Rob Richie incorrigible in recent Ballot Access News post
Clay Shentrup
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
>This is just incredible.
>
>http://www.ballot-access.org/2012/03/08/policymic-carries-column-advocating-approval-voting/comment-page-1/#comment-904804
I added a comment there,
http://www.ballot-access.org/2012/03/08/policymic-carries-column-advocating-approval-voting/comment-page-1/#comment-905051
It's been a long time since I poked him. Been busy.
This is what he wrote there:
>I’m curious how approval voting advocates think
>approval voting would work in this contest. If
>you like one of the top four best, but really
>don’t like one of the four much, how would you vote?
>
>The typical advice is “vote for your favorite
>frontrunner” and anyone you like better. So… do
>you vote for only one of these people? How is
>that different than plurality voting?
Let's assume there are only four candidates. It's
obvious how you vote for the one you like better,
and how you vote for the one you don't like. What about the others?
It's really up to the voter, and how strong the
voter's preferences are, and who is actually a
frontrunner. That "typical advice" is't bad. If
your favorite is one of two frontrunners, the
bullet vote is in fact, the best. How is that different from plurality voting?
What a dumb question, but this is what we expect
from Richie. It is different from plurality in
that you had the choice. In your particular
situation, you didn't need the choice, so you didn't use it. So?
What's irritating here is that the question was
completely off. The claim was not made that
Approval is an ideal election method, and it has
some obvious problems. People differ on how large
they loom, and it would be great to have more
public election experience to really know about
performance under actual conditions. Rather, the
claim was made that Approval would be an
improvement over Plurality, and that's not really
controversial, among those who know. I think even
Richie might admit this, if you catch him in a
corner with a lie detector and tell him you will
shoot him if he doesn't tell the truth. Or maybe
even without that, the man, after all, has to make himself look good.
Absolutely, it would be better if voters can rank
or rate all the candidates, should they so
choose. What Richie, again, isn't going to
mention is that a lot of voters will still bullet
vote. It's natural. The real question is what is
done with the voting information.
The needs of a party primary can be quite
different than those of a public election. In a
public election, if you win, you win. In a party
primary, if the wrong candidate wins the primary,
they lose the election. A method like IRV,
suffering from center squeeze, can easily miss
the party centrist. If it errs toward the overall
political centrist (i.e., the left wing of the
Republican Party), it might have a better chance
of winning, but it will have some difficulty
motivating the party as a whole. If it errs
toward the other edge, the lunatic right, it
might have some delerious happy rightists, but it
is likely to lose the election, wasting everyone's time and energy.
My view is that parties should not select
candidates through primary elections, though they
might well have primary polls, and these polls
might be used, through asset techniques, to elect
a thoroughly representative party convention.
That convention can consider evidence, openly and
privately, and can make political decisions,
i.e., it can consider not only what is popular
within the party, but what is likely to win
overall, which are not necessarily the same.
Probably in a two-party system like the U.S. the
optimal candidate is in the wing of the party
closer to the other major party. Usually.
>All I can say is, I love this page I created to respond to Richie:
>http://www.electology.org/fact-check
Great, Clay. Richie is an idiot, you'd think he'd
know this about approval voting by now, you'd
think he'd be *familiar*. But he was tweeting,
and wanted to crow, immediately. IRV has produced
results like that, with no excuse. It really
would have meant nothing. Voters may not add
enough approvals to raise the percentages much,
expecially where there are no clear frontrunners.
Voters will tend, no matter what the method is,
to vote for their favorite and leave it at that.
Asset takes this problem, if it's a problem, and
makes lemonade. Asset actually works best when
voters simply vote for their favorite candidate
*bar none*. If the implentation is a good one,
they can write that name in. Anyone, the person
they most trust who is willing to serve as a
public elector. And than all kinds of fantastic
things, that we may have immediately rejected as impossible, become possible.
*We know how to do face-to-face, highly
democratic process. The element of live
participation takes an otherwise primitve method,
plurality (but with a majority requirement) and
turns it into a spectacular performer. It can be
improved, but .... we need to recognize that we
know how to do it. Now, what can we learn from
that? Condorcet? No problem. Range? The method
doesn't look like range, but functions far more
like it because of how people interact. And an
assembly can do range polling, for starters. And on and on.