On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 10:58 AM, Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com
wrote:

In EM discussion, and probably at the Center for Election Science too,

I believe this is very significant, so I would like to see this
discussion.  I'll go digging in the archives, unless someone has some
references or summary pages.

If it is agreed by most people that Approval Voting will home in quickly on
the median voter and then stay there, and if we also agree that this is a
good long-term goal, then I believe we should be able to skip most of the
rest of the arguments.

Is there any other voting system that does this?  Or any that does it so
simply and verifiably, with ease and stability?

Why should homing in on the voter median be considered a good goal?
Simply because the median is the most fair way to represent most of the
people.

Alternatives that result in representing the views of barely half of the
voters at best (with two dominant parties) can be no better than half as
good, and often far worse because of flip-flopping from one election to the
next (so maybe they are all good, but only half the time) with deadlocking
between uncooperative polarizing parties all the rest of the time.  But two
dominating parties are even worse when they both polarize around the
middle, while squeezing out the middle and thus rarely if ever settling on
the middle.  Such a system would seem to be designed around actively
discouraging cooperation.

Alternatives that result in many smaller parties might result in workable
coalitions between multiple parties, but still with substantial
flip-flopping instability and/or deadlocking.  To the extent that the
coalitions work, they will more likely be representative of the median.

Alternatives, such as the above, that discourage extreme positions from
having much voice or representation at all should be concerned about an
accumulation of corruption that comes from repeated applications of
lesser-evil voting.  But homing in on the voter median can also have this
problem, as discussed below.

Here are a couple potential problems with representing the median that I
can think of:

• For some policies, it may not make much sense to compromise on a median
  solution, and so a representative of the median might be an indecisive
  do-nothing, unable to move one way or another.  But most issues have a
  range of solutions and many reasonable ways to compromise.

• Extreme positions held by a small percentage of voters will tend to be
  ignored.  This might be considered a good thing, but sometimes, the
  extremes are where we need to go.  E.g. 100% renewable energy and 100%
  recycling is rather extreme, but I claim it is exactly where we need to be
  going as fast as possible.  However, we should find ways to encourage
  voters with more convincing extreme positions to express their views and
  thus have some impact on the rest of the voters and representatives by
  shifting opinions gradually in the direction of those extremes.  Also
  possible is that the opposite extremes may have a neutralizing effect,
  resulting in almost no motion away from the median.  But is our current
  flip-flopping really better than this?

• As a consequence of ignoring extremes over a long time, a government
  dominated by the median will tend toward tyranny of the overwhelmingly
  "vast majority", if it is not kept in check.  This could potentially
  devolve into a mediocracy instead of a meritocracy if we are not careful.
  I believe we shouldn't consider the problem as being with the "vast
  majority" but with the tyranny that could set in.

I have a plan for avoiding these problems, which in short, involves a House
of Delegates selected in exact proportional representation of the voters,
in addition to the House of Representatives elected by Approval Voting.
More in another message.

In contrast to the potential problems, the advantages of representing the
median are huge:

• A Congress composed of members who each represent the median of the
  congressional districts, for Representatives, and whole states, for the
  at-large Senators, will still cover a range of positions reflective of each
  geographic region.

• It will be much easier to find agreement among members of Congress who
  are all closer to the median.  No deadlocking.  No flip-flopping.  And a
  President who represents the median of the entire country would be able to
  work very effectively which such a Congress.

• Gerrymandering would be quickly obsoleted.  No matter where boundaries
  are drawn between congressional districts, and no matter where state
  boundaries happen to have been laid permanently, all the voters in a region
  will be effectively factored into this median calculation.  There would be
  no benefit in arranging that slightly more than half the voters will likely
  vote for one party in an attempt to exclude as many of the non-supporters
  of that party as possible.  This is because the more likely winner would be
  a candidate who is approved of by more people regardless of party
  affiliation.  Black and white mixed populations would tend to elect
  representatives who are sensitive to the needs of both blacks and whites.

• Parties would tend to be weakened to the point of obsolescence.  This is
  mostly because the winning candidates will almost always be close to the
  median regardless of party, so everyone would be a member of the one median
  party if there were such a thing.  But there are other ways that parties
  can be encouraged, and it is important to acknowledge they will tend to
  arise even if actively discouraged because we want and need to gather with
  like-minded people.  It is not the parties I object to so much as the
  disproportionate power they tend to accumulate.  And so I believe we should
  always be on guard to strongly discourage any disproportionate
  concentration of power under the control of part of the population that is
  exclusive of everyone else.

Are people who oppose Approval Voting in disagreement about any of these
advantages of homing in on the median voter?  Or do you disagree that these
are advantages, or that Approval Voting will home in on the median voter?

Also, in the long-term, the chicken-dilemma problem is less, because the

With a House of Delegates, where each delegate is selected by voters to
best represent their views, we could let the delegates vote on behalf of
the voters, weighted by the number of voters they represent, so there would
be far fewer individual counts to worry about.

A show of hands is a good example of how votes tend to be binary, all or
nothing.  We could show 2 hands, or show a number of fingers for more
fine-grained votes, but I've never seen either done.  A show of hands
could be used for plurality or approval voting since both involve the
simple binary indicators.  Any other voting systems make sense for this?

I can't agree with that.  While a verifiable voting system is essential, it
is not enough, even with the other things.  A verifiable voting system that
essentially helps maintains and rationalize the oligarchy (see, they voted
for us), even with a fair media, etc, is still dominated by the oligarchy,
and is not much of a democracy.  It becomes harder and harder to maintain
the illusion of democracy, but it persists as the minority in power
increases their power.  It may eventually self-correct if it doesn't
self-destruct, but not without huge changes necessary to clean up the
corruption.  That's what we are now up against.

This is a good time to not only ensure we have a verifiable voting system
but one that helps elect fair representatives of the "vast majority" of
people, and other good things.

If parties were only about summarizing their proposals in platforms, that
would be great.  I think that could be a good thing.  But parties have
become much more than that for several reasons.  They will naturally try to
grow as much as they can by including multiple factions with mutually
exclusive disagreements which are then sacrificed for the benefit of the
party.  By defining what a party represents, they are drawing boundaries
around themselves to exclude others, and some positions may not fit in any
dominant party and will be excluded.  So parties can be both over-inclusive
and over-exclusive.  When the voting system strongly encourages very few
parties, such as the two dominant parties of plurality, then the abuses can
grow quickly, concentrating power in those few parties.  They will tend to
impose legal procedures such as primary elections and debate rules that
further exacerbate the problems, becoming self-serving as they suppress all
alternatives.

Forcing all primaries for all parties to be on one ballot per state would
avoid some of the abuses, but not all of them.  Maybe most of the problems
with parties can be addressed in various ways, but I think we need to make
a much bigger leap beyond parties in any usual sense.  We don't need to
think in terms of parties to organize our proposals if we have some better
alternatives.

That sounds good, but it is blurring what is going on among the 99% such
that they might actually acting as one entity, rather than what we have
now, two dominant entities that are set against each other in constant
futile battles over the few scraps thrown at us by the 1%.

How the democracy functions is critical, not just that it appears to be a
democracy, even one that we believe truly represents us.  Even if it really
does start out representing us pretty well, if it grows into a fractured,
divisive, schizophrenic blob ruled by sociopaths, well it didn't work, and
we need to understand why, how it happened, and how we can avoid it.

If the chicken-dilemma only arises in such relatively rare cases, and is
not too severe and is temporary, I am not too worried.  If it means that
non-cooperating older siblings may be usurped by the younger sibling, maybe
that is actually a good thing to shake things up a bit.

I don't seem to care much about the chicken-dilemma, though whether it is a
serious problem probably depends on the voting system.  FBC seems like the
right thing to require, mostly because the consequence of not having FBC is
either two-party dominance, instability, or both.  I don't know enough
about the other voting systems to say for sure, so correct me if that is
over-simplified.

