Posts by Steve Todd
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
I was waiting for this, although I assumed you would refer to Wellington, rather than Auckland.
I'll just say this: local government is different to national government. If you want to discuss governance, this is the wrong posting / thread. Besides, you're questioning me, rather than engaging in a discussion by offering us your views on the subject.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Heh, heh, it’s the garden path that’s beginning to worry me, Rich, not the rabbit hole.
First, I’ll say that, in our Westminster system, the office of prime minister should never be directly-elected. The experience of Israel turns me right off that notion (not that I ever had it).
If New Zealand were one day to become a republic, I would like the (non-executive) president of be directly elected by M-PV / IRV / AV, single-seat STV, whatever, as is the President of Ireland.
I don’t like the French two-round system, because too many people have to “hold their noses” should a second round be required (Chirac-Le Pen 2002 being the classic example). Far better to get it all over and done with in one preferential vote election, with people having no incentive other than to express their true preferences for the candidates (as previously discussed).
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Okay, that didn't work.
Try this: http://publicaddress.net/system/cafe/hard-news-ge2015-proper-mad/?p=340160#post340160 .
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
(I’d note that an indirect election would be fairer here in a couple of ways:- a council would be elected with members split maybe 39/34/27 R/VPP/D
Etc.
Yes, what you say here could work in theory, but, unfortunately, at the time, the 14-seat Burlington City Council was elected by single-seat plurality in seven wards, with each councillor being elected for two years; there being an election in each ward every year. From my quick research, it seems to me that, in most elections, the incumbent is re-elected unopposed (except for write-ins). That’s FPP in America for you.
I still think mayors should be directly elected, but the election should be as I described in a reply to you about a year ago, here : The position of mayor is a very important civic post that I think should be filled in accordance with the wishes of the people.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
Your summation is pretty much spot-on. The only correction I would make being that the Republicans could have achieved a *better* outcome for themselves if 750 of them had given their first round support to the Progressive candidate, not to the Democrat. That way, the Republican candidate would have been eliminated at Round 3 instead of the Democrat, and the 75% of Republican voters who ranked the Democrat second, would have enabled the Democrat to beat Kiss (the Progressive).
(To be clear here, there is no electoral system that I know of (except for plurality / FPP) that would have elected the Republican candidate in this particular election (especially given that 85% of Progressive voters also ranked the Democrat second).)
Are there any voting systems that would avoid that and consider the Republican’s preferences?
Yes. Three that immediately spring to mind are: Condorcet pairwise counting, Nicolaus Tideman’s CPO-STV (Comparison of Pairs of Outcomes), and Schulze STV. And, of course, in the election under discussion, voters could have ensured the Republican preferences were considered by bringing about the property known as non-monotonicity – that is, that increased support, for a candidate who would otherwise have been elected [Kiss], can prevent that candidate from being elected.
All three of these alternative methods violate later-no-harm – that is, that adding a later preference to a ballot should not harm any candidate already listed. As I’ve pointed out before, once voters know that later preferences can be used to defeat their earlier-preferred candidate(s), they, in all likelihood, will not express them, and then we’re back to FPP (single-seat elections), or to the Limited Vote (multi-seat elections).
Following the 2009 Burlington mayoral election, it would seem that IRV fell victim to the toxic, two-party, FPP, electoral environment that, over many decades, has greatly contributed to the current parlous state of democracy in the United States.
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Again, this (the 2009 Burlington mayoral election) is a so-called monotonicity violation, detected after the fact. The first-preference votes given for the three main candidates were: Wright (Republican) 2,951; Kiss (Vermont Progressive Party) 2,585; and Montroll (Democratic) 2,063.
According to Donald Marron, here: https://dmarron.com/2010/09/19/the-feud-over-the-2009-burlington-mayoral-election/ if about 750 of Wright’s supporters had [suddenly and unaccountably] decided to vote for the incumbent mayor, Kiss, instead, they could have engineered a better outcome for themselves by enabling Montroll (who, it turned out, was the Condorcet candidate), to win. (At the Second Round, Wright, with 3,294 votes, had 740 votes more than Montroll, who had 2,554 votes.)
Readers already know what I think about all this. It flies in the face of commonsense. It’s like Act voters suddenly deciding to vote for the Greens candidate. And, had pre-election polling indicated Republican voters could successfully do this, wouldn’t Kiss’s supporters have switched their vote to Wright, to counteract the Republican strategy?
To Rich, I draw your attention to this pro-IRV (single-seat STV) analysis of the result, from fairvote.org:
http://www.fairvote.org/response-to-faulty-analysis-of-burlington-irv-election . Among other things, it points out that there was, in fact, no monotonicity failure in this election – “non-monotonicity *could* have affected the election [by Kiss’s votes being raised, so that Wright is eliminated and Kiss loses to Montroll in the final runoff], but did not[.]”The last few paragraphs about Condorcet voting methods are also interesting. It is pointed out that they "discount the relative importance of first choices", and how "that might affect candidate policy discussion".
The simple fact is, not enough people, giving their true preferences for the candidates, voted for Montroll, for him to win. When he was eliminated, the contingency choices of the voters on his ballot papers were activated, resulting in his votes transferring 2 to 1 to Kiss, to elect that candidate.
And let us not forget, any system that elected Montroll would have had to violate later-no-harm – and would almost certainly have been immediately discarded, also.
In my view, it is quite wrong to describe the outcome of this election as “perverse”.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Michael Homer,
I've read the Wikipedia article again, this time more carefully, and I see that the Schulze method does indeed provide for equality of preference. (My apologies, Tim.)
I note your comment about it being less intuitive, and that it would be "fairly inefficient at run time with a large number of candidates."
Getting public servants and legislators to accept it, and provide for it for public elections, for what would be little or no demonstrable gain (especially giving away later-no-harm, which I believe is necessary for public confidence in preferential voting systems), would be very difficult, I think.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Michael Homer,
Wow! Thanks Michael. That is actually great news. (Also, it confirms how much I know about computer programming, which is nothing.)
My problem with Tim is that, Graeme puts up these posts as a public service, but Tim just wants to argue the system he’s talking about is not nearly as good as it could be. But that is not the point.
Graeme is doing his bit to educate voters. He is happy to answer questions from people who may not fully understand the system. If people want to argue that the system we have could be better, there are plenty of other sites where they can do that.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
That must be directed at Tim.
I certainly can't. Besides, I'm very happy with our vote-counting system.
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Legal Beagle: Voting in an STV election, in reply to Tim McKenzie,
But your highest-ranked candidates might also do worse if you refrain from listing remaining candidates. So in practice, why would a well-informed voter want to refrain from listing their remaining candidates?
Because they don’t know them, have (little or) no knowledge of them, and no interest in them.
As I have been at pains to point out, voters in large, public, elections have no way of knowing, when they vote, the effect their vote will have on the election outcome.
Why should Katharine struggle to rank-order more than 30 candidates, when she simply doesn’t need to? The things you’re saying here could only be determined after the fact, and they could go either way.
In discussing Short Votes [votes with truncated preferences] (in a paper sent to me many years ago), David Hill concludes—
“We should always treat all ballot papers as if they meant what is written on them and not by any guesses about what might have been written on them, and (regarding all voters as equal) we should always act in proportion to the numbers involved.” This is exactly what NZ STV does.
Okay, that’s my lot.