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Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

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Re: Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

#51

Post by r00fus »

autarch wrote: post #30
pc86 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be better to have something like 0/1/2 which is essentially IRV, or some other method of point distribution among candidates?

No, IRV actually makes the strategic voting problem even worse than our current system. Approval voting seems to have the best mix of desirable traits.

[cite needed]

The current system (assuming you're not from Australia) - plurality (or first-past-the-post) voting - is literally the least representative voting mechanism. Tell me where you see IRV as having a worse-case than plurality/FPTP.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

Re: Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

#52

Post by jQueryIsAwesome »

Some of you are forgetting something; that even if you had some form of "stadistical fairness" (whatever that may be); you still have the biggest problem of most democracies: Uneducated people; people who think an atheist shouldn't be president, people who like to reinforce their biases more than they like to have deep discussions about the nation's issues, people who were never taught to do critical thinking... and without doing exceptions for their government, their parents, their religion and the law.

Re: Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

#53

Post by jQueryIsAwesome »

maratd wrote: post #25

This is off. Voting is not a system for selecting the best candidate. Voting, in whatever forms it exists, is a system to avoid violence and conflict. Each side feels it had a fair shot, regardless of outcome. The purpose of voting is to leave you with that feeling, to avoid unpleasant behavior from the losing party. The best person for the job almost never gets it. That's why we don't vote people in when hiring some…

> Each side feels it had a fair shot, regardless of outcome

Yeah, but the calm fades away when a big enought amount of people realizes that they are not actually part of neither side and they get angry about it.

Re: Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

#54

Post by lmkg »

nikatwork wrote: post #35

I've always thought New Zealand's mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting system [1] is the least bad solution currently in use. I'm not from NZ so I'd be interested to hear what the locals think. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_voting_system_refer...

Not a local, but... Proportional voting systems suffer from the problem that voting "power" is not proportional to representation.

Consider a parliament with 100 members and 3 parties. Suppose the breakdown is: A has 49 members, B has 48 members, and C has 3 members. Guess what... A, B, and C all have equal voting power! Any two parties are enough to reach a majority of 51 votes, and any one party is not. Despite A having, in theory, over 16 times the representation of C, it does not have any voting advantage.

Keep in mind that any voting system based on parties will tend to have very partisan voting blocs. Representatives in the US are more independent and likely to break with the party because they are elected in geographically isolated elections. Representatives elected directly by a party generally have about as much independence as the Electors in the Electoral College.

Re: Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

#55

Post by justincpollard »

maratd wrote: post #25

This is off. Voting is not a system for selecting the best candidate. Voting, in whatever forms it exists, is a system to avoid violence and conflict. Each side feels it had a fair shot, regardless of outcome. The purpose of voting is to leave you with that feeling, to avoid unpleasant behavior from the losing party. The best person for the job almost never gets it. That's why we don't vote people in when hiring some…

Whether or not voting is a system to avoid violence and conflict or create accountability, it's dominated by a system that allows for those outcomes (assuming they are binary) and a third: a better candidate is elected to the position. As long as the process is generally known and makes sense (whatever that means), I'd rather have all three outcomes than just two. I think the author's point is a simple and important one.

Re: Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

#56

Post by Tloewald »

The article confuses two issues, one illustrated by Arrow's Theorem which is more relevant to parliamentary procedures (where any set of more than two choices has to be resolved as a series of binary choices, and the voting population is small and its preferences well understood) and first past the post electoral systems which are completely hopeless, especially when tiered, as in the US.

Most of the article is essentially discussing an example of Arrow's Theorem where if you know people's preferences and can present them with binary options in an order of your choosing you can obtain any outcome except the least popular option. This is very artificial and not a real flaw of preferential and proportional electoral systems where (a) individual preferences are not known and (b) the entire vote is done in one step, not in a carefully chosen series of binary options. Great for gaming a committee, lousy for elections.

As others have observed, the chief purpose of voting is allowing government transitions without violence and with the appearance of procedural fairness, but the fact remains voting works just fine when the population has a clear cut preference ("throw the bastards out").

Well, modulo corrupt redistricting.