I am asking not about policy goals and how we get there, but the kind of
democracy we want and how we get there.  The extremes I am talking about
here are levels of the hierarchy of government.  At the lowest extreme,
the voting system and how voters make their decisions, and at the highestt
extreme is the resulting characteristics of the representatives of the
people, assuming we have a representative democracy, and how their
decisions reflect the collective will of the people, or whoever they
represent.

Again, I am asking about the nature of the democracy.  Do people want to be
led by a meritocracy, or to be involved in varying degrees with more or
less direct democracy?  Or many other variations.

When we get to how policy decisions are made, rather than how
representatives are elected, we should have the same questions about the
voting system used to make decisions.  This needs to change.

That's the sense of "something wrong" I meant, as opposed to the ideal
voter, like the ideal shopper, who would always vote the "right" way, to
maximize their value. Not only should we recognize that people will
sometimes do the less optimal thing, we should expect it.  And we shouldn't
expect that we can improve things much with sufficient education. Rather,
we should roll with it, and choose a voting system that makes it easier for
the better outcome to best represent the whole of society, assuming that is
the goal.

deleting the rest of this text now...

--
Daniel LaLiberte
daniel.laliberte@gmail.com

On Thu, Nov 24, 2016 at 6:34 PM, Michael Ossipoff email9648742@gmail.com
wrote:

I mentioned Bernie as an example of someone with broad appeal who would
likely win with Approval Voting, and the huge struggle and near success is
evidence of how strong that broad appeal is.  But also, responding to your
reasons why he had this struggle, you are correct that the media blackout
is a major reason, along with the various dirty tricks.  But going deeper,
we should ask why did those things arise? And I would claim they are side
effects of 1)  the concentration of the power of money, i.e. the banks, 2)
the concentration of power of the media, owned directly or indirectly by
big money, and 3) the dominance of two major parties, both of which have
become subservient to the power of big money.

The third point, the two dominant parties becoming subservient to big
money, I would attribute to our relatively weak democracy which has allowed
the power of money to grow unchecked and now dominate the government and
the media. So I would go back to the weakness of the government and blame a
lot of it on the weakness of the two dominant parties, and blame that
primarily on plurality voting.

We're not going to solve the money problem here, but regarding the
domination of two parties and the corruption of them by money, we can
address, at least in part. Avoiding the disproportionate concentration of
power in a few large political parties can help make it more difficult for
them to become corrupted. Or a system that
encourages many parties or no parties might also help avoid the corruption.

Could Approval Voting make the problem of money even worse because it
results in quickly homing in on the median voter and then staying there?
The elected representatives would be able to stay in office much longer, if
otherwise allowed. We wouldn't be able to rely on clearing out the status
quo ideas by the periodic flip-flopping of control between the two major
parties, throwing out a substantial portion of the representatives each
time.

I believe we currently rely on instability to avoid some of the corruption,
but the instability can also be taken advantage of by the powerful to
increase their power, perhaps even faster.

One relatively easy solution to many problems is term limits.  But I
wouldn't want to rely on term limits as the main remedy for the
concentration and corruption of power.

I agree there was a huge amount of election fraud, partly including the
party registration hacking, enough to tip the balance with a margin of
safety.

Anything that makes manual verification of the election harder is probably
not the right direction to go in.  Approval Voting is almost as easy to
count and verify as Plurality, and everything else is much harder, from
what I understand.

I'm hoping enough comes out that both sides claim fraud and the election is
declared invalid, and then we can start again with a new election cycle.
But maybe enough people will want to make some more significant changes
first.

If one of them got 100% of the vote, and it was publicly known that they
did, it would be difficult to deny them the win.  A publicly countable
voting system does seem to be key to avoiding such a level of corruption as
we have now got.  It might be the best way out of the corruption as well,
barring revolution.

It would be a great thing, unless what appears to be good candidates are
actually bad.

--
Daniel LaLiberte
daniel.laliberte@gmail.com

Thanks, Daniel, for starting a very interesting discussion on an important
topic!

On Sun, Nov 27, 2016 at 6:05 PM, Daniel LaLiberte <
daniel.laliberte@gmail.com> wrote:

Maybe this? From http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVcond.html :

Could it be that Approval Voting is, in practice, more likely to produce
Condorcet Winners than "official" Condorcet methods?!

Counterintuitively, we can prove that under reasonable assumptions Approval
and Condorcet voting actually are not in conflict (no-conflict theorem
http://www.rangevoting.org/AppCW.html) and it is plausible that approval
voting will actually be more likely in practice to elect honest-voter
Condorcet winners, than "official" Condorcet methods!

And because strategic range voters generally vote approval-style, the same
would be true of range voting http://www.rangevoting.org/RangeVoting.html
elections with strategic voters. In other words:

• To the extent range voters are strategic they will elect Condorcet
  winners (indeed quite likely doing so better than "official" Condorcet
  methods);
• whereas to the extent they are honest, range voting should perform
  better http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVcond.html#slaves than
  Condorcet.

Even if you don't quite buy all that, we think you still will agree that in
practice, one should expect no great advantage for Condorcet methods over
the simpler range voting system.

Also relevant to this discussion:

Candidate incentives under different voting systems, and the
self-reinforcing deterioration of US democracy
Warren D. Smith, January 18, 2005
http://rangevoting.org/WarrenSmithPages/homepage/candincent.pdf

I don't know if this message will go out to the EM list. There have been
some technical problems with the EM list in the last few months that have
prevented my posts from getting sent out.

• Jan

On Sun, Nov 27, 2016 at 11:16 PM, Daniel LaLiberte <
daniel.laliberte@gmail.com> wrote:

I say he would have lost with Approval voting,or with any voting-system,
because count fraud works just as well with any voting-system. It isn't the
voting system; it's the vote-counting.

"The real voting power belongs to him who counts the votes."

Well, I admit that a more complicatedly-counted method, especially a
precinct-non-summable one like IRV would provide easier opportunity for
count-fraud.

Is that why the count says that the IRV initiative "won" in Maine? I'm not
saying that IRV isn't any good, but its easier count-fraud makes it more
advantageous for our rulers.

I just meant that count-fraud & consistently disinformational media are the
root-basis of the mechanism of it. If you're looking for a cause deeper
than that, then how about...

Greed? Astounding gullibility? That's a combination that can't lose.

Remember when I quoted P.T. Barnum pointing out that there's a sucker born
every minute. Isn't that why those things arise?

If I can be allowed to pursue that subject:

Have you noticed how the public are so perfectly matched to and suited to
their rulers, owners, herders?.  Just like how a glove fits a hand. Why is
that?

It's uncannily like Huxley's "Brave New World", except that of course
there's nothing new about it. And, where, in the novel it was done with
drugs, in actuality it happened via evolution. There must have been a long
period during our species' history when complete, gullible obedience to
authority was adaptive.

Now, maybe the scenario toward a better world, that I've discussed could
happen. Or maybe it's entirely impossible, science fantasy fiction, due to
what I discussed in the paragraph before this one.

No, the dominance of the 2 "major" parties is a result. It certainly isn't
a cause. As I said, the root-basis of the mechanism of it is phony media &
elections. If you want to try to change anything, you have to start with
those. That's why I suggested local NPR FM stations, as the most reachable,
isolatable component of it, if you want something effective that can be
done right now.

It's late, so I'll resume these replies at the next opportunity..

Michael Ossipoff

Hi Kristofer,

Thanks for your message responding to the more neglected aspects of what I
wanted to discuss, not that any of the other subjects are uninteresting.

On Sat, Nov 26, 2016 at 9:27 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km_elmet@t-online.de> wrote:

Do you mean to suggest that honesty (i.e. sincere voting?) is necessary in
order to possibly achieve stability?

