The Least of All Evils

Declaration of Independence (of Irrelvant Alternatives)

2012-01-28T13:26:00.002-09:00

You're finishing up a nice dinner, when the waiter lets you know about their dessert options. They have apple pie (A), and blueberry pie (B). You order a nice hot slice of all-American apple pie. A minute or two goes by, and the waiter returns. "I forgot," he says, "to mention that we also have cherry pie" (C). You consider it a moment and decide, "In that case, I'll have the blueberry."

Just Dessert

Ridiculous, isn't it? If you think A is the best out of A and B, then there's no logical reason you would think that B is the best out of A, B, and C. But what if pies are parties, and you are the American voting public? Official results don't collect voter's full preferences on candidates, but (please, hold off on your Gore/Nader (or Bush/Perot) comments for a bit, thank you!) there's no shortage of people claiming that this new third option, even though they didn't win, changed the outcome. (Keep holding it.) What we're talking about is usually called the spoiler effect, or more broadly and academically, a failure of the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA).

In the absence of 100%-completely-non-controversial data, it's easy enough to construct a plausible example to showcase the theory:

30%: A > (all others)
45%: B > (all others)
25%: C > A > B

If only A and B run, A wins 55% to 45%. But if A, B, and C run, then by plurality voting rules, the winner changes to B. We can vary the percentages pretty widely (we can even throw in in some C > B > A voters) but it doesn't vary the results: C doesn't win, but they do change the winner.

This isn't C's fault. Maybe C was making a statement. Maybe A should have dropped out of the race. Maybe C's voters valued their honest vote over the practicality of supporting a "lesser evil." (Okay, now you may comment.) All of these could be true, or none of them could be true, but the fault lies not in our candidates or our voters, but in the way we have agreed to count our elections. We have decided to use a voting system which fails the independence of irrelevant alternatives. And IIA means spoilers, which means "the lesser of two evils" is an effective voter strategy, which means we will have a two-party system. In other word, not only will C lose, but C will always be feared by voters of potentially causing the election of the worst candidate.

Declare Your Independence

This is not a new revelation; this is a problem we've been aware of, and trying to fix, for at least a few hundred years. But, in 1951, Kenneth Arrow proved--on his way to a Nobel prize--that no (single-winner) voting system can pass IIA if it is both deterministic and based on ranked-order ballots. That leaves us with precisely three options.

One, accept failure of IIA (which means we accept our two-party system.)
Two, allow a random component in our elections (not a popular plan.)
Three, don't use ranked-order ballots.

I chose option three. And if you're the sort who likes 3rd options when you go to vote, then option three is the most important political stance you can take. Because we cannot even fairly consider more than two options--we cannot even rationally think about cherry pie--without it.

Declare your independence from irrelevant alternatives! Support approval voting and other third-party supporting voting systems.

Other Good Ideas: Proportional Representation

2012-01-18T22:00:00.002-09:00

(Note: This post was going to go up sooner, but with Wikipedia going down to protest SOPA, I put it off for a bit.)

Before disappearing for a third of a year, I was asked a simple question in the comments: Would I support an effort in favor of proportional representation (PR), even if it were for single transferable vote (STV), the PR method on which instant runoff voting (IRV) is based. And yes, I would. I often refer to Duverger's Law, the observation that single-winner plurality elections tend toward two-party dominated government, and PR effectively attacks one of the two legs of that problem.

What is Proportional Representation?

The familiar method for electing a legislature is to divide the region into districts, and elect a single representative from each one, the idea being that someone from where you're from, will want what you want. In practice, this isn't always true. There tend to be factions in each district that split along similar lines, and these ideological splits may be completely independent from the geographic split of the districts. It's possible (by accident or by design) for the narrowest of political majorities to win every single seat in a legislature, or for a group that is a minority in the electorate to have a majority of legislative seats. If the legislature is intended to represent the viewpoints of the whole electorate, only with a smaller number of participants, then these single-winner districts often fail.

The goal of PR is to fix this deficiency. Rather than each district electing a single winner, they elect multiples, and in proportion to the number of votes they have received. In this way, the diversity and popularity of viewpoints among the people will more-closely match the diversity and popularity of viewpoints among the representatives.

Variations and Usage

There are many different variations of PR. The most basic is changing the number of winners elected from each district. This number may be as small as 3 or 5 (usually, but not always, the number is odd) or as large as the 120 used for the Israeli Knesset, which is elected from a single, nation-wide "district". The other major point of variation is whether the system is candidate-based, like our current single-winner elections are, or whether it is explicitly party-based, so that voters do not vote for individual candidates but rather for a party or a list of candidates they have supplied; there are also mixed systems, like the one used in Germany, which provide for both simultaneously. There are also different ways of dividing the votes--basically, which way to round fractions--which can favor having fewer, larger parties or more, smaller parties. Depending on the precise method used, a PR ballot may look just like a plurality ballot, like a pair of plurality ballots (one listing candidates and one listing parties), or it may ask you to rank several choices (candidates or parties), or it may even look like an approval voting or score voting ballot

Most of the worlds democracies use proportional representation, which may come as a surprise to those of us in the United States, but that's because some of the largest exceptions--the United Kingdom and Canada--also happen to be some of the countries we Americans are most familiar with.

Criticisms and Difficulties

Since multiple winners are elected in each district, some critics have said that PR severs the connection between a voter and "their" representative. However, since each district elects multiple representatives, it is more-likely that you'll be in political agreement with at least one of "your" representatives. I also have commonly heard complaints about the party-centric aspects of party-based PR, but usually this is from people who don't realize that there are PR methods that are not party-based. Candidate-based PR tends to become somewhat unwieldy as the number of winners increases, as it becomes more difficult for voters to determine and remember which candidates they prefer. The counting procedures, regardless of the specific form of PR used, are also more complex than plurality voting is. Finally, there are people who legitimately believe that it is best to have as few large political parties as possible, in order to best guarantee the existence of a cohesive majority government, although this is less-significant in the US since we have less expectation of party-line voting, as well as extra veto-points in the President and in one chamber of congress acting more-and-more often under super-majority rules via the filibuster.

Also particular to the US, it is currently federal law that the states elect their representatives from single-winner districts (the law was enacted because some states had chosen to elect all their representatives at-large, guaranteeing that 51% of the voters would choose 100% of the representatives, eliminating representation for minorities) and that law would have to modified in order for any form of PR to be usable for House elections. Furthermore, the constitution requires that House seats be apportioned to the states, so no cross-state proportionality would be possible without a constitutional amendment, making the system rather moot for the 7 states who have a single representative.

This hasn't stopped PR from being used in several US cities, even, at one point, New York City; although most of these later returned to single-winner elections, so that, as of today, Cambridge, Massachusetts has the only governing body in the nation that is still elected via proportional representation.

Conclusions

For those who favor a diversity of opinions, proportional representation can be an effective way to achieve it. It has shortcomings and legal hurdles standing in the way of its use, and obviously can't be used for single-seat offices like a governor or the president. I won't stop pressing for approval or score voting, but there's no reason these advances can't be pursued in parallel. Although, anyone who sought to do so should familiarized themselves with how and why PR elections were rolled-back in recent US history, in order to avoid running into the same mistakes again. But that's a blog for another day...

Now, why would I support STV, but not IRV? It's a known property of STV that, the fewer winners it elects per district, the less proportional it is (and the balancing act becomes ballot complexity versus proportionality.) Since IRV is precisely equivalent to STV with one winner, we know that it loses all proportionality (in other words, IRV is not a PR election method.) This, combined with the other deficiencies of IRV make it an unacceptable alternative to my mind.

The Coming Year

2011-12-29T17:47:00.000-09:00

Just want to let everyone know, we're not dead. It's just that in September I bought a house, in October I got married, in November I was standing with the local Occupation group, and in December it gets really, really dark and depressing in Alaska so I just didn't feel like writing anything. But now the solstice is behind us, the new year is in front of us, and we'll be back with a vengeance starting in January. My apologies for the unexpected absence (and my further apologies for making a "my apologies for not posting" post.) I left a couple of important comments un-answered in my haste to the bank/altar/park/dark, and we'll (if all goes to plan) be starting off with a response to those early next year. See you then!

The Franchise

2011-08-31T18:30:00.006-08:00

I've been waffling about discussing today's issue for the last month, for two reasons. One, while it's about voting, it's not about voting systems, so it's a bit off-topic. And two, it's become something of a partisan issue. On the other hand, I've made no posts since last month. So here we go!

The essential component of democracy is elections; to let the people who will be affected by the law decide the law (or at least, representatives who will do so.) Give people a choice over the government, and they will be more satisfied with that government's choices. That's why we have only, and always, expanded the franchise; to African Americans, to women, to 18 year-olds. Even if you disagree with the choices another voter makes, it is essential to democracy to allow them to make that choice. Which is why I am disgusted at the numerous efforts around the country to blatantly disenfranchise groups of voters because of their expected partisan voting habits.

I am, of course, speaking about the attempts, almost exclusively^* in Republican-controlled state houses, to enact legislation that would impose stringent requirements, or strengthen the existing requirements, for government-issued photo identification before a voter is allowed to exercise their right to vote. These bills are nominally being introduced to combat voter fraud, and yes, voter fraud is something any democracy should be worried about. But in modern America, it is not a grave problem (a rough estimate finds that there is one alleged case of voter fraud for every 100,000 eligible voters, and only approximately one in 40 of those leads to a conviction. That's one in 4 million, and there are only slightly over 210 million eligible voters in the United States; do the math.) But worse, the laws being proposed do very-little to absolutely-nothing to prevent the majority of fraud cases (most fraudulent votes are cast by election insiders, and outsiders who vote fraudulently typically do so via absentee ballots or through multiple registrations at different polling places, neither of which can be caught by checking ID.)

Rather, the effect of these laws will primarily be to prevent innocent poor, minority, and youth voters from voting; all groups which tend to vote for Democrats. A generous estimate would be that 3,000 legitimate voters will be turned away at the polls for each case of fraud that these laws would stop, and the true number is possibly orders of magnitude higher.

In any functioning democracy, we will disagree. But attempting to win by reducing the electorate cuts at the very essence of democracy.

(Numbers based off various articles from The Voting News's "voter fraud" topic.)

*Rhode Island's law, although passed through a Democratically-controlled house, is much milder than the other laws pushed forward this year. It does not go into effect until 2014 (i.e., will not affect the next presidential election), it allows a much broader class of documents to count as valid identification, and rather than turn voters away it allows them to cast a provisional ballot.

Then They Laugh At You

2011-07-30T17:59:00.006-08:00

RangeVoting.org is an advocacy site for range voting (also known as score voting), full of (sometimes bewilderingly academic) information arguing in favor of range voting and other ratings-based election methods.

RangeVoting.com is a brand-new-today site created by FairVote, an instant runoff (and other voting reforms) advocacy group, specifically for the purpose of mocking range voting and other voting methods that FairVote disagrees with.

I can't rouse anything other than disappointment over FairVote's blatant attempt to hijack the name "range voting" in such a search-engine-friendly way. It's sad how an organization, one that so often cries about its opponents being unfairly combative, would take such a low road to try and make its arguments seem more legitimate.

On the other hand, I guess it means range voting advocacy is making an impression. I often go to the trouble of checking the comments on pro-IRV editorials, and in the past I would always be the first to present any counter arguments or range voting advocacy. But recently, and more and more often, I find someone, or even two or three someones, have already beaten me too it. This new ".com" shows that FairVote feels that ignoring us is no longer an option.

Get This Party Started: Future History

2011-06-20T23:01:00.003-08:00

About a year and a half ago, I wrote a five-part series looking at the historical transitions of the American party-system. At the end, I promised a look at the future, of what the next transition might look like, and an assessment of whether or not it could happen soon. But when I started looking in to it, I discovered that it was hard to find information about voter's views that wasn't broken down first by party affiliation, and mothballed that idea. But then, just a few weeks ago, the new Pew Research Political Topology Report was released, which has precisely the information I was hoping to see.

Review

First, a quick (and what I hope will be seen as unbiased) summary of the 5 previously-examined transitions.

1st to 2nd: One major party disappears in treasonous-embarrassment, it's members joining up with what is now the only game in town; one-party rule lasts 20 years before falling apart into four-way presidential race, partially along the old party lines; the winner gets just 30.9% of the popular vote.
2nd to 3rd: Both major parties are unable to adequately address the nations largest economic and social issue: slavery; major presidential nomination fights occur in both; one party's leadership collapses completely, the other breaks into factions; a new party is created with an explicit platform on the issue, and they win the presidency on their second try, with just 39.8% of the vote.
3rd to 4th: Economic arguments (over the gold standard and inflation) find split support in both parties; a splinter 3rd-party spoils the election for its parent, taking four (of 44) states, and in the next election, there is mass cross-party voting based on this issue; the crossover becomes permanent.
4th to 5th: A massive economic downturn permanently pushes many voters (the working poor and academics) away from the party they blame for the crisis; despite massive 3rd-party voting, a majority (57.4%) vote for the opposing major party's candidate.
5th to 6th: Massive social change and accompanying laws (culminating in The Civil Rights Act) permanently push many voters away from the party that enacted them, while attracting others; in the course of just two presidential elections, all but 5 (of 48) states reverse their partisan presidential leanings.

What's Your Issue?

After that first transition, there's a strong re-occurring theme in there, namely that of a major issue which cuts across the constituencies of both existing major parties. Only once did it completely collapse a major party, while the other three times it caused a major swap of supporters. And this is where the Pew Report comes in, because it examines the American electorate, and tries to break them down into a small number of issue-groups, from which we should be able to identify a nascent party transition.

The good news, if you're a third-party advocate, is that Staunch Conservatives and Solid Liberals only make up 11% and 16% of the electorate, respectively; this will jive with your belief that there aren't really that many people who are actually that devoted to the two major parties as they currently exist.

The bad news is that, to my eye at least, it doesn't seem like there's any serious cross-party split out of which you could expect to see the sort of transitions we've come to expect over the last 100 years. At least, not in the short term. For instance, Pew identifies Libertarians (10%) as one of its groups, but when you dig into the issues, they tend to hold identical views as Staunch Conservatives except for the issue of gay rights; similarly, we see New Coalition Democrats (9%), who are Solid Liberals except for the issue of gay rights. While that could be the makings of the kind of grand constituency-swaps we've seen since the creation of the Republican party, it hasn't yet risen to the level where this one issue can drive the outcome of every election.

The same story can be told about welfare, and other social safety-net programs. The so-called Disaffecteds (11%) are Staunch Conservatives, except they support (and often are supported by) these programs, while Post-Moderns (14%) are Solid Liberals, except that they would scale back these programs (which they are generally well-off enough to not need to use them, and question if anyone else needs them either.) This could also grow to become a defining issue that leads to a long term exchange of party support, but it's just not quite there yet. In both these cases, the issue at-hand would have to overcome voters' concerns on every other issue, and I have a hard time imagining, for example, that an overwhelming number of Libertarians would vote for the full Democratic platform because of its stance on gay marriage, or a Democratic candidate soften the party's stance on every other issue in an effort to attract them.

The other two groups which Pew identified were Main Street Republicans (14%; Staunch Conservatives except for their stance on the environment) and Hard-Pressed Democrats (15%; Solid Liberals except for their stance on immigration.) Expect these four issues (gay rights, social safety-net programs, the environment, and immigration) to be the top issues for the foreseeable future; but while this is what politicians will be talking about, it won't be bringing us any closer to a change in the party system.

Trying to use transitions from before the civil war as a model works no better. There is simply no issue that compares to slavery in its level of importance to voters and its ability to split both major parties. I've written before about how copyright brought me here, but while it is one of many issues which can draw support from voters for both major parties, it is also one of many issues which is not important enough to enough people to build a new, successful, major party on.

The odds don't seem any better for a "centrist" party to rise up in the current environment; if anything, groups in the middle disagree with each other more than the groups on the wings. For instance, Disaffecteds and Post-Moderns are opposed over the same issues that the Republicans and Democrats are, but while they take opposing issues on welfare from their "host" party, they still disagree with each other completely. The same with Libertarians and New Coalition Democrats over gay rights. An attempt could be made to build a pro-gay anti-welfare centrist party out of Post-Moderns and Libertarians (I read their blog), or an anti-gay pro-welfare centrist party out of Disaffecteds and New Coalition Democrats (does such a group exist?), but there is a huge systemic bias against centrist parties, and the Pew report doesn't show anywhere near enough strength for such a group to have any chance to unseat one of the two major parties.

Conclusions

If you accept the fact that we really do have a two-party system, and you should, then you have to accept that issues, and how the issues are tied to parties, and how the issues and the parties are tied to voters, creates an incredible knot of inertia and rigidity in the political system. And currently, that system does not seem to be near any sort of tipping point. So keep hammering away at it, you 73% of voters who disagree with the major parties on at least one critical issue; your moment isn't here yet, but maybe in another eight years, it could be.

That, or you could throw your support behind better election methods, like approval voting and score voting, which allow better support for third parties and for multiple-issue-driven campaigns; then at least we could at least argue about the issues, instead just the "two" parties.

The Alternative Vote: Neither the Death nor Resurrection of Democracy

2011-05-03T18:19:00.002-08:00

This Thursday, the UK is holding a referendum on voting. Specifically, voters are being asked whether they want to stick with the status quo--"first past the post" (FPTP) or "plurality" voting--or to try something new. The new method they are considering goes by the name "the alternative vote" (AV), but it's known in the US as "instant runoff voting" (IRV) or "ranked choice voting" (RCV), and unless you're new here you've heard me heap criticism upon it. For this article, I'll be using the UK terms.

Current polls show the measure is teetering towards failure, which if fine from my perspective, but both the "Yes" and "No" campaigns have been flying some pretty ridiculous propaganda, so let's set the record straight. AV will not cause democracy to crash and burn. They've used it for a hundred years in Australia, and it hasn't turned them into an arid wasteland of venomous monsters (well, no more so than it already was.) Nor will it create a utopia of perfect democracy. Again, Australia has used it for a hundred years, and everyone complains about the government just as much as they do in any other free country in the world.

In practice, AV gives about the same results as FPTP. I've seen a claim that over 100 seats would have been allocated differently, but that's based on counting any seat where the winner had less than 50% of the votes as a potential switch; the actual number, based on reasonable assumptions about voter's second- and later-choices, is 3, or 1%.

Furthermore, with perfectly-tactical voters, AV always gives exactly the same results as FPTP: It is only beneficial to the degree that voters will choose honesty over tactics, and despite the "Yes" campaign's claims, AV voters still can benefit from, and so will be incentivized to practice, tactical, rather than honest, voting. This is trivial to show, especially in the situation the UK finds itself in now, with three strong parties that have no natural and obvious split among them as a basis to form a coalition. While it is true that AV makes it more-difficult for a small party to act as a spoiler--which is the kernel of truth that the "Yes" campaign has built this fabrication around--it has the same susceptibility to spoilers as FPTP when there are three or more strong parties, and it's fear of spoilers that drives tactical voting. (AV can still result in hung parliaments too, for which I again point to Australia, who saw its two largest blocs walk out with 48% of seats each in their 2010 election.)

While AV does, in a limited way, shore-up this one weakness in FPTP, it also introduce its own special failure modes, including non-monotonicity, participation failure, and other paradoxes of voting which cannot occur under FPTP, but which are quite common under AV. The improvements are small, and then almost entirely countered by these new failures. Failures which commonly are used as the basis for repeal campaigns by voters who feel they've been sold a false bill of election-reforming goods. (Expect the repeal movement to peak after two or three elections have passed under AV.)

But even if we follow the naive notion that every voter would choose honesty, and that the marginal improvements are worth the new paradoxes (and that the inevitable repeal movement can be fought back), then AV still comes at a steep cost. Ballot-spoilage rates are four to seven times higher with AV. Not, as the "No" campaign has said, because voters can't understand the process, but simply because there are so many ways to make a ballot-invalidating error when filling out such a ballot. Perhaps related, the counting process is notably more expensive; not astronomically so, as the "No" campaign has claimed, but it will require either the purchase and maintenance of more complex, and therefore more costly, voting machines, or a more time-consuming, and therefore more costly, amount of hand-counting.

The UK does have a few points in its favor that would make AV less of a wasted effort than it would be, for instance, in the US. The relative lack of effective political polling in the UK leaves voters with less information with which to make informed tactical voting decisions, so "honesty" may be a somewhat more-likely default than it would in the US. And since UK voters do not directly choose the head of government, a unitary office, there is less of central figure for voters and parties to rally, and become divisive, around. Both of these aspects increase the likely amount of improvement in outcomes due to AV, from "minuscule" to "tiny". However even these mitigating trends are on the wane, with political polling catching on and party heads taking a more active role as the faces of their parties.

Finally, there is the notion that a vote on this (non-)reform sends a message. The "Yes" campaign says that a yes vote sends the message that you want something to be done and this is the first step towards proportional representation, while the "No" campaign says that a no vote sends the message that this is not the reform you want and that you would rather have proportional representation. Uh huh. My advice is that your vote for or against AV should be based solely on the (lack of) merits of AV, irrespective of what better "sends the message" that you really want proportional representation (PR). The fundamental prerequisite for PR is multimember districts, and no government anywhere has ever enacted AV and then later been convinced to add multimember districts. The two reforms are essentially unconnected.

AV isn't worth the effort. I would encourage UK voters to vote no on AV, and to campaign for PR.

The Power of Organizing, The Folly of Top-Two

2011-03-21T18:42:00.000-08:00

A group of people working together can accomplish greater things than any one of them working alone. We see it all around us as people rise up against tyranny, or dig each other out from terrible disasters. Cooperation is a force-multiplier.

Which is why top-two primaries (or, as they've erroneously come to be called recently, "open primaries") are a doomed and useless gesture.

First, some vocabulary. If a few years ago you asked anyone what an "open primary" was, invariably they would have told you "A primary election that does not require voters to be affiliated with a political party in order to vote for partisan candidates," [Wikipedia] or something to that effect. But somehow, in the last year or two, the name "open primary" has been applied to what used to be known as a "top-two" or "jungle" primary. In this sort of primary, rather than each parties nominees appearing on separate ballots (and the winner of each party's vote continuing on to the general election), all the candidates of all parties appear on a single ballot, and only the first- and second-place candidates compete in the general election. While all "top-two" primaries are also "open primaries," it is not the case that all "open primaries" are "top-two."

The problem (make that "a problem," but we'll just focus on this one for today) with top-two is, if there are a large number of good candidates from one party (let's call them the "A" party), and relatively fewer good candidates in the other parties, then the A-party candidates could split the A-vote, potentially making it so that none of the A-party members get into the general election, even if one (or more of them) could have defeated candidates from the other parties in the general election. When I wrote about this last May in the lead-up to the vote on California's top-two primary proposal (Proposition 14), I said that "it would be really nice if we could have a party primary before the open primary." I was at least half-joking: such a response is absurd, meant to show that the original proposal is absurd.

Well, the absurdity passed, and now the absurd response has followed. The California GOP plans to hold a party primary in advance of the top-two primary in order to select their favored candidate. [Via Ballot Access News.]

Coordination is a force-multiplier. (So is repetition.) People will always seek to coordinate in order to maximize their effect on a situation. That's why we have political parties. That's why parties want to keep non-members out of the primaries. That the GOP has decided to go this route in California is a simple, logical, and inevitable response to the rules under which they operate.

Proponents of top-two try to claim that it would elect more moderate candidates, and would ease the stranglehold that the two major parties hold on the political system. It hasn't done so in Louisiana, nor in Washington, and it won't do so in California. But there is a change to the rules which we could make that would do those things: spoiler-free, consensus-seeking voting methods, like approval voting or score voting. These would actually change the incentives, for voters and for the parties they organize.

New Hampshire Approval Voting Bill Shot Down

2011-03-04T13:47:00.002-09:00

HB240, the bill in the New Hampshire state house to enact approval voting, has failed to pass, having been deemed "Inexpedient to Legislate."

Apparently, some of the same state representatives who shot down Dr. Steven Brams' original push for approval voting in the state back in the 70s are still in the house, and did not find any of the research performed since 2000 persuasive.

I can only hope that this does not deter the approval voting advocates. Perhaps, given more time, they can persuade more of their colleagues of the system's benefits.

CES on Oscars

2011-02-28T10:06:00.003-09:00

Following up on last year's effort, I was working on something in exactly the same vein, but the Center for Election Science beat me to the punch. Here's this year's Oscar for best picture (voted on by Academy members via instant runoff voting) versus IMDB's top films of the year (voted on by IMDBPro members via score voting): Should the Academy Awards Use Instant Runoff Voting?

More on New Hampshire Approval Voting Bill

2011-01-30T16:24:00.002-09:00

The story has made it all the way around my corner of the internet and found its way to Slashdot (which links back to how I ended up writing about this topic in the first place), so now would be a good time to summarize some of the arguments and counter arguments I've been having with people about this:

First, look over to the right and take note of the pink-highlighted link, What Do You Mean By Best?. There I talk about Arrow's Theorem, the debate over voting systems and voting system criteria, and how computer simulations can help us resolve it. Approval voting and range voting stand head-and-shoulders above other alternatives. This is especially important to the Slashdot crowd, because many Linux distributions, as well as Wikimedia, all perform their elections using a Condorcet method, and so many have come to accept that Condorcet methods are the way forward (although the Fedora project uses range voting). Regular readers will of course recall that Condorcet's ideal is better-met by approval voting than by any actual rank-based "Condorcet method".

The bill is having committee hearings next week; I'll continue to keep you posted.

Approval Voting Bill Introduced in New Hampshire

2011-01-25T13:45:00.003-09:00

Longer pieces are in the works, but I have a quick link to share. A bill has been introduced in the state of New Hampshire to move all state-level elections to approval voting. But potentially even more interesting, the bill would move the chronologically-important New Hampshire presidential primary to approval voting as well. I'll be keeping an eye on this as it continues throughout the legislative session.

"I'm the Greatest!"

2011-01-05T18:10:00.003-09:00

Sports metaphors are always popular when discussing politics. But is an election more like a boxing match, or a foot race? To answer that question, let me ask some more questions: Who do you think is the fastest runner in the world, and who do you think is the best boxer in the world? And how would you know?

In a foot race, the number of contestants is limited only by the width of the track; actually, since everyone runs against the same clock, even that isn't necessarily a restriction. And so there's no question who the fastest runner in the world is.

But boxing is different. If you put Muhammad Ali, George Foreman, and Joe Frasier together in the same ring at the height of their careers, which one would have won? And could you even be sure that the last man standing was the best boxer, and not, for instance, that #2 and #3 didn't just gang up on the "real" world heavyweight champion?

Sadly, elections seem more like boxing matches. Any third challenger either is forced out and not allowed into the ring (via ballot access laws), or drags down a better winner (by being a spoiler). But a little over 200 years ago (or perhaps quite a bit earlier) an improvement was discovered by the Marquis de Condorcet: if there are more than two candidates, have each of them compete, in effect, one-on-one; the truly best one will always beat any other challenger.

(This is done be examining every ballot for its expressed opinion on each pair of candidates; every ballot that list A above B, is a point for A over B. Rankings for any other candidates are inconsequential in the A versus B determination. Then we compare A versus C, and then B versus C, and so on, until we've examined every ballot while considering every pair of candidates.)

There's only one little problem: such a "beats all" or "Condorcet winner" doesn't always exist. Just like Foreman beat Frasier, and Frasier beat Ali, but Ali beat Foreman, so it can go when counting votes. This may not seem obvious, but it's true! Consider:

40%: A > B > C
35%: B > C > A
25%: C > A > B

65% of these voters prefer A over B, and 75% prefer B over C... but 60% prefer C over A! (For this to happen, there would have to be more than a single topic over which voters consider the options. It couldn't just be "right versus left," for instance, but left versus right on "social issues" and "fiscal issues" would be enough to trigger this problem.) When a Condorcet voting method is used then, it's important to have a method to break these "Condorcet cycles," a sort of circular-tie-breaker. Over the years, different tie-breakers have been proposed and used, but they all run into one problem or another, especially when voters begin to act tactically; potentially even electing the worst possible candidate.

How can we improve on this? We can make elections more like a foot race. The problems that other election methods have, they have because they ask the voters to explicitly rank the candidates relative to each other; they ask "who would win in a fight?" But if we instead make the seemingly-minor change of rating every candidate against an independent scale--in other words, have them all race against the clock, so that they are ranked against each other only implicitly--then we discover some surprising things.

For one, we'd find that we can allow many more contestants to run simultaneously, without "spoiling" the election; any supporter of third-party or independent candidates should be excited by that. Of course, there would still be some interaction among candidates; I might rate a candidate lower not because I think they are worse, but because I think it will help my favored candidate win. That's tactical voting. So rather than a 100 meter dash, perhaps a marathon, where all the runners bunch together and pace each other (i.e., run faster or slower because of the presence of the other runners), is a better analogy. (Although we should point out that not even the 100 meter dash is immune to pacing effects.)

Although tactical voting is still present, what we find is that it is a much less significant factor in determining the outcome. The truly surprising thing though is that, when we allow our models to account for tactical voting, we discover that these rating-based methods--such as approval voting and score voting--are more likely to elect the honest Condorcet winner than any actual, rankings-based, Condorcet voting method! (Scroll down to the first chart; Condorcet methods are highlighted in blue; score voting is equivalent to range voting.)

Condorcet's insight is a powerful tool for evaluating election methods. And even though he only considered it in the context of ranked ballots, in practice, the most reliable way to achieve it is through rated ballots; through approval voting and score voting.

"Instant" "Majority"

2010-12-21T18:09:00.001-09:00

48 days after the election, a statewide instant runoff vote in North Carolina has concluded. After applying the IRV method, which FairVote touts as always returning a majority decision, the win was awarded to a candidate with 28% of the ballots. So much for "instant", and so much for "majority."

It took 10 days for Oakland, California to count their "instant" runoff vote for mayor this year. The winner there received a "majority" consisting of 45% of all ballots.

Fix Congress, Too

2010-12-03T18:53:00.003-09:00

I firmly believe that, by using superior election methods, we can greatly improve our democracy. I think it's the single most cost-effective change we could make. But it's not the only effective change we could make.

Five years ago, I wasn't reading the New York Times and the Washington Post; I was reading Slashdot, Techdirt, and ArsTechnica. (Actually, I still read those, but I now also read political blogs.) I was concerned with copyright, free software, and the DMCA. It was only slowly that it dawned on me that my concerns about technology and culture were losing out because of a failure to influence the law, and the politicians and political parties that write the law.

Five years ago, one of the heroes of my world was Lawrence Lessig: copyright crusader. But today, one of the heroes of my world is Lawrence Lessig: election reform advocate. We've marched the same road. But Lessig's plan for change is different from mine. He wants publicly-funded elections, in order to take the money of out politics. If you're a fan of this blog, and you haven't already done so, please take a look at Fix Congress First. It's a good idea, and it would do a lot of good... even if it's not the only good idea. ;)

Voting for the Best Comments

2010-11-30T18:05:00.000-09:00

Lots of websites have a comment section. Some sites which get huge numbers of comments have a sort of voting system for determining which comments are helpful, and which are not. The website of the San Francisco Chronicle is an example of such a site: this article on Oakland's use of ranked choice voting (AKA instant runoff voting) shows the system in action.

You'll note that, for each comment, you can give it a "thumbs-up" or a "thumbs-down", or leave it alone; the difference between ups and downs gives each comment a net score, and the most highly-scored comments get preferred listing. This is an example of range-3, i.e., range voting with three levels. Meanwhile, comment sections at The New York Times allow you to "recommend" comments, and the most-recommended comments get preferred listing. This is an example of approval voting, and is probably the most common sort of comment-voting setup on the internet.

However, I have never seen anywhere on the internet a comment-voting setup that used any sort of ranked-order voting system. (Although Kitten War comes close to a Condorcet system, sort of.) Why do you think that might be the case? Of course, who our next elected representatives will be is a much more important question than which is the most helpful blog comment (and obviously, when the stakes are so much higher, captchas and email-verification wouldn't be used for voter-roll identification) but the theory is the same: many people will have an opinion, and we want to aggregate those opinions to express a single, group opinion. If range and approval voting work so well in one domain, there's good reason to expect that it will work well in the other.

A Third Party? We Already Have One (Or Thirty)

2010-11-11T11:11:00.000-09:00

Since last Tuesday, there have been more than a few articles written clamoring that we need a third party to rescue this country from the terrible evils that the Republicans and Democrats are laying upon it. A third party, we're told, will really resonate with the voters; will unite them against the two "basically identical" major parties; will end corruption. There's only one problem: we already have a third party.

Actually, we have several "third" parties. The Libertarian party, if you add all the races together, got over one million votes for the House of Representatives this year. The Green party got more than twice that many for President just 12 years ago. And the Libertarian, Green, and Constitution parties have all run nation-wide Presidential tickets in every election since 1992. And that doesn't even count the literally dozens of smaller and regional parties.

Maybe you think there's a growing trend? That, yes, it's true that this has been going on for decades, but that's because it's building slowly, and now it's clear that the wave is about to crest, and a three-party utopia is on the horizon! Well... not so much. There have consistently been three or more new political parties founded in every decade of the nation's history since at least the 1840s, and some of them have done much better than any of the ones we have now. The only exception to this rule is the 1860s which, significantly, is the decade of the civil war and, related, the decade after the Republican party replaced the Whig party as one of America's two major-parties. (And by the way, the Republican party was never a third party.)

Third parties come, and third parties go; if they're lucky, they get to have some indirect influence on the debate by way of being a credible-enough spoiler threat. Occasionally (once a century or so) a major-party goes, and a new major-party forms to take its place—never (yet) an existing third-party. And that's the way it is, because third parties can't win this game.

Anyone who is whining that America needs a third party to "save" it then, is wrong for two reasons: we already have them, and they can't save us. We have a two-party political system because we have a two-party voting system, and if you don't like the former, you have to change the later.

Approval voting and score voting allow third parties a real chance to grow and actually win elections. That would, at the very least, facilitate a faster rate of change of who the two major parties are, and perhaps even lead to a long-term three (or more) party system. This would then speed the rate at which new issues, new ideas, and new ideals, are incorporated into our political discourse.

Consider that the Whig party collapsed because neither it nor the opposing Democratic party could discuss slavery, and that the Republican party's rise was because it could. Had this changeover not been artificially retarded by an inefficient voting system perhaps war could have been avoided. If war really is just the continuation of politics by other means, then a better voting system really is a matter of life and death. I ask you to give this a moments thought on this Veteran's Day.

Strategy-Free Elections, And The True Measure of a Voting System

2010-11-10T18:20:00.002-09:00

If you get involved in the debate on voting system reform, it's never long before someone brings up the concept of "strategic voting." The idea is simple enough: we all want to be as honest as possible on our ballots, but because the voting system is imperfect, we vote otherwise. This is easy to see in plurality; lots of people who claim to really want a third-party candidate end up voting for one of the two major-party candidates on election day. But it happens, to a lesser or greater extent, under all voting methods.

Actually, that's a cleverly-constructed lie of omission.

It turns out that there are a number of voting systems which are 100% strategy-free, so your honest vote will always also be your best vote. But you're not going to like them. Here's an example: voting is performed like plurality, i.e., each voter picks a single candidate. The winner is whichever candidate is named on a ballot chosen at random. Clearly, you should always vote the one candidate you think is best for the job, because there's no reason to fear that you're "throwing your vote away" or making it easier for a candidate you dislike to win. The clever part in the constructing of the lie was omitting the word deterministic, which means "no random components". There are no strategy-free deterministic voting systems.

Constructing other (and better) strategy-free methods is easy enough. So if strategy is so vitally important that it invariably comes up in every voting-system discussion, why don't we use one of them? The answer is: average performance. Random ballot voting, as your intuition probably tells you, is an absolutely terrible system. But intuition is sometimes wrong, so it's important that we can back it up with data by running computer simulations to calculate Bayesian regret. And the data shows that, based on the number of candidates competing, random ballot is two- to four-times worse than plurality voting; which we all know from experience to be a pretty bad system.

Strategy, and a voting system's susceptibility to it, are an important thing to be aware of. But immunity to strategy, even though it sounds like a great thing to strive for, isn't the goal of a voting system; if it were, we'd have an easy answer to the problem, in the form of non-deterministic voting methods. And there are a host of other reasonable-sounding things for a voting system to accomplish, many of which have been codified as voting system criterion. But, besides many of them being mutually-exclusive (i.e., you can't meet them all), using any of them as a litmus test obscures the true objective, in the same way that focusing exclusively on being strategy-free obscures the true objective. The only true measure of a voting system is it's expected performance: how well it delivers a desirable candidate to the electorate. Average performance, as measured by Bayesian regret, smooths over all the coarse edges of criterion, implicitly assessing all of them for frequency as well as impact.

Why should it matter that, for instance, approval voting fails the majority criteria, if the failure rate is vanishingly-infrequent and has minimal impact? When it performs significantly better than a host of other systems that do meet this criteria, but fail some other, equally-reasonable criteria? It shouldn't. Holding the percentage of strategic voters constant, approval voting has significantly better performance than just about any other voting method. Range voting (AKA score voting) can be even better. Which criteria are passed are secondary to that fact.

How it Might Have Been Different

2010-11-04T18:19:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lack of posting, but my political energy has all gone towards volunteering my time to my favorite candidates. One of those candidates was Scott McAdams, who ran in the race I am about to discuss. I have tried to keep my partisan views out of this piece as best as I can and to refer only to polls and election results in the most dispassionate way possible, but I feel it would be deceptive of me to not acknowledge my connection to the campaign.

Sometimes it's hard to articulate how approval voting or score voting would serve to create better electoral results. The typical election quickly boils down to just two good choices, and despite the rare holdout, most voters begrudgingly accept that they have a binary choice to make. But when there are only two options, every voting system produces the same result; the improvements only come by making more choices viable. Yet, for whatever reason, people have a hard time imagining how a better system encourages more choices, preferring instead to just complain about the lack of options or to simply demand more options, without supplying any mechanism that could encourage such a thing.

Approval voting and score voting are the mechanisms. And this election has actually provided an example to illustrate it: the three-way Alaska Senate race. Thanks to Public Policy Polling, we have some excellent information [PDF] pertaining to the candidate's favorability ratings. Favorability is a pretty good proxy for three-point score voting (where the scores are -1/0/+1). The first thing that jumps out when we look at these numbers, is that Miller and Murkowski had some of the worst favorability scores out of all Senate candidates across the entire country. Miller had 36% favorable versus an astounding 59% disfavorable, for a -23 net, and Murkowski had a 37/53, for a -16 net. But McAdams had one of the best favorability scores in the country, with a 50/30 for a +20 net.

This means that, under this simple score voting system, McAdams would likely have won this race, and it wouldn't have even been close. Under plurality though, he got only 24% of the vote, while Miller got 34% and Murkowski got up to 41% (41% is the total for all write-ins, but polling suggest that about 95% of those (so about 39% of the total) are for Murkowski). Looking at just these numbers it's clear that not only did a large number of Murkowski-and-McAdams approving voters chose to go with Murkowski, but that at least some Alaskans voted for Murkowski in spite of the fact that they did not approve of her.

Clearly, this is an example of tactical voting. No (deterministic) system is completely immune to tactical voting, and we can't be fully certain that voters would have voted precisely how the poll suggest they would have if they knew their favorability opinions would decide the outcome (indeed, some PPP favorability polls would have called narrow two-way races backwards). But, assuming the poll represents honest opinions, we can be certain that a majority of Alaskans (i.e., over 50%) would be disappointed with either a Miller win or a Murkowski win, while about half would have been satisfied with a McAdams win. And yet, the winner will be either Miller or Murkowski, and certainly not McAdams, depending on how many write-ins survive the auditing process.

Plurality voting breaks down when there are more than two good choices. That's why most elections see just two "viable" candidates. But simply adding more candidates (or even more parties) accomplishes nothing, because we don't have a system that can deal with more than two options. We have a two-party political system because we have a two-party voting system. But if we change to a better system, one where we can get better results by adding more candidates, only then can we find success by doing so.

Clowns to the Left of Me, Jokers to the Right

2010-09-30T18:49:00.001-08:00

I have a game for you. Get one hundred things--pennies, toothpicks, whatever--and set them up in a line, from left to right. This is our voting populace in simplified, one-dimensional form. Each "voter" has just one simple rule to decide how to vote: vote for whichever one candidate stands closest to them (yes, we're using plurality voting; and if there's a tie for closest, each gets a half vote). Now, grab another thing--a pencil, a button, it doesn't matter--and place it on the line, between two voters, so that 17 voters are to the left of it. This new thing is one of our "candidates", Libram McLeftyson. Nearly five out of six voters think he's too liberal. Grab another candidate, and place it, mirror-like, so that 17 voters are to the right of it, and in equal measure to her competitor, nearly five out of six voters think Constance O'Righterly is too conservative.

Now, here's how you win the game: place a third candidate between any two voters (except right on top of one of the existing candidates) such that they win the election. Go on, try it; I'll wait while you count your things.

Give up yet? You should, because the challenge is impossible. No matter where you put your third candidate, it is impossible to make it so they win; even putting them right in the center won't do it. As an added bonus, you'll find that whichever of the other two candidates you put them closer to, also loses. And if I move them from inside the 17 marks to precisely the 25 marks, you can't even come in second. I can even put them at the 49 marks, practically next to each other, and there's still nowhere you can go where you can win.

More and more Americans are agitating for a "third party", most without even realizing that there are already dozens of active third parties to choose from. But they don't win. They can't win. And this is without even acknowledging the effects of tactical voting, this is with honest voters! In this simulation, the only ones voting for the big-two are the ones who honestly believe them to be the uniquely best option available.

The existence of a multitude of third parties hasn't change this. Screaming that we need even more third parties won't change this. You cannot win this game. The only way you can win, is if you change the rules.

And the rules that would give third parties a chance to win are approval voting and score voting.

Voting In Pictures

2010-09-21T10:12:00.002-08:00

Everyone needs to play around with this graphical voting simulator. Be sure to click on the help link at the top, so you can know what all the features do (and to find the link to two-dimensional voting simulation graphics.) At a minimum, you should click on and enable the displays for plurality, approval, and Hare (IRV), as well as enable a third candidate; then slide the candidates around. From this, it should be very easy to highlight the short-comings of plurality, and see the sorts of bizarre and non-intuitive results that IRV can give.

For instance, you should easily be able to construct a case demonstrating the non-monotonicity of IRV, which will show up as bands of a candidate's color being disjointed (for instance, red-yellow-red). Or, a case where the point directly above the candidate's marker in IRV (or plurality) is not the same color as the candidate; meaning that, even if the candidate were perfectly-centered in the voter distribution, they would not win the election. I think that is something that, with this model, cannot ever be the case for approval voting, but I'm not 100% certain of that (the non-normal distributions are probably the best bet for proving me wrong.)

You can also demonstrate the effect of "spoilers" (or, in Borda, "teaming") by toggling candidates on and off, and noting how the winner changes.

Have fun!

Aspen Update

2010-08-25T00:14:00.002-08:00

Never mind. The vote will be between keeping IRV or going back to the 2007 system. One simple, binary choice. I guess deciding between three things is just too hard.

Irony: Aspen To Use Approval Voting... Once

2010-08-24T15:21:00.005-08:00

In 2009, Aspen, Colorado voters chose to begin using instant runoff voting in some elections. They were, apparently, less than satisfied with it, and are now working out their options for replacing it. Aspen Daily News describes how the choice will be made:

Aspen voters will be asked if they support the winner-take-all system that was used through 1999, and one that requires a majority for council members and the mayor, which was used through 2007.

Both options will have their own “yes” or “no” question on the ballot. Whatever receives the most support will become the new voting method...

Does this sound familiar to you at all? It should, because this is approval voting! Each option can be approved or disapproved of independently, and the most-approved option is the winner.

There is one hitch though:

If neither method gets a majority, IRV will remain.

For this to be a proper approval voting election, the un-stated third option in favor of the status-quo ought to also be on the ballot. After all, it is possible that both replacement options will get more than 50% support but that an even greater percentage would approve of keeping IRV. (I didn't say likely, I said possible.) Or, conversely, that both alternatives could get less than 50% but that even fewer voters would want to keep IRV. Leaving one of the options unstated leaves open these possibilities. Imagine if this near-approval format were used when two challengers faced an incumbent office-holder; you wouldn't want the incumbent off-ballot and to make these sorts of assumptions about how the voters truly judge them!

Thankfully, Ward Hauenstein, a member of the city's election commission, has suggested precisely this; although his reasoning was due to the possibility of voter confusion. Either way, it's not clear if the people in charge of the ballot will take him up on the idea.

So, Aspen will be using approval voting (or at least something close to it) this one time; but they will be using it to decide which less-effective-than-approval voting method to use for future votes. Come on Aspen, you're so close!

Instant Runoffs Elects (a) Third-Party Candidate

2010-08-23T09:54:00.003-08:00

It's a red-letter day for supporters of instant runoff voting; after a three-cycle drought, the instant runoff system used for the Australian House of Representatives has elected a member of a third party. As there are 150 seats elected in the house each cycle, this means that one sixth of one percent of all elections were won by a third party member over the last four cycles.

Previous elections had seen a number of independent candidates win seats, but all of these had won their seats primarily because of previous membership in one of the two major parties, before falling out to run on their own (think Joe Lieberman in the US Senate, for comparison.)

Although The Coalition is officially two separate parties--the Liberal party and the National party--the two have an agreement whereby they do not challenge each others incumbents, have been united (as government or opposition) in the legislature for 60 years, and have formally combined as a single party in some Australian states. Virtually all Australian news sources refer to "the two party vote" as being between Labor and the Lib/Nat coalition.

Meanwhile, the Australian Senate uses single transferable vote, which is a system of proportional representation, on which IRV was based (but in such a way that it loses all proportionality.) There, the greens hold 5 of the 76 seats, while the Country Liberal and Family First parties hold 1 each (and 1 independent); for about 9% third-party representation, versus the 0.16% now available in the House.

So congratulations to Adam Bandt and to all the people out there tell us that IRV would be a huge boon to third parties; today you are a little less wrong.

Book Review: Numbers Rule

2010-08-21T18:21:00.007-08:00

After being directed to it by The New Yorker Book Review (and getting involved in the debate about the review and the response to it) I borrowed a copy of Numbers Rule, by George G. Szpiro, from my local library.

Numbers shares a similar concept to Gaming the Vote, of presenting the somewhat dry topic of voting theory via the colorful true stories of the great thinkers who have wrestled with the subject over the centuries. And I do mean centuries; we start with Plato, who is harshly criticized for his didactic and entirely unscientific approach to the issue. Quickly, the realization that it's hard to decide among three or more choices is brought out, as Pliny the Younger presides over a choice between the innocence, banishment, or execution of an Athenian slave.

Next, we are introduced to Ramon Llull and Nikolaus Cuanus, who, Szpiro tells us, developed the Borda count and the Condorcet method, over 350 years before the stars of the following chapters, Borda and Condorcet, were born. While the rediscovery and repetition for these two pairs of chapters is interesting and historically relevant, unfortunately it doesn't add anything to the readers knowledge about elections. To further the irrelevance, each chapter ends with entirely irrelevant (but still interesting) additional historical information on the main characters.

In the following chapter on Laplace—a contemporary of both Borda and Condorcet—the clever idea to "guarantee" majority-choices is introduced: If a vote doesn't result in a majority decision, vote again. Laplace's original thought was that voters would, eventually, settle on a compromise. Instead, his legacy is France's consistent use of top-two runoff, and the mathematically-unsound claims of instant runoff proponents. I think Laplace, as a mathematician of the highest caliber, would be displeased.

And then we go through much of the same material one last time—only with accusations of pedophillia—thanks to Charles Dodgson; better known as Lewis Carroll. Again, interesting, but the repetition is not especially helpful for learning the issue at hand.

It's here that the book takes a two-chapter and mostly-unconnected side trek to discuss the difficulties of apportioning seats in a legislature to its constituent districts. Even the impending re-apportionment that will soon occur on the heels of the 2010 census couldn't bring me to really care about the issue. A one-seat difference, out of 435, every 30 or 40 years, just seems insignificant to me. (Or maybe it's just that my new home state will certainly continue to have just one representative.)

When we return to elections proper, we are following Kenneth Arrow, to learn about the impossibility of perfection. Numbers gives a more in-depth explanation of why Arrow only considered ranked-order ballots, but armed with that understanding, I am now more confident both that Arrow's work can't be applied, for good or bad, to approval voting and score voting, and that the election simulations I often refer to can still be valid. A strange parallel is drawn between Arrow's work on voting, Hisenberg's work on physics, and Godel's work on logic; the point of which seems to be "Give up; nothing in the world works!" Again; interesting, but even more so than the chapters on districting, it seems out of place.

The book closes with one final chapter on districting—with an extra side of impossibility, for good measure—followed by a short and un-directed prance through the modern issues. This is the first, and only time, that any sort of proportional representation is mentioned, or that approval voting is brought up. (And the misleading description of approval voting that led off the New Yorker review? Not present at all.) Instant runoff voting is not mentioned by name, but single transferable vote is, and that it can be used for single-winner elections is discussed. But Szpiro avoids discussing them in any depth, and keeps far away from taking any sides. Having now spent a year and a half myself participating in the argument, perhaps this is a wise move on his part; but if the intent of the book is to educate, it's a missed opportunity to avoid what's happening in the world today.

If you love historical trivia (and I admit, I do) Numbers Rule is great. But if you're looking to get a handle on the issue of elections, Gaming the Vote is not only better focussed, but is more engaging to read. While Gaming sucked me in and inspired me to get involved and make this blog what it is today, I had to pull myself back into Numbers each time; happy that I would get a few more interesting tidbits, but knowing that I wasn't going to learn anything about voting that I didn't already know.

Topsy-Turvy Instant Runoff

2010-08-19T17:23:00.001-08:00

Instant runoff voting (IRV) is known to display a number of perverse problems when there are more than two strong candidates. As a thought experiment, and mental exercise, Professor Warren Smith--mathematician and founder of the Center for Range Voting--try to determine the simplest IRV election that can showcase the greatest number of these issues.

9 voters: A > B > C
12 voters: B > C > A
8 voters: C > A > B

The example has only three candidates, and needs just 29 voters, but still illustrates:

Reversal Paradox: if all the ballots have their order reversed, the "winner" stays the same, so the "best" choice is also the worst choice. (It's A in both cases.)
Less-is-More: one of two forms of non-monotonicity, where by lowering the rankings for a losing candidate on certain ballots, they become the winning candidate. (Change two B-first voters to C-first, and B wins instead of A.)
More-is-Less: the other form of non-monotonicity, where raising the winning candidate's rank on certain ballots makes them lose. (Raise A from bottom to top on 5 of the B-first ballots, and C wins instead of A.)
Participation Paradox: where, if certain voters had just stayed home instead of voting, the result of the election would have been better for them. (Remove 5 B-first voters (who rank A last!) and C wins instead of A.)
Anti-Participation Paradox: where, if more of a certain group of voters had shown up and voted, the results of the election would have been worse for them. (Add 2 C-first voters (who rank B last!) and B wins instead of A.)
Precinct Paradox: the ballots can be divided into precincts, and the winner in each precinct is the same, but is not the same as the winner of the overall election. (Break into 3 precincts such that A-first/B-first/C-first in each is 3/4/4, 3/4/4, 3/4/0; B wins in each precinct, but A wins the aggregate.)
Tactical Opportunity: some voters could prevent their least-favorite choice from winning by ranking a different candidate above their honest favorite. (If at least 2 B-first voters instead rank C above B, then A doesn't win; either B or C wins.)

I want to emphasize the last point, tactical opportunity; because this is the number-one problem that I see IRV-proponents falsely claiming that IRV doesn't have. It is simply not true that IRV removes the incentive to vote for the "lesser of two evils". There are less-contrived examples that can show this too, but it's worth pointing out every time it comes up.

How would approval voting handle this election? That, of course, depends on exactly how many voters in each faction approve of their second choice, but the Nash equilibrium is a win for B. I believe this is also true for IRV, but it involves the majority of voters ranking their second-favorite above their true favorite. Meanwhile, under approval it never helps you to lower your vote for your true favorite. I'll explore equilibria more in a future post.

Further Thoughts: Minneapolis RCV Report

2010-08-16T18:53:00.001-08:00

I was contacted via email by a concerned reader about my last post, discussing Minneapolis' use of ranked choice voting (RCV, AKA instant runoff voting (IRV)). This reader had attempted to contact the report's lead author, Dr. David Schultz, with the hope of clarifying a few points, such as:

The paper notes a factor of four increase in ballot spoilage rates, but the prose refuses to acknowledge the possibility that any of this increase was due to the use of RCV. What else would Schultz attribute the increase to?
How is such a large number of votes being tossed out not disenfranchisement? How would Schultz identify disenfranchisement?
How does Schultz reconcile the 7.5% ballot-error rate with a claim that there did not seem to be any voter confusion?

Unfortunately, Dr. Schultz chose not to answer any of these salient points at all, and was rather short--I would say insultingly dismissive, if the message forwarded to me is any indication--with the few questions he did answer. (One question, about why Schultz's report made constant comparisons to first-past-the-post while Minneapolis had previously used top-two-runoff, was answered with "SO? Your point?")

So perhaps I was too generous to the good doctor. It seems he desperately wants to "prove" that RCV/IRV works, and despite reporting the numbers truthfully (which, he should be praised for), it seems he will continue to support pro-IRV rhetoric, even when his own numbers strongly suggest against it; and that he isn't interested in discussing it.

Minneapolis RCV Report: IRV Is No Magic Bullet

2010-07-27T18:46:00.000-08:00

Dr. David Schultz (not be confused with Mark Schulze, of Schulze method fame) has posted his report for the Minneapolis Elections Department on the use of ranked choice voting [PDF] (more commonly known as instant runoff voting or IRV), as it was used in that city's recent elections. Schultz was (and apparently still is) a strong supporter of the use of IRV, having previously served as a board member for FairVote Minnesota, a fact he plainly states in his paper's Conflict of Interest heading. And this refreshing honesty continues throughout the document... which probably isn't good news for FairVote's or Dr. Schultz's objectives.

First on the chopping block is the claim that IRV increases turnout. Turnout for the 2009 IRV election was down 21% form the 2005 election. Now, there are many reasons for turnout to vary between elections--for instance, the report mentions that there weren't any particularly heated contests on the ballot--so this alone isn't certainly damning for IRV; but it surely doesn't help.

We also find that the well-advertised claim of decreased election costs turned out to not be true. We already knew this, based on a previous report, but it's worth reiterating: even when one-time costs, including voter-education costs, are ignored, the 2009 IRV election cost 20% more than the 2005 election. This is primarily a labor-cost issue, since Minneapolis was not able to find any voting machines capable of adjudicating an IRV election which meet the necessary security and accountability requirements set by law; so the vote had to be counted by hand. Schultz hopes that, perhaps, other towns in Minnesota will express interest in IRV, which will encourage the approval of the cost-saving IRV-capable voting machines. Considering the continuing problems of ~~Diebold~~ ~~Premier~~ Dominion Voting, I wouldn't hold my breath.

I do have one serious complaint about this report, and that's Schultz's claim that first past the post (FPTP, AKA plurality voting) is, like IRV, non-monotonic. This statement is unequivocally false, and the blatant attempt to whitewash this shortcoming of IRV stands out, painfully, against the otherwise honest assessments given throughout.

But my "favorite" part of the report is the section on Spoiled Ballots and Voter Error. Schultz begins by assuring us that "[T]he worst fears were not realized." By which he means IRV only quadrupled the ballot-spoilage rate, from 1.0% to 4.1%. It's true, previous IRV elections would suggest a six- or seven-fold increase in spoilage rates would be expected. Although it should be pointed out that, in addition to the 4.1% of ballots that had to be thrown out, an additional 6.4% had "errors" which the hand-counting procedure was able to "ascertain the intent of," for a total error rate of 10.5%. It's not clear how these ballots would have been handled by an automated system, had one been available.

Finally: how much of an impact did IRV have on the election? In all 20 single-winner contests, the candidate with the most initial 1st-place votes won the election. In 17 of these 20, the winner surpassed the 50% threshold immediately, and in the other 3 cases they did so after the first round of eliminations. But I don't want to hold this too strongly against IRV: as mentioned earlier, there weren't any hotly-contested races in this election. That usually means low-turnout and a lot of blow-out elections. Realistically, any electoral system would probably have come to the same conclusions in these races as IRV did. The true measure of an electoral system's quality is how well it can handle highly-contested and close-to-call elections. The predominant examples suggests that IRV would handle such elections poorly; but the Minneapolis data provides no real information for or against that proposition.

I hope that Dr. Schultz will carefully consider the empirical data that his report has highlighted, and that it will help to temper the misleading rhetoric that FairVote Minnesota has used, and which the national FairVote organization continues to use, to push for IRV's adoption around the country.

Instant Runoff (AKA Ranked Choice) Voting Has Spoilers

2010-07-27T16:21:00.005-08:00

Another new YouTube video from SJVoter, showing how, despite claims to the contrary, instant runoff voting has spoilers.

Hmm... that example looks really familiar...

Linky Linky

2010-07-23T10:35:00.002-08:00

Ran across a great summary of voting theory issues and why score voting is worth taking a look at. It covers a lot of the same points I often make, so if you've been following along here, you won't find anything new (well, I don't think I've talked about the bees thing yet...), but if you're just starting out, you'll find it to be an enlightening read.

Three Is More Than Two (But Less Than Infinity)

2010-07-19T23:59:00.001-08:00

Why are approval voting and score voting such good voting methods? This certainly wasn't the expected result when Dr. Smith's voting simulation was first run, and a lot of work has gone into trying to make sense of the result.

I've Got a Theorem...

When anyone first starts to dig into the vagaries of electoral systems, they will quickly hit upon the Nobel-winning work of Kenneth Arrow and his impossibility theorem. But there was another very important--perhaps more important--theorem that came along just a few years later. It goes by the mouthful-of-a-name of The Gibbard-Satterwaite theorem. You do have to admit "Arrow" is a much catchier, and certainly shorter, name; so we'll call this "G-S" for short.

What G-S proves is that, under any electoral system using rank-order ballots, if there are at least three candidates, there will always be situations where a voter who knew how every other voter was voting, would be better off by voting strategically. Always. Even if you allow for equal-rank preferences (which some Condorcet methods can handle) you still run into this problem. So the conjecture is that no single-winner, rank-order-based method could ever possibly support three strong parties, since any candidate would eventually run headfirst into this problem and the perfectly-informed voter will have to choose between honesty and strategy.

But approval voting and score voting don't have this problem with a third candidate. It is still always in your best interest to rate your true-favorite highest, and your true-hated lowest, and doing so will never cause the election outcome to be worse than any other outcome you could achieve. In short, there's no incentive to vote strategically.

Preemptive Counter-Counter-Arguments

Now, there are a couple counter-arguments that people will bring up at this point. One of them is that, since G-S is about a "perfectly-informed" voter, they claim that this means approval (and score) only work this well if there is perfect polling for an election. Which is clearly impossible, so we should obviously use INSERT_FAVORITE_METHOD instead. The logic here is entirely unsound. First, even if G-S doesn't guarantee the effectiveness of ratings-based methods, it certainly does guarantee the ineffectiveness of all ranking-based methods; to stump for a known-bad over an unknown-but-potentially-good, seems blindingly counter-productive. Secondly, the fact that even the best-informed voters may have to strategize to avoid a bad outcome will tend to cause less-than-perfectly-omniscient voters to hedge their bets, and strategically go with the lesser of two evils out of fear of the greater evil.

But a more bizarre (or perhaps just more brazen) argument is that, since approval and score can't pass G-S with four or more candidates, then they are clearly insufficient. Which is an absolutely mindboggling argument, since even school children know that three is still more than two, regardless of the fact that three is less than infinity. Are these methods perfect? No, they aren't. Are they able to deliver an outcome that it is impossible for any ranking-based method to deliver? Yes, they are.

Too Infinity!

The fact that these methods have no perverse incentives in three-candidate elections is probably a large contributor to their improved performance in three-candidate elections, even if they still aren't perfect. And we know that all methods do better when everyone is honest, so having nothing to gain from being dishonest probably accounts for something. And perhaps this improved performance with three candidates somehow carries over and provide better results with four-or-more candidate races too, since performance drops at a noticeably slower rate than the rank-order methods do.

Perhaps knowing why something works isn't as important as knowing that it works; but being able to explain why may help convince some people who refuse to believe that.

I Am Full of Links Today

2010-07-19T14:16:00.002-08:00

Another one for you, this time from The New Yorker book review; but it does a mighty job of summarizing 200 years of the intersection of math and politics in that rambling, New Yorker style, with a shout-out to my favorite book on the subject, "Gaming the Vote" (Amazon link on your right). An enlightening read, even if it does unfairly complicated approval voting in the opener (selecting the voters, no matter how complicated, isn't a part of the voting system!)

Must-Read Pro-Approval/Pro-Range Piece

2010-07-19T13:44:00.002-08:00

Frequent LoAE commenter Broken Ladder post this excellent piece at As It Ought To Be, about the superiority of score and approval voting. The piece is by Andrew Jennings, Clay Shentrup (who I believe has also commented here), and Dr. Warren Smith (whose work I regularly quote).

Note to self: write up a post on the "complexity" argument.

Promising Trends

2010-07-15T12:01:00.002-08:00

I want you to take a look at this Google Trend, particularly the breakdown by cities (bottom, center).

Minneapolis and San Francisco, which have both passed instant runoff laws in the last few years, have practically zero people who have looked into approval voting. But on the plus side, in Los Angeles, which is slowly examining IRV, even though IRV is more-often searched for, approval is still getting a noticeable number of hits. And in New York City, which has also begun considering IRV, approval voting has actually caught more people's interest than IRV has.

It's hard work, but it seems that the word is getting out. Please, do your part, especially if you're in LA or NYC. Unfortunately, score voting/range voting have no noticeable activity in any city; but keep talking about approval voting, because people are starting to listen!

The United Kingdom and the Alternative Vote

2010-07-09T16:22:00.008-08:00

If you follow international news, you may be aware that, as part of the agreement for a new government, the Liberal Democrats have argued for a national referendum on the alternative vote, or what we would call in the United States (and what I will call in this post) instant runoff voting. Now, I'm no fan of IRV. But I think that, if the UK went this way, they might actually come out a bit better for it.

At first, I will be ignoring any non-outcome-based effects (i.e., costs) and holding everything else equal. And under these conditions, IRV would provide slightly better outcomes than plurality, given the assumption that a significant number of voters vote honestly rather than tactically. And, examining the election data for the UK, it seems that more voters are honest. There are two reasons that this may be the case.

One, the UK is a parliamentary system rather than a presidential one, so there is an extra layer of dis-connectedness between voters and the executive branch. This means there's less incentive to rally around or against the prime minister, and less direct control over them, meaning there is (or at least there is perceived to be) less to gain by voting tactically (this is, I think, a large reason for the LibDems success in the last several years).

Two, compared to the US, there is practically no polling done in the UK, except on the national level. And knowing that, say, 23% of people plan to vote for the LibDems, tells you practically nothing about what percentage of people will be voting for them in your local election, fancy new attempts to model such things not withstanding. Without that information, it's difficult to know how to vote tactically. Election results bear this out: there are a great many constituencies where tactical voters could have easily swayed the outcome in their benefit. So, given that there is and will continue to be significant honesty, the IRV results could be slightly more satisfying, based on Smith's simulation data.

But only slightly. And the elections will be more costly to count (perhaps only a little, perhaps 20% more). And this election marked a strong shift towards rallying around the party's would-be prime ministers (featuring the first-ever debate among them). And there's also a rising interest in local polling, partially caused by interest in IRV's possible benefits. Taking everything into account, there will likely be less election-satisfaction in the future no matter what, and if IRV is passed, it will probably be blamed on it, as a great deal of money will have been spent with little to show for it; which surely won't endear voters to the politicians who fought for— and over-sold the benefits of—it.

I wish someone with Nick Clegg's ear would tell him about approval and score voting. It would not be appreciably more costly, and would lead to markedly better outcomes (and probably more LibDems) regardless of voter honesty.

Always Learning

2010-07-04T11:04:00.002-08:00

I picked the wrong day to be out sick, so since I missed out on the latter half of the conversation, I wanted to give a big thank you to DLW and Broken Ladder for an engaging debate in the comments. In the near future, expect to see some post from me based on those discussions. When intelligent people disagree with you, you should take the opportunity to come up with better ways to make your arguments, and that's what I'll be trying to do.

Pro-Approval Video from NYU Professor

2010-06-30T11:13:00.003-08:00

Steven Brams, Professor of Politics at New York University, runs down the advantages of approval voting and refutes many of the arguments against it, in this video. Worth the five minutes.

Start With the Primaries?

2010-06-29T19:38:00.001-08:00

Enacting meaningful election reform is going to be an uphill battle. But perhaps there's an easier way to get a foot in the door. Currently, the national Republican party is reconsidering the rules for its presidential primaries. The plan coming from the national party would require that the states--at least those earliest in the primary season--divide their delegates in some proportion based on the percentage of votes each candidate receives in the primary, rather than using a winner-takes-all approach.

Presumably, this is coming as a response to John McCain's "win" in the Florida primary, way back in January of 2007 (seems like forever ago, doesn't it?), where he got 36% of the votes, but 100% of the delegates. Allegedly, this led to McCain's nomination, despite most Republicans wanting someone else. (The first post to LoAE was about this very issue. Oh my, I was still planing to advocate for Condorcet methods then!)

This will be a difficult process to implement. While there could be some potential improvement in national outcomes if every state delegation went with a proportional division, this is in opposition to the fact that each individual state can improve it's own power by sticking with winner-takes-all. It's the same reason that only a couple states divide their electoral college votes: by dividing your effort, you weaken the effect you have on the outcome. It may be possible for the national party to convince the state parties to give up this power, but someone, somewhere, is going to lose out in this transition.

But let's take a step back: the deeper problem here is that the national Republican party is trying to find a better way to make plurality votes decide an outcome among more than two possible choices. Whether or not to divide delegates up is missing the forest for the trees; the problem is that plurality voting sucks when there are more than two options.

The answer (which you've already guessed if this isn't your first time here) is approval voting (or score voting). Under approval, rather than have each voter vote for one, and then divvy those up somehow among several delegates who will also each vote for one, a better result can be obtained by having each voter approve of as many candidates as they want, and then assign a proportional number of delegates to submit approval for those candidates, potentially even having some delegates approve of multiple candidates. If 55% of the voters approve of A, have 55% of the delegates approve of A; if 65% also approve of B, have 65% approve of B, even if that means that (at least) 20% will have to approve of both. A similar procedure can work with score voting; if a candidate's average score is 5.5/10, have 55% of the delegates approve of A, and so on.

This process will require a larger change than perhaps the party can manage (it will require changes in all states, not just a Florida and a few others), but it will lead to much better results than any proportional-division plan based on plurality ballots could.

In the larger sense, entering the political system via party primaries is potentially a much better way to get approval (or score) voting adopted: while in the general elections, alternative voting methods could only hurt major parties (to the benefit of third parties), in a primary election it could only help, by delivering better candidates into the general election whenever more than two candidates vie for the nomination (where "better" is determined by whatever the voters think it means).

First and Second, or First and Last?

2010-06-18T14:12:00.003-08:00

When I find myself trying to persuade others of the advantage of approval and score voting, I often end up arguing with proponents of instant runoff voting. And after debunking the claim that IRV is immune to spoilers, their typical follow-up response is to bring up "bullet voting".

Bang!

"Bullet voting" means that, even if a voter has the option in a voting system to rank or rate multiple candidates, they choose to only rank one. And so, their ballot is effectively equivalent to a plurality voting ballot. Since plurality is bad (a fact we can all agree on), any system that incentivizes it will also be bad.

My opponents argue that, if enough voters choose to approve of (or to give maximum points to) a second candidate—one other than their honest-favorite—that these voters could cause a worse result for themselves than if they had not done so. In other words, they could cause their true favorite to lose by approving multiple options; therefore, voters have an incentive to approve only one candidate, hence bullet voting, hence plurality-level results.

"You Missed"

The truth is, they've actually pointed out the greatest strength that cardinal voting systems (like approval and score) have over ranked voting systems (like IRV and Condorcet systems): you might accidentally cause your second choice to win. But how is this an advantage? Because in those other systems, the risk is that you might accidentally cause your last choice to win! That's what the existence of spoilers in these systems mean, that when voters choose to support their true favorite above all others, they risk throwing the election to the candidate the hate the most; that, or they can play it safe, by supporting an acceptable, but not fantastic, candidate, at the expense of removing all hope for their true-favorite to win.

Meanwhile, while you sit in the booth contemplating your approval ballot, trying to decide whether or not to "bullet vote", your fear isn't of your least-favorite candidate winning, but of your second-favorite candidate winning. Now, that's still not going to be an easy choice, but your prospects seem much better when your choice is between 1st and 2nd rather than between 1st and last.

What Do You Mean By "Best"?

2010-05-28T16:03:00.005-08:00

Plurality voting is terrible and should be replaced, but what's the best voting system to replace it with? This isn't a new revelation, or a new question; for instance Thomas Jefferson considered the problem. But academic inquiries to it had been in a lull since Kenneth Arrow's Nobel-prize-winning work in 1950 showed that, given certain assumptions, there was no perfect system. Social-decision scientists everywhere were crushed.

What little debate that continued about the subject focused around various "voting system criteria". Arrow's work had shown that a group of five certain "clearly necessary" criteria were mutually exclusive, but perhaps by breaking certain ones in a minimally-damaging way an almost-perfect voting system could be found. The problem was, no one could agree which criteria were most important; each practitioner could always come up with some worst-case scenario in which their opponents latest new proposal clearly gave a horrible result (usually involving a candidate named "Hitler" winning the election, just to make the point clear.) And so the debate degenerated to what situations were more likely to come up or led to more damaging results: the terrible one I concocted for your new voting system, or the terrible one you concocted for mine. But all these arguments lacked one important piece: evidence.

To make good estimates of how often various worst-case scenarios happen and how bad they are, it would take at least hundreds of elections, each with a minimum of a few hundred participants, multiplied by each of dozens of systems that had been developed, in order to get a clear picture. But even then, what do you measure? When your experiment is to ask people "what's the best ice-cream favor," how do you measure whether the voting system was right without knowing the right answer ahead of time? And how would you determine the right answer ahead of time, without asking people to vote on it?

The problem is that economic utility can't be measured directly. Combined with the in-feasibility of performing enough test-elections, it's enough to make almost anyone throw up their hands in frustration.

But here's a clever idea: what if we replace real people with little bits of computer code? Instead of futilely trying to measure each participants utility, we can just assign them randomly from a statistical distribution. We'll have each little bit of code "vote" using every one of the electoral methods we've developed, but also calculate what the maximum possible utility could be from each election, and see how much we miss by. And we'll do it a few hundred times and take the average. Running the whole simulation should take maybe a long weekend. (If only Arrow had had access to a modern desktop computer!) What would we find? Let's ask Professor Warren D. Smith, who ran this simulation over the 1999/2000 New Year's holiday.

If the data from this simulation is to be believed, using approval voting, or score voting (listed here as range voting), could improve the results of our elections by the same proportion as voting at all is an improvement over choosing our leaders at random. That's an astounding result!

Of course, there are still critics: most of them just repeat their favorite criteria argument (usually later-no-harm or majority, since score and approval fail them) ignoring that this data already accounts for any downsides from those short-comings. A few smug folks point out that you can't measure utility; but we already know that, that's why we used a simulation. Some attacked the statistical distribution of utility (now we're getting to something meaty!), so a series of better distributions, based on their suggestions, were used: the results were virtually the same. Then they argued that voters are a poor judge of their own utility; so the experiment was rerun with a "voter uncertainty" parameter. Even with a 50% error factor, score and approval still top the list.

The most bizarre argument is that score and approval can't be the best voting systems, because they aren't voting systems at all. You see, one of Arrow's assumptions was that a voting system would convert a set of all voter's "ranked-order preferences" into a societal order of ranked preferences. But score and approval don't used ranked-order preferences; perhaps, if Arrow hadn't used this overly-restrictive requirement, it wouldn't have taken 50 years to find these results.

Not only is this an astounding result, it seems to be a fairly unassailable result. The "best" voting system is score voting, and approval is almost as good (but easier to implement).

Hawaii 01: Another Example

2010-05-22T22:07:00.005-08:00

The state of Hawaii has provided us yet another example of the need to reform our electoral system. Voting in the special election to fill HI-01, left open by Neil Abercrombie's (D) retirement, finished up today, and the results are out:

(R) DJOU, Charles 67,274 39.5%
(D) HANABUSA, Colleen 52,445 30.8%
(D) CASE, Ed 47,012 27.6%

Quick math will show that Hanabusa and Case, both Democrats, combined for 58.4% of the vote. (The other three Democrats, other four Republicans, and four third-party and independent candidates combined received about 1.5%.) It would be a hard argument to make that a majority of either of the Hanabusa or Case voters would prefer that Djou be their representative, and yet, for the next 8 months, he will be.

Some people will claim that this is mostly Abercrombie's fault: he knew that Hawaii election law would lead to this free-for-all election, and he should have stayed on the job until January. Some will blame Case: he should have known he was running behind Hanabusa, and therefore should have stepped aside. Some will claim that this shows Hawaii should update its election laws to allow for primaries, or at least for party-commission selection of candidates.

A better answer would be approval voting (or score voting). This wouldn't have required a gubernatorial hopeful to half-heartedly continue on as a congressmen. And it wouldn't have forced a legitimately viable candidate (27.6% is a pretty respectable percentage) to bow out prematurely. Nor would it require another expensive and time consuming set of elections, or required the choice to be made by an undemocratic party boss. Instead, voters whose concern is that a Democrat, any Democrat, wins could have approved of both Hanabusa and Case, and as long as about 9% or so of the electorate had done that (or about 1/6th of the voters who voted for any Democrat), a Democrat would have won.

Utah Republican Primaries

2010-05-10T18:49:00.001-08:00

Ignoring, for a moment, the larger political implications of stalwart Republican Senator Robert Bennett failing to get on the Republican primary ballot for his re-election, I find it very interesting that Utah's Republicans have taken the idea of a primary to the next logical level, by having a pre-primary decision that makes the actual primary a top-two runoff; which then, of course, feeds straight into the two-party-dominated general election. It's the only rational response when you assume single-winner plurality elections.

Someone should tell them about approval voting.

Lies My Blogger Told Me; Or:The Republicans Were Never A Third Party

2010-05-07T18:03:00.010-08:00

I've read this on a several small blogs and in many comments over the last few months: this misguided belief that the Republican party was, at one time, a third party; like the Constitutionist or the Libertarians or the Greens or the Socialist of today.

It's not true. The Republicans were never anything like any of the third parties we have now, because the Republicans were never on the outside looking in at the two-party system. Instead, one of the existing two major parties—the Whigs—collapsed due to an internal schism over the issue of slavery. Then, one of the factions met up and re-named themselves the Republicans. But the people involved were the same people, the same politicians! And a lot of them went straight from being elected Whigs to being elected Republicans!

(Although some of them, fed up with the squabbling, left a few years before the dramatic collapse, and had to be coaxed back later.)

That's completely different then any group of out-of-power citizens trying to build an organization up from the ground floor to challenge the two near-indomitable incumbents. Remember, it is a two-party system. The only road to success for a third party (other than a fundamental voting system change such as approval voting or score voting) is for one of the two major parties to collapse; which has only ever happened in American history because of internal disagreements, never because of an assault from the outside.

So good luck.

Thought Experiments: On Top-Two Open Primaries

2010-05-06T16:27:00.000-08:00

If you follow voting issues, or if you happen to live in California, you may be aware of Proposition 14, an initiative which seeks to replace party-based primaries in the state with the so-called "top-two open primary" (TTOP); top-two because only the top two vote-getters get to appear on the ballot for the general election, and open because its open to candidates and voters from all parties.

It's a terrible idea. Let me show you why, by means of a few thought-experiments:

#1: Party Hack

First, let's presume I'm an ultra-partisan party hack for one of the two major parites; all I care about is whether or not a member of my party wins the general election, and that a member of the other major party doesn't. What changes for me under TTOP?

Before TTOP, the only reason I cared about primaries at all was I wanted to candidate with the best chance to win the general election to come out of the party primary; typically, I tend to back someone who's a moderate, rather than an extreme, member of my party, so that they'll get some cross-over support in the general, and pick up the moderates and independents; but not someone who's crazy moderate, such that the "base" (read: extreme wing of the party) stay home on election day... which means I can actually back a much more moderate candidate than their grumblings would attest to (they'll come around; after all, they wouldn't want a member of the other party to win, would they?)

What's different for me with TTOP? To keep things simple, let's assume that the other party only has a single candidate in the TTOP. Well, I have a small problem: if my moderate is too moderate, then the base will abandon him for the more-extreme option. And then, fearing that the extreme candidate in my party and the moderate member of my party will be the top-two, my cross-over support starts to slip away. So I stand I good chance to see my moderate go down, and the general to be between my extremist and the other party's guy; and that's a contest that I worry I might lose.

On the other hand, maybe I pick up a lot of true moderates. As long as the primary voters really don't care in a fight between my extremist and the other party's guy, then they have nothing to lose in voter for my moderate. But there's two problems with that. One, they really have to not care which of the those two wins, and most moderates lean one way or the other. Two, actual moderate (or independents or what have you) aren't used to voting in the formerly party-only primaries, so I'll need to step up my get-out-the-vote game, while focusing it on an entirely new electorate. That'll cost me a pretty penny.

These two forces pull in opposite directions with respect to how "moderate" the final election winner will be. But which force is stronger? Which is more likely to come up? A lot of ink is being sacrificed over that debate, but the best analytical guess comes from The Center For Government Studies [PDF], who conclude that, averaged over time, there will only be minimal improvement. Sometimes you'll end up with a more moderate eventual winner, but sometimes you'll get the crazy. By "on average" though, it means we're adding a lot of variance, which is to say, randomness. But we don't want randomness, we want accountability, and transparency, and responsiveness. Randomness doesn't help anyone. Still, I have to play the odds, and no matter what, I back my moderate.

But what if the other party chooses to also run two candidates against my two candidates? Then things get a bit more complicated, because now there's the chance that neither of my guys makes it to election day. Now I need to do extensive polling, and advertise it widely, because I've got to make sure that, no matter which of our two guys we choose to back, we've all got to back him, because in this case, a split vote could mean we're out with no chance of recovery.

My instincts point me clearly towards a simple conclusion: it would be really nice if we could have a party primary before the open primary. Except that's, for one, illegal now, and two, kind of pointing out how ridiculously stupid this law is in the first place. And the problem only gets worse for me if there are more members of my party running; as long as there's more than one candidate not of my party, I need to do everything I can to limit the number of members of my party that run, and the one tool I have for this, a party primary, is gone.

If I'm a party hack, I don't really like TTOP.

Separately, let's consider the case where there's three candidates in the TTOP: my guy, the other guy, and a third-party candidate. I still need to do a lot of polling and advertising, because if the third-party guy is doing well, and is doing well at my party's expense, then it's similar to the case where the other party was running two candidates; I might be out before the general. This is the dream scenario that a lot of third-party backers are envisioning for themselves now, where they unseat a major party candidate and go into the final vote. But how likely is that? Thankfully, we already know the answer to that, because TTOP is functionally the same as another voting system we've looked at: instant runoff voting. And we know that, in many situations involving three candidates, IRV leads to spoiled elections, and spoiled elections lead to a two-party dominated system. Which means we get the "lesser of two evils" voters, and things keep working for us just as before.

#2: A Moderate Voter

On the flip side, the problems are equal, but opposite. I can try to vote for third-parties, but I still probably see a spoiler before I see a winner, which the party hacks will be betting on. So I'll try to vote for more moderate members of major parties; which is fine, unless both parties are running a moderate, in which case I have to do a lot of homework to make sure the moderate vote doesn't get split such that neither moderate goes to the general and we're stuck with a vote between two insane extremists.

Sound and Fury

So in the aggregate, what we find is an effectively identical average effectiveness (perhaps a smidge better, according to simulations), but one that's surrounded by a lot more random variance, and with a whole lot more money spent on polling and advertising; which is, again, the same conclusion as the Center For Government Studies came to. And really, do we want to enact a change whose most significant effect will be to make our elected representatives to be more dependent on their corporate financiers?

All in all, TTOP isn't worth the trouble. So if you're Californian, remember to vote NO on Proposition 14.

Betrayal and Clones

2010-04-15T10:02:00.001-08:00

Why do I call this blog The Least of All Evils? It's a play on a well-known phrase that seems to come up a lot around election time every year. Many voters—and perhaps you've been one of these voters—have found themselves standing in the election booth, looking at a Democrat and a Republican, and also perhaps some other third choice, and said to themselves "I really like this third option; but I know they haven't being polling great, and I really hate the Democrat (or the Republican), so in order to prevent the worst candidate from winning, perhaps it's best if I vote for the lesser of two evils." And so either voters take such a tactical position—and third-party candidates become self-fulfilled prophecies of failure—or voters stick to their honest views—and third-party candidates become spoilers.

Making the tactical choice is an example of favorite betrayal, which is hands-down the most common type of strategic voting, and is probably the most damaging as well, so it shouldn't be surprising if a student of voting theory might try to design a voting system to combat it. (And yet, the Wikipedia article for the favorite betrayal criterion has been deleted.) This is the crux of my problem with instant runoff voting: that it cannot guarantee immunity to favorite betrayal and, more so, that it markets itself by lying that it can.

