Re:  [EM] The 'post
mortem' discussions on UK radio (from Steve)

To:  Kristofer
Munsterhjelm  km_elmet@t-online.de
James Gilmour"
jgilmour@globalnet.co.uk
Fred
Gohlkefredgohlke@verizon.net

Jun 2015 15:55:34 +0100

….........................

To: Kristofer Munsterhjelm
Because you want both a 'simple' and 'fair'
electoral system, perhaps you would like to consider APR. It is
referred to in my next comment to James Gilmour.  APR's countrywide
count with its modified STV would be administured through all the
single member constituencies that remained after APR's primary
election.  Consequently, rather than having to rank more than one
candidate, each citizen would still have the option of voting only
for one candidate, much as they do now using FPTP.  At the same time,
each such vote would still be guaranteed to continue mathematically
to count in the legislative assembly.  APR seems to offer your
'fairness throughout'.  APR is almost as simple as party-list systems
but puts each citizen in control of to which representative's
'weighted vote' her vote will be added.

What do you think?
Steve

To:  James Gilmour

Because of the valid
points you make to Fred Cohlke about the Frome result, I wonder if
you or others have any better suggestions or criticisms of the
electoral system that Sol Erdman proposes, also for nationwide
electoral purposes:  Personal Accountability Representation (PAR, see
ERDMAN,
SOL
.
2010
‘To Reverse America’s Decline, We Have to Fix Congress’s
Dysfunctional Incentives’, Center for Collaborative Democracy, pp.
7—17, Appendices III-V:
https://www.olssons.us/thelibrary/Center%20for%20Collaborative%20De
mocracy_%20Case%20for%20PAR.pdf.
).

Erdman's PAR paper
ballot system is disarmingly introduced by describing the simple
face to face way the following imaginary village elects the 7 Members
of its Village Council:
Imagine
that you are a citizen of this village and 15 of your fellow citizens
want to be elected.  To discover which 7 of the 15 are to be elected,
each candidate initially stands at a different place in the Village
Hall surrounded by the citizens who most favour him or her.  If more
than 7 candidates have such supporters, the one with the fewest is
eliminated.  Each of his or her supporters now moves to stand by
their 2nd

choice candidates.  This process continues until only 7 candidates
remain.  These 7 are elected.

Each
of these 7 Members will have a ‘weighted vote’ in the Council
equal to the number of citizens standing by them at the end of the
count.    No citizen’s vote is wasted.  Each citizen’s vote will
continue to count in every decision made by the Council. Each citizen
has voted most positively.  If you participated in this election,
your concerns would be represented by the Member you trust most.

If
you like Erdman's proposal, perhaps you would also like to receive an
emailed copy of my article that describes an improvement on
development on PAR called APR: Associational Proportional
Representation ('Equal Voting Sustained' from
stevebosworth@hotmail.com).  In addition to PAR's allowing each
citizen's vote equally to continue mathematically to count in the
relevant legislative assembly through the 'weighted vote' earned by
each rep, APR also includes a primary election which discovers the
most popular geographically and non-geographically defined electoral
'associations' through which each citizen will later rank as few or
as many candidates in the country during the general election.  This
additon makes it also more likely that each citizen will continue to
be represented qualitatively—
by the one representative in the assembly whose scale of values is as
close as possible to his or her own.

What
doe you think?
Steve

To: Fred Gohlke,
I would like to
understand exactly what you mean by the difference between 'internal
and external proportionality'.  In any case, I see the
proportionality that could be guaranteed by APR (as mentioned) above
my comments to James Gilmour) would offer what you seem to want:
' to choose representatives that represent the entire community'.
In this regard, perhaps you would also like to receive an
emailed copy of 'Equal Voting Sustained' as well as to consider
Erdman's PAR.  I see both as offering a much better means by which
the candidates could have been selected (and voted for) by the
citizens of Frome.

