andrewducker | Annoyed by politics

Absolutely agree - except why would you want AV with an AMS top-up? AMS gives party leaders control over who gets in, rather than voters, meaning that any party with more than a trivially small amount of votes gets automatic safe seats for leadership loyalists.
STV still seems to me the perfect balance between preferentiality and proportionality...

How does it cope with a party with 10% of the votes spread evenly across the country?

All of the discussions I've seen have posited multi-member constituencies with 5 or so members in them. If we're going to have 20 members in a group then I'd go with STV, but otherwise you're margnalising people more than I'm comfortable with.

Looking at the results in Ireland, last election 25 out of 166 members got in with under 11% of the first-preference vote (an arbitrary figure I chose for your '10% of the votes'). Many of those were, it's true, second- or third-place candidates for large parties, but it still suggests that a party which genuinely had across-the-board 10% support would get, if anything, a disproportionately *high* result (assuming it did reasonably on transfers from other parties).

(I couldn't find any statistics on this, so went through the Eire 2007 results by hand - if anyone has any better data, I'd like to know).

But what you've got there is a party getting (for instance) 60% of the vote, and thus multiple of their representatives getting through.

As most of the people I know vote by party, not representative, I can't see it working nearly as well cross-party, as they'd vote for all of the reps for a party before they voted for a different one.

If I remember rightly, the last poll I ran showed that most people didn't even know who their prospective candidate was, they weer just going to vote for whoever was next to "Raving Loony" on the ballot.

"As most of the people I know vote by party, not representative, I can't see it working nearly as well cross-party, as they'd vote for all of the reps for a party before they voted for a different one."

This would still lead to a situation where, for example, you'd get probably two Labour MPs, one Lib Dem and one Tory in the four seats nearest me by the last election's numbers, as opposed to the current situation of three Labour and one Lib Dem. I personally prefer the latter, but the former is more democratic.

"If I remember rightly, the last poll I ran showed that most people didn't even know who their prospective candidate was, they weer just going to vote for whoever was next to "Raving Loony" on the ballot."

Absolutely - most people still don't have a clue (I'm very unusual in that I've met five of the candidates who stood in my constituency last time, and can count two of them as, if not friends, at least good acquaintances). However, in areas with a nationally-known candidate, or one with a strong local reputation, that difference could still be crucial (I imagine that Labour voters would, for example, have listed only Labour candidates, but listing Hazel Blears last in North Manchester, essentially meaning she'd never get re-elected.)

That means that those who genuinely don't know about candidates can rank them randomly and still get a say in which party represents them, while those who do can order them properly and get a say in which member represents them.

I agree that STV is better than what we have now. Clearly more democratic. I think it's healthier for party politics (insofar as we have more control over the candidates that are elected), but I still suspect that it would lead to small parties (like the Greens in Scotland) being shut out, unlike AMS (where it's working better for them).

It's a question of whether you priorities voting for candidates or including small parties, which is always going to be a matter of taste. Either is clearly better than the current situation.

nwhyte has convinced me further down...

Just on a point of information: in the last Northern Ireland Assembly election (18 six-member constituencies elected by STV), the quota was theoretically 14.29% in each constituency but in practice any candidate with more than 8.9% (and most candidates with more than 8.4%) got in. So in fact a party with a fairly even 10% spread is unlikely to be badly penalised. Even a party with a fairly even 5% spread is likely to have enough strong candidates to get people elected (as has happened repeatedly in Northern Ireland).

Ok, I retract my objection in that case. Thanks for the data.

Although in the last Scottish election the Greens got 4%, and that netted them 2 seats, which I wouldn't expect to happen under STV.

I would, because I think the Greens would get a lot of transferred preferences.
Every system is going to have some sort of cut-off, and I think getting 4% and not getting any seats would be acceptable if not ideal, but in practice I think parties on the margins, like the Greens or Racist UKIP, would do a little targetting and still get a couple of seats with high-profile candidates. The only ones who would definitely be kept out are parties like the Bastard Nazis, who wouldn't get a significant number of transfers - but frankly, while I *should* care about BNP voters not being represented, I can't feel that bad about it...