But an election method might not result in stability and could still be a
good method, depending on the nature of the instability.  It could
oscillate between different states quickly, slowly, mildly or wildly, or
perhaps it will grow in some direction possibly toward an inevitable
catastrophic collapse, and maybe that pattern of gradual growth followed by
sudden collapse will be repeated over a longer cycle.

Stability or various kinds of instability is one class of long-term,
emergent effects, concerned with how the state of things changes over time.

Another important class of emergent effects should be about how well the
voters are represented through party organizations or otherwise.  It might
be, for example, that only half the voters are represented very well while
the other half is represented very poorly.  Or it might be that most of the
voters are represented very well to moderately well, as in homing in on the
median, with a smaller number on the fringes being less well represented.

And another important class that I mentioned previously is how vulnerable a
government is to a growing concentration of power leading to self-serving
corruption.  This is somewhat in conflict with the stability effect since
increased stability, which might otherwise be a good thing, allows a
concentration of power to remain in power and find ways to gradually
increase its power.

What other emergent effects should we be aware of that we have a chance
understanding and linking back to the election methods and other
governmental structures that affected them?

The hard part about this is that Nash might be too strong: it assumes

If determining a stable point is difficult, then a varying pattern is
likely to be much harder to figure out in this way.

This seems closer to what I was hoping for in terms of finding way to
determine the likely bounds of emergent behaviors based on the underlying
properties of election methods.  How bad or good could it get?

I would expect people to disagree about which criteria are most important,
but I suspect that is largely because each criteria is relevant to varying
degrees and in different ways for each emergent effect, and we haven't
agreed on what emergent effects we want in the first place.  I suspect it
might actually be easier to agree on the emergent effects, however, and
then we may have a better chance of determining which election methods
could work, or which criteria are most relevant for affecting the emergent
effects.

For instance, I think clone independence is important (to the degree it

Whether a criterion is more or less important relative to an election
method depends on the desired emergent effects. For Approval Voting, where
the likely emergent effect is homing in on the median, I would think clone
independence is going to be very low, but it won't matter at all because it
is actually desirable (at least in my view) to have most winning candidates
be fairly close to that median.  But for Plurality, where two party
dominance should be an expected emergent effect, high clone independence is
very desirable, especially in primary elections, to avoid vote-splitting.

Multiple parties seems much closer to what I would like to see, at least
compared to only two parties, but there are several other things going on
that should be considered.  I think one thing that may be missed in the
self-sorting by voters into parties is that there are really many issues,
and while each voter has a mix of positions on the issues that make hir
(gack) a relatively unique individual, each party tends to adopt a
particular set of positions.  There may be some reasonable correlation
between the positions, but more often than not, fit is uncomfortable.  And
then we may get various awkward and temporary coalitions between parties
(or factions) based on some arbitrary subset of common positions while
other positions remain in conflict.

I think it would be much better if we could avoid the exclusive boundaries
of hierarchical parties based on arbitrary bundles of positions, and
instead actively support a much more natural collection (or web) of
overlapping groups where each group focuses on just one issue or one
position.  This would be a rather messy thing but it would correspond more
directly to the true nature of collections of voters.

This organization, by the way, corresponds to what I am thinking of as a
House of Delegates where each voter can select a different delegate for
each issue.

Yes, I have been saying that.  It reflects my intuition, but I am trying to
provoke a clear counter-argument. So far, it sounds like it may be mostly
true, but not so clear on the edges.

But would you actually vote that way if only one of "good" or "bad" is
likely to win. Wouldn't you want to insincerely vote "good" > "very good"
to give "good" a slightly better chance, and also rank "good" better than
any other candidates you might prefer as long as they are not too bad?  I
honestly don't know enough details about any of the Condorcet methods to
say for sure, but my intuition is that this is true.  I would tend to vote
this insincere way, at least as long as my preferred "very good" candidate
is not very likely to win.

If the only cases where this is not true are rather obscure and difficult
to determine from the naive voter's perspective, then it hardly matters
anyway.

The only benefit I can see for a ranking system is if, despite the
drawbacks, when repeatedly applied overtime, it actually improves the
degree of representation by homing in on the median, just as Approval
Voting does.  But then why not just use Approval?

That is, even though a ranking system may have a spoiler effect or other
similar effects that tend to result in two parties (maybe plus some
change), this can still work out well if subsequent elections attract more
candidates who more voters would like to rank higher on the scale.

But I think that if there is still a tendency to separate candidates and
policies into a few parties, and if only one party wins, we will never
satisfy more than about half the people at a time, at best.  We will never
get very close to any kind of unity that crosses party boundaries that most
people will be happy with.  And we will still tend to flip-flop between
parties and deadlock in the meantime.

If many smaller parties can cooperate, then they could add up to more than
half the voters, but how many parties and individuals outside of this
cooperative would still be excluded entirely?  Is that really what we want,
or is it just what we have ended up with because we couldn't anticipate it
and we didn't have any better ideas?

Now, since no ranked method passes IIA, it is of course possible that

That would be an interesting and useful result, if it is true and could be
proven.

The "vulnerable region" of an election method sounds like something
unexpected could emerge that we don't like, whatever it is, though there is
a chance it could be better.  If we can't anticipate where a voting system
is going to evolve toward, there is at least a risk that we won't like
where it takes us. What we should prefer instead is a voting system that
tends to evolve to a known good place.

As an analogy, two round runoff doesn't seem to lead to two-party rule.

Delayed runoff strikes me as very much like a two-vote Approval since you
always get a chance to vote for one of the leading candidates in the second
round, so you can safely vote for your preferred candidate in the first
round.  If the first round used normal Approval, I think it would be even
better in terms of not rewarding parties, and maybe it would help mitigate
the underdog effect, and moreover, it would completely negate the main
argument of approval-opponents that you would feel obligated to approve one
of the likely winners.

So how about this as a compromise: The first round would be a primary
election using Approval Voting with all candidates regardless of party on
one ballot.  The second round, general election will be between the top two
most approved candidates from the primary.  Each state could have a
primary, but the approval votes would be totaled across all states.

Would be interesting to see this investigation.

I am tempted, as a matter of fact, to build an election simulator using
neural nets to model voters who would learn how to vote to get their
preferred outcome.  Has anyone done anything like that?

By "the above" I assume you mean that one of the leading candidates will
likely win. And that is almost always the case for any half-way decent
voting system, depending on how "leading candidates" are determined.  Any
poll uses some voting system while sampling the population, so which voting
system is used makes all the difference, assuming they do the sampling and
reweighting in statistically reasonable ways.

And as I said, I don't think it is fair to judge Approval Voting or any
voting system based on running candidates who would do badly. The simple
reason is that candidates who would likely do badly will tend to not run at
all. We should be looking at who the likely candidates are who believe they
have a chance of winning.

(more a ways down...)

Consider a country that changes from Plurality to Approval. There are

I strongly doubt that we can rely on parties to improve democracy.  They
tend to be anti-democratic if the power structure of the parties allows it,
and there is no reason they would give up control unless required to do so.
So if we have to live with parties, we have to impose democracy on them, in
which case they effectively become proper institutionalized bodies of the
government itself.

And even if they can be made to function democratically, then there are all
the other problems with parties I mentioned above in this message and in a
couple others.  I remain strongly anti-party.

I like the direct democracy aspect of Gohlke's recursive democracy.  But I
think its structure is wrong for proportionally representing all the
positions on issues.  It is a people organization first, and that may have
some benefits for cross-fertilization of ideas, but I would suspect that
widely dispersed minority opinions will tend to be slighted.

--
Daniel LaLiberte
daniel.laliberte@gmail.com

On Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 1:01 AM, Jan Kok jan.kok.5y@gmail.com wrote:

It's been my pleasure to join you guys here to try to express what I have
in mind with my limited grasp of what you already know, and to get your
valuable feedback.  Thank you all!