I see APR as especially
offering 'the means to seek out and elect those who have the
particular blend of qualities needed to address and resolve the
issues that are of current concern'.  APR seems to offer what your
Dr. Mansbridge wants: 'the objectives of principal and agent … to
be aligned'.  Similarly, I see that  because APR
is more likely to produce, on average, a closer ideological fit
between each citizen and her congressperson (MP), APR is more likely
to help solve the real problems facing the country.  They are more
likely to do this because of the greater expectation on the part of
their different electorates that progress must actually be made with
respect to the goals of each of the ideologically different
electorates who elected them. To do this, compromises must be made
and a working majority coalition formed.  The likelihood of this
happening with APR contrasts with the gridlock that is frequently
produced by the more defuse, vague, and often conflicting agendas
held by the congresspersons and their electors using existing
electoral systems.

A
trusting voter is more likely to believe her own congressperson’s
claim that a given compromise is necessary.  This closer bond between
each rep and his electorate would also seem to make each
congressperson’s work in the assembly more focused and known to be
backed by his 'association' and his electors. This greater clarity
and focus would seem to help each APR congressperson to present the
strongest possible case for his legislative proposals to the other
members of the House.  Consequently, an assembly composed of such
able, different, well informed, clashing, and focused reps would seem
to provide an optimal debating and negotiating chamber for the
production of creative and evidence based solutions to the country's
problems. The wisdom of any decisions resulting from this
deliberative process is also likely to be aided by the simple fact
that it would take place in an assembly whose composition most
accurately reflects the real variety and intensity of the concerns of
all citizens.

What do you think?

Steve

On 06/18/2015 05:49 PM, steve bosworth wrote:

Unfortunately, because APR reduces to IRV, I can only consider it
asymptotically fair (that is, when you have enough seats compared to the
number of candidates). I would much rather have an APR-like method based
on one of my Bucklin methods for the actual count, because neither
Bucklin/MJ nor Range exhibit monotonicity failures.

Perhaps you would accept a Bucklin variant of APR as well, though I
would have to write up the algorithm in a more user-friendly way than I
have in my past posts. The basic idea is that instead of eliminating
candidates, you set a support threshold so that a candidate is elected
after achieving that support, and then you gradually add inn first
preferences, second preferences, etc. When a candidate exceeds the
threshold, all the voters whose votes contributed to the candidate's
election are associated to that candidate, and then the count continues
without them.

You then try different thresholds until you find one where only the
number of candidates you want to be is elected (say, a single winner or
three winners), and then each winner is given a weight corresponding to
the number of voters associated to that winner.

Just like IRV APR, every voter's vote matters in the sense that it
increases the weight of a winner; and there are (to my knowledge) no
monotonicity problems of the sort where ranking X higher might lead to X
being defeated. Furthermore, it handles certain scenarios with
compromise candidates better than IRV, and can be used for both ranked
votes and rated ones[1].

If the IRV method's intuition is of a sequential elimination
competition, Bucklin is one of repeated voting until the voters reach an
agreement. The voters start off being very picky about what candidates
they want to give their votes to (corresponding to a high threshold),
then they become less and less picky and try again until there are
enough winners. In practice, the algorithm would use a binary search
instead, but the outcome is the same.

Neither Bucklin nor IRV would be as good as say, using a weighted
variant of Monroe's method or Statistical Condorcet (if it can be
simplified). But either of these would be a lot more complex.

I would also have to check if the other concepts of APR are reasonable.
I haven't been investigating it much as I have been busy with other
things. What I am saying is that reducing to IRV makes it too sketchy
for me unless it's used with a lot of winners relative to candidates. If
simplicity is number one, I'd rather have your Asset fix be the default
mode of operation[2].

[1] There's also a distant connection to party list PR systems.
Webster's method can be phrased as: if party (or state) p has v_p votes
(or population), find x so that (sum over all p: round(v_p * x)) equals
the number of seats you want. Again you find a threshold that gives the
right number of winners.

[2]  Or emulate the Bucklin intuition in the town hall setting by
letting the voters remove and add their vote whenever they feel like it,
and stopping the process when only three (or seven, or however many)
candidates have nonzero support and none have greater than 20% support
(or what your threshold was). The voters will start off being picky and,
seeing that that doesn't get them nowhere, will gradually become more
lenient. However, it will be messy and may not follow Bucklin well since
there are no restarts. In a town hall setting, regular majority vote or
parliamentary procedure might be good enough in any case, because there
are relatively few voters.