I'm just looking at Scotland's results from 2007, where the Greens got 4% of the vote, which transferred into two seats. And I'm not convinced that this would have translated similarly in STV, unless there were places where they could double that.

They would be able to, and need, to concentrate some campaigning resources and similar into some of their 'strong' areas. STV favours geographic concentrations of support to an extent.

I personally view that as a good thing, specifically I think more Dr Richard Taylors in Parlt would benefit all of us. STV is the only electoral system that increases the chances of Independents and weakens party control that I'm aware of.

Essentially, Greens on 4% are struggling anyway-in some list PR/top up systems, like Germany or Israel, they wouldn't get any seats on 4%, there's a 5% cutoff to exclude extremist and minority/fringe parties (Germany allows parties below 5% to keep their top up if they get at least one constituency MP though). That means that the FDP (Liberals, but fairly right wing by standard terms) scrapes along and sometimes loses all its seats.

But STV strengthens candidates. Greens got 2% in 2010, but guarantee Lucas would get in with a massively over quota first preferences in Brighton & Area under an STV election.

There is some anecdotal evidence that supporters of the Christian Democratic Party vote for the FDP to make sure that they either win a seat of get over the 5% hurdle and are able to take seats instead of a similar smaller party of the left.

Wouldn't surprise me and given the system, it makes sense to do that.

One of the reasons I went off the system was the ability to game it is too high and important. STV can be gamed, but nowhere near as much, and it's fairly obvious when it happens as well, from what I've seen/read.

Minimums certainly make it easier to game. Which is why I prefer the Scottish system.

Yeah, this is why I like the Scottish system, where there is no minimum. You can vote for the party you actually want to, with no worrying about tactical matters.

I think in practise you need to have some minimum (for example, in Holyrood a party that polls less than 1.29% of the vote won't be able to have a part of a seat on a job share basis) but the lower the limit the better I say.

I'm not comfortable with the idea that view points are excluded even from the debate just because they lack a certain mass of support. Not only is it wrong in principle but I look at parties like the Greens or UKIP and then at the early Labour Party and I think the future is being created now.

My ideal system is Single Transferable Vote, with a requirement that for party affiliations to be listed against candidate names on the ballot, the party must put up at least one more candidate than there are seats available, so that voters can choose between different candidates for the same party.

So, for example, if a constituency will elect three MPs (multi-member constituencies are required for STV), parties must put up at least four candidates. This will mean that for individual MPs there is no such thing as a safe seat, so they will have to work harder for their constituents.

See above comment to Andrew Hickey for my objection to STV in that regard. Other than that I like STV a lot.

I don't like that requirement. For smaller parties, like the Greens, that could fatally weaken them. It would also lead to a lot of 'independent' candidates who were actually from extremist groups (be they BNP or SWP) without that information being on the ballot paper. The Greens, say, are only likely to get a maximum one MP in a four-member constituency, so whether they stood two candidates or five the choice would still be in effect.

I'd be happy with an alternative rule that a party can only have at most (n-1) candidates elected, where n is the number that they put up, so that the Greens can run only two if they're confident they can't have two winners.

I'd be less *un*happy with that, but it does rather require everyone to either have an accurate idea of how they're likely to do (which is a bias towards large parties who can afford private polling) or risk going against the electorate's wishes (if they really do want two Green MPs but the Greens thought they'd be lucky to get one).

Interesting thought, but from the campaign organisers' point of view, do you have any idea how difficult it can be to find even one candidate, let alone four people willing to be nominated when they all know in advance that at least three of them won't be elected?

But this is in bigger constituencies, so instead of 3 candidates for 3 constituencies you have 4 candidates for one three-times-the-size constituency. Or do I misunderstand you?

Edited 2011-01-06 13:06 (UTC)

No, you don't; and indeed you illustrate the point that

drplokta's proposal actually increases the number of willing candidates that a party must find.

In a single-seat system (which I opposed for other reasons) at least one can run a 'paper' candidate in a hopeless seat; fill in the nomination papers, print the leaflets for distribution by the post office, collect your 5% of the votes on polling day, but actually put your efforts into places you might win.