That is very interesting, and helps in an unexpected way. I haven't yet
found any direct support for the claim that Approval will home in on the
voter median and then stay there, as Michael says.  But see below.

Could it be that Approval Voting is, in practice, more likely to produce

That article is highly relevant to what I am seeking to understand, so I
will be studying it in depth.  Here are some of the main points:

Abstract - The USA has been and is evolving into an undemocratic state in
which rich moneyed entities control politics to favor their own interests
at the expense of the majority of the voting population. This evolution is
a natural and inevitable consequence of certain
logical-historical-economic-political
laws that operate under the US’s present system of government. The process
is self-strengthening via “positive feedback.” We back these statements up
with evidence. We state and argue for the validity of several dynamical
laws which underlie this. We then analyse the feedback process they cause.
[...]

This paper’s thesis is that 1. Nader’s complaints about US democracy are
correct. 2. These trends are an inherent consequence of (a) The present
structure of the US’s government and electoral system, (b) certain
realities about today’s economy, (c) historo-political laws. They are a
self-reinforcing positively-fedback juggernaut that are causing, or have
caused, the conversion of US democracy into a sham which is really a
plutocracy. 3. By altering that system, much of the positive feedback that
creates these pernicious effects would go away, allowing a healthier
democracy and society.  [...]

Duverger’s laws of political party development: 1. The plurality (1 winner)
voting system tends to lead to a 2-party system. 2. The proportional
representation (multiwinner) system tends to lead to many mutually
independent parties. [...]

There is a simple reason why Duverger’s first law is operative. It is an
immediate consequence of “strategic voting.”  [...] This effect causes 3rd
party candidates to lose plurality-system elections by greatly magnified
margins compared with their true stature in the minds of voters. Over time,
this tends to kill them off and solidify the power of the top two parties.
Of course, the more powerful the top two parties become, the more valid the
logic of avoiding “wasting your vote” becomes, i.e. we have positive
feedback.
[...]

Now let us consider some further laws of political science.

3. Law of convergence to the median voter: The two parties and their
   major candidates (assuming a plurality voting system with 2-party
   dominance) will tend, in their apparent stances on all major issues, to
   converge both toward each other and toward the median-voter stance. Over
   time this causes them, like Tweedledum and Tweedledee, to greatly resemble
   one another.

This law is a Darwinian consequence of the simple 1- dimensional “spatial
analysis” originally due to H.Hotelling in 1929 [...] The reason,
essentially, is that any candidate with a well known non-median stance on
an issue will have less voter support than an opponent whose stance is
slightly different and closer to the median voter’s stance. Over time this
causes non-median candidates and parties to vanish from the political
scene.

I am going to stop quoting there, for now, partly because I am going to
take more time to read closely, but mostly because this rule 3 is changing
my mind about how I think we should proceed.  Read it again if you skimmed
past it.

If even plurality voting is known to converge the two dominant parties
toward each other and toward the median-voter, then it seems likely true
that most voting systems will do about the same, by at least averaging over
time to hover around the median, sometimes being very close to the median,
and occasionally bouncing to further extremes away from the median.  With
many very small parties, or with a proportional representation system that
is intended to represent many positions wherever voters are, they all still
average out to the median, but at least they allow more expression of the
variety of opinions.

One side question we should ask is whether it is true that the closer to
the median we get, the more voters there are.  If that were not the case,
if there are actually fewer voters near or very close to the median, then
we could still converge any number of parties toward the median if there
are still more voters in a larger neighborhood around the median, though it
might be more difficult to reside smack in the middle of the median.

Another side question is whether the median is close to the mean (or
average).  With an even distribution, the two measures will be very close.
I would think it makes more sense to talk about the mean than the median,
because the median is just about finding the middle of a linear ordering,
whereas the mean is about adding up everything to find the weighted middle.

But regarding Approval Voting, it seems natural that it would even more
quickly converge on the median than other voting systems would, but given
the problems resulting from plurality which also has converged on the
median, it is not enough to be at the median.

This perhaps why some people say it is better that government is deadlocked
and flip-flopping rather than empowered to act more effectively.    Would
more parties be better or just add more deadlocking and flip-flopping in
more directions?

But I don't accept this.  Primarily, the two parties of plurality, and any
smallish number of parties that result from other voting systems are still
parties, still exclusive of everyone not in the parties, rather than
inclusive of everyone.  The party organizations are power structures that
reinforce their own ways of becoming corrupted by the self-serving power
they gather around themselves, mostly outside of the regulations and
constraints imposed by democracy.

So I believe Approval Voting, by avoiding the incentives for ANY parties,
avoids that whole set of party-based problems.  You win under an approval
voting system by appealing to voters regardless of party affiliation.
Unless we have party-exclusive primary elections, or other ways of giving
power to parties, there would be very little political value in identifying
with a party.

Well, one possible value of parties is easy name recognition, and a loose
association with a set of positions. But I think there is enough of a
tendency for that to happen without giving parties ANY more power.  Parties
might be merely a way of certifying that candidates appear to support a set
of positions associated with the parties.  That could be useful, but even
that certification process could be abused.

But it is not just about parties.  There are other factors involved in the
self-serving positive feedback of any power structure.  A congress composed
almost entirely of very agreeable moderates who are all "owned" by
corporate power would likely be even worse than what we have now.

I don't think the right solution is to hobble congress with a deadlocking,
flip-flopping, back-stabbing, exclusionary, party-dominated system in order
to keep it from being effective, because that is clearly not working
anyway.

What we need to do is find any source of the increasing concentration of
power and place suitable constraints on it.  I.e. the power of money has
gotten out of our control.

Relative to election methods, I think we need to understand which voting
systems might result in more or less concentration of power or other forms
of vulnerability to corruption.

And we do need proportional representation as well, but I think we should
do it not with elections because all voting systems intended to result in
proportional representation seem to be very complex and thus not ease to
understand or trust.  Instead, we should achieve proportional
representation very simply via direct selection of any eligible delegate(s)
by each voter.

I don't know if this message will go out to the EM list. There have been

It's been a while since I was active in any mailing list.  I do like this
mode of communication that gives one space to think and to compose a
response to an audience interested in the same things.

The technical difficulties of this most ancient of internet applications
are no fun though.

--
Daniel LaLiberte
daniel.laliberte@gmail.com

On 11/27/2016 09:10 PM, Daniel LaLiberte wrote:

I can think of two voting methods that cheat and thus (mostly) avoid the
need for strategy.

1. Random pair: pick two candidates at random, and whoever the majority
   prefers to the other wins. Alternatively: hold a runoff between them. Or
   choose a random voter and whoever he ranks first wins.

2. Asset: you name an elector. Every elector named by at least one voter
   meets in a room and they all discuss whom to elect, then decide by
   weighted majority vote. That they have weighted votes means that each
   elector has a weight proportional to the number of people who named him,
   and a majority of the weight wins.

Even Plurality Asset has some strategy if you're not sure about the
skill of the elector; but if not, you can imagine that the elector you
name will do the strategy for you.

For most practical methods, strategy seems to benefit from knowing
predictive information. It's certainly possible to construct methods
where the voters would benefit very little, but I can't think of any
good methods that work that way.

But just as there's a difference between ranked voting methods' quality
even though Arrow's theorem says none of them can be perfect, there's
also a difference between how well the methods resist strategy. Say
there are four broad types of strategy:

• Compromise (voting one of the major candidates higher than you would
  if you were honest so that he wins instead of the greater evil)

• Burial (voting one of the major candidates lower so that he loses)

• Pushover (voting some candidate Z higher so Z loses).

• Strategic nomination (for parties: adding or removing candidates to
  shift the result in their favor).

