and degrade, if it serves
their turn, electoral practises. Perhaps worst of all, proportional
representation, as it is generally known, is nearly always a form of the
original Andrae (or Hare) PR system degraded to merely
party-proportional counts.

Human frailty demands that competitions must have impartial referees.
Politics works so badly, because professional incumbency is an exercise
in oligarchic ignorance against the public good. The trick is to create
impartial referees with democratic authority, to be respected by all. In
science, theory is tested by experience. So, the first chamber of
political theories competing to serve community law, must be tested by a
second chamber representing the division of labor of society. This
scientifically complements, but does not compete with, the political
chamber, yet has the democratic authority and the authority of its
comprehensive expertise, to referee it.
Both chambers could and should be elected by STV (a system which can be
enhanced to Meek method STV or, eventually, even something like my own
method of Binomial STV. Electoral democracy can evolve, the transferable
voting way.)

Richard Lung.

On 09/01/2017 09:42, robert bristow-johnson wrote:

--
Richard Lung.
http://www.voting.ukscientists.com
Democracy Science series 3 free e-books in pdf:
https://plus.google.com/106191200795605365085
E-books in epub format:
https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/democracyscience

Good question, Sennet.  In my opinion the
most important goal is to give candidates who
want to win a strong incentive to take
positions responsive to voters' preferences
on many more issues, so that lobbyists for
wealthy special interest minorities will get
their way on far fewer issues.

With traditional primitive voting methods,
many voters choose among the candidates based
on one or a very small number of issues.  For
example, a significant number of voters in
the U.S. base their votes on candidates'
positions on the abortion issue, and it
doesn't matter much to them what the
candidates will do on other issues. This
leaves the candidates free to serve special
interest minorities on most issues (for
example bank regulations).  Candidates can
win election by cobbling together an
electoral majority coalition based on just a
few issues. (The coalition can even consist
of minorities on those few issues, because
several minorities can add up to a majority.)

In theory, a voting method that elicits all
pairwise majorities and pays attention to the
majorities' sizes (affirming the larger
majorities' pairwise preferences when
majorities cycle) ought to meet the goal.
Here's why: Suppose candidate Smith takes
position X on some issue, and a majority of
the voters prefer position Y over position
X.  The risk for Smith is that some other
candidate, say Jones, will enter the race,
taking position Y and copying Smith's
positions on all other issues, because in
that event a majority would tend to prefer
Jones over Smith... even if it's an issue
such as bank regulations that most voters
don't care about much (relative to other
issues).  The more unpopular X is compared to
Y, the larger the majority who should prefer
Jones over Smith. (If the issue is
one-dimensional and Y is the voters' median
position, then the further X is from the
median, the larger the majority who would
tend to prefer Jones over Smith.)  Given a
voting method that elicits all pairwise
majorities and pays attention to their sizes,
why would Smith risk taking an unpopular
position, if Smith wants to win?

A flawed argument often made by proponents of
proportional representation methods is that
representativeness, by definition, requires
proportionality.  But that's not the only
possible definition, and proportionality is
really only a means to an end. Suppose the
end is to have a legislature that produces
policies similar to the policies the voters
themselves would produce in a
well-functioning direct democracy. (By
"well-functioning" I mean voters somehow
aren't too busy to represent themselves, and
they choose policies using a voting method at
least as democratic as the Robert's Rules
"pairwise single elimination" majoritarian
method for voting on motions and amended
motions.)  In other words, the closer a
legislature's policies are to the policies
the people themselves would choose, the more
representative is the legislature.  With this
definition of representativeness, a
non-proportional legislature may be more
representative than a proportional
legislature.  A legislature elected using a
voting method that gives candidates a strong
incentive to take majority-preferred
positions on many more issues would be very
representative.

--Steve

On 1/8/2017 9:49 PM, Sennet Williams wrote: