Approval Voting passes in Fargo, North Dakota.
While I appreciate all the work done to implement what should have been a no-brainer long ago, there were some myths and possible misrepresentations stated or promulgated in the campaign.
Approval Voting, in essence is simply counting all the votes, instead of discarding "overvotes." It is simpler, in fact, than ordinary first-past-the-post, vote for one. Here are stories on this historic action. It's not quite as historic as represented, I'll get to that.
This city just approved a new election system never tried before in America
Fargo just switched to an “approval voting” system, which allows you to mark all the candidates on the ballot that you like.
There were two changes, actually: first, and most important, the rules ended the practice of disregarding ballots with more than the number of votes on them than officers to be elected in a single poll. This never actually made any sense, and has historically caused damage (such as the Florida U.S. Presidential election in Florida in 2000.) Thus the new practice was to Count All the Votes. Fairly simple, in fact, and "the one with the most votes wins (or plural, "ones") is simply standard.
However, voting is not a sentiment, and there has never been a requirement that voters feel a certain way, and how they feel cannot be determined from the vote. "Approve" can either be understood as a feeling, or as an action, and the action is voting, and since that's what's being described, then, the instruction is "Vote for all the candidates you choose to vote for."
Which is a tad redundant. Older instructions would have been something like "Vote for as many candidates you as you choose to support." More sophisticated instructions, in a runoff system that requires a majority (which would be the next useful reform, as they discover that approval voting may not be enough to generate majority approvals), might say "Vote for all candidates you prefer to holding a runoff election."
It is entirely up to voters, however, to decide how to vote, and we know from experience that under most conditions, even when voting for more than one is possible, voters will still "bullet vote," at least in a primary election.
That this election method has "never been tried before in America" is misleading. First of all, I'm not aware of a simple Approval system ever having been used in a governmental election, but Approval Voting certainly has been used in America. Wikipedia.
Notice that the IEEE rescinded Approval Voting because "few of our members were using it and it was felt that it was no longer needed." This betrays the history. Approval was implemented because the Board feared that a dissident candidate would cause vote-splitting, so they used Approval to prevent that. But the method could then have allowed dissidents to run again. In Approval Voting, it is normal for most to vote for one, for a number of reasons. It is not a failure of the system. "No longer needed" was, in context, admitting that the voting system was changed for political reasons, not because it was more democratic (which it was and is). The Board was manipulating the election process to preserve the status quo.
So it's important to understand this. There is substantial experience with Approval Voting or the like of it in real elections, and "bullet voting," voting just for one, which can then cause majority failure, is common. However, when an election has a spoiler, and is considered important, we also know that voters will add approvals, and there is another method, used widely and, in a few applications, for years, Bucklin Voting.
Bucklin is a ranked voting system, and generally had three ranks. It was amalgamated, however, by adding approvals if no candidate found a majority in the first rank; then if no candidate found a majority in the second rank, then the third rank was added in. So if enough voters added approvals, there could be a majority result.
Bucklin worked, and it is quite arguable that, historically, Bucklin was taken down precisely because it worked quite well. Bucklin allowed third-party candidates to win, and the two major parties, no surprise, didn't like that. Another voting reform that makes a great deal of sense, used in New York, Fusion Voting, Again, the system works to allow third parties to flourish without spoiling elections (which kills them when, by voting for a third party candidate, voters cause the least-preferred major party candidate to be elected). Fusion Voting has been killed by ... no surprise! The major parties! Do not count on a political party to support improved democratic procedures if they might result in a sharing of power. History has shown, again and again, that "democratic parties" are, too often, not.
Overall, the Box article is pretty good, it attempts to be balanced. It covers the Lizard v. Wizard election. But it does not point out that Instant Runoff Voting (or Ranked Choice Voting, same thing) would probably also have elected the Lizard instead of the more widely-acceptable candidate, Roemer. There are better and simpler reforms with better performance. If one wants a majority result, and in spite of deceptive claims in voter information pamphets, IRV often fails to create a genuine majority of the votes, but only gets a majority by disregarding ballots with exhausted votes. I.e., IRV commonly elects a candidate whom most of the voters voted *against*, simply because they did not agree on a winner. I've pointed out that if one could call this result, with only a plurality of the votes cast, a "majority," one could also call the result "unanimous" simply by taking the eliminations one step further.
As for approval voting, some people worry that it might be frustrating or unclear for voters. “Approval voting just says, ‘I’m okay with all these people,’” Drutman says, “but it doesn’t allow you to say that you’d like one more than the rest.” It’s not clear how much voters will make use of their opportunity to vote for more than one candidate.