Then it'd be possible to consider various criterion compliances as ways
of saying that the method resists a particular form of strategy.

For instance, all other things equal, a method that passes the favorite
betrayal criterion would resist compromise more strongly than one that
doesn't; while a method that passes, say, mutual dominant third burial
resistance would resist burial more strongly than one that doesn't; and
methods that pass various monotonicity criteria would not be vulnerable
to pushover.

But I don't think you can get invulnerability to all of them at once, so
to some extent, you have to "pick your poison". Approval seems to do the
impossible, but on a second look, even it has strategy: it consists of
having to decide which particular sincere vote you should submit.

Yes, subject to that the cure shouldn't be worse than the disease. Take
again random ballot. It's strategy proof: if your ballot is chosen, you
get to choose who the winner is, so it's in your best interest to put
your favorite first. If you don't get picked, you have no say either
way, so you're never harmed by voting sincerely. But the performance is
awful. It's too high a price to pay.

Those claims aren't quite the same. Your first claim is that every
method is susceptible to compromise strategy, but your later question is
about whether there's a method that doesn't require frontrunner strategy
at all.

Consider Antiplurality: voters submit ranked ballots, and each candidate
gets a penalty according to how many ballots he's ranked last on. The
candidate with the lowest penalty wins.

Here there's no need to put the lesser evil first because the method
doesn't care at all about who you put first. So the method is immune to
compromise strategy. However, you may strategically decide to put the
worse frontrunner last, even if there're some awful minor candidates you
think even worse of. That's burial strategy.

Antiplurality shows that there are some methods that are completely
immune to compromise strategy. (Antiplurality is not a particular good
method, however.) And there are restricted domains where better methods
are strategy-proof, e.g. Condorcet methods when there's no cycle. But I
don't know to what degree FBC methods in general are immune to
compromise - it's not my area, so to speak.

"The most likely winning candidates are also the most approved by
voters" is true by definition for Approval voting if you mean "approved"
in the sense of "has the most Approval votes". But if you mean really
approved (in the sense of "liked by the voters"), then that seems to
assume two things about Approval voting:

• First, it must lead to a state where the most likely winning
  candidates are the ones most approved/liked by the voters, and do so
  stably enough that it doesn't get repealed, and

• second, it must be able to stay in that state. This is related to the
  stability you mentioned, I'd think.

Neither of these seem completely evident.

It might be pretty destabilizing in a contentious election. Suppose you
had a situation like the last election, but a third party was also
pretty strong, and the voters of that third party mostly preferred
Clinton to Trump. The vast majority of polls showed that Clinton was
going to win. So a third party voter might have reasoned: "I can take
the chance of voting for third party alone". Now, as we know, the polls
were wrong. The voters would not be amused.

The problem here is that (in my opinion) while a good ranked voting
method like the advanced Condorcet methods are safe in a bunch of
situations (no cycle, singlepeaked preferences, etc), and in such a
situation, only voters who want to squeeze something extra from their
votes need to think of strategy, in Approval every voter needs to
consider strategy. As long as you don't have an inherently binary
preference ("I like these candidates, I don't like those candidates, and
there's nothing in between"), there's no obvious way of picking your
cutoff. The closer the election, the more important polls become. And if
the polls are wrong, Approval goes wrong too.

Approval passes many criteria and seems to do the impossible in many
ways. But to quote Forest Simmons:

http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2016-October/000717.html

This is to say that, suppose you try to create an algorithm where you
input your sincere (ranked) vote into the computer and it uses all the
data it can get to make the optimal Approval vote for you. Now suppose
every voter uses this algorithm. Then you could consider that the
country is essentially running another voting method. Then LeGrand
showed that such a method is nonmonotone, i.e. sometimes ranking a
candidate higher makes him lose. Approval hides this by moving the
"algorithm" into the voters' heads, but the voters still have to do what
the algorithm would have done in the hypothetical setting above.

On 11/29/2016 05:33 AM, Daniel LaLiberte wrote:

No, what I mean is that you can get a good idea whether voters will stay
honest by determining if an initially small group of dishonest voters
can make other honest voters have to turn to strategy in order to not
lose. That's what an evolutionarily stable strategy means: a strategy
(say, honesty in voting) is an ESS if an initially small group can't
grow and displace that strategy by the gains they get.

A strong Nash Equilibrium is stronger in that it requires that (say,
honesty) is stable in the sense that if everybody is initially using
that strategy, no group (no matter how large or small) can benefit by
using another strategy.

The point, in any case, is: suppose the ESS for some voting system is
honesty or some strategy that doesn't lead to two party domination. Then
you're not going to be pushed out of that state by any small group that
falls for the temptation to strategize; only a large group will do. And
if the strong Nash equilibrium for a voting method in a particular
situation is to elect some candidate X, then no coalition/group of
voters can make some other candidate Y win by strategizing, even if the
method as such isn't strategy-proof -- as long as the voters know enough
about each other.

So game theory can give you an idea of when a method will lead to
two-party dominance, and conversely, when it won't. The standard
Plurality argument "I can't vote for my party because then the greater
evil might win" is in a sense a game-theoretical one. But the problems
with game theory are:

• it only answers the precise question you ask (e.g. the questionable
  realism of the very strong conditions on strong Nash)
• it's hard to figure out whether a system has a particular equilibrium,
  particularly when there are many voters and parties.

The stability I'm thinking of is thus not stability of government, but
rather stability of the method. The method is stable in some state if it
doesn't trail off into another state. E.g. strategic Plurality (in
isolation) might be stable in the two-party state since it's hard for
third parties to get any support if everybody thinks "but if I vote for
them, the other guy might win". But strategic Plurality isn't stable in
the multiparty state; if you start with many parties, it'll veer
chaotically around until the parties coalesce into just a few.

(I'm being a little fuzzy here because the law isn't ironclad. Consider
the existence of the Liberal Democrats in the UK, for instance; and
regional variety may also matter, where you could have two-party rule in
different areas of the country, but which two parties they are depends
on which part of the country you're in. I've heard India is like that.)

If a method is stable in some multiparty state, that doesn't imply that
the governments it leads to are, in turn, stable or impervious to
change. You'd expect the voting method to change which parties are in
power as the people change their opinions -- if the voting method is good.

Whether the greater political system is in itself stable is a much more
difficult question, as well. We don't know whether parliamentary or
presidential democracy is stable. In some even wider sense, we know that
they aren't, as both have failed numerous times - consider Germany as an
example of the former, and various South American nations as examples of
the latter.

I suppose that is possible, but I find it hard to see how a method in
itself could have complex attractors. The complexity would arise from
outside interaction, I think. For instance, a winner-takes-it-all system
can rather severely swing from one side to another and then back again.
Some two-party states are like that: party X gets to rule, and then they
do so until the people becomes dissatisfied enough, then party Y gets to
rule, and rinse and repeat. You get something reminiscent of hunting
oscillation, and the overshoot to either side can be rather harmful.

The increased stability has to be real, not illusory. A dictatorship is
pretty stable (until the revolution, at least) but it is so because it
manages to repress what would otherwise lead to change.

Or to take an analogy of two people who don't like each other, but
decide not to voice their dislike because they want to be nice -- and in
the end they get so angry at each other that the encounter explodes. A
better system can also be stable if it's responsive as well, which means
that it deals with changing demands placed upon it before these demands
become severe enough to cause instability. The system then smoothly
changes instead of with a jerk.

I've mentioned some of them at the bottom, as regards political systems
in general. Another one we should be aware of is that political systems
are self-reinforcing. So suppose we find a way to implement a much
better system. This system should still leave open the possibility that
something better yet may appear at a later time, which means it should
be able to be improved upon in turn. But how to do that without also
becoming more vulnerable to say, authoritarianism... that's a tricky one.