Americans who want to talk about voting really need to understand that there are other voting systems than the horse and buggy system used in the US and UK.

Re: Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

#57

Post by chimeracoder »

Empact wrote: post #40
Steko wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Approval voting suffers the largest number of "Especially Intolerable Failures" in the comparison here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_instant_runoff_vo...

If you examine these supposed failures of Approval voting, you'll find that the bulk of them can be attributed to the divide between a "Majoritarian" or a "Consensus-driven" perspective. That is, many of the criteria suppose that the most-preferred candidate of the majority should win, but should that be the case? Imagine there are 3 candidates, one who is adored by the super-majority, a second who is very well-liked…

> Given 2 systems, one which exhibits several flaws often, and another which rarely exhibits flaws but is theoretically capable of exhibiting a certain offensive flaw, does it make sense to reject the better-behaving system because of a theoretical result? I think not

No, but if we want to go on the basis of how likely it is to produce those outcomes, Instant-runoff voting beats approval voting by a long shot. Amartya Sen has shown that, not only is IRV is highly unlikely to produce an outcome which violates transitivity and independence, but if ideologies are assumed to be relatively linear[1], then it never violates those conditions.

[1] Ie, very few people would rank Nader > Bush > Gore

Re: Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

#58

Post by nitrogen »

chimeracoder wrote: post #57
Empact wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you examine these supposed failures of Approval voting, you'll find that the bulk of them can be attributed to the divide between a "Majoritarian" or a "Consensus-driven" perspective. That is, many of the criteria suppose that the most-preferred candidate of the majority should win, but should that be the case? Imagine there are 3 candidates, one who is adored by the super-majority, a second who is very well-liked…

> Given 2 systems, one which exhibits several flaws often, and another which rarely exhibits flaws but is theoretically capable of exhibiting a certain offensive flaw, does it make sense to reject the better-behaving system because of a theoretical result? I think not No, but if we want to go on the basis of how likely it is to produce those outcomes, Instant-runoff voting beats approval voting by a long shot. Amarty…

IRV still has the problem that gaining a few percentage points can cause a candidate to lose. I'd prefer approval voting's potential paradoxes over that possibility any day.

I'd also consider a non-majority approval victory a highly desirable outcome, and the way politics goes right now, it'd be more like a 40% candidate with 85% approval beating a 51% candidate with 51% approval.

Re: Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

#59

Post by derleth »

saraid216 wrote: post #44
derleth wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's entirely possible to be active in the ACLU, for example, and still be annoyed that since you live in Montana your vote for a Democratic presidential candidate is basically pointless.

Pointless for what purpose?

> Pointless for what purpose?

I'm beginning to think you don't understand how the Electoral College works, but maybe Montana wasn't the best example.

Pointless for the purpose of electing a President. The odds of Montana casting any of its electoral votes for a Democratic candidate are so low that it is essentially impossible for an individual Montanan voting for a Democratic Presidential candidate to have any actual impact on the result. Compare this to a Floridian, or even a Virginian.

Now, Montana isn't nearly as Republican-leaning a state as, say, Arizona has been recently. Montana has a Democratic governor and has elected two Democrats to the Senate. However, we've been two very reliable electoral votes in the Republican column for decades now, and that shows no sign of changing.

So, statistically, a Montanan voting for a Democratic Presidential candidate is throwing their vote away in a very real sense. However, they can still cast an efficacious ballot for two Senators, a Representative, a Governor, and other state-level offices, not to mention voting on referenda. A way to make up for lost influence is to, as I said, support a special interest group in addition to voting.

Re: Voting is a Sham Mathematically Speaking

#60

Post by bluedanieru »

jQueryIsAwesome wrote: post #52

Some of you are forgetting something; that even if you had some form of "stadistical fairness" (whatever that may be); you still have the biggest problem of most democracies: Uneducated people; people who think an atheist shouldn't be president, people who like to reinforce their biases more than they like to have deep discussions about the nation's issues, people who were never taught to do critical thinking... and…

That's not really in scope for choosing a voting system that best represents the people. But yes, point taken.
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