(With apologies to the non-Americans on -vote... :) On Tue, May 14, 2013 at 11:56:49AM -0400, Michael Ossipoff wrote: > One reason why I've been advocating Schwartz Woodal (along with > Woodall and Benham) is because, in official public government > elections, the chicken dilemma _would_ be a problem, or at least a > serious nuisance that would demand special strategy, and would take > away the freedom from strategy-need that Condorcet methods could > ideally have. I have seen this argument advanced by advocates of IRV, but I have not seen any real proof. Most IRV advocates seem to claim IRV is better than CSSD because voters are too stupid to cast a ballot non-strategically, and therefore we're better off with a system that gets closest to the Condorcet winner given such broken inputs. But while I don't hold the electorate in particularly high esteem, I reject this particular premise: most voters aren't going to grasp the *proof* of Condorcet, but they are certainly capable of grasping the *principle* that their best strategy when voting is to vote honestly. > I consider official public government elections to be where we > seriously need a better voting system. I believe that it would make > all the difference. > I realize that Debian is an international organization, and this this > forum is for duscussing Debian voting matters, and so what follows in > this post is off-topic. But I just want to explain why I consider it > important to advocate better voting systems. > The Green Party U.S. (GPUS) offers Instant Runoff (IRV) in its > platform. I know that Debian is an international organization, but of > course my main goal has been reforms in the U,.S. It seems to me that > any reform in the U.S. must start with the election of Greens to > office. I agree that it's important to have better voting systems for public elections (in the US and elsewhere). I believe that the combination of our first-past-the-post voting and the nature of our non-parliamentary Congress reinforces the polarizing, anti-consensus-seeking two-party setup that we currently endure. However, coming from a Debian background I find the flaws of IRV so much worse than those of CSSD in terms of enacting the will of the people that I consider endorsement of IRV a mark against the Green Party candidates in my jurisdiction. > IRV, like Woodall, Benham, and Schwartz Woodall, meets the Mutual > Majority Criterion, and has no chicken dilemma. But of course IRV > fails the Condorcet Criterion. IRV's failure to always elect the > Condorcet winner compromise makes IRV too uncompromising and inimical > for amicable organizations. It also makes IRV vulnerable to > replacement by a dis-satisfied majority, when IRV is used in official > public government elections. > So, I feel that, if the GPUS were elected here, and IRV were > established as the voting system, there might soon be majority wishes > to replace IRV with a Condorcet-complying voting system. A good > Condorcet-complying replacement would be Benham, Woodall, or Schwartz > Woodall. I think this significantly underestimates the power of inertia in such matters. It's difficult to mobilize people around something as esoteric as voting systems; even with all the readily available evidence of how our current system betrays the will of the electorate, changing the voting system remains a fringe issue throughout the US. Once IRV is adopted, this problem will be compounded. Voters will have a knee-jerk reaction to any request to change the voting system again after they've already done so recently; the practical advantages of Condorcet over IRV will be more difficult to explain to the electorate; and there will be no history of abuses / wrong election outcomes for advocates to point to in justifying the need for a further change. So I think we have (at most) one shot in our generation to fix the voting system; and if we manage to get rid of FPTP only to settle for another exploitable system, we'll be stuck with it for good. > That gives me incentive to advocate Schwartz Woodall for > organizations, because it's the kind of voting system that would > likely be eventually adopted in a Green U.S. So I'm just telling my > motivation to advocate Schwartz Woodall, even to organizations that > don't really have a chicken dilemma. > Of course (at least if there's a chicken dilemma), Schwartz Woodall's > combination of the Mutual Majority Criterion, no chicken dilemma, and > the Condorcet Criterion would make it the a good choice (the best > choice, I claim) for organizational voting. > Of course obviously, if Debian doesn't have a chicken dilemma, there's > no need for Debian to change its voting system from CSSD to Schwartz > Woodall. Given that Debian is my own standard example of Voting Done Right™, I think it's worth evaluating how to improve Debian's system even if we're fixing bugs that we think aren't practical problems in Debian - if they are practical problems elsewhere. I just have not been convinced that the chicken dilemma is the practical problem that IRV advocates argue it is. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/ slangasek@ubuntu.com vorlon@debian.org
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