Well, Arrow and Gibbard-Satterthwaite says that no ranked method can be
perfect and there will always be some need for strategy. In another
reply, I mentioned classes of strategy being compromise, burial and
pushover. It seems not too hard to make methods that are invulnerable to
one of these classes, but by Arrow and G-S you can't make methods that
are vulnerable to all of them.

Approval seems to do the impossible here, but as I said in the other
post, I think it's just hiding the problems by shifting the burden to
the mind of the voter.

Call the mechanism the voter uses to turn his preferences ("I like A
more than B, B more than C") into an Approval ballot, "manual DSV".

Then, as an example, if if "Approval with manual DSV" were to pass
independence from irrelevant alternatives (the Arrow criterion that
pretty much every ranked method fails), then that means there must exist
situations where a reasonable voter would approve of no candidate or of
all of them. But it's hard to imagine that ever happening in a real
election: perhaps a voter could submit a no-approvals ballot as a
none-of-the-above sentiment, but submitting one that approves of every
candidate?

Suppose we start from considering emergent effects. Then the reasoning
would go like this:

1. We want emergent effects X, Y, Z.
2. Criteria A, B, C lead to X, Y, Z.
3. So we want A, B, C.

I think that while step 1 is pretty easy - just declare the effects you
want - step 2 is very hard. Suppose we know that IRV leads to
"two-party plus change" rule. We know what criteria IRV passes and
fails. But which of them makes IRV lead to two-party-plus-change rule?
For that matter, how do we know that not every single-winner method used
with single-member districts leads to two-party rule?

You are right about criteria sometimes hiding what effects we want,
though. In a past discussion on this list with an IRV supporter, I
eventually found out that he wanted to keep a two-party system where the
third parties shouldn't interfere too much. In other words, he wanted
the third parties to pull the major parties in their direction but
otherwise stay very small so not as to interfere with the process. For
him, that IRV led to two-party rule was a feature, not a bug, and in his
opinion, the benefit of IRV was that it eliminates a fringe spoiler
effect. If the sum of support for the fringe parties is less than the
support for the weakest major party, then IRV satisfies IIA, but
Plurality doesn't.

I didn't figure this out until relatively late, and so I spent a lot of
time talking about bizarre outcomes from IRV, but those outcomes were of
no problem for him.

I think that's kind of having it backwards. Part of the reason Approval
has a chance of getting to the median is because if voters either vote
for all the clones or none of them, there's no difference how many
clones there are, so Approval is cloneproof.

If say, Approval had instead been single-winner cumulative voting (where
each approval counts one point if you approve of one, each approval
counts half a point if you approve of two, etc), then that method,
despite having the same ballots, would have a pretty serious
vote-splitting problem and so would have a smaller chance of getting to
the median.

But speaking of emergent properties, what I'm thinking is a real
possibility for Approval is one of these:

Situation 1: two parties plus a growing third.

• Everything goes well until the third party becomes a real factor.
• Uncertainty in whether the third party supporters should support only
  the third party or both the third party and the lesser evil causes the
  election to go to the greater evil.
• Voters become pissed (like in Burlington) and repeal it.

Situation 2: noisy polls, many parties

• There are many parties and some are close.
• The polls are incorrect so some voters approve of too many or too few
  candidates.
• The election goes to the wrong winner and the outcome suffers.

Neither of these are really desirable. Furthermore, at least if I were a
voter in an Approval situation, I wouldn't be unduly happy that I'd have
to run "manual DSV" in my head just because the ballot format isn't
expressive enough to let me say what I mean.

(I just thought of an unusual voting method: "Approval-Asset",
where you give a favorite elector and a ranked ballot. After all the
ballots have been gathered, the favorite candidates/electors get to set
the Approval cutoff of the ballots they're assigned to in an interactive
process, and then the Approval winner wins. Say you vote A>B>C>D and set
A as your elector. A can then turn this into the "A" approval ballot,
the "A B" ballot, the "A B C" ballot, or the "A B C D" ballot, but not
the "A C D" ballot. In essence, you make your favorite candidate/elector
run the manual DSV for you.)

Perhaps delegable proxy could work for this purpose. Let each person
have one person's worth of voting power. He can then either use his vote
on issues that come up from time to time, or delegate part or all of his
vote to someone else. You could then imagine more sophisticated programs
that let you delegate your vote to person X only if the upcoming issue
is a foreign policy issue (determined by some trusted independent
group), otherwise delegate your vote to person Y.

The problem with DP is that everybody knows who you're delegating your
vote to, so vote buying and coercion can potentially become a serious
problem. You could use crypto to hide this, but then the people at the
top ("movers and shakers" with a lot of voting power) would also be
unaccountable.

Condorcet works like this: the candidate who beats everybody else one on
one wins. So if there's no cycle, what happens when you vote

very good > good > bad?

1. You give "very good" one point in the "very good vs good" contest
2. You give "very good" one point in the "very good vs bad" contest
3. You give "good" one point in the "good vs bad" contest.

This can lead to "very good" winning if "very good" now has a majority
in both "very good vs good" and "very good vs bad", or it can lead to
"good" winning if "good" now has a majority in "good vs bad" and used to
have a majority in "good vs very good".

If one of "good" or "bad" was going to win before your vote, then the
"good > bad" part of your vote makes sure you strengthen "good" rather
than "bad". The only thing "very good > good" and "very good > bad" can
do is pull the victory away from either "good" or "bad" over to "very good".

Now consider

good > very good > bad

The effects of this ballot are:

1. You give "good" one point in the "good vs very good" contest
2. You give "good" one point in the "good vs bad" contest
3. You give "very good" one point in the "very good vs bad" contest.

Number 1 is not something you want, because in the "good vs very good"
contest, you want "very good" to win. Numbers 2 and 3 are effects that
you also get by voting "very good > good > bad". So as long as you don't
establish a cycle, the "very good > good > bad" vote is better than
"good > very good > bad".

What evidence we have seems to rather suggest the opposite: that
Condorcet cycles are rare. Of course, it's possible that it would change
if a Condorcet method were adopted, because the strategy incentives
would also change, but then again, it might not. In the absence of
information about what will happen in the future, all we've got to go on
is present data, and that data says Condorcet cycles are rare.

Because you shouldn't have to do strategy when you're a sincere voter.
There shouldn't be multiple sincere votes that you have to choose from,
where you get burned if you choose the wrong one. It's okay to have a
burden if you want to game the system (i.e. vote insincerely), but
ordinary voters shouldn't have to be burdened.

Not necessarily. Suppose you have 1D politics like this, where 0 is
left-wing and 1 is right-wing:

position candidate
0        A
0.2      B
0.4      C
0.6      D
0.8      E
1        F

Suppose that the public median oscillates with intermediate speed
between 0 and 1. In a two-party system, you might have two parties, one
with a candidate at 0.33 and one with a candidate at 0.67, and then
you'd get a hard shift once there's enough public support built up to
move the median closer to 0.67 than 0.33.

But in a multiparty system, as the public shifts from 0.2 to 0.4, the
elected candidate also shifts from B to C, and the same as you go from
0.4 to 0.6, the candidate shifts from C to D.

I suppose you could argue that if the public opinion oscillates slowly,
then while the voters spend time around the right-wing axis, the parties
on the left-wing end will stop being influential, lose support, and thus
shrink; and when the public opinion shifts back to the left, then they
aren't strong enough to field credible candidates for a single-winner
position like president.

That may be true. On the other hand, if the same method is used for
single-winner districts on a more local scale, the left-wing parties may
have solid bases in certain areas of the country, so that they're not
entirely wiped out even if public sentiment moves to the right. And if
you combine a reasonable single-winner method with proportional
representation, then as long as there's some left-wing support, the
left-wing parties will be represented in the PR assemblies.

In the 1D model above, I'm assuming a voter around 0 (at the very left)
would vote

A>B>C>D>E>F

and a voter around 1 (at the very right) would vote

F>E>D>C>B>A.