From the party organisation point of view, if I know we are going to get 5% in a multiple-seat constituency, I much prefer to have a single candidate who then has a ghost of a chance of getting in, rather than divide efforts and waste energy in co-ordinating four simultaneous campaigns which may turn out to be bald men squabbling over a comb.

(I should add that I was the central party campaign organiser for the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland for three years, so I have some practical experience in this area.)

If you chance it to one more than they got last time, minimum, then it would be viable and work.

But insisting all parties put up more candidates than there are total seats, despite the odds of any party getting even 50% of the votes being small, is going to substantially increase voter confusion, decrease the chances of minority candidates and create havoc.

Masses of studies (and

nwhyte knows a lot more about this than I) indicate that parties that put forward too many candidates lose out as voters simply stop numbering in order of preference past a certain point.

That's why Australia introduced the 'above the line' party agreed distribution for STV Senate eletions.

Essentially, if the party is likely to win 1, and could possibly win 2 seats, then putting two candidates forward fulfills your criteria of 'no safe seats' and ensures they work.

One of the biggest critiques of STV I've read for Ireland is the parochialism it encourages, MPs have to keep working, constantly, because they know they can lose out. Lord Trimble thinks that's a bad thing (in fact, all his objections struck me as being bloody good reasons for, but different worldviews are interesting to encounter).

For single-winner elections only a Condorcet system makes sense.

Sadly, it fails the "an ordinary person can understand how it works" test, as I've seen repeatedly when people try to explain Condorcet.

How would you go about testing this assertion? If you were doing a survey to test a particular explanation of STV vs a particular explanation of Condorcet, what questions would you ask the subjects after they'd seen the explanation?

I'd ask them to explain it to me.

People seem to get how the comparisons work in AV/STV relatively easily, whereas every discussion I've seen of Condorcet has been full of comments from people getting it wrong, or just being baffled.

(I may be somewhat biased here, as I felt similarly baffled for a long time by it.)

Get twelve people to whom you've explained it, give them the set of results for a large election, let them each individually calculate the winner without reference to the explanation. If they all agree then you're in with a chance, otherwise it's hanging chads and lawsuit time.

This is the test of if it came up in court, would the jury be able to get the right candidate elected.

How would you even *present* the results of a large STV election to your subjects? With Condorcet you just present the win matrix, but for STV?

List of the candidates, number of first-preference votes received, how the second, third, etc broke down, as a chart.
(Don't have graphviz installed on this computer, but imagine
Bill Bloggs (Birthday) 3000 -> Dave Bloggs (Birthday) 1000
Bill Bloggs (Birthday) 3000 -> Fred Bloggs (Birthday) 1000
Bill Bloggs (Birthday) 3000 -> Alan Smithee (Madeup) 1000

and so on, as a simple DAG. Easier to view than to describe verbally).

I'd settle for 50 actual votes. If they can do it with 50 votes then they understand it.

Oh, I absolutely agree there. And I've *never* found anyone who didn't understand AV/STV style preferentiality when I've explained it. But was answering the precise question of how you present all the results to someone.

Which reminds me - with STV, once a candidate is elected, do you just take _new_ votes for them and distribute them to others?

I ask because I can see a problem with skewing the data. If the first half of the votes arrive in from precinct one, where people voted LibDem then Labour, and the second half of the votes arrive in from precinct two, where people votes LibDem then Conservative, then if the first lot are counted, electing the candidate, then the second lot will skew the voting towards the Conservatives. (I know voting is for individual candidates, but I hope you see my point).

How does it work in practice? Get all of the votes in and shuffle them before you start?

Good question. I would imagine the shuffling or something like it would have to take place, but someone like

matgb would know better than I how these things happen in reality.

I've dropped him an email...

drdoug has handily enlightened us below...

Heh. How complicated do you want it?

Normally, you get someone to do the maths. I've actually done this for committee elections while half drunk, it's a lot easier to do than it is to explain.

Say there are 5 seats, and 599,000 votes. To win, you need 100,000 votes, as if 5 candidates get 100,000 then no one else can get more than 99,000.

Say it's Sheffield at the last GE, when everyone agreed with Nick.