A Brief Digression

Let me change gears for a moment and talk about primaries again. I said before that the sole reason for political parties to exist is to hold primaries, in which they try to determine which of several similarly-minded candidates would best serve their members while still wining the election. What if a party were to consider two completely identical candidates, and they found themselves tied for first-place in their party's primary, could the party run both candidates? Of course not! At best, everyone will vote for the same candidate and any effort spent on the other will be wasted, and at worst the votes will be split perfectly equally, and the party will have done nothing but increase the share of votes they need to win from half to two-thirds. Having this sort of problem crop up in a voting system is called susceptibility to cloning. (I should note that there are voting systems, such as the Borda count, that have the opposite problem, where a party's best strategy is run as many similar candidates as possible; this is sometimes called "teaming", but we'll refer to both collectively as "cloning" here.)

Now, why have I brought up cloning? Because there is an interesting piece of mathematical work [PDF] that shows that no voting system based on ranked order ballots (which is the kind of ballots used in instant runoff voting) can be immune to both favorite betrayal and to cloning. So given the choice between a voting system that prevents the worst type of tactical voting, and one that can protect elections from the Star Wars Clone Army, instant runoff supporters have decided that the science fiction ravings of George Lucas are a bigger threat.

Accidentally On Purpose

Now, back to favorite betrayal, and how instant runoff supporters lie that they can fix it. Here's their claim (from FairVote.org's "How Instant Runoff Voting Works"):

IRV allows all voters to vote for their favorite candidate, while avoiding the fear of helping elect their least favorite candidate.

Now, this is simply not true; I can provide simple examples illustrating it, and point to real-life elections where it was not the case. If it's so obvious, why the lie? Perhaps it's not intentional; perhaps they are simple confusing favorite betrayal with independence of clones?

To fall for this lie, you only need to make one unstated, seemingly-intuitive, but regrettably false, assumption: that everyone's true favorite is functionally a clone of another candidate. Allow me to sketch an example. Lets assume there's a Republican, a Democrat, and a Green running in an election. If you assume that every Democrat-first voter has the Green candidate as their second choice, and every Green-first voter has the Democratic candidate as their second choice—which seems to be close-enough to true that it shouldn't really effect the outcome of the election—then instant-runoff voting performs flawlessly! That's because you've treated the Green and the Democrat as clones; you could just as easily had two identical Democrats running in the election, and the voters would have acted the same way. But the problem is this: it only takes one, single, solitary voter to throw the election into a situation where a large number of voters will find that they have accidentally elected their least-preferred candidate, which they could have avoided if they'd strategically betrayed their favorite and voted their second-favorite first, just like so many voters do today under plurality. This is because instant runoff is immune clones, but is not immune to favorite betrayal. And all it takes is one Democrat who likes the Republicans better than the Greens (someone like Al Gore, to name one example.)

A Whole Lot of Work, For Nothing

Because of its susceptibility to favorite betrayal, instant runoff voting will ultimately result in the same two-party-dominated system as we have under plurality; the proof is in the Australian House of Representatives, which has used instant runoff for decades and is as two-party-dominated as the U.S. House of Representatives. (Note that the Liberal and National parties are universally considered to be the same party, to the point that they don't run candidates in the same elections unless Labor isn't running.)

A better answer is approval voting and score voting. Approval voting and score voting are immune to both cloning and to favorite betrayal. They do what no other voting system can, because they don't use rank order ballots, which means they are the only systems which can actually help third parties, and the only system which can help us escape from two-party politics. If you are a third-party supporter, or if you are simply fed up with feeling you are forced to pick the lesser of two evils, then your number-one political priority should be to enact approval or score voting. Even if all politicians are scum, you should at least have your choice among The Least of All Evils.

The Paradoxical Primary

2010-04-06T15:57:00.025-08:00

2008 was a historic election, and understandably for such a momentous vote, it saw the highest voter turnout percentage in over 40 years. But still, only about 63% of eligible voters took the opportunity to participate. The 2008 election also saw one of the closest and most drawn-out presidential primary contest in American history, and "Super Tuesday" set an all-time-high record for participation. That record? 27%

Primaries are funny things. In virtually every city and county in America, the local government pays an exorbitant amount of money—nearly as much as it spends on the general election—for a vote which is not only poorly attended, but which a growing number of voters are legally barred from participating in (due to both more-restrictive affiliation laws and the growing ranks of third-party and independent registrations). And furthermore, why are public funds being expended at all, when political parties are private organizations?

The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of parties; and George Washington famously warned against such factionalization. Nevertheless, the First Party System coalesced right in Washington's cabinet chambers (among his secretaries of State and of the Treasury). And despite the fact that pretty much everyone has been complaining about it ever since, we've had essentially the same two-party dynamic straight through to today.

On the flip side, consider that, of the 435 house elections held in 2008 (concurrent with those same high voter-turnout numbers), 56 were uncontested, and an astounding 149 more were won by two-to-one margins. That's over 47% where it's safe to say the "real" election didn't matter at all, and it was the primary that decided the outcome. This is the secret truth of political parties: they exist for one reason, and one reason only, and that is to hold primaries.

Why are primaries so important?

Why do we have a two-party system?

The answers to these two questions are the same: our voting system is stupid. It's stupid because it does an abysmally poor job of deciding between more than two options. Parties hold primaries in order to limit the number of options presented to voters, so that like-minded candidates won't overload the system such that every one of them loses to some other, presumably less-worthy opponent. We have two parties because like-minded candidates continued to band together into parties until a manageable number of options were presented in the final vote: two.

The collapse from a nation of individual free-thinkers to two-party rigidity happens almost instantly, but once reached, is almost impossible to escape. And when it is escaped, we fall back almost as quickly; hopefully not to many of us die along the way. But this is as much a moral failing on our part as it is a moral failing of a stone to fall to the ground. As much as the contours of the laws of physics inescapably control the path of the stone, the contours of our voting system control the path of our politics. The difference is, we can change our voting system.

Of course, we change our voting system all the time. Ballot Access News notes that, in the month of March alone, nine states had bills introduced changing the vote percentage, or the number of signatures, or the number of registrations, needed to get on the ballot for elections. Seven states are considering laws to change precisely who can vote in primaries. And some states are considering larger changes, such as California's proposition 14, which would replace all party-specific primaries with a single blanket-primary, from which only the top two vote-getters would appear on the ballot for the actual election. Every single one of these efforts is a poor attempt to patch the system without acknowledging the underlying truth that our voting system is stupid because it does an abysmally poor job of deciding between more than two choices, and until we can change that fact, no change can initiate the systemic reform that the backers of these efforts naively expect them to.

Prop 14 is particularly egregious since the failures of "top two blanket primary" are well-known, and functionally identical to "top two runoff elections", which have also led to disappointing results.

I recently read "Grand Illusion" by Theresa Amato (campaign manager for Ralph Nader in 2000 and 2004). Chapter 8 of the book is titled "'The Debate Commission Sucks'", although the book's other eight chapters could have had similarly dismissive titles. ("Ballot Access Laws Suck", "Being a Third Party Sucks", "Lawsuits (over ballot access) Suck", "Democrats Suck (and blame us)", "The Judicial System (with respect to ballot access laws) Sucks", "The Federal Election Commission Sucks", and "Voting Administration In This Country Sucks") Ms. Amato, and indeed, Ralph Nader and everyone around him, are berating a stone for falling. Although, in her defense, she does make some effort to suggest solutions, although most of them are along the same lines as what Ballot Access News is tracking. She does, however, make two passing references to the real solution: score voting (which appears in her index under an alternate name, as "range voting").

Score voting, and only score voting [PDF], can correctly adjudicate an election with three candidates. Three is a very important number. Scientist have known since Newton how to determine all the physical interactions between two objects; such as a stone falling to the ground, or the Moon orbiting the Earth. There is a simple equation which will tell us the precise positions of both objects at any time in the future. But when we add a third object, just one more, that goes away. A three-body system is a chaotic system, and while it may appear as stable as a two-body system for an extended time frame, it is inherently unpredictable.

That sort of unpredictability is what we need, because its the freedom to make our own path rather than to be locked into this repeating orbit. It's what the 40% of Americans who aren't members of the Democratic or Republican party want, even if they can't articulate it that way. It's what everyone who rails against ballot access laws or rallies for new primary laws wants, even if they don't know it. We want a smarter democracy; one that can count to three.

The Abyss Stares Also

2010-02-16T16:27:00.002-09:00

There's been a lot of talk recently among people who dream of bringing the two-party system low, and ushering in a new era of three-party politics; with, of course, their own favorite third-party as the newcomer. They see their new party as a mediator, keeping the other two parties honest, and everyone, Republican, Democrat, and $NEWPARTIER alike will all be better off!

Let me lay this out in no uncertain terms: it won't happen; not like that anyway.

Here's the problem: it's a two-party system. I know what you're thinking, "This guy has no vision, no drive; history is written by those who believe in doing what others say can't be done; forget him!" No, that's not it at all. What I'm telling you is this: if you suceed—and I wish you the best of luck—it will not be by creating a three-party system where there was once a two-party system, it will be by destroying and taking the place of either the Republicans or the Democrats.

There are several lines of reasoning to support this; let's start with history. As I covered in a five part series late last summer, while parties have collapsed (Federalist), split (Democratic-Republicans), died (Whigs), and re-cast themselves over again (Democrats, Republicans), there has never simultaneously been more than two strong nation-wide parties. There are some people who seem to think that the Republican party began as a third-party movement and grew to supplant the Whigs, but that's not the case. The Whigs were well on their way to destruction when the Republican party formed among the despondent anti-slavery Whigs, and it then immediately attracted strong support from the anti-slavery faction of the Democrats. And this happened in a historical blink of an eye. In the 1852 presidential election, the Whigs took over 43% of the vote. In 1856, they didn't even hold a convention, and the Republicans took over 33% of the vote. The change in congressional seats tells the same story; the complete supplantation of one party by another in just four years (and this rapid change rippled across America before the invention of the telephone, let alone the internet).

The second line of reasoning is mathematical. It really is a two-party system. This is an application of Duverger's Law, which is the tendency of all single-member plurality voting systems to favor just two parties (note: I would personally extend it to all single-member spoiler-prone voting systems, but Wikipedia disagrees with me.) No amount of wishful thinking, inspired begging, or hard work can ever change that. This doesn't mean that your dreams of power for your preferred third-party are hopeless, not by a long shot; it means that if you are successful, you will become (half of) the two-party system.

But before you get excited about that idea, let's pause for a moment. In 1860, this nation snapped. Yes, the two-party system changed, something that it seems everyone always wishes will happen, and yet something that so rarely does. And over 600,000 died, and the echoes from those battles still haunt our politics today.

Why do I advocate for better voting systems? Because the system we have now, that we've used for over 200 years, too easily allows for politics to become calcified, for the government to become unresponsive, for the people to become disengaged and despondent. And when that happens, the nation is ripe for corruption, disorder, and in the worst cases, civil war. Spoiler-free election systems would allow a smoother and more graceful transfer of power because they allow a third-party to rise up non-violently.

So, if you are successful, remember what happens to he who fights with monsters. And if you want your success to come more organically, consider supporting score and approval voting now.

Game Theory and Healthcare on Slate

2010-02-10T20:19:00.003-09:00

A few months ago, I wrote about how the prisoner's dilemma from game theory applies to voting, and before that I mentioned how score voting could help with healthcare reform.

Now, Slate brings us a story about how the prisoner's dilemma and another famous game-theoretical example called "battle of the sexes" apply in the debate on healthcare reform... although they don't offer any suggestions for resolving the dilemma/battle.

Oscar Update

2010-02-04T12:54:00.008-09:00

As we discussed last summer, the Oscar for best picture is moving from a field of 5 to a field of 10, and the vote is done by instant runoff. Here's the 2009 best picture nominees, vs. IMDB's "Top Rated Titles".

Academy	IMDB
Avatar The Blind Side District 9 An Education The Hurt Locker Inglorious Basterds Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire A Serious Man Up Up in the Air	Avatar Up Inglorious Basterds District 9 Fantastic Mr. Fox Star Trek

The IMDB list is a little truncated, since they only list by decade, and only the top 50 of the decade, so its hard to find IMDB's best 10 films for any one year (maybe they don't want to step on the Academy's toes). You'll note, there's a good amount of overlap this year, which isn't too surprising since the nomination step uses a "name five" approval-style ballot, in which each voter names up to five films, without ranking them. The ten most-often-named films become the nominees. Top-5 is mathematically similar to IMDB's score-based voting system; at least, the two are more similar to each other than either is to the instant runoff voting (IRV) used for the final round.

But which picture will win? It's tempting to say Avatar, since it's IMDB's top rated film of the year, but we know that IRV has somewhere between a 5 and 15% chance to exhibit non-monotonic behavior, in which the true first-choice is eliminated before the final round. And that's with three strong contenders; the odds get worse the more there are, and I think at least four of these can be considered "strong contenders".

But what does "true first-choice" mean? For me, it means consensus. If you put all the Academy voters in a room and told them to watch a movie, which movie would engender the greatest total happiness for the crowd? That's the question that score voting (and IMDB) asks. But supporters of IRV instead speak of something they call "core support"; they say that it's most important for a winner to have a large following of fanatics, voters who like them best of all. They don't use the word "fanatic", but it's appropriate. Instant runoff repeatedly removes the choice with the fewest fanatic followers and shuffles them off to their next favorite group; it's fair to call them fanatics because other options that you may also like are never considered until your number-one is eliminated. In other words, IRV doesn't offer you much of an opportunity to offer a compromise, because its almost always the compromise that gets eliminated by non-monotonic behavior. So the question is, is Avatar a compromise? Does it make everyone mostly happy, or does it make only a few people very happy? Luckily, IMDB records that data too! Maybe we'll examine that next time.

Also, remember that the Academy hates science fiction, and animation. In which case, maybe Inglorious Basterds has a good chance...

Grab Bag

2010-02-02T15:37:00.002-09:00

I feel as if I blinked, and missed half of December and the entire month of January. I have a good excuse though: I quit my job, moved over 3,100 miles, and got married in that time. (It sounds a lot more dramatic than it actually is; we'd been planning all this for close to six months.) Anyway, as I dig out from under the mountain that is life, here are some stories I wish I had the time to write more in-depth about:

Via Ezra Klein, Lawrence Lessig's powerful presentation on the damaging influence of money on politics. It's close to an hour in length, but it is absolutely worth watching.
Via Daily Kos, don't try to spin it, according to Public Policy Polling, Fox is the most trusted news agency. About 2/3rds of McCain voters/Republicans/conservatives trust Fox and no one else, whereas Obama voters/Democrats/liberals are split: half of them trust no one, a quarter trust everyone except Fox, and a quarter trust everyone including Fox. If I were a national news agency executive, I see opportunities at both ends of that spectrum.
From Ballot Access News, Alaska is considering a new way to deal with independents and primaries. In a world full of cumbersome work-arounds to plurality voting, it's better than most; but to really fix the problem, you've got to get rid of plurality!
Meanwhile, California is fiddling with primaries too. Like I said, a world of work-arounds...
Portland, Maine is recommending IRV. I blame Vermont for spreading this bad idea eastward. It doesn't even look like they considered anything besides plurality and IRV.
Finally, the Green party is using a collaborative process to modify their party platform. That's great, and I've already made a comment regarding the parties foolish support for IRV, when they'd be much better served by score or approval voting.

That's everything from the last week that I'd wished I had time to do a full analysis of.

Laws Limiting Third-Parties Are an Effect, Not a Cause

2009-12-16T15:54:00.002-09:00

Funny story out of Massachusetts. As you're hopefully aware, a special election is soon to be held to fill the seat of the late Ted Kennedy. The party primaries are over, and ballot-access forms have been filed, leaving three contenders. But just the other day, the Boston Globe came out with an opinion piece saying that one of those three should be shut out of the debates.

Obviously, I think that's a travesty of democracy that, after jumping through all the hoops it takes to get on the ballot as a third party, that anyone thinks that not enough was done to keep the rabble out. And most of the candidates agree; two-thirds, to be exact: the third-party candidate and the one who disagrees with everything the third-party candidate stands for.

Aww; how nice of a politician to stand up for the rights of someone who she doesn't even agree with. But allow me to be a bit cynical for just a moment. (Pause for laughter.) She's only doing it because it helps her. The third party candidate leans right, and is therefore more likely to draw away her opponent's otherwise-Republican voters rather than her own otherwise-Democratic voters. And she knows it; I'm fully certain that if the third ballot-qualified candidate were a member of the Green party, she'd be singing the opposite tune, and so would her opponent.

But let's look at this from the other side: spoilers suck. If I'm the Republican in this race, knowing that Massachusetts leans left, I'm going to need all the help I can get. But more importantly, if I really think most of the voters prefer me over the Democrat, then the voters stand to be harmed by the third-party candidate as well. A spoiled election means the wrong candidate gets elected, so how do you prevent that from happening?

It's popular to claim that ballot-access laws, and debate access, and media coverage are all a cause of poor performance by third parties. But it's the opposite that's true: it's the strong performances by third parties that inspire these things. Not strong enough to win the election, but strong enough to spoil it. From a certain point of view, these things exist to protect the voters, because unless a third-party is strong enough to win the election, then their presence is a hindrance to the will of the majority.

Before you start screaming: yes, this logic ignores lots of other very important factors. But from this limited view point, it is an entirely rational responses to the damaging effects of third-party candidacies. And as long as we insist on using voting methods which are known to be prone to spoilers, methods which we know have two-party dominance as the only long-term equilibrium, then these sort of short-sited "solutions" are going to be something that we will constantly be fighting against (or for, depending).

The long-term solution is spoiler-free election methods; something that can fairly tease out the real majority-will in a three-way contest. Plurality doesn't do it. Score and approval voting do.

If you find yourself screaming at ballot-access laws, or yelling about third-party candidates being shut out of debates, or crying over a close election that was spoiled by a third-party, (I'm looking at you, Theresa Amato) place the blame where it belongs: on our foolish voting system. And then, commit yourself to changing it.

Sympathy for the Whigs

2009-12-09T20:33:00.003-09:00

You know, I wish the Modern Whig party all the best. I truly, earnestly, hope they achieve some measure of success. But as I just go through saying, moderate parties and candidates have an even harder time wining elections than the further-afield parties do under our shamefully-poor plurality voting method.

Hey Whigs, you know what would help you a lot? Score voting. Ask me about it.

The Prisoner's Moderate Voter's Dilemma

2009-12-02T15:08:00.000-09:00

If you have any familiarity with game theory—and maybe even if you don't—you've heard of the prisoner's dilemma.

The idea is simple enough: two players each have two options; cooperate or defect. If both cooperate, both do well (gain utility). But if either one defects, they do better (gain more utility), at the others' expense. And if both defect both do very poorly (lose utility). But game theory can also elegantly explains why third-party candidates, and especially moderate third-party candidates, perform so poorly.

Consider the setup: two players, although each "player" is actually a block of voters, those who prefer one of the two major parties, but would be willing to vote for the compromise candidate. Each bloc has two options; vote for their party-line candidate, or vote for the compromise (third-party, moderate) candidate (voting for the opposing party-line candidate isn't really an option.)

If both blocks choose to compromise, the compromise candidate will win, and this will usually result in the greatest net-gain for the electorate (no one gets everything they want, but most people get most of what they want). Eventually, one bloc will notice that the compromise choice isn't polling well enough to win, and neither is their preferred major-party candidate, and so they will drift back towards their party-line favorite; the opposition will then see that the compromise candidate has lost some support, but even worse, their preferred major-party candidate is now no-longer winning either, and so they will also fall back toward their own party-line candidate. As voters abandon the compromise, the balance shifts back and forth, inspiring even more voters to abandon the compromise, and so on. Rapidly, the entire compromise collapses, and one of the two major-party candidates is, once again, elected.

This is what happened to Chris Daggett in the New Jersey gubernatorial race last month, and has happened to thousands of third-party and moderate candidates in the past. Daggett polled as high as 20% just two weeks before the election, but as election day drew closer, voters began to abandon him in droves; on election day itself, he got less than 6% of the vote. If a moderate/third-party candidate isn't leading in the polls—which would only have to be around 33%—this is bound to happen. In fact, Daggett's polling plus undecideds never exceeded that critical one-third benchmark.

When a third-party candidate results in a spoiled election, that's a tragedy; but this, where the fear of a spoiled election drives out the compromise choice, is the true tyranny of the electoral system. Actually, fear isn't the right word: each voter who abandons the compromise doesn't do so out of fear, but because it is the only rational choice they have to maximize their own utility from the election. Each one comes to the rational realization that, while the compromise would be best for everyone overall, it looks like the other guy is going to win, and so they have no choice but to run to the support of their guy.

These elections are, mathematically, precisely identical to the prisoner's dilemma, and the only rational result to the prisoner's dilemma results in everyone losing.

The only solution to avoid this problem is to play a different game. That's what score voting and approval voting do. They change the rules of the game so that the strategic choice which is best for each individual player's utility more often matches the strategic choice that is best for the utility of the population as a whole. No other proposed fix—not anti-gerrymandering laws, not fairer ballot-access laws, not instant runoff voting—changes the game. Change the game. Vote with score voting.

A Majority of a Majority is a Minority

2009-11-20T12:02:00.002-09:00

Consider an election in a swing district; one that is very nearly evenly split between voters who generally prefer Democrats over Republican and voters who generally prefer Republicans over Democrats. Consider also that, in nearly all districts, voters can vote in a primary election, but in only one of the two primaries. Unless the primaries are complete blowouts, the winner of the election can not possibly be the favorite of a majority of voters. Rather, they will be the favorite of a majority of the majority, which could be as little as 25%+1 of the voters—or less if there are more than two candidates in the primary!

Score voting is occasionally attacked because it fails the "majority criterion", which states that, if a candidate is the first-choice of a majority of the voters, that candidate should win the election. I'll provide a simple example: three candidates, A, B, and C. Three voters, two of which vote A=9, B=5, C=0, and one who votes A=0, B=9, C=9. A majority of the voters (two out of three) prefer A over B, but B wins the election, with an average score of 6.33 versus A's score of 6.00. Score voting fails the majority criteria. (This might not be a bad thing, but that's a post for another day...)

But consider this in context of the first paragraph's example: plurality elections are known to fail spectacularly when there are more than two strong candidates, which is why the system of party primaries developed. But this has the side effect of squeezing the middle out of the pool of candidates. While it's true that many primary voters will take into consideration a candidate's chances of winning the general election, the voters are still by and large trying to choose a candidate who is preferable only to the majority of the party members; then, the hope is that the party members will be a majority of the electorate. However, we must remember that this candidate was the first-preference of only a majority of a majority. And since that's the case, is it even meaningful to say that plurality elections (preceded by primaries) choose a "majority winner"?

If you were to put all the candidates from both parties' primaries up at once, how often would more than half of all the voters indicate a single one of those candidates as their favorite? Not very often! Surely, if there were such a candidate, they would win any subsequent plurality election, but when we say that plurality elects a "majority winner", we are usually not talking about such a candidate, even if the system we use obscures this fact from us.

Comics

2009-11-10T21:25:00.002-09:00

I have two mostly-written posts waiting in the wings, but they have to take a back-burner to this.

I love the webcomic xkcd, and considering the topic of this blog, today's comic is very special to me. But then I read the hover text: "I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party."

Okay; approval voting I'm in favor of. It's a minimalist form of score voting (score where the only allowed scores are 0 and 1), which is good, and since score voting is free of both candidate cloning and favorite betrayal, it could actually allow third parties, like The Bull Moose party, to have a real chance at victory.

But IRV is not good. IRV is strongly susceptible to favorite betrayal, and so is only a marginal improvement over plurality, in that all those third parties, like The Bull Moose party, will still be spoilers (yes, IRV has spoilers) before they become winners. (And that marginal improvement is before you start to account for the significant increase in complexity while counting the election, the potential cost of new machines, and non-intuitive results stemming from non-monotonicity issues.)

But, I have hope: xkcd's author and fans tend to be rather logical (you have to be in order to get all the jokes!) Hopefully this proof will convince them. And if not, this image might.

LOLotics

2009-11-08T08:40:00.008-09:00

As you may know, the White House has its own Flickr stream. But take a look at the text bellow the images:

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

(Emphasis added.) As detailed in an article on Techdirt, these images, as government works, must be (and are explicitly indicated as) public domain, and you can't put restrictions such as these on items in the public domain.

So, in the name of civil disobedience, I bring you: Lolotics.

EDIT: You are welcome to join me in the virtual sit-in; pick any picture out of the White House photo stream, and manipulate away. Post links to your work in the comments. Do take note however that this is in direct violation of the legal terms presented by the White House; any who choose to do so must be aware of the potential for legal action against them, and take full responsibility for any of their own actions

Now On Twitter

2009-11-03T15:57:00.002-09:00

You can now follow The Least of All Evils on twitter, at the very-clever name LeastOfAllEvils.

CRV On the Biggest Elections of 2009

2009-11-03T11:38:00.002-09:00

The Center for Range Voting is putting out a press release of sorts, covering the big elections of 2009: NJ Governor, NY-23, and the Afghan presidential election.

The take away: while IRV would have fixed some of the problems in NJ, score voting would have fixed all of the problems in NJ and in NY and been significant help in Afghanistan. (The release also recommends asset voting for Afghanistan.)

Life Imitating Art: New York Edition

2009-11-01T11:48:00.004-09:00

My last post centered around a set of example elections that serve to highlight the short-comings of instant runoff voting (IRV). Going into this Tuesday's election, we have two highly-publicized real-world elections that also perfectly highlight how IRV fails: the New Jersey governor race and special election for the US House seat for New York's 23rd district. Here, I will cover the New York race.

A lot is being made of what would, under any other circumstances, be a very minor race in upstate New York. What was expected to be a rather uninteresting race between moderate Democrat Bill Owens and equally-moderate Republican Dede Scozzafava, has been grabbing headline after headline since Conservative party candidate Doug Hoffman arrived on the scene.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and make a prediction, which I'll explain below: it will be close, but Hoffman will win. But that's not all: by a thin margin, he deserves to win.

First things first: Scozzafava's stepping out changes absolutely nothing. She was in third place under plurality, and even though she's a Republican, her and Hoffman were not about to split the (small-c) conservative vote. Hoffman's support, as 538 points out, was coming from voters who otherwise would be staying home. And even now that Sozzafava is out, her voters (at least the ones who won't now be staying home) will very nearly evenly divide between Hoffman and Owens. Which leaves Hoffman with a small, but noticeable, advantage. Were this election to be run under IRV, Scozzafava would be the first eliminated, and the results of the election would be exactly the same. IRVs results would mirror pluralities results (as is often the case.) But I'm okay with all of this because, in this case, they both agree with score voting.