This is misleading. Approval does allow that. Simply vote for that one. Rather, Count All the Votes is a basic principle that improves the voting system at very simple cost, providing the voter with more flexibility without doing harm. If we want even more flexibility, there are then ranked or rating systems. The ranked Bucklin system worked, and certainly allows and uses first preference, first. So the voters have "said" whom they prefer. Bucklin is far easier to count than the IRV system that Drutman prefers. It's expensive, not precinct summable. Any error in early counting can cause all the later counts to be obsolete. IRV was known as a terrible system in the 19th century, i.e., Single Transferable Vote as used for single-winner elections. It has huge flaws, known well to voting systems analysts. And then IRV supporters will claim that "no voting system is perfect." Which is, gain, misleading. There are systems that, in theory, approach perfection. And there is a system that was first proposed as a tweak on STV, now called Asset Voting, which is so far advanced as a democratic system that it's insane it has never been used for a political election. And that could well be why it has never been used. It would revolutionize the system, probably making massive fundraising unnecessary and political parties unnecessary as well.
It is popular to give democracy lip service, but do we actually trust the people?
Hence I have recommended that advanced voting systems be tried first in NGOs, so that people gain a sense of how they work.... But Fargo is going to demonstrate Approval, which is definitely progress. Some outcomes are relatively predictable, however.
All of the Above? The Ancient Voting Method One City Might Adopt
Advocates say "approval voting," which has never been used in electoral politics, offers voters more flexibility.
They miss that Bucklin was ranked Approval Voting, and was quite popular for a time. They do recognize that Approval is ancient. It's a puzzle to me why the rules restricting voters to only voting for one candidate ever were created. As long as systems require a true majority (which can only be done through allowing the possibility of more than one ballot), there is little harm in allowing one to have a greater majority than another, but if there really is concern about that -- a runoff!
. . . in terms of electoral politics in the United States, it would be something entirely new.
"It hasn't been used in any actual governing system since at least World War I," says Mark L. Johnson, a political scientist at Minnesota State Community and Technical College.It is so freakin' hard to find good help. . . . Bucklin ballots, when they did not find a majority in the first rank, collapsed to approval ballots, so approval has been used, and it was last used up into the 1940s, for primary elections.
Its novelty is not the problem, Johnson says. When approval voting is used, most people end up worrying that their top choice could lose since votes are spread thin among many candidates. The vast majority of voters at Dartmouth and elsewhere have ended up voting for a single candidate even though they have the option of voting for several.\"Most people end up worrying." He made that up. Practically nobody worries about this. The comment about the "vast majority of voters" is true, though "vast" is probably an exaggeration. Most people vote for their favorite, it's that simple. It is what they are accustomed to, and it is strategically the easiest. "Spread thin" is crazy. Approval votes count fully as a single vote for each candidate voted for and thus are completely effective in pairwise elections against all unapproved candidates. If you don't want to support a candidate, don't vote for them! To completely create voting freedom requires more sophisticated methods, but they can still be pretty simple, unlike the complex-to-canvass IRV system, with its foibles that voters won't expect -- you must still consider strategic issues, but most voters will not realize this.
What you cannot do with a simple approval ballot is approve a candidate for election and maintain an expressed preference for your favorite. TANSTAAFL. If you want to be able to do that, you want something like Bucklin, which did this. In theory, Score voting is better, and my opinion is that any system is improved by holding real runoffs when the outcome is questionable. If a majority of voters have not explicitly approved a winner for election, the outcome is questionable and the election should be repeated. There are then various ways to do that, and probably the best ways have never been tried.
But the basic principle of approval voting, Count All the Votes, should have been done long ago. It does no harm, and even Instant Runoff Voting would be improved, or at least not harmed, if multiple votes at a rank were simply counted, instead of being rejected (as they are). Pure ranked ballots assume that there is no equal ranking, but real people may actually rank equally, having no significant preference.
Thus Fargo has begun with the simplest of all voting reforms, with practically no implementation cost. If this isn't enough, then the next reform could be considered. The one with the most experience behind it is Bucklin.
The method also doesn't solve the underlying issues Fargo wants to address.
The referendum was recommended by a task force that had been convened to deal with issues in recent local elections, namely commissioners being elected by small pluralities from big fields. Approval voting would do nothing to give winning candidates a larger mandate since they will be competing for more votes, even if there are the same number of voters casting ballots.This is not entirely incorrect. Count All the Votes does not solve every problem. It may, however, reduce the problem at no cost. This "competing for more votes" makes no sense. The additional votes cannot be distinguished from first-preference votes, so getting more votes will certainly provide more "mandate." However, if one wants fuller representation, there are deeper reforms needed. Fargo has implemented for multi-winner elections, "Approval at large," which over-represents majorities.
The city would be better off if it extended early voting or encouraged absentee voting, says Commissioner Tony Gehrig.
"Approval voting does not fix the problem of voter turnout," he says. "It actually makes it more confusing."
