Annoyed by politics

[andrewducker]

I keep seeing articles talking about alliances between the Lib Dems and Conservatives, either for the next election, or for the Oldham East and Saddleworth by-election that's happening a week today. In the latter case, many of the Conservatives basically seem to be saying "We don't have a chance of winning, so you Tory voters should vote LibDem instead, so that Labour don't win."

Not only do I disagree over there being alliances over elections (because it denies people a free choice), but I object to the fact that the current system encourages them. If we had AV then Conservative voters could vote the way they want to (Conservative) and then vote Lib-Dem as a second choice _if that's what they want_. Similarly, Lib-Dem voters could vote Lib-Dem first, and then either Conservative or Labour depending on which they preferred as a second-choice, etc., etc.

That way the parties could concentrate on standing for themselves, and not what other parties are doing, and electoral bargaining could at least wait until _after_ the votes were in.

As it is, the election results won't actually tell us what the honest choices of the electorate are. People will be voting tactically, to keep out the people they oppose, based on guesswork over who has the most chance of winning. It's a horribly broken system.

(Not that I think that AV is the bees knees, but it's decidedly better than FPTP. I think my ideal system would probably be AV with an AMS top-up, but that's a completely different debate.)

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

... 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.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

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.

[andrewhickey.livejournal.com]

"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.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

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.

[drplokta]

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.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

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. :-)

[andrewducker]

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

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

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.

[nwhyte]

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