I'm basing these numbers on the latest Daily Kos poll of the race (which if it can be accused of any bias, would be Democratic leaning, but meta-analysis has found them to be surprisingly honest and accurate.) To determine the score voting results of the election, I looked at the favorability scores, just like I did for the New Jersey governor race: "very favorable" = 4, "somewhat favorable" = 3; "somewhat unfavorable" = 1, and "very unfavorable" = 0. Since this poll doesn't separate "no opinion" from "haven't heard of candidate", I ran two separate sets of data; one where I treat all the "no opinion" scores as a 2, and one where I treat them all as an "X". Each candidate's real score will then be somewhere between these two values. Here's the data:

Candidate	Very Favorable	Somewhat Favorable	Somewhat Unfavorable	Very Unfavorable	No Opinion
Scozzafava	15%	17%	24%	22%	22%
Hoffman	16%	22%	12%	11%	39%
Owens	15%	21%	14%	12%	38%

Scozzafava ends up with a losing score no matter which way we count the "no opinion" column, somewhere between 1.8 and 1.7. Owens does much better, with somewhere between 2.1 and 2.2. But by a thin sliver, Hoffman takes the crown, with a low score of 2.2 and a high of 2.3. The only way Owens would win (modulo the margin of error of the poll) in a score voting adjudicated election would be if all the voters with no opinion of him voted that way because they had never heard of him and all the voters with no opinion of Hoffman voted that way because they knew him, but had a neutral opinion of him; if anything, the opposite if probably closer to the truth. Eyeballing the effect that margins of error could have on the result (which is a lot, since it's so close), I give Hoffman the advantage, 60:40, over Owens.

A lot will be made of the results of this highly-scrutinized election. But no matter how you slice the data, this is a painfully close election between the two remaining contenders. And the reason, to go back to 538's analysis, is because Hoffman has managed to excite a group of voters who otherwise wouldn't be voting.

Interestingly, the minutia of this poll doesn't fit the stereotype that most news outlets are trying to put on it: it's not a left vs. right vs. hard-right election. This is a ever-so-slightly-left vs. ever-so-slightly-right vs. I-hate-left-and-right election. Hoffman, and the voters in upstate New York, are refusing to fit the narrative. Hoffman will win (probably), but when he does, don't believe the spin you'll hear from Fox news about it: among the likely voters in NY-23, the same ones who are about to elect Hoffman to congress, Obama still has a net-positive favorability (he gets a score of 2.1.)

Update

Since posting this, Scozzafava, the Republican who suspended her campaign on Saturday, has endorsed Owens, the Democrat. Also, several new polls have come out showing Hoffman's lead has skyrocketed. So my 60:40 odds are... kinda laughable now. Looks like it'll be Hoffman in a landslide.

Life Imitating Art: New Jersey Edition

2009-11-01T07:58:00.008-09:00

My last post centered around a set of example elections that serve to highlight the short-comings of instant runoff voting (IRV). Going into this Tuesday's election, we have two highly-publicized real-world elections that also perfectly highlight how IRV fails: the New Jersey governor race and special election for the US House seat for New York's 23rd district. Here, I will cover the New Jersey race

In New Jersey, Democrat John Corzine and Republican Chris Christie are very nearly tied, while Independent Chris Daggett has faded into the background after reaching a peak of about 14% in earlier polls. On the 5th of October, a piece was printed in the Times of Trenton claiming that IRV is the panacea for this problem, an article which was recently quoted on and supported by Independent Political Report, a pro-third-party website. But IRV would not be a good choice for the independent candidate in this election, and would elect the same winner as plurality would. Let's walk through the logic.

First, the data. Political Wire points us to the latest FDU Public Mind Poll. One of the questions they asked was whether the voter would vote for Corzine (D) or Christie (R); the answers fell for Corzine, 44% to 43%; but while 4% were undecided, 6% named Daggett, even unprompted. They also asked the question naming all three possibilities; at that point, Daggett's support climbs to 14%, but then Christie takes the lead, 41% to 39%.

What does this tell us? Daggett's support is significant, and comes about 2:1 from otherwise-Democratic voters. But even if we were to double his vote share to 28%, while pulling in at the same 2:1 proportion, the election would go 29% for Corzine with only 28% for Daggett (with 36% going to Christie, giving him a clear win.) With double support, Daggett still comes in third! And since IRV decides who to eliminate based on first-place support, there is no way that Daggett can avoid being the first of these three to be eliminated if this election were held under IRV. We do see, however, that once he is eliminated, his supporters second-choice votes could change the outcome from Christie to Corzine. In other words, IRV isn't pro-third-party; in this election, it's pro-Democrat.

Digging deeper into the FDU poll, we find a different set of questions, which might shed some more light on what's happening here. Instead of posing the election as an either/or choice, they ask whether the voter views the candidate favorably or unfavorably, and whether that view is somewhat strong or very strong. The results are illuminating. I'll leave the names out (as well as the percentages for "no opinion" and "haven't heard of the candidate"); with just this information, which candidate do you think voters would most want to win?

Secret Name	Very Favorable	Somewhat Favorable	Somewhat Unfavorable	Very Unfavorable
Mystery Candidate A	15%	24%	17%	37%
Mystery Candidate B	17%	24%	20%	24%
Mystery Candidate C	6%	22%	15%	8%

Looking at just these numbers, who hard to tell which candidate "deserves" to win. B has the most "very favorable" ratings, and A has the most "very unfavorable"; but B has more "somewhat unfavorable". Meanwhile C has the fewest "somewhat unfavorable" and by a large margin the fewest "very unfavorable", but also the fewest "very favorable". Really, the choice is between two options that much of the electorate will absolutely despise and a few will cheer, and one choice that won't ruffle any feathers but will only have a few ecstatic celebrations. Is it more important to make a few people very happy at other's expense, or is it better to shy away from the extremes to have an overall slightly-satisfied balance? To give in to extremes, or to reach an equitable compromise?

I think the answer is to compromise. I think the preferences of the voters of New Jersey would be most closely matched by electing Candidate C; and that candidate (if you haven't already figured it out), is Daggett. But under plurality, as well as under IRV, voters are pushed away from the real compromise.

There are several ways to take the FPU data and interpret it as a score voting election. I chose to take "very unfavorable" = 0, "somewhat unfavorable" = 1, "no opinion" = 2, "somewhat favorable" = 3, "very favorable" = 4 (and "haven't heard of" = X; see rangevoting.org's front page.) These values give final scores of Corzine = 1.6, Christie = 1.9, and Daggett = 2.0. Now, you may or may not agree that that's a fair rubric for scoring (if you have suggestions, please share in the comments), but to me it doesn't seem like a score that could even be coming from the same electorate that intends to vote 44% for Corzine, 43% for Christie, and 6% for Daggett. It seems to me like a large number of Daggett supporters are going to begrudgingly vote for Corzine, even though they don't like him. Those people will be wide-open to the false promises of IRV, when what they really need is score voting.

How To Decide: Where to Go For Dinner

2009-10-27T15:23:00.005-08:00

Let me propose a situation to you: you, and eight friends of yours, all live on the same street in some city or large town. As a crazy random happenstance, you are all precisely equally distant from your nearest neighbors: two blocks away. The nine of you decide that you're going to go out for a big dinner somewhere along your street, and there are two more-or-less identically good options: you could go to ApricotBug's, over on the west end of town, or you could go to Beryl Thursday's, closer to the east end.

How do you decide? Well, let's suppose you decide to put it to a vote, since that seems most democratic. Let's further suppose that, since the restaurants are more-or-less identical, everyone simply votes for the one closest to their house. Three of you live west of ApricotBug's, four of you live east of Beryl Thursday's, and two of you live in between. Let's vote!

You can easily see that everyone west of ApricotBug's votes for it, everyone east of Beryl Thursday's votes for it, and the two in between split their votes one and one. Beryl Thursday's wins, 5 to 4.

Notice that, even though each of you used a selfish algorithm (or to put a positive spin on it, an honest, true-to-yourself algorithm) to decide how to vote (the option that minimizes your own travel time), that as a group you also voted for the globally-minimum amount of travel; it would take a total of 45 blocks traveled for everyone to get to ApricotBug's, but only 41 blocks for everyone to get to Beryl Thursday's.

Continuing with the story: You have so much fun, you decide to do it again next month. However, a new restaurant has opened down the street, CBIM (Can't Believe It's (Already) Monday).

How does CBIM change the voting?

If we used the well-known method of plurality voting, we can see that the vote for ApricotBug's stays at 4, but the 5 votes that originally all went to Beryl Thursday's are now split 3 for it and 2 for CGIM. Which means that, now, ApricotBug's wins.

This is no longer the globally-optimal solution, and if you think about it, it's really kind of stupid that adding more options, particularly an obviously bad choice like CBIM, would ruin the vote like this.

What to Do, What to Do...

After much existential gnashing of teeth, you decide to use "instant runoff voting" (because one of you heard about it on the internet and, at first glance, it sounds pretty good!) With IRV, you can pick additional options beyond just your first choice, and if your first choice doesn't win, your vote will be moved over to the next in line.

Everyone west of ApricotBug's and your friend who lives right next to it will vote A > B > C. Also, the two friends closest to CBIM will vote C > B > A. For the three in the middle, two vote B > A > C and one votes B > C > A. (Count the distances yourself if this isn't clear to you.) So which restaurant wins now? IRV tells us to eliminate the option with the fewest first-place votes. That's CBIM. We then move those votes to the voter's second choice, which in this case is Beryl Thursday's for both voters.

Those two votes puts Beryl Thursday's back over the top, which is good, since we know that it's the globally-optimal solution, with respect to total distance traveled. So it sure seems like IRV has improved things for us. (If you're curious, CBIM would have taken 81 blocks; almost twice as bad as ApricotBug's!)

Next month rolls by, and gosh darnit, you've all gotten really attached to this big night out, so you're going to do it again! One minor change though: CBIM had a little problem at their original location (it was too popular, so it wasn't large enough) and so the owner relocated four blocks over (a total distance of 53 blocks for everyone to reach.)

No problem; we'll let IRV handle this! It's still 4 for A > B > C, and 1 for B > C > A, but now we're up to 3 for C > B > A and down to 1 for B > A > C. That's 4 first-place votes for A, 3 for C, and two for B. Uh oh...

Now we're back to the exact same problem we had before under plurality. None of you or your friends have moved. ApricotBug's and Beryl Thursday's haven't moved. The only thing that changed is a that a third fringe option has moved to a slightly-more-acceptable position. The mere presence of CBIM spoiled the vote under plurality, and now its mere presence has spoiled the election in the exact same way under IRV.

Perhaps you're thinking to yourself that, no, some of the CBIM fans will see what's going to happen, and they'll instead vote for Beryl Thursday's first. But they could have just as easily done that under plurality voting; why would IRV be different? And even if it is, for some unexplained reason, different, why should they have to choose among the lesser of two evils, between ApricotBug's and Beryl Thursday's, when in their heart-of-hearts, they want CBIM? Wasn't IRV supposed to fix that problem?

IRV Isn't a Good Idea

If you think IRV is a good idea because it will allow third parties to win elections, you are wrong; it will be just like under plurality. If you think IRV is a good idea because it fixes the spoiler problem, you are wrong; it will be just like under plurality.

In the real-world, we don't have access to simple metrics like "fewest total blocks traveled" to guide us in choosing our political leaders; we only have everyone's biased, greedy, short-sighted, and misinformed opinions. I believe that, deep down, we all want what's best for everyone, but that, obviously, opinions differ on what that is. If IRV can't properly decide which of three kitsch restaurants to hang out at in a simple, one-dimensional scenario like this, I guarantee that it won't do any better in the real world.

Coming Soon!

Next up, I'll have a dinner-vote using score voting, and then maybe we'll try a two-dimensional example, which will show the problems with Condorcet methods.

How Score Voting Could Save the Healthcare Bill

2009-10-23T14:51:00.002-08:00

Sure, score voting is great for elections; but it's also good for any decision you need to make among more than two options. Right now, for example, some folks are worrying about nightmare scenarios where the major healthcare bill being discussed gets stuck in Senate limbo, because not enough senators would vote for the bill as it is (or rather, will be), but also, not enough senators would vote to change it toward the compromise that might allow the bill to proceed. (It's a similar problem to that of a legislative "poison pill" amendment.)

The problem is, the healthcare bill is big; it has lots of different parts, some of which are more popular than others, and all of which are supported by different groups of senators, and any one of them can be strengthened or weakened or changed entirely. So the overall choice the senate has to make isn't "yes or no," it's which set of pieces to use, and there are lot of different possible combinations. A lot more than two, at least.

It would (or at least, could) work like this: instead of a series of "yes or no" votes on changes to the bill followed by a "yes or no" vote on the final bill, a whole series of different bills could be considered at once (including a "none of the above" option), and each senator could give each of those bills a score in some range; the bill with the highest average score is the one that's passed (or if "none of the above" wins, no bill is passed.)

You might say "That's way too complicated!" but consider the alternative (i.e., consider what we do now): months of committee work to craft a bill that might have a chance on the floor, months more to reconcile the bills from different committees toward that same end, and weeks of debate on the floor, including dodging "poison-pill" amendments. So is it really more complicated? Just like in elections, is score voting really more complicated than dealing with our current ballot-access laws, party primaries, party conventions, and runoff elections? I think not.

Guest Post at Poli-Tea

2009-10-05T09:02:00.000-08:00

I have a guest post up today at Poli-Tea.

IRV Has a Surprise For You!

2009-09-26T20:20:00.002-08:00

Caught this over at Instant Runoff Voting on Blogspot. It's educational!

Term Limits

2009-09-25T14:12:00.000-08:00

I've suggested before how score- and approval-voting could make primaries unnecessary, but after reading about this poll, it occurred to me that they could also make term limits unnecessary (or at least redundant).

It's well-known that incumbency is a huge advantage; name recognition is a big part of that (better the devil you know...), and being in office is the best way to build recognition. But the next-best way is to be in the news for months leading up to an election. But because of spoilers and vote-splitting, no party can risk running two candidates in the same election, and when the incumbent is a member of your party, of course you're going to run them. So if you don't like the incumbent, but do like the stance of their party (or at least, hate them less than the other guy), you've got little choice, because the party isn't going to risk the election by ditching their incumbency advantage (which I'm sure is precisely the thoughts going through people's heads when they're voting in the primary.)

But with score and approval, a party could run multiple candidates, the incumbent and an up-and-comer; giving voters the choice to stay within their party but still vote for change, instead of being stuck settling for "more of the same, but at least not a change for the worse".

Spoiler-free election methods allow for smoother incremental change, by weakening frictions like incumbency and "lesser of two evils" decision making. Its ability to make primaries redundant has occurred to many, but it will also lessen the need for legal patches like term limits. It's just like how the common comeback to anti-duopoly arguments, "If you don't like them, just vote for a third party!", won't actually work because of systemic problems in the voting system. Similarly, the common comeback to term-limit arguments, "If you don't want them to serve another term, vote for someone else!", also doesn't actually work. It's the same friction, the same systemic problem; and the solution is the same: score voting.

ASIDE: I've been super-busy this last month. Hopefully, this post marks a return to more-regular blogging on my part. I owe a guest post out there, too... I haven't forgotten about you!

Get This Party Started: Part V

2009-09-02T16:00:00.001-08:00

What It Is, Ain't Exactly Clear

As I've been hinting at since part one, there's still some debate over how many party systems we've gone through. Historians pretty much agree on when the first four ended (all the times we've already covered), but by some accounts the fifth is either still on going, while others say it ended in the late 1960s. The argument against is that there wasn't a significant, rapid shift in the composition of congress, which had marked every other transition. The argument in favor is that there was; it wasn't a large net change nationally, but it was, regionally, almost a complete reversal.

Since their inception on the cusp of third party system, the Republican party had enjoyed its greatest support in the north, and overwhelming support from African-Americans; conversely, the Democratic party had been able to rely on the "solid south" for many years. But there had been signs that this certainty wasn't quite so certain after all, going back as early as 1948, when Harry Truman backed the civl rights platform of northern Democratic leaders. This prompted several dozen southerners to walk out of the convention, whereupon they founded the Dixiecrat party, and nominated Strom Thurmond for president. Truman won the election narrowly over Thomas Dewey, while Thurmond took four southern states.

During Truman's administration, he found his policy objectives blocked by the so-called Conservative Coalition, consisting of a majority of Republicans and a large minority of the conservative southern Democrats who had favored Thurmond. In 1960, during the nail-bitingly close election between civil-rights supporter and Democrat John F. Kennedy, and Republican candidate Richard Nixon (who distanced himself entirely from the issue) fifteen electors in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, refusing to vote for either of the major candidates, voted for Harry Byrd, who had not at any point announced himself as a candidate, but who was a strong segregationist and conservative Democrat.

But 1964, perhaps, was the true turning point. Lyndon Johnson, who had assumed the presidency upon Kennedy's assassination, was all-but assured the party nomination. Still, he had to weather surprisingly strong primary challenges from segregationist Democrat George Wallace, and narrowly avoided a messy convention fight over civil rights brought on by competing Mississippi delegations. Meanwhile, for the Republicans, Nixon had been a strong bridge between the moderate wing of the party, which was predominantly based in the north and led by Nelson Rockafeller, and the conservative wing, which was led by Barry Goldwater and quickly growing—and incidentally picking up segregationist former Democrats—in the south. But Nixon refused to run, and in a highly fractured vote, Goldwater took the nomination. On July 2nd, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, allegedly saying "We have lost the south for a generation." But in exchange, the Democrats gained the votes of most African-Americans and turned many northern Republicans into swing voters.

A month and a half after the bill's signing, on September 16th, Strom Thurmond switched parties; other segregationist Democrats followed. Goldwater lost the election terribly, but more importantly, compare the 1956 electoral map and the 1964 electoral map: in just eight years, just two presidential election cycles, had almost completely reversed the map. Even though congress didn't show any great change in party split, the regions from which they drew their greatest support had changed completely. I would count that as being as significant, if not more significant, than when the debate over silver brought about the the fourth party system.

So what does this mean for today's third parties? Unfortunately, not much. At least, not much that's helpful. Wallace would make a third-party run in 1968, running on a pro-segregation platform and taking the old south, but a resurgent Nixon would win that election. As in the transition to the fourth and fifth party systems, the two existing parties had managed to hold on, lithely jumping on new issues when necessary and adroitly absorbing and swapping large swaths of various voter demographics as they became disillusioned with the alternative. The two have exchanged the white house and control of the chambers of congress with increasing regularity since, while third parties continue to fail to find a foothold. But the strange bedfellows that make up each of the parties are perhaps a chink in the armor; one that may lead us to a seventh party system! A possibility that we will discuss in the next installment.

Get This Party Started: Part IV

2009-08-18T15:00:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the slight delay; I'd hoped to have this up for Monday, but life intervenes. To recap: Part I — Part II — Part III.

One Roosevelt, Red Roosevelt

Before we get to the next big switch, at little aside about a failed attempt to shift the two-party system: Teddy Roosevelt and his Progressive party. Having ascended to the presidency due to William McKinley's assassination, and then having won the 1904 election, he felt the honorable thing to do (and TR considered himself to be a paragon of honor) was to count that as his two terms and, as was tradition (but not, at the time, law), follow in Washington's footsteps by not seeking a third term. William Howard Taft took the nomination, and was easily elected.

But then the trouble started. Roosevelt found Taft to be unacceptable in office, and pressed for the party nomination in 1912. But he was rebuked by Taft's supporters; humiliated and unwilling to compromise, Roosevelt and his supporters walked out, and formed their own party, the Progressive or Bull Moose party. The new party seemed to survive solely by Roosevelt's force of personality, and had little if any appeal for staunch Democrats, and none for any Taft-supporting Republicans. At this point, Republicans were enjoying a rather solid and comfortable 55/45 or better advantage in Presidential elections; but the Progressives split the party almost completely down the middle. The final popular vote totals were 27.4% for Roosevelt and 23.2% for Taft; a total of more than 50%, but individually, both lost to the Democrats and Woodrow Wilson's 41.8%, and by an absolute landslide in the electoral college: 88 for Roosevelt, to 8 for Taft, to 435 for Wilson.

Roosevelt apparently learned his lesson though; in 1916, when the Progressive party nominated him again, he declined, and endorsed the Republican candidate; Wilson won reelection, but only narrowly. But Roosevelt's contrition placated his party well enough that he was the front runner for the 1920 nomination; cut short only by a quick but fatal illness.

The lesson from this aside should be obvious: if all you do is split your party, you'll both lose. Neither the Republicans nor the Progressives got any appreciable support from Democratic voters. To succeed, a third party needs to divide, and then build from the pieces, a coalition from both (or as we saw in part I, the only) existing major parties. And it's not enough to build "in the middle", as Roosevelt tried; you have to be completely outside the axis of partisan identification.

Two Roosevelt, Blue Roosevelt

On to today's transition, from the fourth party system to the fifth. Economic recessions had helped usher in the previous realignment, by instigating the Populist party and the silver faction of the Democrats. And economics would play in a big way for this one as well. Yes, we're talking about the Great Depression. But there's not a whole lot to say. When the stock market crashed in 1929, Herbert Hoover insisted that he and the Republicans had it under control; but three years later, not many believed him. Instead, the put their trust in Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Teddy's 5th cousin.)

So, there's that option: hope that unbelievable economic devastation will be wrought upon the nation, and that you'll be there to pick up the pieces. Not a particularly uplifting or proactive strategy (at least I hope no one would try to cause such a thing), but one that we've seen can work.

It's also important to note that this shift didn't involve the rise of any new party (not even an analog to the aborted Populist party), only a drastic shift in support from one major party (which had dominated national politics for decades) to the other. Third parties did enjoy a startling increase in support after the crash, but not enough to even act as spoilers. Was it because of the homogenizing effect of modern communications, making what would have been strong regional third-party movements into a more diffuse national movement? Was it FDR himself, something about him that drew would-be third-party supporters to the Democrats? Or perhaps we had simply become more savvy about the inevitability of a two-party system under our spoiler-prone voting system?

Whatever it was, like the voters Bryan had brought (and driven from) the Democrats at the turn of the century, the voters FDR brought also stuck around; the New Deal Coalition, were reliable not just for FDR, but for Democrats in many elections to follow, up until the late 1960s; which may (or may not have, depending which historians you ask) have represented another realignment of the party system. But we'll discuss that next time.

Get This Party Started: Part III

2009-08-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

One is Silver and the Other's Gold

Compared to the dramatic backdrop of civil war that carried America from the second party system to the third, the transistion from the third to the fourth seems mundane and almost alien (except maybe to some Libertarians); but the effect it had on US politics is no less imporant. It was about coinage; specifically, about moving the US from a currency based around gold as a standard, to one using silver. As with the concerns of slavery in the previous transistion, both major parties were internally split on the issue. But in the 1890s, mid-western silver miners (mostly Republicans), as well farmers who saw inflation as a way out of recession-caused debts (mostly Democrats), finding no outlet for their political aims, began building a coalition, which quickly grew into the Populist party. In 1892, the Populist nominated James Weaver for president... and promply spoiled the election for the Republicans, allowing Grover Cleveland's unprecedented (and unrepeated) non-consecutive presidential terms. (In addition to the 22 electoral votes Weaver won outright, he may have tipped the balance in states worth an additional 69 of the 444 available electoral votes.)

But the story doesn't end there. In 1896, pro-silver Democrats seized control of the party, denounced Cleveland, and successfully nominated William Jennings Bryan, who delived his famous "Cross of Gold" speach; the Populist party jumped on the opportunity and nominated him for their candidate as well. But what was more surprising was that the Silver Republican party, who had split from the Republicans over the silver issue, also supported Bryan. Meanwhile the gold faction of the Democrats, dejected over the result of the convention, nominated their own candidate, although he received practically no votes; instead, many gold Democrats voted for Republican candidate William McKinley. The end result was that many Republicans ended up voting for the Democratic ticket, and many Democrats voted for the Republican ticket, all over currency.

Bryan and his silverites lost, and even the silver issue itself fell by the wayside as economic prosperity returned. But the new coalitions formed in the leadup to the election lingered on, and solidified the supports of both parties. This would lead to decades of almost completely uninterrupted Republican rule.

So we see the same strategy repeated from before: Pick an issue ignored by the major parties, and run on it. The important lesson here is, it doesn't always work, at least not necessarily like you planned. Even though a major party picked up the issue, they lost the election, and the movement died out. Slavery had been an important issue in America since before the Constitution was written; maybe the gold standard just isn't something that captures the hearts and minds of voters, or maybe Bryan only picked up the silver issue to gain votes? Either way, pick your issue, and your allies, carefully.

Get This Party Started: Part II

2009-08-12T05:00:00.002-08:00

Choosing Not To Choose

When we left off, the Democratic and Whig parties the components of the second party system. The two were nearly-equally popular in all parts of the country; north, south, and the newly-forming west. And so, both had to take care not to take sides in any regional conflicts, as that could cost them an election. Only one problem: the most important issue in the country, the focus of every debate and every headline, pitted north against south. Slavery. Neither party would take a stance on the issue. Democrats in the north were opposed, by needed the assistance of the slavery-dependent farm-owning Democrats in the south to win elections, and the story was similar for the Whigs. Everyone in America had a strong view on the issue, but with the axis of party alignment completely skew to it, it seemed a resolution on the issue would be impossible. The Whigs cracked first. Arguments over their party nomination in 1852 (and their subsequent loss in the election) shattered the party. Early in 1854, former Whigs began meeting as newly-minted Republican, Know-Nothing, and other party members.

In 1856, it was the Democrats chance for a nomination fight, settling on northerner-with-southern-sympathies, James Buchanan. That sympathy (and a southern running mate) was enough to defeat the clearly north-favoring Republican (as well as the border state Know-Nothing) candidate. As president, Buchanan's refusal to act or even speak out decisively about the rising calls for secession turned the whole nation against him, and in 1860, the Democratic party broke in half over the nomination of his replacement. The southern faction walked out, held their own convention, and nominated Buchanan's vice-president, John Breckinridge. The northern faction proceeded alone, and nominated Stephen Douglas, although many members left to join with the Republican party instead. A few border and western states, desperate to avoid war, combined the Know-Nothings with the few remaining (and still unaligned) former Whigs to create the short-lived Constitutional Union party, and nominated John Bell. The Republicans settled on a former Whig congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln.

The election was brutally close. Republican's didn't even bother to get on the ballot in 9 southern states. In three of the states Lincoln won—California, New York, and Oregon—he received less than half of the popular vote; in California, he received less than one third. Had he lost New York—where his margin of victory was less than seven and a half percent—then no candidate would have had the required electoral vote majority and the election would have been decided in the House. All told, Lincoln received a smaller percentage of the popular vote—39.8%—than Walter Mondale did in his 1980 landslide loss to Ronald Reagan.

Before Lincoln could even be sworn in, the Civil War had begun. When it was over, the Republican and Democratic parties would be the two to emerge from the ashes, nominally the same two parties we have today; although a lot has changed between then and now.

So, what do we learn from this? Another way to disrupt the two-party system is to find an issue both major parties are split over, so strongly that you can cause nomination fights in both in rapid succession. Then, while the parties fracture you can promote one of the pieces as your new third party, building it on a coalition from both parties that support your issue. Abusing the weaknesses of plurality election with more than two strong candidates, as well as the specifics of electoral rules, you can game the system just enough to slip your unpopular candidate in to office. But watch out for war. This is painful lesson on the inevitable, almost predictably periodic failures of a two-party system. The important issues were ignored in order to secure electoral victories, and they were ignored because they fell outside the domain that served to originally define the existing major parties. A new party was necessary in order to address the issue, but the two-party system held back its emergence, until it burst forth, violently.