So you get a sort of "inherent cooperation effect" because a method like
Condorcet would find the median here. For single-peaked preferences like
the above (where voters just rank candidates from closest on the line to
most distant) there's always a Condorcet winner, so for such a method,
it doesn't matter if there are 11 candidates from 0 to 1 spaced 0.1
apart, or if there are six spaced 0.2 apart; if the median position if
0.6, it'll pick the candidate closest to 0.6.

We can't know for sure what it's going to evolve towards because the
real world is messy. We can do game theoretical calculations (to some
extent), give guarantees in terms of criteria, and simulate utilitarian
efficiency, but these are only as strong as the assumptions.

That has the problem that you don't get much diversity. Suppose each
party fields two candidates. Then the supporters of each party will
approve both candidates, so both candidates get the same number of votes
and the winning party gets both candidates to the runoff.

In practice, something like this could happen: each party fields the
chosen presidential candidate and the chosen VP and tells party
supporters to approve of both. Then the second round simply becomes a
question of who gets to be president (where the loser becomes the VP).

It would be better to hold a runoff between the Approval winner, and
whoever wins when you count the ballots again but reduce the weight of
every ballot that approved of the first winner. But make this
deweighting too large, and you're back to the "I want to vote third
party but don't know if I should vote for the lesser evil too" problem.

Not that I'm aware of. But go ahead if you'd like to try :-)

What I mean is that if you assume that voters will put the lesser evil
first, then I can just as easily assume that voters will always approve
of the lesser evil as well. There's no obvious reason that cautious
voters would compromise in ranking but not in Approval voting.

If the voters rank the lesser evil first in ranked methods to protect
themselves from the greater evil winning, then you could just as well
argue that the voters would also approve of the lesser evil so that the
greater evil doesn't win if the polls were wrong. And if the voters keep
approving of the lesser evil, third parties can never win.

Parties who will do well in the future have to start somewhere. That
said, I don't think any of the advanced voting methods have problems
with candidates who would do badly.

I don't think changing election methods on their own can get rid of
parties, so in that case, a much more thorough change would be required.

That's the impression I had as well. The decision process on each level
pares away the wings and elects the centrist (assuming the people in the
triad are reasonable). You end up with a very majoritarian result: if
every voter was either type A or type B, and 51% were type A, you'd most
likely get only type A representatives at the top.

I suggested, as a counter to this, that the triads could be larger and
use proportional representation. But that sort of weakens the intuitive
simplicity that "some people come together, discuss, and select a
candidate to go to the next level". So Fred suggested virtual parties
instead, where say, all type-A voters elect within their own "party",
and all type-B voters within theirs, and then you end up with a 51-49
result at the top instead of 100-0.

There's another thing to think of, as well. Some political structures
may become reversed (power goes from the top down instead of the bottom
up) or they may be incapable of defending themselves from outside attack.

Consider the idealized council structure of the USSR as an example of
the former: in theory, you have large local councils that elect
delegates to the next level, that elect delegates to the next and so on.
But what happened in practice was that the flow of power reversed: the
upper levels controlled the lower ones. "The party substituted itself
for the masses, the central committee substituted itself for the party,
and the leader substituted himself for the central committee", and all
that. In some respect, it could do that because the upper levels could
control the lower ones more effectively than the lower ones could make
the upper ones stop. As a result, the system didn't end up very democratic.

Gerrymandering might be another example of reversed power, where the
politicians select their constituents before the constituents elect the
politicians. It's even worse in Singapore: in 2011, the PAP managed to
get 93% of the seats with 60% of the vote.

I kind of like the idea of democracy by sortition because it sidesteps
the whole problem of imperfect election methods and is automatically
proportional given enough seats. Even proportional representation
elections fail absolute proportionality in the sense that every
candidate is a politician, and you have e.g. the Aristotlean observation
that elections are aristocratic rather than democratic. However,
sortition may fail to give the people a sense of participating in the
process, because there's nothing any given person can do to get himself
elected (or not). His chances are always exactly the same.

Furthermore, it might be vulnerable to attacks from the outside. A
non-democratic example of a structure being vulnerable to attacks from
the outside is the House of Lords. I'm not saying it is a good
structure, but since the people in general don't feel like they're part
of it, the elected politicians have been free to reduce its influence
without any repercussion. A chamber or house chosen by lot could also be
vulnerable for the same reason: it's hard for any given person to see
the influence of the sortition house diminish since their chances of
getting selected to it are very low to begin with.

So if we're to consider different types of democracy, and not just
different election methods within the current model, things get a lot
hairier. And it's very hard to conduct experiments.

Daniel--

Kristofer is repeating the usual Approval-objection, the same one that
Robert expressed.

The popular assumption is that it's essential to try to elect the best
individual candidate that you can get. Contrary to popular belief, that's
only an assumption, an unsupported one.

1. In this country, for the 99%, a progressive government would be
   incomparably better than a Republocrat government (like we've had for a
   long time, and still have).

If you don't believe it, look at some progressive party platforms (Greens,
etc.), and compare them to the things that people are saying that they
want, or that they want changed.

So, for the 99%, any progressive would support better policies than_any_
republocrat.

That means that, for the 99%, there's a strong top-set and a strong
bottom-set.

...And, when there is, Approval voting is really simple:

Approve (only) all of your strong top-set.

2. Suppose we're talking about a better world, in a better future, in which
   the 99% don't have a bottom-set. Or suppose we're talking about some other
   country, or some entirely different non-political voting-situation.in which
   you don't have strong top & bottom sets.

There are various ways that you could vote.

a) If you wanted to, and if any reliable predictive information is
available, then you could use it for tactical voting. (We're talking about
voting in Approval).

b) If not, you could, if you wanted to, try to estimate where, in the
candidate lineuup, your merit-expectation is, and approve down to there, as
an expectation-maximizing strategy. Depending on what is known or felt
about the relation between the distributions of voters & candidates, you
could approve down to the mean, the mid-range, or the median, of the
candidates' merits.

Of course the median & midrange would be easiest: The midrange is the point
halfway between the worst & the best. But easiest of all is the median.
You'd approve the best half of the candidates. That could be regarded as a
rough estimate for the other two central-tendency measures, when they're
difficult to estimate.

c) But you needn't bother with a) or b).

Even without strong top & bottom-sets, you can still take a guess about
which set you'd like to elect instead of the other candidates.

Maybe, though you don't have strong top & bottom sets, you have ordinary
top & bottom sets, meaning that the merit difference between the sets is
greater (even if not incomparably greater) than the merit differences
within those 2 sets.
If so, you likely will feel like approving (only) all of your (ordinary)
top-set.

Or maybe even that isn't so, and you don't have any kind of top & bottom
sets. Maybe the merit gradation is uniform, without any gaps or natural
dividing-lines. What then?

Well, then you don't know where to make your approval cutoff. You don't
have an obvious way to choose which set you want to approve over the other.

No problem! If you don't know which set approve, then it doesn't matter!

Just approve as you feel like. Maybe just guess. Maybe flip a coin, or draw
a number from a bag. Or have the candidates' names in a bag, and draw one
to choose which one to approve down to. If you don't know which set you
want to approve, then it doesn't matter which set you approve.

Any such set that you choose by guessing will include the best, and won't
include the worst, and will be within the range that you feel that the
approval cutoff should be in. That's good enough! Don't worry about it.

Another thing: If, by guessing or drawing from a bag, you make a choice of
what set to approve, but, when you start to actually do so, you don't feel
good about it, then don't do it.

Maybe you'll say to yourself, "This is disgusting !"  Then of course
don't do it. Don't approve down that far. Go by your feelings.