Makes what more confusing? How does allowing voters to vote for more than one *if they choose* has what effect on voter turnout. Do voters not vote because it's "confusing"? Early voting may or may not be an improvement, because campainging continues. Absentee voting the same. There is a possible voting reform that trumps all these ideas, Asset Voting, but I'm not holding my breath for it. Asset was invented to solve the problem faced by Single Transferable Vote, that it required more knowledge of the field than most voters possessed. (Hence when STV has actually been implemented, it is often associated with "party list," complicated issue. One step at a time!)
Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) proposed that instead of ballots being exhausted if they have no lower ranked votes, the candidate in first position would get the vote to "spend" as the candidate saw fit. Thus the voter is represented in the final result. The final result is then negotiated. Because we think of candidates as trying to get elected, we don't expect them to cooperate! But ... what if anyone could register as a "candidate."? Candidates would really become "electors," or public voters, and the collection of electors would *fully represent* the electorate, and there has only been one election in history, to my knowledge, run by this system, and it elected a three person steering committee with five candidates and 17 voters, and the result when the smoke cleared, was a unanimously approved election, where every voter was represented. This actually matched theory.
So the first, and simplest reform: Count All the Votes.
Then comes: Make Every Vote Count.
No wasted votes. It's possible. But back to Fargo and the arguments.
Gehrig and other critics like to point out that Reform Fargo has received the bulk of its funding from out-of-state sources that they say want to use Fargo as a petri dish for the latest voting experiment. There is no organized opposition campaign.The status quo, even though obviously and blatantly defective and undemocratic, will come up with arguments to defend itself. This "experiment" has been tried, it is more of a known system than represented. Counting All the Votes is not going to cause the sky to fall, and the "out of state sources" are simply interested in voting system reform, in general. It appears that the reform proposal was local and then the Center for Election Science provided some expense funding.
They did not argue what, to my mind, is the simplest argument: counting all the votes is simply more fair, and cannot hurt. It will either improve results, or it will not harm them. If it has been over-sold, if people discover that it did not cure dandruff, there could be a backlash. But the way forward would then be to adopt proportional representation systems or, for single-winner elections, runoff voting, still keeping Approval. Allowing equal ranking improves or does not harm all voting systems.
And it allows the voters to fix certain problems, if they choose.
Approval voting measure to appear on Fargo ballots in November
So wanting to count all the votes is "socialist"? This guy is actually a Fargo City Comissioner. It is possible that he would not win if Approval is allowed. Even more possible that his political future would be toast if Bucklin were used. Bucklin, in the first election performed with the method, actually did elect a Socialist, and from the election results, it was clearly fair. The Socialist did not nationalize the banks, he was simply a mayor, apparently a decent one. Gehrign was correct, those people had "nothing to do with [the Fargo] community. They were people interested in election science, who have realized that we have massive problems with election methods, and that something can be done about it. But they are not socialists (or if they are, they have done a great job of concealing it, and do socialists want to destroy our democratic system by allowing more fairness in voting?). So this was fake news, promoted by an elected official as if fact, and the reporter did not question it. So hard to find good help!(The first story I reported above also quoted Gehrig, but left out the "socialist" bit.)
Finally, the Reform Fargo web site.
They kept it very simple. There is one argument they did not use, and I'm not sure why. Approval Voting is simply fixing an old problem, that ballots containing votes for more than one candidate in a race were disregarded, the votes did not count. While I have seen claims that this would violate "one person, one vote," that maxim is really about equal voting power, not about casting what could be called "alternate votes." Count All the Votes is simply restoring fairness, and it's a simple slogan to understand. Count All the Votes does not unfairly prevent voters from equally supporting more than one candidate, for prohibiting multiple votes gives no extra voting power to the voter, in that in the final result, either no vote actually counts to create a winner, or one vote only, or, if, say, the voter has approved of two, and those are the top two, the voter has effectively abstained from that choice, while contributing to the majority of both, if both obtain a majority.
To distinguish the favorite from "also approved" takes a more sophisticated ballot. It can be done, that was Bucklin. Bucklin also did not allow multiple approvals in the ranks, except for the lowest rank. But allowing multiple approvals in first rank would, again, simplify voter choices, in some cases, slightly. I cannot see the harm in allowing multiple votes in any single-winner system. I can imagine some multiwinner systems where it could hurt. In systems were every vote counts, like asset voting, designed for proporational representation, voting for more than one could require fractionation, since all votes may end up creating winners (with very few exceptions). But that is unusual in election systems, I don't know of any actual examples other than Asset.
Looks to me like the voters of Fargo were not impressed by Gehrig's arguments.
I was about to put this to bed but decided to look at the City Commission. So I watched Tony Gehrig's statement on the Approval Voting initiative. It's a video! And, yes, "the socialists." He expected that the voters would toss Approval in the trash. They didn't, the vote was overwhelming.
No comments:
Post a Comment