Get This Party Started: Part I

2009-08-10T05:00:00.002-08:00

Back in June, Bill Maher was railing about the lack of options in the voting both, hyperbolically pointing out that "We don't need a third party, we need a first party." (Exaggeration aside, what he meant was we desperately need third parties.) He then went on to describe his ideal platform and driving principles for such a third party. Oh, if only such a thing as he desired existed! The thing is, what he described does exist. But Maher's complaint echoes often. Everyone seems to be asking, "Why doesn't someone start a third party that matches my goals?" And the answer, when one if given, is often the same: "Someone has."

For instance, most people—even those clamoring for "a new third party"—don't even realize how many candidates there were for president in 2008. Sure, everyone knows about Obama and McCain. But there were four other candidates who were on the ballot in enough states that they could potentially get the necessary 270 electoral votes to win. There were eight more who were on the ballot in at least one state. And there are dozens more parties in the country that didn't nominate a presidential candidate last election, but have recently nominated candidates for other offices. The problem, therefore, is not simply a lack of choices.

Bill Maher knows the Green party exists. But he also knows that they don't matter. It's a two-party system, and when people are railing how "someone" should just make a new party, what they really are crying out for is a change in the two-party system. The way I see it, there are two ways to meet that goal: the one I advocate for is a spoiler-free election method, which I believe would, by avoiding Duverger's Law, cause and end to a two-party dominated system. The other? History.

A Brief History of Political Parties in the United States

To know where you're going, first you have to know where you've been. Since the 1960s, political history in the US has been examined through a framework called the "party system", numbering periods of stability, separated by short spans of realignment. In other words, the times when the two parties at the forefront of American politics changed. There have been at least five such stable periods. There is debate to whether we are still in the fifth or are now in the sixth; or perhaps we are in an unstable realignment period, in which case the lessons to be learned are all-the-more valuable. (The following are chock-full of Wikipedia links, and I encourage you to read up on aspect which you find particularly interesting.)

First Cabinet Fight through Nomination Failure

The first party system, which solidified early in George Washington's first term from disagreements between Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, ended when, after twelve years of one party rule (Hamilton's Federalist party having become irrelevant after the War of 1812), the Democratic-Republican party split over a failure to settle on a single nominee for president in 1824, and so four candidates split the electoral vote. One faction, backing Andrew Jackson (who had led the popular vote and the electoral vote, but lost the election (if you thought Democrats were pissy about Al Gore, you ain't seen nothin')), became the Democratic party (from which the modern Democratic party draws its lineage). The other faction, backing John Quincy Adams and made up of many former members of the Federalist party and some long-time D-R members who opposed Jackson for their own reasons, became the National Republican Party (no relation to the modern party), which shortly reorganized as the Whig party.

So that's one way to shift the two-party system that's been shown to work; take an existing major party in wide-spread popular decline, resign to 12 years of defeat, during which you infiltrate the opposition, then use parliamentary shenanigans to exacerbate "intra"-party resentment, and be re-born with a slightly new direction. This also perfectly highlights one of the big drivers of the two-party systems: when there are more than two strong candidates, vote-splitting leads to unexpected (and unpopular) results.

More to Come in Part II!

When You Poll, What Do You Poll About?

2009-07-09T16:26:00.008-08:00

There's an interesting fact I've noticed about polling, especially at this point in time, when primaries for important state-wide offices are going by in some states (Virginia and New Jersey, for example), while in others, hats are being tossed into the ring well in advance of any primaries for next year's elections. And what I noticed is this: there are two separate classes of questions, and their proportions change as the primary passes.

The first class is the one people are probably most familiar with, and it completely dominates the post-primary polls. It follows the basic form of "If the election were held today, would you vote for A or for B?" Which is a fine question to ask, once the field has been narrowed such that there are only two candidates with any chance of winning (everyone knows, of course, that third parties can't win.) But there is a second question that, while it doesn't completely push the first out of the spotlight, gets at least equal billing before the primary has passed, when there are still more than two candidates who "have a chance", and it follows the form "Do you view candidate A favorably or disfavorably?"

The reason why is pretty clear: if there are 3 Democrats and 3 Republicans vying for the nominations of their respective parties, you would need to ask 3×3=9 questions to cover all the head-to-head match ups—and that wouldn't necessarily give you a clear impression of the likely outcome—but with the favorability question, you would only have to ask 3+3=6 questions to get, basically, the whole story (and there are proportionally even fewer questions the more candidates are added to each side). And it is basically the whole story: usually, the candidate with the highest favorability wins their party's nomination, and the candidate with the overall highest favorability wins the election.

There's only a few problems: First, a lot can happen in the time between the primary and the election, so who knows what may have happened if all the losers in the primary had just had more time to prove their case to the voters. Secondly, and more importantly, there's no place in this system for any third parties; there's no place to get in at all, actually, without going through one of the two major parties.

And that makes sense to: after all, we have to remember why the parties exist, which is to avoid the perils of vote-splitting by ensuring there's only a one-versus-one choice for any election. Sure, a few crazy folks floated the idea that the Democrats should have kept both Obama and Clinton in to election day, but you'd have to be insane (or angling for a Republican win) to think that would be a good idea: your unified-opposition would be almost guaranteed to win each state's plurality election, and both Democrats would lose. The only logical thing for all leftward-leaning voters is to pool their resources behind a single name; and the same is true for the right.

But what if vote-splitting weren't a concern, and you could rate each candidate, out of a field of three, four, or more, in a way that was completely independent of your rating for every other candidate, and the winner was simply the highest-rated candidate? Essentially, what if favorability polls were how the election was decided? Primaries would still be informative, but they would no longer be restrictive, eliminating most voters opinions before they even have the opportunity to express it; a second-place finisher in the primary could stay in the race as long as they'd like, withhout anyone saying they're ruining the parties chances. We would no longer even need the twin gatekeepers of the two major parties, which only 60% of voters even subscribe to despite their shared near-100% dominance of politics in this country, and those two would no longer be able to create a moral argument for the insanely restrictive ballot-access laws which they've created to keep third-parties from even making it to election day.

I contend that election results would be no worse—by which I mean, in aggregate the electorate would be at least as satisfied with the results of the election as they are today, and may possibly be more satisfied, given the larger field to choose from.

IMDB does at least as well as the Academy at choosing the best films of all time; and it can pick them out against a field of thousands, not just five. Favorability polls can pick an election winner out of a field of a half-dozen, not just two. And favorability polls are the same thing as approval voting. Some outfits even publish "net approval" ratings; the candidate's favorability minus their unfavorability. This system is precisely the same as the method used in the Republic of Venice's elections, which lasted under a Democratic system for over 500 years. We may do even better by including "strongly favor" and "strongly disfavor"—in essence, a score voting system from -2 to +2—which is an answer many pollsters already allow in their questionaires.

These last few post (I hope you've noticed) have a common theme: approval and score voting are all around us, we use them everyday, in mundane decisions and even, in limited capacity, with our current electoral system. It allows greater choice, and gives us better results. It's time we tried it on Election Day, not just in the polls leading up to Super Tuesday.

Award Season

2009-07-08T12:14:00.007-08:00

I've been trying to come up with some sort of clear conclusion to draw about the Academy Awards vs. IMDB's Top 250, but I keep running into the problem that I don't know half the movies on both lists, and when I try to generalize anything from conclusions based on what I do know, I run into this wall of uncertainty (another reason that I was hoping for comments, but oh well.) But, before I give it all a rest, I'd like to talk about another award-slash-voting-system: science fiction's Hugo Awards.

According to their description, the Hugo Awards (like the Academy Awards) uses a two-step process; nominations and final voting. The nomination process for the Hugo's uses approval voting (good on them!) but with a limit of five titles on each persons ballot (oh well, no one's perfect) with the top five being nominated. The final voting step is instant-runoff (uh oh!) with one important exception.

In addition to the nominees, Hugo voters are allowed to rank "no award" anywhere on their ballot. After determining the IRV winner by the normal method, the potential winner is compared pairwise to "no award" (obviously, if "no award" was the IRV winner, there is no award). In other words, for each ballot it is determined whether that ballot ranks the potential winner higher or "no award" higher, irrespective of the rankings of all other nominees. If more ballots prefer "no award" than prefer the potential winner, then there is no award.

This "special case" highlights one of the more damning aspects of instant runoff: it does not, despite its advocate's claims, always pick a majority-preferred candidate, but rather, sometimes, one of the other candidates is preferred over the "winner" by a majority of voters. (This, among other issues, happened in Burlington, Vermont's most recent mayoral election.)

These sorts of pairwise comparissons—looking at a more-than-two way race as a series of one-on-one contests—is the heart of another ranked-order voting method (or rather, a family of such methods) called Condorcet's method; and as ranked-order methods go, based on Bayesian regret, Condorcet is better than IRV (not a tall order since IRV is the second-worst method, only ahead of plurality). If the Hugo awards are so fearful of "no award" getting an unfair pairwise chance against the IRV winner, I wonder why they don't use an entirely pairwise method; surely there must be some overlap with judges of a science-fiction contest (geeks) and open-source programmers (more geeks), and the programmers use Condorcet for their elections.

Of course, I recommend that both of them move to score voting; however, the approval-based nomination step is a great idea for the initial round of a two-step process (although on average the approval votes alone would likely get a better result than the final IRV round, barring the fact that the two-round process gives everyone a chance to go read any nominees they missed before the decisive round.)

Finally: I try to keep my personal views on any actual issues out of my writing here, and focus only on the process by which groups can make more-democratic decisions. But if Anathem doesn't win Best Novel, I will riot in the streets.

"Better" Picture

2009-07-01T17:02:00.003-08:00

Which method is superior for choosing the best movie: single transferable vote to plurality, or score voting? Really, last post didn't give enough data. So first: more data. A note though; I moved foreign films into the year of their U.S. release (since that's what determines eligibility for Best Picture). Films that appear in both columns are in bold.

Year	Academy	IMDB
2009	not yet determined	partial result Up Star Trek The Hangover
2008	Slumdog Millionaire The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Frost/Nixon Milk The Reader	The Dark Knight WALL·E Slumdog Millionaire Gran Torino The Wrestler Lat den ratte komma in (Let the Right One In) The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Vals Im Bashir (Waltz with Bashir) Ip Man
2007	No Country for Old Men Atonement Juno Michael Clayton There Will Be Blood	No Country for Old Men There Will Be Blood Into the Wild The Bourne Ultimatum Ratatouille Le scaphandre et le papillon
2006	The Departed Babel Letters from Iwo Jima Little Miss Sunshine The Queen	Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) The Departed El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labrinth) The Prestige Children of Men Letters from Iwo Jima
2005	Crash Brokeback Mountain Capote Good Night, and Good Luck Munich	Der Untergang (Downfall) Sin City Batman Begins V for Vendetta
2004	Million Dollar Baby The Aviator Finding Neverland Ray Sideways	Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Hotel Rwanda Million Dollar Baby Tasogara Seibei (The Twilight Samurai) The Incredibles
2003	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Lost in Translation Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World Mystic River Seabiscuit	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Oldboy Kill Bill: Vol. 1 Finding Nemo
2002	Chicago Gangs of New York The Hours The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers The Pianist	Cidade de Deus (City of God) The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers The Pianist Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi (Spirited Away)
2001	A Beautiful Mind Gosford Park In the Bedroom The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Moulin Rouge!	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Le fabuleux destin d'Amelie Poulain (Amelie) Donnie Darko Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch) Dil Chahta Hai (Do Your Thing)
2000	Gladiator Chocolat Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon Erin Brockovich Traffic	Memento Requiem for a Dream Gladiator Snatch

So, take some time, look at, and see if it tells you anything. (Note: there are additional categories for "Best Animated Feature" and "Best Foreign Feature", which might explain some of that disparity. But there isn't a "Best Adapted Comic Book Feature".)

Our lone commentary from the last post mentioned that they were upset that Shawshank Redemption didn't win best picture in 1994; you'll be happy to know then that, according to IMDB, it's the greatest movie of all time.

Now, if you like IMDB's results, please ask yourself: if it works so well for movies, why wouldn't it work for elections? If the best method for picking a winner out of dozens and dozens of choices is score voting, why wouldn't it work for picking between two; or, do we only get to decide between two because we don't use a better system to decide?

"Best" Picture?

2009-06-26T16:13:00.016-08:00

Between reading all that politics-stuff out there, you might have heard that the Academy of Motion Pictures has decided to expand the number of nominees in their "best picture" category from five to ten. This is, of course, the perfect time to talk about voting methods!

Okay, I'd probably say that about almost anything... but really this is a great example. And liberal blogger Matthew Yglesias almost puts his finger on why: "[B]ut if they want to make this switch they also need to reform the voting procedure to something with ordered preferences or something." But here's the thing, Matt: they already do. Kind of.

The Method

That article explains the current (until just now) method used to vote for best picture. According to that article, it goes like this:

All Academy members can submit an ordered ballot of up to 5 movies
Any movie which gets at lest 20% of 1st-place choices becomes a nominee
The movie with the fewest 1st-place preferences is eliminated, and those ballots are re-allocated to their next choice
Repeat until there are 5 nominees
Then, a simple plurality vote on the nominees determines the actual winner

The first half is a (a very-poorly described version) of the single transferable vote method for multi-winner elections. And then, of course, we follow this up with a round of the worst voting method known: plurality.

Now, there's a funny thing about plurality; as shown by this graph from Brian Olsen's voting and elections page, the average performance of plurality (assuming honest voters) increases the more candidates there are... until you get beyond five candidates. So increasing the number of nominees to 10 might not actually help much.

But back to STV: it's not a terrible method, but it's not exactly great, particularly for this use: it's not designed to pick the best set of options out of a group, it's designed to pick a set of options that (more or less) evenly covers the voter's opinions. What I mean by that is, if there are, for instance (assuming we're picking 5 nominees) two very good movies that a very well received by a particular niche of voters, but those voters account for less than 40% of the electorate, then they can only get one of them to be nominated; STV will tend towards picking options strongly supported by other niches after one of these two is selected. STV tries to cover all the extremes, not pick 5 films that are all broadly well-liked. This is why it's used in political elections; if a region is 60% Democrat and 40% Republican, it's fairer to pick 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans than it is to pick 5 democrats (which is what would happen in 5 separate plurality elections for those same 5 seats.) This might explain why, sometimes, you get some really bizarre picks: the 20% of voters who hate everything popular randomly settle on some out-of-the-mainstream film. Addi tonally, it doesn't necessarily pick the favorite of each niche, either; like instant runoff voting (which is just STV with a single winner), if there are more than two strong competitors, you can run into problems with spoilers.

Still, STV-to-plurality is certain a better way to pick a winner than a simple plurality vote over a couple hundred candidates. But can we do better? You know what I'm going to say...

Score Voting!

That's right, the Academy should move to score voting. It's going to be a hard sell though. Hollywood (if any sci-fi film is evidence) absolutely hate math, logic, and science. So how do you go about convincing people that one method is better than another, when they have almost 80 years of examples for the old way and there's nothing to support the superiority of your new idea. Well, there's good news for us, because there is.

The Internet Movie Database allows its members to score any and every movie in their system, on 1 to 10 point scale and (barring some algorithmic scrubbing that we'll discuss in a minute), they sort them by average score. That's score voting. And IMDB has at least 430,000 "voters", who have voted on who knows how many hundreds (thousands?) of films. This is all the data we could ever ask for!

Now, about the scrubbing: IMDB doesn't used a simple arithmetic average. First, they work very hard to try to eliminate ballot stuffing (one person, one vote!), but that's probably impossible to do completely. Furthermore, Academy voting all takes place within a single year, whereas IMDB lets members vote years and years after the fact, and that may screw results as tastes change over the years. We'll just have to deal with all that in this analysis. Secondly, they realize that, since most people won't vote on most films, some films will have very few votes, and it'd be foolish to, for example, let a film with only 1 vote of 10 stars be listed as the greatest film of all time. So they do some math to correct for that, not unlike the quorum rule that scorevoting.net suggests. Their quorum is around one-third of one percent of the number of votes received by the most-voted on film; not a large number, but enough to quell the "lunatic with a fanatic following that no one else has heard of wins" fears.

So, how does score voting stack up against STV+Plurality? Compare and contrast for 2000-2008.

Year	Academy	IMDB
2008	Slumdog Millionaire	The Dark Knight¹
2007	No Country for Old Men	No Country for Old Men
2006	The Departed	The Lives of Others^1,3
2005	Crash²	Sin City¹
2004	Million Dollar Baby	Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind¹
2003	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King	The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2002	Chicago²	City of God^1,3
2001	A Beautiful Mind²	The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
2000	Gladiator	Memento¹

Not nominated by Academy
Not contained in IMDB's "Best/Worst '2000s' Titles"
Listed in IMDB under original foreign title

Okay, so what does this tell us? I'll tell you my thoughts in the next post, but for now, I'd like to know your thoughts? Which method do you agree with more often? What films are you favorites that don't make either list? What do you think this years best picture is and–different question!–what film do you think the Academy will pick?

25% Majority: The Census, Governors and Gerrymanders (Oh My!)

2009-06-16T13:13:00.007-08:00

I want to take a little side trek from my usual focus on election methods, to put them in a larger context.

The census is coming up shortly, and while it provides all sorts of interesting trivia to pour over, its main purpose has always been to determine how seats in the House of Representatives will be apportioned among the states, although the Constitution leaves most of the details for filling those seats up to the states themselves. In general (although this is not universal), each state's legislature writes up a proposal for the new district boundaries, which must be approved by the governor. And it's usually assumed that, if the legislature and the governorship are all controlled by the same political party, that the party can pretty much get away with even the most absurd boundaries. FiveThiryEight covered the where's-and-what-have-you's of these redistricting battlegrounds last month.

Of course, this isn't because of an appreciation for fractal geometry or for modern art, but in order to maximize the party's performance in future elections. Under a system of proportional representation, if an electorate's support is divided 40% for one party and 60% for another, than approximately 40% of legislative seats will be filled by the first party and 60% by the other; not so if you have single-winner districts and free-reign for drawing district boundaries! Depending on how much wiggle-room you want to leave yourself, you can fill 100% of the seats with members of your own party as long as you have a sliver more than 50% of the voters. And even if you have less than 50%, effective gerrymandering can double your seating percentage; which means that even if only 25%-plus-one of the electorate supports you, you can still have 50%-plus-one of the congressional seats.

This leads to a very strong self-reinforcing system, where a thin pseudo-majority can artificially inflate its political power for many years down the road, or one where a real, but small, majority can effectively remove all opposition. Occasionally, something of an unsteady balance is found, which you could positively think of as a "bipartisan compromise". Or, if you're more cynically minded, you could think of it as the parties agreeing to systematically disenfranchise about a third of the electorate; but it's okay, because this way, both of them save equally as much money by not having to buy ads in nearly as many markets (well, except for the primaries); and since it's equal, who can complain? Some states have gone so far as to remove the elected legislature and elected governor from this decision-making process, to replace them with a "bipartisan committee", whose equal number of Democrat- and Republican-appointed members would have control over the boundary lines.

Somewhere between 20 and 40 percent of Americans don't think of themselves as Republicans or Democrats, and yet, 99.9% or more of elected officials do. These sorts of games are yet another of the ways that this imbalance is made to continue. We could throw our hands up in the air and say "It's terrible, but what can you do?"; or would could take the approach I always do here and ask if there's a better system, one that everyone (not just party-faithful) could agree is fairer. There are a lot of different suggestions for algorithmically-defined solutions (I'm currently enthralled by the third in that list), but like score-voting, effecting change will be an up-hill battle.

Just something else to think about when you're voting for governor next year, or filling out your census questionnaire.

Presented

2009-06-05T16:30:00.011-08:00

Recently, I gave a brief presentation to the local chapter of the Green Party. I wouldn't call the following a "transcript", but it does hit the same points.

Between 1996 and 2000, the Green party increased their share of the votes in the presidential election by over 400%. But between 2000 and 2004, despite flagging support for the incumbent Republican, a lackluster Democratic challenger, and an increase in public support for the Green stance on virtually every policy issue, the Green party share of votes dropped by 96%. How is that possible?

Because Nader, and the Green party, was branded as a spoiler. When you spoil an election, your support dries up as voters go back to voting for the lesser of two evils. This is a known problem with our current plurality election method, one that economists, mathematicians, and political scientists have known about for years, and they have also known for years of alternative election methods that don't suffer from this problem. And yet, it doesn't seem to come up as something worth fixing.

Thankfully, recently, there has been some movement towards trying different election methods. Unfortunately, one often-proposed method, instant-runoff voting, which is a plank in the Green party platform, does not fix this problem. I'm here to show you some methods, called approval voting and score voting, that do fix this problem. Allow me to show you some examples.

This is a simple example with just nine voters; four vote for option 'A', and five for option 'B'. B wins. But what if we add a new option, 'C', that appeals primarily to the B-voters.

C doesn't win, but now, neither does B, so C spoiled the election. This is basically what happened in Florida in 2000. Instant-runoff voting (IRV) claims that it can fix this problem. On an instant-runoff ballot, instead of listing only one choice, you can list several choices in order. The candidate with the fewest votes is eliminated, and votes for them are re-allocated to the voter's next choice in line, and you repeat this until one candidate has a majority of votes. So, in our example, C has the fewest votes, so it's eliminated, and the votes go to the voter's second choice, which we know from before is B. B now has five votes, and wins, as they should have all along.

This looks great; it looks like IRV fixed the problem. But you still haven't won any elections. Support for a new party grows slowly over time; you don't go from zero to victory. So let's give C one more of B's votes.

Okay, now, you're doing really well; you've actually got more votes than one of the major parties. But now, we have to ask a question that we haven't answered before: what's the second choice of these last two B voters? If one of them (let's call him "Al") has A as his second choice, we get this:

Now, A wins. Remember, without C involved in the vote, B would win. But because C is here, A wins. So C is, again, a spoiler. And here you'll still lose 96% of your support in the next election.

A better option is score voting or approval voting: I'll do an example with approval since it's a bit simpler. With approval voting, instead of indicating just one candidate, you can indicate as many or as few as you want. So, those first two votes for C can come without in any way diminishing B's five votes, as can the third; and as your support continues to grow, maybe you convince some of A's voters to approve you as well, until you win. Without ever being a spoiler.

Score voting is only slightly more complicated, in that it gives you the option to explicity state a willingness to compromise, by letting you give each candidate a score in some range, such as zero to ten. So you could say, for instance, I give C my full approval at 10, but I'd be pretty satisfied with B as well, so I give it an 8.

Either way—score or approval—no spoilers, no abandonment by the electorate, and so your support can continue to grow until you actually win.

Now, what I want from you is I'd like to promote this idea to the rest of your party; your national conference is in July, perhaps something there. Also, IRV has had some pilot programs conducted, in California, Vermont, North Carolina; I'd would like to ask for your support in getting some sort of pilot program using score voting here.

Then there was a brief question-and-answer period. I was asked to reiterate the example of how a spoiler happens under IRV (the important part is that not all B-first voters will vote C-second), to speak to IRV's "success" in San Francisco (before IRV: one Green elected to council, after IRV: one Green elected to council. Change: zero), and to discuss briefly proportional representation (also a good idea.)

Overall, I thought the experience was very positive, and I will be put in touch with some local Green party members who are also voting-reform advocates. It was also recommended that I contact Ralph Nader directly.

The presentation took just five minutes, with five minutes more for questions and discussion. If you would like to give a similar presentation in your area, feel free to use everything I've said; the images are quite easy to reproduce on a chalkboard or whiteboard.

Constitutionality of Instant Runoff

2009-05-15T15:14:00.000-08:00

Earlier this week in the Minnesota Supreme Court, a case questioning the contitutionality of instant runoff voting was heard. There hasn't been a ruling yet, but the suspicion is that the judges will find that IRV is constitutional, and the plaintiffs are already preparing an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

This may be surprising, but I agree with the judges (supposed) decision. Just because IRV is a bad system (and I think it is) that shouldn't make it unconstitutional. Plurality is a bad system too, and we've been using it since before the constitution was even ratified. Part of the argument was that IRV violates the principle of "one person, one vote", since you can indicate more than one candidate for a position on your ballot; this is also one of the major arguments used against approval voting. But it's a spurious argument. A "vote" isn't necessarily one candidate's name, but rather it is the expression of one voter's will via their ballot. The principle of "one person, one vote" is meant to be taken as no voter should have a greater (or lesser) impact upon the outcome of the election than another; if I could submit two ballots in a plurality election, that would be as bad as if could submit two ballots in an IRV (or approval or score) election. But as long as everyone's ballot is treated identically, and everyone can only submit one ballot, than the "one person, one vote" principle is still followed. Counting a voter's choice toward their second choice after their first is eliminated isn't "changing their vote", it's following their will; as the defense attorney said "You have cast that second choice ballot."

There is additional complaint over multi-winner elections (such as for the school board), which I assume are using some variation of Single Transferable Vote (STV). STV is the grandfather of IRV, and can involve moving around fractions of a vote (if the quota to be named a winner is, for example, 300 votes, and a candidate, let's call them "A", gets 310, then 10 of those votes are re-distributed in proportion to all 310 "A" voter's second choices; so if 180 of them had candidate "B" as their second choice and the rest had some other candidate(s), then B gets 10*(180/310) = 5 and 25/31 votes); apparently, some people feel that these fractional votes mean their vote is carrying less weight (and thereby violating "one person, one vote"), but that's not the case either; those fractional votes will always have come from voters who have already had one of their earlier choices chosen as a winner; the alternative is to drop the extras, penalizing voters for picking a choice that was too popular by not allowing them any say in who the other winners should be in the election. And how would that not be disenfranchisement?

So yes, while I think approval and score are much better systems than instant runoff, I also think all of them are legal under the constitution (and that all of them perform better than plurality.)

(While I'm here though, I feel I should mention that there is a proportional score-voting-style system, called reweighted score voting, which could be used for the sort of multi-winner elections that STV is used for. But I'm not aware of much research into its benefits versus STV; my suspicion is that it will be better, but not so dramatically better than score and approval are as compared to instant runoff.)

Strategy

2009-05-07T15:41:00.002-08:00

I got into a bit of an ~~argument~~ discussion in the comments of this article about instant runoff voting over at Independent Political Report. I hope I was able to provide some compelling arguments to the folks there, but I stopped myself short of getting down into the weeds about strategy in different systems, and which ones are more susceptible to strategic manipulations. But I did promise to talk about it here.

One of the commenters at IPR asked the following:

Wouldn’t a 100% strategic vote be identical for all voting systems? With range voting, you could just give someone a 10 out of 10 and everyone else a 0 out of 10 or not vote for them.

The short answer to the first question is "no", they're not all the same, and to the second, while you could vote that way (often called "bullet voting"), it's usually not going to be your best strategy. But these questions (well, one question and one statement) are blind to another strategic consideration, one that takes place outside the voting both and long before the election. We'll cover that at the end.

Strategy for Score Voters

While the strategy for different voting methods are different, they do all share some similarities. Most of them involve first figuring out who the two front-runners are, since that's the "real" fight and each voter is going to want to maximize the effect their vote will have on its outcome. You do that by reading the polls. Polling, and the feed-back effect polls have on opinion and voter turnout, is a whole other subject, but for now, let's assume that polls will nearly, but not perfectly reflect voter's opinions (after all, if they were perfect, we could just skip the vote entirely.) Additionally, there's a chance that there may not be two clear front runners; there may be a three-or-more-way tie for first, or a clear front runner and tie for second. We'll discuss that complication later too; for now, assume we can determine two clear front runners.