People who assume, as a starting premise, that it's necessary to get the
best candidate possible are making things unnecessarily difficult for
themselves. Even the more elaborate methods, the ranking-methods, do do
that as reliabliably automcatically as their advocates sometimes seem to
believe.

By approving (only) your strong top-set, or your ordinary top-set, or
(absent either of those) a set that is a good guess, within the range where
you feel that the approval cutoff should be--By approving that set, you're
maximizing the probability of electing from that set.

And that's good enough.

My message to those who complain that Approval doesn't automatically elect
the best candidate that you can get is: You worry too much.

Michael Ossipoff

On Sat, Dec 3, 2016 at 6:45 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet@t-online.de

On Wed, Nov 30, 2016 at 5:51 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km_elmet@t-online.de> wrote:

By "cheating", it looks like these systems avoid having voters do much
decision making at all, and thus there is no place for strategy either.

With any random decision making, the voters get no decision at that point,
and but then later may be given a choice among two, where honesty prevails.

With asset voting, voters choose honestly among electors to find one who
best represents them, and then leave subsequent decision making up to those
electors.  But then how those decisions are made, which voting system the
electors use, could make a lot of difference in what strategies they use.

So in this "cheat", the decision making and strategizing still exist among
the electors, so it is not really any different regarding the kind of
strategizing that is necessary based on the voting system the electors are
inclined to use.

And therefore, we should expect to get some of the same kind of effects
with asset voting as with direct voting.  One important difference is that
with asset voting, the assets are transferable, which would be similar to a
series of run-off elections.  More below.

Even Plurality Asset has some strategy if you're not sure about the

So with Plurality Asset, if I understand (or even if I misunderstand, this
sounds interesting), voters would vote for only one candidate, and the
candidates with the lowest votes would then transfer their votes, as
assets, to another candidate, until there is only one left.  I can see that
this would avoid the spoiler effect by original voters since votes are
never wasted in the same way as direct plurality voting.  But the
candidates who are eliminated would then vote for, presumably, another
candidate who the voters should probably have voted for initially, if they
could.  But the same strategizing these eliminated candidates might do is
also avoided for the same reason since their votes are also not wasted.

Would we still end up with two dominant parties?  I think so, at least as
long as the eliminated candidates transfer all of their votes to one
other candidate.  Any third parties would tend to fall under the umbrella
of one of the two dominant parties.

But if eliminated candidates could split their asset votes by some means
(either arbitrarily or evenly) among other candidates that changes things,
but perhaps not enough.

Letting the original voters essentially say, if my preferred candidate is
eliminated, then here is my second choice, etc, gives us an instant run-off.

IRV is Borda with instant run-off, correct?  Does IRV amplify or ameliorate
the many problems with Borda?

But the process of conducting an instant run-off could apply to many other
voting systems, just as asset transference could apply to many other voting
systems.  Is there some reason it is not considered for other voting
systems, and has become associated with IRV?

Is there a Range Voting with instant run-off?  Range Voting with assets?
Is there Approval Voting with instant run-off?  Approval Voting with assets?

Is there a breakdown all voting systems into a set of steps, each step
being done in one of a variety of ways, some steps repeated?  There might
be many more interesting and useful combinations that could be discovered
by using such a matrix of options.

For most practical methods, strategy seems to benefit from knowing

The wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_voting lists
Compromose, Burial, Pushover, and one other, Bullet voting (voting for just
one candidate, not to be confused with Bullet Voting).  It doesn't list
strategic nomination, but at a party level, nominating just one candidate
is analogous to the Bullet voting strategy.

I'd like to see something more convincingly comprehensive about the
possible strategies, but perhaps that is similar to asking for a list of
all possible emergent effects, when we rarely have any way to predict
emergent effects just looking at the components of a system.  Or perhaps
our differential equations are just not up to the task yet.

Yes, I wasn't expecting to be invulnerable to all strategies, or even to
any of them.  In fact, as long as the strategies are not to obscure and
counter-intuitive, I find it much more important to focus on the emergent
effects that despite the strategies applied, or perhaps because of them,
affect how the democracy functions and changes over the long-haul.

Approval seems to do the

Yes, but I find that the strategy required for Approval is in your face, up
front and honest about it.  Meanwhile, you don't get to strategize about
which ordering of weightings or preferences might work out better.  And for
many ranking systems, you might not even be aware that there are many
strategic decisions you ought to make, and maybe many voters default to
being honest just because it is too complex to be strategic.

With Approval Voting, there is really only one bit of strategy, where to
draw the line between approval and disapproval, and you have no choice but
to make that decision.  The complexity comes in deciding among several
candidates who are close to that dividing line between approval and
disapproval, and also factor in the chances that some are more likely to
win than others.

But I am not too concerned about that fuzzy gray dividing line between
approval and disapproval once most of the candidates in elections are much
more likely to be liked by many more voters.  Different voters will chose
where to draw the line differently, and a reasonable gradient will result,
keeping the least approved candidates further away from the top end.

Yes, they are different, and I am interested in both.  But if there is a
ranking system in which it is safe to ignore who the frontrunners are, then
I was assuming that voters would not have to consider ranking one of the
frontrunners highest.

But given your example of Antiplurality, I would have to expand that to
say: If there is a ranking system in which it is safe to ignore who the
frontrunners are, then voters wouldn't have to do anything special with
the frontrunners, for example, vote for the lesser evil highest or the
worser evil lowest.

Consider Antiplurality: voters submit ranked ballots, and each candidate

Not completely evident, I agree, though my growing intuition is that they
are true. Hence I am still seeking confirmation or refutation.

I think both points depend on having a large predominance of voters near
the median, as well as a smooth gradation to the extremes.  I.e. no huge
bumps or voids.  If voters tend to divide into mutually exclusive parties,
and there is no 'centralist' party such that there are relatively few
voters near the median, then I would expect to see more instability.

But I think most voters are near the median, and what we see in the US is
an artificially constructed subdivision between two dominant parties that
each appear to be more polarized in opposition to the other, but behave
more moderately when they can cooperate at all.  Lies all around and no one
is happy about it except maybe a few billionaires.

I agree that would be bad, but I don't believe it is fair to judge how
Approval would work in an election where it was known in advance that
Plurality will be used.

With Approval being used, a different set of candidates would more likely
rise to the top, and we would be unlikely to have to contend with any that
are hugely unpopular, or at least there would be less reason to fear that
they might get close to winning.

Approval Voting could be used badly, however. If Approval Voting were used
in party nominations, then the party might get a better representative of
all the voters in the party, which might be good for the party, but it
would not be good if several such candidates who were nominated separately
by their parties all ran in the general election.  Or rather, the best
outcome might be the emergence of a Centralist party that could suck the
life out of the other two dominant parties.

With Approval Voting being used in state primaries, where all candidates
for all parties are on one ballot, then parties would soon not matter at
all.  The Chicken Dilemma actually raises a possibility for when it would
still be advantageous for similar candidates to cooperate, so I am hoping
we can cut the head off that chicken before it arises.

The problem here is that (in my opinion) while a good ranked voting

I don't think Approval goes wrong so badly, after it stabilizes around the
median.  With most candidates who have a chance of winning being close to
the median, it can't go far wrong when someone slightly farther away from
the median wins occasionally.

I think this stability around the median is far better than having third
parties occasionally win due to the weakness of major parties, or other
destabilizing situations and asymmetries of power.

Granted, this could occur.  But I have a couple responses.

1. Real voters will make their strategic decisions differently, not ideally
   or optimally, to the extremes of approving only one, or all but one.  Does
   that change the monotonicity?

2. We might model the voters probabilisticly to match what real voters do.
   I'm thinking of effectively doing that with a neural net model of voters.

3. Does it matter much in the long run, when most candidates are close to
   the median and the degree of disapproval is small, in comparison to the
   gross disparities we have now?

--
Daniel LaLiberte
daniel.laliberte@gmail.com