So Nick Clegg gets 250,000 first preferences. Paul Scriven, 2nd LD candidate, gets maybe 10 first preferences and 150,000 of Nick's voters give him their 2nd preference.

You eliminate anyone that's past quota first. So Nick's excess quota votes are shared out.

Now, to ensure it's fair, rather than randomly picking, or using the top of the pile, all votes are redistributed, but are now worth less each.

In this case, Nick got 250K but needed 100K. So all of his 250K votes are redistributed, but each is now worth 150/250 (3/5ths, obviously) of a vote.

So Paul gets 3/5ths of 150,000 added to his score, and the rest go off to wherever they were going to, likely spread around all the other parties.

Essentially, most modern STV systems never remove a ballot from the contention, but each individual ballot is worth less and less as counting goes on.

There's software to do it for you (Colin Rosenstiel wrote one, he's the guy that does all the Lib Dem internal counts), or you can actually do it manually by writing the current value of each ballot on the paper sheet, which is a bit of a PITA but doable.

Very very easy to actually do in practice as long as you can pass remedial maths. Very difficult to explain in words.

In the STV elections I've counted, the order of counting votes is entirely irrelevant, and you count up *all* the votes for each round each time. You can't complete the first round until you have all the votes in. (Obviously, you can be pretty confident of how it's going to go once you have 95% of the votes!)

First you count up all the votes (for security checking).

Then you count first preferences, discarding any invalid. Total of valid first preferences gives you N, you calculate the quota, and declare elected anyone over the quota (or eliminate the lowest if nobody made the quota).

When someone's declared elected, you distribute their surplus. You take the whole pile of their first preference votes, and redistribute them to their next-available preference candidates. You don't just add those totals to the other candidates though - you multiply those totals by the surplus divided by the number of votes.

So, say the quota is 1000 votes, and Candidate A gets 1500 first preferences. Their surplus is 500. All 1500 papers are redistributed to next available preferences - say 500 go to B, and 1000 to C. The transfer value (the value of a redistributed vote) is 500/1500, or 1/3. So B's score goes up by 500/3, and C's by 1000/3.

So if you voted for candidate A, it's as if 2/3 of your vote gets counted for them, and 1/3 is distributed to your next preference.

Thank you. That makes perfect sense. Takes a little longer, but gives you a better result.

You're welcome. If you're really interested, the Electoral Reform Society procedures for the count itself under STV are here:
http://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/votingsystems/stvrules.htm

That's pretty much how I've done it in practice. For big elections, there's a load of counters sitting in a big hall at tables facing the front, and the Returning Officer sits at the front like teacher. A big groan goes up late on in the process when they announce you have to transfer a surplus from a candidate with a huge pile of votes but only a small surplus - you know that transferring their votes isn't going to get anyone else elected, and you'll have to transfer someone else before the count is done.

Happily the number of votes to re-count tends to tail off through the process - lots of people only rank two or three candidates. But towards the end of a big count, you're stuck with the hard core who have listed every single bloody candidate. (Which is what I do if I vote in such elections.)

Isn't this a strong argument that STV would fail my jury test if you who understands it aren't entirely certain how to count the ballots?

I'd never taken an interest past "and then excess votes are redistributed" before. So I wouldn't say I understood it. Having had the 30 second explanation from two people, it seems trivial.

No.
There are several good ways to count the ballots, any one of which can be explained in relatively few words (e.g. 'shuffle them before you start'). The only question was which one of these good ways is actually chosen in practice.

Colin does the full tables with all the elimination rounds, here's a fairly good one:
Interim Peers List Top-up Election.

Only 1500 votes as it was voting reps only, small electorate and some of us (*cough*me*cough*) couldn't be arsed voting, but the principle works fine for any number of votes, it's how the LDs do candidate selection for lists elections and similar.

I'm sure the Irish have very reader friendly ways of doing it by now. I probably ought to go look at some point.

Right, but that presentation basically gives away the answer. Obviously a presentation that gives away the answer for Condorcet could also be devised, but at that point it's not much of a test.

Ah, I was answering an entirely different question.

Not sure how to do it for Pete's hypothetical, but I am sure that it could be done, you might need to give them all the ballot papers, but...