For score voting, once you've figured out who the front runners are, you vote like this: Give your most-preferred candidate among the two front runners the maximum score. If there are any candidates you prefer more than that candidate, give them the maximum score too. To the other front-running candidate, give the minimum score. If there are any candidates you prefer less than that candidate, give them the minimum score too. If there are any candidates between these extremes, give them a score scaled linearly between them. Most of the time this means that most voters will give most candidates one of the two extreme scores. In other words, highly-strategic score voters look a lot like voters in approval voting elections, but not exactly; we'll come back to that.

The practical upshot of this is, you can always give your honestly-most-preferred candidate the maximum possible score, while still having the greatest possible effect on the "real" fight between the two front-runners. This may not seem important right now, but keep it in mind, because we'll come back to it too, soon.

Strategy for Plurality Voters

Strategy under plurality should be familiar to everyone. Like score, you determine who the two front-runners are. You vote for whichever of the two you prefer. If there's another candidate you prefer more, then too bad; if you vote for them, you might accidentally give the election to your least-preferred candidate.

Theoretically, if the spread between the two front-runners is wide enough, you could throw away the tiny effect you could have on that contest, and toss your vote to your honest-favorite as a show of moral support. It's strategically not the best plan, but in that situation even the best plan isn't very good for you (no one you like has a chance to win!), so maybe you don't care, maybe communicating your dissatisfaction with both likely winners is more important to you; but this line of thinking feeds into the outside-the-ballot-box strategies which we'll discuss later. So keep it in mind (I know, it's a lot to keep in mind; stay with me!)

Strategy for Instant Runoff Voters

Again, determine the top-two. Among those two, rank your favorite first, and your least favorite last. Rank all the others in between those two. You will note that, in contrast to what IRV advocacy groups claim, it is not in your best interest to rank your honest-favorite first (unless they are in the top two), but rather to rank them second. This is because (again, in contrast to advocates claims) it is possible that your honest favorite could be a spoiler for your preferred top-two candidate, an issue I discussed at length in my posts on non-monotonicity (part I and part II).

Now, if the spread between the top-two candidates is large, or if support for your honest-favorite candidate is low (less than 25% if there are three candidates in the race, and progressively less and less if there are more candidates), you can safely communicate your dissatisfaction with both likely winners buy ranking your honest-favorite first. The percentage values are different, but the logic is the same as under plurality: if your honest vote doesn't really matter, you can afford to be honest. But if the "real" contest is close, your best bet is to betray your favorite, and rank them lower. In this way, highly-strategic instant-runoff voters look very similar to plurality voters.

Instant Runoff is to Plurality as Score is to Approval

Strategic IRV looks like plurality, and strategic score looks like approval; it's an interesting result, and one that is well supported by Warren Smith's Bayesian regret study (representative result graphic). And the values aren't just close, they are exactly the same; a surprising result that Smith went on to prove mathematically.

I want to reiterate this: the correct strategy for IRV gives identical results to plurality voting when all voters follow it. So the only potential improvements we could see under IRV would come from voters choosing to vote honestly instead of strategically. At this point, IRV advocates claim that voters will be more honest; but there's no evidence to support that. Indeed, since this strategic favorite-betrayal is the leading reason for two-party dominance in a government, and all nations that have used IRV have seen their elections stay two-party dominated, we can presume that favorite-betrayal is, in real life, common. And that honesty is relatively rare.

Thinking Outside the (Voting) Box

Voter strategy is just part of the equation though; candidates and political parties have strategies too, under the umbrella of "strategic nomination". Under plurality, for instance, parties absolutely must make sure that they have only one candidate in the race: if they run more than one, the candidates will likely split the vote, and so neither will win. This is why we have party-primaries. In addition, recently parties have realized that they can support candidates who are similar to their opponents, in order to split their vote and ensure their own success (for instance, Republicans buying ads for Green party candidates to defeat their Democratic rival), a tactic so underhanded that even some politicians find it despicable!

IRV fares better, but only slightly better: if there's only one strong opposition party, then running two or more identical candidates can't cause the party any problems. However, since under our current system there is only one strong opposition party, and since all the candidates from the same party are quite similar, IRV advocates have stretched this truth to claim that, under IRV, any number of parties can run as many candidates as they want, without suffering any repercussions, and therefore third parties should help them get IRV enacted. But this claim isn't true; it only seems true given the context of our current two-party environment, and a false appeal that what's true for two must be true for three or more. The truth is, IRV will continue to keep us locked in to a two-party system; although you may be allowed to vote for your favorite among a large homogeneous selection of Democratic and Republican clones. Anything riskier, and they would find themselves in the same vote-splitting catastrophes that plurality suffers from.

There's also consideration of the "nursery effect". Political parties, as a general rule, don't spring up over-night; they grow slowly over several election cycles. Under plurality, they grow and grow until they spoil an election by splitting a vote, and then voters abandon them in droves (the Green Party received 4% as many votes in 2004 as they did in 2000, for instance). Under IRV, the pattern will be the same. Parties will grow, they will spoil elections, and they will be abandoned. The only difference is that they will grow larger before they spoil an election (at least 25% rather than Nader's paltry 2.7%.)

It's that critical point, where a party has grown large enough to be a spoiler, that we must focus on. How well an election method performs in "run of the mill" elections is completely unimportant; in such elections, any method that's ever been seriously proposed will work as well as any other. It's performance in messy, close, near-tie elections that matters; these are the times when polling will flounder, and determining the top-two contenders will be hard. And at these critical points, plurality and IRV will often punish honest voting, electing the wrong candidate because of a spoiler, and pushing voters back towards the two well-known parties.

But what about score and approval voting? Under these methods, any number of parties actually could run any number of candidates without fear; no need for primaries. There can't be any spoilers, and so nothing will force a "lesser of two evils" decision and keep us locked in to a two-party system. Instead, third parties would grow, and grow, until they... win. And in those messy, close, near-tie elections, your best strategy is... honesty.

Strategy Strategy

So which method is "most prone to strategic manipulation"? You've read the strategies, judge for yourself. But know that there's no objective data to back up claims one way or the other, and intelligent people on both sides have written similar descriptions and they all still disagree about what it means. But here's the thing: It doesn't matter. That question is a mere distraction, taking attention away from the actual important question: which method gives us the best results? If you think two-party domination is definitively bad then the answer is clear: score voting or approval voting. If you examine the only marginally objective measure of effectiveness, Bayesian regret, then the answer is clear: even if you cling to the (unsubstantiated) claim that IRV encourages more honesty than score or approval, score and approval still perform better (likely because they avoid two-party domination). This is the only way that new parties (and the fresh ideas they represent) can grow without being cut-off at a critical point; so that they can continue to grow, get elected, and put their ideas into practice. IRV can't do that. (In fact it's been proven that no rank-order method can.)

Mu

Strategy is the wrong question. It leads to pointless, subjective, and unsubstantiated arguments. Effectiveness is what matters. An end to two-party dominance is what matters. And score voting is the only logical answer.

India's Elections

2009-04-28T16:01:00.003-08:00

Those who follow international news will already know that India—the most populous democracy in the history of the world—is currently in the middle of its (nearly month-long) federal elections. Poli-Tea has pointed me to a pair of dueling editorials on whether India would be better-served by becoming a two-party country (like the United States) or by fostering as many parties as possible.

First, some background. India uses single-winner plurality districts to elect all (well, all but two...) members of its lower parliamentary house, which if you've been reading the blog you know means it will tend toward two-party dominance. But currently, India has a lot of parties, and many of them actually have representation. Three facts contribute to this apparent contradiction. First, parliamentary governments better resist two-party domination (as compared to presidential governments like the United States has). Second, India has been a Republic for a relatively short time, 60 years, and the pressure to fall into the two-party trap operates over multiple election cycles. Third, and perhaps most important, India is a very regionally-divided country; most of those parties are very regional-focused in nature, and only six meet the rather low requirement to be listed as "national parties", that requirement being simply recognition in just four of India's 28 states.

The two-party side argues that, with so many parties, it was difficult to form a government (under a parliamentary system, a majority of the parliament must come together to form the government—what we would call the administration—and put forward a prime minister), or that government coalitions would collapse–usually over budget issues–necessitating a new election. And there's precedent for that fear, because it has happened at least three times since the year 1989. He goes on to say that, with just two parties, you always know the winner has a true majority (well I guess that's true), that the government will be less extreme (probably not), and corruption will decrease (I doubt it).

The multi-party side argues that two-party domination means many far-flung regions will have their issues ignored and eventually politics will devolve into a one-party dominated system. And there's precedent for that fear since one party, the Indian National Congress, dominated the government until the year 1989. He goes on to argue that regional parties better serve their regions (no argument there), and that perhaps a three-party system would be best (unlikely).

But there's more than these two options. What I think (as a mostly uninformed American) is that India could be well-served some form of proportional representation (PR). They already have a work-around to try to shoehorn a minimal amount of PR in: some seats are reserved for specific castes and tribes. PR has worked well in many other parliamentary systems to preserve regional differences while still leading to effective governments (Ireland's lower house and Australia's upper house come to mind). It might be something worth considering.

Specter Boogaloo

2009-04-28T14:00:00.003-08:00

In case, you hadn't heard the news, Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania has switched parties, from Republican to Democrat. There's plenty of analysis out there about what that means for this congress, but I want to use it to make some points about the two-party system.

Pennsylvania is an interesting state. Until today, it had a pro-choice Republican and a pro-life Democrat as its Senators. This, I think, perfectly illustrates one of the major problems: on the issues of the day, there is a strong incentive (mostly money in the form of party campaign contributions, but other incentives as well) for politicians to adopt the full party-line on all issues. A pro-choice Republican is noteworthy because it is such an exception. But what thread runs through a person's views on, for example, abortion, gun control, immigration, and corporate taxation? Is there any reason that a person's view on those four issues should go together with such high regularity? I don't see one. And yet, from the 16 possible combinations of stances on those four issues, typically voters only get to choose between two pre-defined packages.

Let's be clear on something: Specter is leaving the Republican party for one reason and one reason only, and that's because polls show him losing by 20% to his most likely challenger in the Republican primary (Pennsylvania has closed primaries; only registered Republicans get to vote in the Republican primary, and 200,000 moderate Republicans jumped ship to vote in last year's Democratic pressidential primary).

Changing parties is his only hope for survival. But he's always been on the left outskirts of the Republican party, ever since the last time he switched, from Democrat to Republican. He's a man whose views just don't line up perfectly with either of the two major parties. Which, while making him an exception in Congress, makes him part of the American plurality: more Americans identify as neither Republican nor Democrat (38% versus 35% Democrats and 21% Republicans). So if most people are independents, why are barely one-third of one-percent of congress independents? It's not a conspiracy, it's the system. The system we chose for our elections—singe-winner districts chosen by plurality vote—always tends toward two-party domination. And Specter, like most Americans, finds himself stuck in the middle, not liking either option.

But there's good news: we can change the system. We can use different voting methods that don't suffer from two-party domination, such as score- and approval-voting, or we could change from single-winner districts to a system of proportional representation. There will be opposition; afterall, it's not easy to change the law when all the law-makers owe their position to the law you want to change. But today, I hope, we have received a new ally in this fight. Please, contact Senator Specter to bring this issue, to bring the solution to his own troubles, to his attention.

Mistakes Squared: North Carolina

2009-04-20T15:48:00.008-08:00

Prompted by a reader comment, I did some research on North Carolina's instant runoff voting pilot program, and I am simply stunned. It's no secret that I'm not an IRV fan; it fails to fix the "spoiler" problem, it fails to help third party candidates, and it fails in a host of other ways. But what they're doing in North Carolina goes beyond even that. They've actually managed to create a system that is even worse than IRV.

Attack of the Clones

One of the few things IRV actually has going in its favor, and one of the few ways it actually improves over plurality, is that it is immune to "cloning". To abuse cloning under plurality, you prop up candidates who are ideologically identical to your opponent; i.e., clones. All else being equal, this will lead to voters splitting their ballots among the clones, hopefully (for you) more or less equally. So, instead of you losing 40% to 60%, if you introduce a clone, you'd win 40% to 35% and 25%. In practice, things are a bit more complicated, and usually results in, for example, Republicans paying for Green Party ads to shave a couple points off the Democrat in a close election (or Democrats paying for Libertarians).

IRV actually fixes the cloning problem, because 100% of the clone-first voters will have your original opponent as their second choice. So, when the clone is eliminated, you're back to losing 40% to 60%, where you should have been all along.

Short Circuit

But North Carolina added two short-cuts to the IRV process. One, they limited a ballot to listing at most three candidates. This re-introduces the threat of cloning, because if there are four ideologically similar candidates on the ballot, a voter can't list them all, so the incentive to list one of the major two parties highly is even stronger than regular IRV. Two, rather than eliminating just one candidate at a time, as is normally done for IRV, North Carolina has decided that they will eliminate, all at once, all except the top-two. This makes the already vanishingly-small odds for a third-party candidate under IRV an order of magnitude worse, as there's only one opportunity for second- and third-choices to cascade together.

Consider an election where two "third" party candidates each have 17% support, and lets say they are effectively clones of each other, with the voters for each listing the other as their second choice (even if all they agree on is "anyone but the Republicrats"). The two major parties evenly split the remaining votes at 33% each. Even though the third-party coalition has a 34% total—more than either major party candidate has—both third party candidates are eliminated immediately. Even though under normal IRV, only one of them would have, and then one of the major party candidates would have been. Every third party effectively becomes a spoiler for every other third party, while the major party candidates are insulated.

Gentleman's Agreement

What this amounts to is a gentleman's agreement between the two major parties whereby they agree not to prop-up third party candidates as spoilers (even if it's cost effective, it just feels like cheating I guess), while simultaneously making it harder for a coalition of third parties to act together against them (which is unlikely under IRV, but still more-likely than it was under plurality). And thanks to IRV's inability to eliminate the spoiler effect, they can continue to have a virtual guarantee that their duopoly will continue.

As much as I rail against it, I want to state that, by the metric of Bayesian regret, IRV is an improvement over plurality (at least, as long as some voters vote honestly rather than strategically.) This is probably also an improvement (I haven't run the simulation) but certainly less of one than normal IRV.

It Can Always Get Worse

Even if this systematically-assured lack of change weren't enough, NC still has to deal with all the normal problems of IRV: difficulty counting, costly machines and software, inability to centrally count, etc.. But there's one thing that's even worse: North Carolina wants to use IRV in multi-seat elections.

First, a brief history lesson: IRV was invented as a single-winner analog to a multi-winner method called "single transferable vote". It's actually been pretty successful and effective. But NC is not using STV, they're using a home-grown and absolutely insane system that is so convoluted I can't even begin to analyze it (mostly because I start crying before I can finish reading the description).

A New Hope

There is hope, though. This is just a pilot. If NC is open to the idea of trying new voting methods, maybe they can be convinced to give score voting a try. Heck, maybe they could be convinced to try actual instant runoff voting and single transferable vote too, instead of these abominations. Almost anything looks good when compared to plurality, but time is running out on this opportunity; lets get some real options out there for North Carolinians to look at, and let them make an informed decision.

Let's Talk

2009-04-08T15:22:00.001-08:00

First, let me say that I still get absolutely thrilled whenever I get comments; I've only been at this for a few months, and I've been really squeamish about publicizing it. I got one comment though in response to my last post about how IRV fails to fix the spoiler problem or grant success to third parties. And it really got me thinking. So let's talk:

IRV has elected Progressive Bob Kiss as the mayor of Burlington, VT and Ross Mirkarimi, a Green, to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. While score/range voting is a worthy system, third parties in this country have enough problems with credibility without trying to advocate for a voting system that has never been used anywhere in the world.
--Anonymous

I Owe It All to IRV?

This comment bring up two points, and they're both worth responding to. The first is the assertion that IRV does fix the spoiler problem and allow third parties to succeed, as evidenced by Bob Kiss of the Vermont Progressive Party winning the election. I have three responses to that. One, if that's true, than plurality voting also fixes the spoiler problem, because plurality elected Bernie Sanders mayor of Burlington, VT in 1981 when he was the Progressive candidate. Obviously, that's ludicrous; if plurality was immune to spoilers, none of us would be wasting our time trying to fix the problem. No, the truth is, that Burlington (and San Francisco as well) is something of an exception in American politics, in that it has a very strong "third" party that is already capable of winning elections. But IRV has virtually nothing to do with their success.

My second response to this first point is a bit more flippant, but makes the same point: in Burlington, the Republicans are the third party; something that I went into more detail with in the too-long post I referred to in the previous post. (Mental note: maybe I should try to turn Burlington's Republicans on to score voting. Or would that be overly antagonistic?)

Third, and more substantive, if IRV were actually any help to third parties, then you would expect a country that has used IRV for years, like Australia, to actually have some in their legislature. But of the 150 Australian legislators, currently every last one is a member of one of two parties. (Technically, the Liberal party and the National party are different, but the two have been in a tight coalition since 1922, and are currently working on a merger plan that has already succeeded in the state of Queensland. In the minds of virtually every Australian, they are a single party. Furthermore, the three "independent" representatives were all, at one time, members of the National party, before leaving over intra-party disagreements; a situation very similar to "independent" US Senator Joseph Lieberman's position with the Democratic party.) And let's not forget senator Bernie Sanders; the same Progressive who won a plurality election to become mayor of Burlington also won a plurality election to become a senator from Vermont; by this logic, plurality is better for third parties than IRV!

But It's Doing Nothing Right Now!

The commentator's second point is that, even if IRV isn't helpful at fixing the spoiler/two-party problem, it's still a better idea than anything else out there because it's actually being used already. This is, one, foolish, and two, a bit disingenuous. It's foolish to put all of this effort into making a huge change, knowing that it doesn't actually fix the problem. Besides being a clear waste of effort, it creates a hostile environment for any future real improvements; once an electorate has been bitten by a false "fix-all" solution like IRV, they become much more shy about trying some other solution. Many locales that try IRV find themselves slipping back into the even-worse world of plurality; North Carolina, for instance, has a pilot program that is facing some strong motions this week to go back.

Besides, the truth is score voting has been used for a very long time, and is a system people are already quite familiar with: from Olympic judging, to movie and restaurant reviews, to Hot or Not. We use it every day; we just haven't used it to democratically elect our leaders. At least, not recently. But the two longest-running democratic governments in world history did. For 500 hundred years, Sparta used a (loud and very analog) score voting method for all their elections, and for another 500 years, Venice used a three-valued (+1, -1, 0) score voting method. IRV, on the other hand, was first used in 1893. Call me in three or four centuries.

The Real Winner

But really, it's not important which idea is older, or was used for longer. Even clearly showing that IRV can't completely fix the spoiler problem doesn't show that it's, overall, no good. Taken alone, each of these arguments can be brushed off as simple anecdotes, and we want data (and the plural of anecdote is not data!) Spoilers are bad, because it means a lot of people get something they strongly don't want; two-party domination is bad, because it restricts voter's choices to "the least of two evils" and we often don't want either. But how bad? Which is worse? How often is it a problem? Warren Smith's insight was to try to side-step all the anecdotes, and directly measure "how bad"; that's the idea behind Bayesian regret. And even he was honestly surprised at just how overwhelming the data was.

Now, maybe the simulation is flawed. But maybe it's not. But it's certainly compelling enough to suggest that score voting would be something worth trying. Meanwhile, everything CRV has said would happen with IRV, has happened, including spoilers and continual failure for third party candidates. So again, I would urge you: if you're supporting IRV because of spoilers, or because of third parties, you should STOP supporting IRV. Other options do a better job of fixing the issues you care about.

But if you're still not convinced, I'm game to continue the debate, so keep the comments coming!

FairVote's Flash

2009-04-06T19:20:00.009-08:00

As I mentioned, off handily, in an earlier (and far-too-long) post, FairVote has a not-too-shabby video showing off how instant runoff voting "fixes" the spoiler problem.

At the start of the video, we're presented with two candidates, A and B, and shown the results of the election between them: seven for A, eight for B; a narrow win for B.

Then, the plot thickens, and a new candidate, C, who agrees on most issues with B, is introduced. Three of B's voters, and one of A's, decide they prefer C, and we are shown the TERRIBLE TRAGEDY of how C's presence caused A to win instead of B, a clear SUBVERSION OF THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER. And I agree; that's terrible. Adding a candidate who is not a winner themself should never change who the winner of the election is. Academically, this is called independence of irrelevant alternatives, or colloquially, the spoiler effect.

"Luckily" (according to the video), instant runoff voting saves the day, because it eliminates C, and redistributes their votes back to A and B, and the victory returns to it's proper place, with B.

But I have a question for FairVote.

What if C was just a bit more popular, and managed to convince just one more of B's supporter's to vote for them?

Now, B, having the fewest first-place votes, is the candidate who is eliminated. And, depending on B's voter's second-choices (which we don't ever see in video) either C or A may win. If two or more of the four prefer A over C, then A wins. Which is the same SUBVERSION OF THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER which instant runoff voting was supposed to guarantee never happened again; an "irrelevant alternative" changed the outcome of the election. That should never happen!

IRV's advocates are trying to popularize a false notion (or maybe they're just trying to deal with their cognitive dissonance) that there's some magic cutoff for "significance", beyond which a candidate doesn't count as a spoiler. But if it quacks like a duck, then it's a duck. I believe they may be confused because they (and all of us) are most familiar with plurality voting, and under plurality third parties virtually never get more than about 15% of the vote. There's a good reason for that value; it's that the difference between the Republican candidate and the Democratic candidate in any election is virtually never more than about 15% of the vote. Third parties tend to grow, until they get big enough that they spoil an election, and then they're destroyed in a terrible backlash (Nader has yet to recover from Gore's loss; come to think of it, neither has Ross Perot from Bush I's). The only thing IRV changes is what that cutoff-limit is; it goes from about 15% to closer to 30%. But don't let them trick you: it's still there, waiting for a fatted third-party to grow large enough to sacrifice itself upon its altar, and SUBVERT THE DEMOCRATIC ORDER by spoiling an election.

If you're an IRV advocate because you want to eliminate the spoiler effect, or because you want third-parties to have an actual chance of wining elections, then you should STOP being an IRV advocate. There are other voting methods that better achieve your ends. Score voting actually does completely eliminate the spoiler effect, which means third-parties have a real chance to win.

Look at Other Options, Too, LA!

2009-04-01T14:24:00.005-08:00

The LATimes' blog is reporting that L.A. County is going to look into Instant Runoff Voting. Currently, they use a plurality election, with a top-two runoff election if no one gets a majority, but the added cost of a second election and the lower turnout for it, have them looking elsewhere.

Please, L.A. County, take a look at some other alternative election methods, like score voting. If money is the worry, it's a winner:

No need to buy new voting machines (which might be necessary to do IRV)
Fewer chances for tied and near-tied tallies to necessitate a recount (or lawsuit)
Can still be counted in precincts (IRV requires potentally more-expensive centralized counting)

And that's ignoring the utilitarian benefits: score voting reduces two-party domination, which means better options for voters, which means better government.

EDIT: Oh, and if turnout is the worry, remember that IRV also suffers from potential no-show paradoxes!

Spoilers and Spite

2009-03-28T07:54:00.003-08:00

Ah, the wonders of plurality-based voting. New York's 20th congressional district is having a special election, after their congressperson, Kirsten Gillibrand, was appointed to Hillary Clinton's senate seat (after Clinton became Secretary of State). It's a slightly-Republican-leaning district, but Eric Sundwall was running as a candidate for the Libertarian party. The Libertarians, of course, when compared to the two major parties, are most-similar to the Republicans, and so, thanks to plurality voting's susceptibility to spoilers, would likely have siphoned more votes from them than from the Democrats.

The Republicans in the state apparently felt that Sudwall's spoiler-effect might have been strong enough to sink the candidate's, Jim Tedisco, chances of wining, and so launched a coordinated effort to challenge Sundwall's petition signatures, and force him off the ballot. They were successfull. And so, Sundwall has endorsed the Democratic candidate, Scott Murphy. Tedisco's campaign is already considered to be much more negative than Murphy's, and this can't be helping.

Sundwall was only showing about 2% support in the election, with approximately equal support from Democrats and Republicans, so you have to wonder how much the Republicans thought this would help them. But in a close enough plurality election, a spoiler only needs a couple of votes to change the outcome. Under instant runoff, a candidate needs at least 25% support to spoil an election, and under score voting, spoilers don't exist.

A Glossary (For Terril Bouricius)

2009-03-24T15:48:00.000-08:00

Like any field, discussion of voting methods has developed a language all its own, full of jargon and technical terms that, while clearly defined for those well-versed in the field, are sometimes confusing or completely opaque to those on the outside. So I don't fault Terril Bouricius for his repeated failures to understand the lingo. I hope he will find this short glossary of voting-method terms useful.

non-mon·o·ton·ic: adj. 1. In reference to a method, a property meaning it is possible in that method to construct a scenario where either a. by improving a winning candidate's rank (or score) on some ballots, the candidate becomes a loser, or b. by lowering a losing candidate's rank (or score) on some ballots, the candidate becomes a winner. 2. In reference to an election, an example where either of the scenarios in 1. is in evidence.

spoi·ler: n. 1. A a non-winning candidate such that, if they are removed from all ballots, the winners of the election change.

By these well-accepted definitions, instant runoff voting is a non-monotonic method (whereas score voting and even plurality are monotonic), and Burlington's recent mayoral election was non-monotonic; instant runoff voting is susceptible to spoilers (plurality is too, but score voting is not), and Kurt Wright was a spoiler for Andy Montroll. These are easily-proven, in-arguable facts, and so are not up for discussion. So please, stop arguing from a position of ignorance, and learn the definitions.

Non-Monotonicity: Part II

2009-03-22T13:34:00.001-08:00

In Part I, we defined non-monotonicity, showed that Instant Runoff Voting is a non-monotonic voting system, and that the recent mayoral election in Burlington Vermont suffered from non-monotonicity.

Here in Part II, I'll talk about why monotonicity matters, and do my best to refute all arguments to the contrary.

What happened?

To understand why it's important, first we should try to understand what happen to make an IRV election display non-monotonicity; we'll use what happened in Burlington's IRV election to showcase. I mentioned that "monotonicity" is an idea borrowed from algebra, but let's make that more clear: rather than move just 8 votes from Wright to Kiss, as we did in the example in Part I, let's make a function out of it, so we can see what it's like to move any number of votes over, and graph it against the vote-tallies in the final IRV round. A picture should make this clear:

You can see the huge discontinuity at 8 votes, where the IRV algorithm changes which candidate is eliminated. You can also see that, at 14 votes, the election switches back into Kiss' favor. So there's a limited window where this sort of manipulation will work. Foremost, obviously, is that there must be at least three candidates in the election. As candidates are eliminated, when only three are left, they must each have more than 25% of the vote. Finally, the eliminated candidate (the one with the fewest first-place votes) must be the "beats-all" (or "Condorcet winner") candidate, meaning that, in any one-on-one race, they would win. We can determine this by, for each pair of candidates, removing all but that pair from every ballot, and seeing who would win. For the Burlington election, check, check, and check.

Under these circumstances, IRV exhibits non-monotonic behavior, and eliminates the Condorcet winner. In fact, you could say that because it eliminates the Condorcet winner, it has exhibited non-monotonic behavior. But so what? Well, there's a hidden implication in the elimination of a Condorcet winner, and that is that the Condorcet winner is the moderate candidate, the compromise candidate. Meaning that, by eliminating them, we've chosen an extremist candidate.

In the Burlington election, in addition to the nationally-familiar Democratic party (with candidate Andy Montroll) and Republican party (with candidate Kurt Wright), we also had the eventual IRV-winner, Bob Kiss of the Vermont Progressive Party, which is just a bit more left-leaning than the Democrats. There is a model of voting behavior, appropriately refered to as the "1D" model, where candidates and voters are arrayed on a line, left to right, and voters always more-prefer the candidate closer to them. In the 1D model then, we should expect that all Kiss-first or Wright-first voters would have had Montroll second (ignoring, for now, candidates other than these three). And that's almost the case: among those who expressed a preference, Wright voters prefered Montroll 3:1 over Kiss, and Kiss voters prefered Montrol 7:1 over Wright. 1D isnt' perfect, but it's often pretty close (how much of this is feedback from our two-party dominated political process is an article for another day), and in my "simplified" example of the election, I moved all the "wrong" votes to their "proper" 1D vote. If the purpose of an election is to choose an appropriate candidate to represent a body of people, it's logical to say that you want the winner to come from the center of the spread of voters' opinions; it's a compromise.

But IRV doesn't always pick the compromise candidate; instead, it picks one of the two extremes. The Center for Range Voting has some excellent graphical representations of this, using a 2D political spectrum and many more candidates (which is more realistic than our 1D, 3 candidate example). At a glance you can see how extremist candidates encroach on the territory of more moderate candidates.

On one hand, it's very strange for me to be damning this election, since it technically elected a third-party candidate, which I generally find to be a good thing. One of the reasons I find our current system so abhorrent is because third-party candidates actually damage their most closely-aligned major-party by acting as spoiler candidates. On the other hand, that's what happened in Burlington. Nearly two-thirds of Burlington residents are registered Democrats (click "voting" on that page to expose the data). And considering the Democratic wave that has been washing over the nation recently, in a vote between right, left, and lefter, the Republicans are the "third" party in Burlington. And as a third party, they operated as we would expect; they siphoned votes away from their nearest major-party candidate and gave the election to their most-hated opponent. Their nearest major-party candidate just happened to be the Democrats.

The "third party" Republicans opperated as a spoiler. Under the 1D model (and by a 7:1 margin in actuality) they would prefer the more-moderate Democrat, Montrol, over the further-left Progressive, Kiss. But their votes for Wright acted only as votes against Montroll in the final tally. This is exactly analogous to Nader spoiling Gore. Despite IRV proponents claims, IRV does not eliminate the effect of spoilers, it only delays their effect. Under our current plurality system, spoilers can have an effect with as little as one vote, if the other candidates are close enough. Under IRV, they only pop up when they have at least 25% of the vote. But the effect will ultimately be the same: fear of spoilers will tend to drive voters back towards the two major parties.

Both of these things—failure to elect a "beats all" winner and susceptibility to a "spoiler" candidate—are indicated by IRV's non-monotonic behavior. Non-monotonicity is the smoke to their fire, or the chink in the armor that lets them sneak in. As IRV advocates will claim, it doesn't matter that if some voters changed their votes they could change the outcome in a non-intuitive way; because they didn't. It matters because that possibility indicates that elections will tend toward extremism and towards two-party domination.

How often?

After being forced to admit that, yes, non-monotonicity is something to be concerned about, an IRV advocate's second round of defense will be that it doesn't matter because it doesn't happen that often. And I must admit, this one example is just one example; the plural of "anecdote" is not "data". Luckily, a host of very smart individuals have tried to calculate how often these things should happen, which CRV has taken the time to summarize. The first to make the attempt was Crispin Allard in 1996, and he calculated the chance as 1 in 40,000, and this is the number upon which IRV advocates have built their argument. Unfortunately, Allard's calculation was wrong. Very wrong. He only counted the more common of the two types of non-monotonicity, and he took advantage of a six-fold symmetry to simplify his calculations but forgot to multiply by six at the end, but worst of all made a serious arithmetic error. Over all, he was off by a factor of over 1,000.

Corrected calculations have found that, using Allard's model and his assumptions, the correct odds of an IRV election displaying non-monotonicity is closer to 1 in 7.

But, an IRV advocate might say, that's only one model. Yes, it is. Using a different model, the odds were calculated to be around 1 in 18, and in a third, a little less than 1 in 10. That, combined with the growing list of real-life IRV elections that have displayed non-monotonicity, it should be quite clear that these failures are predicted to happen often, and often happen in real life. Also, it's important to note that these values apply only when there are three strong candidates in a race. As the number of viable candidates increases, the odds only get worse, until the chaos is practically guaranteed.

What's it mean?

Ultimately, adoption of IRV will result in practically no change to the status-quo. Third parties will find they can gather more votes, but they still won't be able to win any elections, because of the fear of spoilers. Voters will still find themselves deciding between the least-evil of a pair of party-chosen politicians, and we'll continue to lurch back-and-forth between left-leaning policy and right-leaning policy, rather than pick a stable course. The divide between "red" and "blue" will continue to grow and our common ground will continue to wither away. And let's not ignore that this non-improvement comes at a high cost (another post for another day). Why not focus on a change that will actually change something?

I've come down hard on IRV here, but that's only because it's the loudest competitor. The truth is, every election method that uses ranked-order ballots (i.e., ballots of the type A > B > C) is susceptible to one of two failings, either "favorite-betrayal" (which IRV displays through its non-monotonicity) or something called "cloning" (which, briefly, involves proping up ideological copies of your opponent in order to split the votes of those who oppose you). IRV is immune to cloning, a fact that they proudly showcase in this video, while ignoring their non-monotonicity pitfall. ("Or something like that" indeed!) Now, cloning is a serious concern under our current plurality system; but why fix one problem by introducing another, when score voting is clone-proof and monotonic, not to mention cheaper to implement?

Commercial Interruption

2009-03-20T19:23:00.001-08:00

On a whim I added some links to the blog front page (over to the right there), and wanted to add a link to "Gaming the Vote" (which I reviewed a few months ago.)

Well guess what; it looks like the hardcover version is currently selling for just five dollars! If you haven't already read it, buy one today. I'm thinking of buying one for my town councilman, and one for the mayor, plus one for my state representative, another for my state senator, one for my U.S. representative, two for my U.S. senators... you get the idea.

In addition, currently the top-rated customer review is from Mr. Terrill G. Bouricius, the well-known Burlington Vermont resident, IRV advocate, and IRV software-seller I mentioned just the other day. Since Poundstone ultimately comes down in favor of score voting (AKA range voting), Bouricius gives him a 2-star review (point of irony: Amazon's 1- to 5-star ratings are effectively a score voting system.) Bouricius mentions Nicholas Tideman's dislike of score voting (a link to his book (a smidge pricier), CRV's review and follow-up responses.) Which is an issue worthy of a blog post in its own right (after I finish discussing non-monotonicity.) Anyway if you have read the book, I encourage you to write your own review/rate the existing reviews.

Non-Monotonicity: Part I

2009-03-19T17:29:00.001-08:00

Since the results of Burlington's mayoral election were announced, battle has raged across the internet between advocates of instant runoff voting and those who have better ideas. Several points are being ~~argued~~ discussed, but the most confusing in the issue of non-monotonicity. What's that word even mean?

Monotonic, if you remember your algebra, means that a function, f(x), is either always increasing or always decreasing as x increases. A function that goes up for a little while and then goes back down is non-monotonic. You could think of it as "if more is better, than even more is even better". And that's (sort of) how the analogy comes over to voting methods: under a monotonic method, getting more votes is always better. So under a non-monotonic method, getting more votes is sometimes bad, or, getting fewer votes is sometimes good.

There are three issues at stake here: first, is IRV non-monotonic? This is an unqualified "yes", although IRV advocates will claim that it's so rare as to be inconsequential in real-life elections. (More on that later.) Second, did the recent election in Burlington exhibit non-monotonicity? This is also an unqualified "yes", which one might think would give pause to those claiming that non-monotonicity is ultra-rare. (Rather, they have decided to argue that it didn't really happen.) And finally, does it matter? This is the only issue of the three which can be up for debate, which we'll do in Part II. But first, we'll pause to prove points one and two.

IRV is non-monotonic

The easiest way to show this, is to construct an example. First, the election needs to have at least three candidates; let's call them 'K', 'M', and 'W'. Secondly, we need to construct a set of ballots where one candidate, let's pick K, is the winner, but in such a way that if we improve K's ranking on some of the ballots, they instead lose. Easy enough:

29 ballots: K > M > W
25 ballots: M > K > W
32 ballots: W > M > K

M, with the fewest top-ranking ballots, is eliminated, and K defeats W by an impressive 54 to 32 margin. But! if we improve K's position on just eight ballots, like this:

29 ballots: K > M > W
25 ballots: M > K > W
24 ballots: W > M > K
8 ballots: K > W > M

Then instead candidate W, with only 24 top-ranking ballots, is eliminated, and M defeats K by a 49 to 37 margin. To repeat: by improving K's score on a small number of ballots, K went from being the winner to being the loser. Which is a very non-intuitive result. It's also possible to create a situation where decreasing a losing candidate's rank on some ballots can cause them to win (but I leave that as an exercise to the reader). If either of these cases is possible to construct for a given voting method, then getting more votes is not always better, and by definition the voting method is non-monotonic.

What about Burlington?

So clearly these situations can happen under IRV. The next question is if the Burlington election was one of those situations. The proof of this is almost trivial, since the numbers (and names) in the above example were pulled from the results of the Burlington election (with a few complicating but non-relevant omissions.)

The real question is, why do IRV's supporters insist that this is not the case? I wish I knew! It seems to stem from a lack of understanding of the words "if" and "could", as in "If the outcome of the election could be changed by...", as their argument is that this election "could" have been non-monotonic "if" some voters changed their ballots "but they didn't". No, no, no! If they could then it is non-monotonic! A lot of bad-blood is being spilled over this non-disputable point, and I don't understand why the opposition persists, as it only serves to distract us from the real discussion.

Which we'll cover in the next installment.

IRV Fails In Its Own Backyard

2009-03-16T17:24:00.000-08:00

Burlington Vermont just elected their mayor, which wouldn't be big news, except that Burlington is the home town of one of IRVs largest proponents, Terrill G. Bouricius, and he has persuaded his town to use that system. Courtesy of the Center For Range Voting, we show how this election perfectly demonstrates the problems that IRV causes; the ones that Bouricius and Fair Vote insist are "unimportant", "unlikely", and "uninteresting". Namely:

Failure to elect a majority winner: the eventual winner, Bob Kiss, would have lost to Andy Montroll in a one-on-one election. In fact, Montroll would have beaten any other candidate in a one-on-one election.
Failure in the face of a spoiler candidate: if Wright hadn't been in the election, then Montroll would have won.
Failure of participation: if a few hundred Wright voters had stayed home and not voted, they would have gotten a better outcome (their 2nd choice, Montroll, instead of Kiss.)
Failure by non-monotonicity: if a few hundred Wright voters had instead voted for Kiss, Kiss would have lost (and Montroll wold have won).

The first, I can almost forgive; it's not as if Condorcet's method is perfect either, and IRV advocates can make a deliberate choice between simplicity and effectiveness. The second makes me furious, as IRV advocates prey on Democrat's fear of Gore-Florida-2000-like scenarios, claiming IRV will completely fix problems with Nader-like spoilers; but this election exemplifies how this is not the case. The third, considering the already embarassingly low voter turnouts in the US, is disgusting; we cannot allow people another excuse to stay home on election day. Finally, "non-monotonicity" gets brushed off by IRV advocates as being too "academic" to be concerned over; sure, it's a somewhat complicated concern, but it's a serious concern, which this election shows.

Considering all these failures--all the ones that the Center for Range Voting has warned about and Fair Vote has repeatedly brushed off--I'm disgusted that Fair Vote is pretending everything is fine. Why--how--could you continue to support IRV in the face of this overwhelming evidence from your own home town? Is it ego? Or maybe... it's the money? Yes, in addition to being a "senior analyst" for Fair Vote, Mr. Bouricius is one of the founders of Election Solutions, Inc., who sell the software that Burlington uses to run its elections.

Honesty is the Best Policy. But...

2009-03-05T17:49:00.000-09:00

Warren Smith's mamoth voting study in 2000 (abstract, pdf) revealed several exciting bits of information. Chief among these was that score voting (referred to as "range voting" in the paper) had, under all 700+ conditions, the best performance of any voting method he examined. Less significant to the voting-reform movement, but no less interesting, was his finding that performance was better with a population of honest voters than with a population of strategic ones, for every method examined.

But what does "honesty" mean, in this sense? If your only voting experience is with the plurality system (which is likely), the idea of a dishonest vote might be confusing; after all, if you prefered Barak Obama, why would you lie and say you preferred John McCain (or vice-versa)? Of course you wouldn't; but maybe you would have prefered Hillary Clinton (or Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee or even Ron Paul) or maybe even Ralph Nader. If you honestly, in your political heart-of-hearts, preferred one of these other candidates, but voted for one of the two front-runners, then you are a dishonest voter.

You are a dishonest voter

Or, to put it a nicer way, a "strategic" voter. After all, it doesn't take a genius to realize that voting for one of the other former Democratic (or Republican) candidates is a waste of time: there's a reason why parties have primaries, and it's because our election system provides strong incentives to reduce the election to a choice between just two options, so they better make sure all their people are backing the same candidate, ensuring they'll be one of those two. The same incentives are what cause our politics to be dominated by just two parties); in fact, voting for a third party actually makes it more likely that your less-preferred choice among the "major" candidates will win. This is a fact still warm in the minds of left-leaning Americans from Nader's spoiler effect in Florida in the 2000 pressidential race (or if you prefer, among right-leaning Minnesotans in the 2008 senate race.)

So: people--probably you--vote strategically in order to increase the effect their vote will have on the outcome. You don't vote for a candidate who "can't win", and only two candidates will be able to win. Now, back to Dr. Smith's experiment. His measure of performance is called "Bayesian regret", the idea being that we take all the positive and negative effects (commonly referred to as "utilities") that every voter would experience for each candidate if they were elected, add them all togehter to get society's utility, and for each election method determine how much worse the winner is when compared to the best possible candidate. Smith's results showed that, under every election method he tested, if everyone votes honestly (i.e., as truthfully-accurate to their computer-generated utilities as allowed by the election method), then the net utility for society as a whole is better. But we just showed that, at least under our current system, vast numbers of people don't vote honestly, as the system compels them to vote for "the lesser of two evils".

Why do people do that? We can answer that by examining these same utilities: if I honestly prefer Nader over Gore (utility of, say, +9 units versus +8), and Gore over Bush (+8 units versus -5), but realize that a vote for Nader will result in Bush being elected (as occured in Florida in 2000), then I can maximize my personal utility by dishonestly voting "for" Gore (really, "against" Bush.) But if everyone follows this sort of plan, then Smith's results show that on average, across a great many elections, society's net utility will be lower. (You might ask, "Why don't we just measure everyone's utilities, and determine the optimum winner that wasy?" The answer is simple: people will strategize ("lie") about those, too. (It's okay to use them in the simulation though, since we assigned each computer voter their honest utilities programatically.))

Strategy under score voting

What about Smith's election-method-shootout winner, score voting? Well, it turns out you can lie there, too. Maybe you have in your mind some "ideal" candidate, who agrees with you on every issue; but what if none of the candidates for office matches you on more than 70% of those issues? Do you give that candidate 70% of the maximum score? Or do you lie just a bit, and give them the maximum score, increasing their chance to win? Similarly, do you give your least prefered candidate a 0, or do you give them 20% because they agree with you on a few issues? What if everyone else was doing it? That's just the tip of iceberg though. If you really wanted to maximixe the impact of your vote, you'd look at the polls, figure out who the two front runners are, and give whichever of those two candidates you prefer and every candidate you prefer better than them, the maximum score, and give the other candidate and every candidate you prefer less than them a zero; if there's any candidates left, you could scale them appropriately to fit between those extremes.

No election method (short of deep mind-reading to determine real, honest utilities) will ever be immune to strategic manipulation. But score voting is hurt much less by it than our current plurality system; strategic score voting is functionally the same as approval voting, which was also examined in Smith's study. Indeed, those two methods have identical Bayesian regret with 100% strategic voters. Furthermore, there's less for a strategic voter to gain; the chance that a strategic vote will change the outcome is lower, and there's never any reason to give your honest true favorite less than the maximum score, a property called "immunity to favorite-betrayal". So you can feel good about yourself while still maximizing your impact on the election, by giving your honest favorite "third party" candidate as well as your favorite "major" candidate both the maximum score. Given some time for the party to grow support, a third-party candidate could even win an election; we can actually escape the two-party system.

Strategic IRV = Strategic Plurality

Interestingly, instant-runoff voting (IRV), which is gaining popularity following its adoption in several parts of California, is exactly the same (which is to say, exactly as bad) as our current plurality system when we assume strategic voters. IRV and plurality are analogous to score and approval in that sense: in the worst case, they're identical. And assuming a constant percentage of honest voters, score is always better than IRV as measured by Bayesian regret. This is because, while an IRV advocate will tell you that you can honestly vote Nader > Gore > Bush without fear, this is only true up until Nader has about 20% support. At that point, a vote for Nader will cause Bush to win instead of Gore, which means we will continue to be trapped in a two-party system. While IRV is (in someways) better than plurality, score voting can actually create some change, and means you can always afford to be honest.

Tell Obama About Range Voting Now

2009-01-14T16:13:00.000-09:00

Likely, you're already familiar with Change.gov (if not, you should go check it out and sign up.) Just today, the issue of Range voting (AKA Score voting) was put up. Please, go vote for it. (Trivia: Change.gov itself seems to opperate via an Approval-voting-like method.)

"Gaming the Vote"

2009-01-12T22:36:00.000-09:00

Received for the holidays, and quickly devoured, William Poundstone's Gaming the Vote. I absolutely loved this book, as its layout mirrored my own exploration of the issue of fair voting, and was filled with the sorts of great examples that grab and focus attention, written in a way that brings out the very human characters that underlie what seems, on the surface, to be a dryly academic topic. Basically, it's the book I would love to write, if I had Poundstone's experience, training, and writing ability.

Starting with an anectdote about Kurt Godel (one of my other favorite books is Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach), it lays out all the problems with our current voting system, with examples scatterd across American history, from Lincoln (and his 39.8% popular-vote win) all the way up to 2006's midterm elections. Once the problem is laid out, Poundstone starts searching for solutions, again giving us great real-life examples full of all-too-human characters, including Kenneth Arrow (winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics), Lewis Carrol (author of Alice in Wonderland), and Lee Atwater (Nixon's expert slime-man.) Along the way, he points out all the downsides of IRV, Condorcet's method, Approval voting, and even his favorite horse, Range voting. Most compelling is his diagram of Baysian Regret of various voting methods (basically, the sum total of how upset people are about an election's result), which strongly suggest that he's right: Range voting scores best.

The book ends by calling me out; asking if any municipality would be willing to step up to the plate and put Range voting into law. Well Mr. Poundstone, I accept your challenge. Tuesday, I'll be attending the local Drinking Liberally chapter, and begin gathering the help I need to make my next vote be a Range vote. I'll also be downloading Warren Smith's source code to try running my own Baysian voting simulations. Wish me luck.

Marching Two By Two

2008-12-10T13:43:00.001-09:00

Voting is easy, at least if there are only two options. When congress is deciding on what form a bill should take, they don't ask the congresmen to vote for their favorite of 3 (or 4 or more) options; they break it into pieces, and vote yes/no on incorporating each one as an ammendment. How would this procedure work if we tried to apply it to elections?

Presume, as before, that there are three candidates, and that the 9 congressmembers opinions break down as in our previous examples:

4 prefer A > B > C
3 prefer C > B > A
2 prefer B > C > A

Three "bills" are introduced, one naming each of the candidates, A B and C, as the ultimate winner of the election. At first, each member only votes "yes" for the bill naming their first-choice candidate. Since no candidate has a majority of first-preference, none of them pass. Not picking a winner is clearly sub-optimal, so we'll have to try something else.

Let's suppose B's supporters get a clever idea: they resubmit the "C wins" bill... but vote in favor of it, along with all of C's supporters. By a one-vote margin the bill passes. This is almost analogous to what would happen in a plurality election or in a run-off; B's supporters compromised and got their second-choice candidate.

Now suppose that B's supporters, feeling a bit cheeky, get even more clever: they submit a motion to change the winner from C to B. Obviously, their allies in the "C wins" vote are against them this time, but A's supporters more than make up for it, and the motion passes. A and C's supporters can try similar tricks, but neither such bill will pass; each opposes the other's motion, and B's supporters oppose both. A temporary compromise (like the B voters voting for C) can shift the field, but if the voters always eventually fall back to their honest opinions, B always comes out on top. I contend that this means that B is, overall, the more prefered candidate, the best compromise among all the options, and that the best vote-counting method would choose them as the winner.

Multiple votes are probably out of the question as a method to replace our current election process; this is why the "instant" in instant runoff is appealing. But IRV would give C the win, and that's only half-way to the solution. But there is a voting method that, like IRV, can determine the winner in one round of ballots, and those ballots are not any more complicated than the ones used in IRV, and it's called Condorcet's Method.

Condorcet's method works by breaking the election down into a group of smaller, simpler, one-on-one elections. With only two choices, voting is easy! So, in a three way race, rather than look at it as a free-for-all of A vs. B vs. C, Condorcet looks at it as three seperate contests: A vs. B, B vs. C, and A vs. C. In our example, we see that B wins against A (since both B and C's supporters prefer B in that case), that B also wins against C (since both B and A's supporters prefer B in that case), and that C wins against A (since both B and C's supporters prefer C in that case). So who wins? Put simply (and somewhat tautologically-sounding), the winner is the candidate who doesn't ever lose. This means that there is no single opponent who a majority of voters would prefer over them. In our case, this is candidate B.

Condorcet's method is a powerfull tool for teasing a compromise out of a vote. It's not perfect (no voting method is, and I'll cover so-called "circular ambiguities" soon), but I think it gives a better result in a greater number of situations than plurality or IRV.

Shooting Down IRV

2008-11-19T21:08:00.000-09:00

I hope that, by now, I've convinced you that preferential voting is a good idea. Now, onto phase II: convincing you that preferential voting is a bad idea. Or rather, that it's most popular form, Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) isn't such a good one.

Consider the following election. There are three candidates--A, B, and C--and 9 voters. Candidate A leans strongly to one side (left, right, or whatever you prefer), while B and C lean the other way, although B is a bit more centrist. Let's suppose then that four voters would prefer A the most, and prefer the more moderate B over candidate C; three would go in the precise opposite direction, prefering C over B with A in a distant third; finally two prefer candidate B, followed by C, followed by A. Like this:

4: A > B > C
3: C > B > A
2: B > C > A

Who wins? By plurality, A does; but the supporters of B and C will point out that A only won because their candidates split the vote; clearly their camp should have held a primary! But IRV would proceed by eliminating the candidate with the fewest first-ranked votes, in this case B, and passing those votes to the voters' next-higest ranked candidate, in this case C, making C the winner. This is the same result that would have occured had the "BC" camp held a primary to decide on who their candidate should be. Which is some progress; perhaps we could eliminate the need for primaries by moving to IRV, and allow supporters of minor-party candidates to speak their honest opinion instead of being forced to choose between the lesser of two evils.

But consider this: what if A's supporters had decided to disingenuously rank them at the bottom of their ballot? Then we get this:

6: B > C > A
3: C > B > A

Now, B wins. Which, for A's supporters, who unanimously prefered B over C, is an improvement! We've traded minor-party supporters lying about their preferences for major-party supporters lying about their preferences (in both cases, in order to avoid what they see as an even worse outcome.) And while some might bitterly remark "Good, let them see how it feels!", upon calm reflection I can't say that this is a good thing. If we're going to change our voting methods, we should do so with an eye towards eliminating these sorts of insincerity-encouraging effects as completely as possible, rather then push them off to some other segment of the electorate.

Unfortunately (and this will be covered in more detail in a future post), it has been mathematically proven that no reasonable voting method is entirely immune to these incentives. While plurality performs quite poorly--allowing two major groups to gain a stranglehold on all political discourse across a nation--IRV doesn't do that much better. In a highly-polarized election, it can (and mark my words, it will!) tend to eliminate moderate choices, and if it doesn't, the decision of which moderate candidate (when there is more than one) ultimately wins, becomes very sensitive to the order they are eliminated, which can hinge on an incredibly thin sliver of voters. If you thought re-counts were bitter fiascos now, just wait to see the chaos of a close 4-or-more way IRV race. In the most pathological case, consider an "ultimate compromise" candidate, one who is everyone's second choice. Under IRV, such a candidate has no chance of victory, as he has no first-place votes. But I can't help but think that such a compromise candidate would be a very good choice as an election winner.

Next up, an alternative preferential system.

But Don't Forget the Primaries

2008-11-10T12:23:00.000-09:00

Some critics try to attack preferential voting via the argument that it's too complicated. They say that it's too hard to explain how instant runoff voting or Condorcet's method work; and because of the complexity, voters will never like it.

I would ask these people to explain--in plain language and as few words as possible--how our current system work. But don't forget the primaries. Because the primaries are as decisive, if not more decisive, in determining our pressident and other elected officials, then anything that happens in early November. And if you read my state-by-state description in the comments of the first post, you'll notice that every state's primaries are also a little different.

Why do we even have primaries? Because the parties know that running multiple similar candidates is the best way to ensure that none of them win. This is identical to how a third-party candidate can pull support away from their most-similar major-party candidate and give the election away to the (mutually hated) opposition. The primaries exist solely as a way for the like-minded party members to agree to restrict the choices of the general electorate in order to avoid this vote-spliting effect, by compromising on a candidate which the whole group will agree to support. (Actually, you could argue that's the only reason political parties exist.) In other words, primaries and preferential voting try to solve the same problem. One through a complex, fractionalized labyrinth that actively prevents many voters from participating while giving disproportionate power to the leadership of the two major political parties, and the other by giving every voter a better (if slightly more complicated) way to express their choice. I think you can guess which option I would choose.

This may imply that, for instance, Hillary Clinton could have stayed in the race without increasing the chance that John McCain would have won, if we used a preferential system. Is that true? I would love to give you an unequivocal "yes", but I'll have to hedge a bit and say "almost certainly yes, but maybe not". For a full answer, we'll have to get into the nitty-gritty of voting systems and voting criteria; stay tuned! (I already made one assumption about criteria in this blog, on Friday. Can you find it?)

Minnesota's Recount

2008-11-09T12:25:00.000-09:00

You may have heard about what's going on in Minnesota, where Al Franken (D) and Norm Coleman (R) are just a few hundred votes apart out nearly three million cast. What's interesting is that the two candidates each have around 42% of the vote; over 15% of voters chose independent candidate Dean Barkley (and a few picked Libertarian Charles Aldrich). I wonder what those minor-party voters are thinking now. I wonder who their second choice would have been, or how many of them are going to regret their mostly symbolic gesture.