... though of course, as I'm sure you're aware, it's far from free of issues, including how you rank your lower choices (potentially) affecting the chances of your first choice getting elected, and, famously, potential funny effects from adding irrelevant alternative candidates to the ballot.

And equally famously, though to my mind much less seriously in terms of shady tactical election deal-making, there's the question of what to do if you get circular preferences (i.e. when there's no single Condorcet winner - e.g. a majority prefer A to B, a majority prefer B to C, and a majority prefer C to A, all in the same election) - with SFAIK no widely-agreed answer as to how best to resolve those.

As I'm sure you know, all voting systems have issues thanks to Arrow's Theorem; those that don't sacrifice Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives have much worse problems. AV has much, much more serious problems - under certain circumstances for example, a subset of voters moving a candidate from first to last on their ballots can cause that candidate to win where they would otherwise have lost!

I'm much more pushed about Condorcet in general than the particular variant used: MAM is my favourite but I wouldn't moan about BeatPath being used instead. I've never heard of a real Condorcet election that didn't have a Condorcet winner anyway.

"I've never heard of a real Condorcet election that didn't have a Condorcet winner anyway."

To be fair, that is partly because there's never *been* a 'real Condorcet election' outside fairly small groups like Debian or Gentoo. I'm sure it would happen in the real world.

If we *have* to have single-member constituencies, I could accept Condorcet (though I prefer AV, partly because it's easier to explain and partly because it's much easier to use as a stepping stone to STV), but at some point the opacity of a system counterbalances its other aspects, and I suspect Condorcet systems are at or near that point.

To be fair, that is partly because there's never *been* a 'real Condorcet election' outside fairly small groups

That was my instant reaction too. One reason is the practicalities of counting. Counting an STV election manually (or AV, or others of that ilk) is do-able but requires trained counters. Counting a large Condorcet election manually is labour-intensive to say the least.

SFAIK, the only practical way to count a large Condorcet election is electronically. If the votes are born digital, this is entirely practical, but vulnerable to hard-to-detect tampering - though if you're using electronic voting systems, you have to trust the people running it anyway, so this is not necessarily a show-stopper.

There are widely-attested issues with use of electronic voting machines in full-scale Political elections. There exist some workarounds for verifiability and paper trails and so on - but they rely on the fact that it's relatively straightforward to re-count a disputed precinct. With Condorcet, it's much more labour intensive. Not impossible, but it's adding serious complication to something that's already close to what's wearable practically.

I'd prefer to sacrifice non-dictatorship. I don't care if one voter gets his exact preferences, as long as it's not determined in advance who that one voter is going to be.

How about a Vetinari lottery system? One person, one vote, and you select which person gets that vote from the voters at random after the election? Elegantly immune from many attacks and flaws.

Admittedly, it's not going to meet the Condorcet criterion every time, but does have certain practical advantages. :-)

I can see this working:
http://amultiverse.com/2010/08/31/the-draft/

Not dissimilar to the system used in some ancient Greek city-states where small numbers of citizens were empannelled to run the city by lottery.

Hah, I am very sympathetic to that. Makes another to add to my list of objections to Arrow's theorem.

Edited 2011-01-06 18:02 (UTC)

Heh, all those comments, virtually all about voting systems and how to count, far fewer about the thrust of your actual post. We're such a bunch of geeks.

Note that All the talk of 'electoral alliances' and similar is coming from the Tories. And it's worth noting that the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom is nothing if not an electoral alliance writ large, so they sort of expect this sort of thing, they just absorb smaller parties all the time.

Lib Dems are opposed, for most of the reasons you state, most importantly that AV precludes the need for one immediately.

Within the last 60 years, the Tories have absorbed the National Liberals, the Liberal Nationals, the Scottish Unionists (and I think an off shoot), and absorbed then de absorbed then attempted to absorb again then given up on the idea the Ulster Unionists. Electoral pacts are second nature to them, and a factor of FPTP.

Labour is, after all, in permanent electoral pact with the Cooperative Party (unfortunately, I'd join them if they disaffiliated). Thee and me want preferential voting to give voters the real say.

Those that favour FPTP are at least consistent, and favour pre-election pacts so the voters know what they're getting afterwards. FPTP's main "strength" is it encourages a forced choice between leading candidates. Apparently.

Yeah, I havered back and forth about whether to include my own preferences, because I knew it would derail the conversation. Ah well.

And yeah, FPTP encourages electoral pacts inside parties, which leads to more tribalism. I'd rather that the big groups were formed ad-hoc around the centre, with changes in voting patterns shifting things a bit left or a bit right, rather than big jumps back and forth.

Amen. :-)

I should preface my remarks by saying that I am a local organiser for the Yes campaign.

I like the Alternative Vote system. I would probably prefer the Single Transferable Vote or Alternative Vote with Additional Member top up (with open lists rather than closed) but what I’m being offered is AV or First Past the Post.

I both observe and feel the tribalism. I used to a very tribal member of the Labour Party and, after drifting towards the Liberal Democrats, I now feel much more tribally Labour than I have done in 5 years. That’s how I feel. It’s different from how I think, or I think it is.

One of the interesting things for me about working on the AV campaign is meeting lots of different people from different political persuasions. I think I am a more rounded citizen and politician because of it.

My current image of British politics is an arch. Two large, heavy buttresses pushing against each other with great power and energy in order to keep the status quo static. You pick one side or the other and heave away for the rest of your life and you don’t speak to, let alone trust, anyone not on your side. Whilst some changes have happened and the voting share of the Labour and Conservative Parties has fallen over the last 50 years I think that’s how many people in parties feel. They create structures and systems that suit the way they feel and it’s difficult to change the way people think and feel about how they do the business of politics.

Everything becomes very tightly structured around the Party. Your status within the Party is judged on your loyalty to the Party, not to the voters, even voters who actually voted for you personally.

As a thought experiment on tribalism, imagine if you were a very politically aware and active citizen sitting somewhere between the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats and explicitly said to each candidate “I’ll campaign for you if you convince me that you are the best candidate and the one most aligned with my own views but my support next time round will be contingent on your voting and activism record. I will campaign for your opponent if you fail my interview ”. Imagine how that conversation would go.

So I like AV because it begins to do something about the tribalism of politics by increasing voter power.

I think it increases voter power by
• Creating more marginal seats
• Reduces the risks of vote splitting
• Increases personal accountability
• Allows implicit primaries or splinter candidates
• Reducing the number of wasted votes (ie votes not cast for the eventual winner or runner up)

I also think AV gives smaller parties more influence. They may not gain any more seats but their voters will have to be courted for 2nd and 3rd preferences.

AV also creates the potential for larger parties to split. I think the Conservative party are particularly susceptible to this, given the breadth of their views and the existence of UKIP. I think the model of the Liberal / Country / National alliance in Australia is one to look at.

Generally I see AV as lowering the barriers to entry for parties and the barriers to shifting your support as a voter. If a new party enters an election under First Past the Post in order to poll any significant vote is must firstly persuade me to vote for it and then persuade me that everyone else will vote for it too. That is a hard hill to climb.

Anything that creates more competition tends to move power from suppliers (parties) to consumers (voters).

What I would hope from AV is that
• Whips have reduced power as MP’s keep one eye on both voters and rogue challenges from their own constituency party
• More independent or independently minded MP’s
• More accurate polling for smaller parties leading to a better appreciation of voters’ desires
• More influence for smaller parties (arguably more in line with their national polling)

Those MP’s and party managers who are able to enter into a dialogue with other parties and non-aligned activists best will begin to prosper and the culture of our political parties and political debate will begin to change.

I think it will take several election cycles under the new system for voters, candidates and party managers to get used to the new system and we may get some strange occurrences for a while.

I agree about the shift in power. And I sincerely hope that it leads to a growth in small parties.

Oh, and I definitely agree that it will take a few elections to really bed in. But I'm fine with that, change takes time, and it's always worth pushing forwards.

Also, would you care to post this on your own journal for me to link to? Or shall I just link to it here?

I've cross posted to my journal. Link away.

Done! It'll be in tomorrow's post. Thank you.

Annoyed by politics

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German Cut Off

Re: German Cut Off

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Re: German Cut Off

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