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	Benson	2008-09-06 , 06:31
	Posts: 4,930 \| Thanked: 2,272 times \| Joined on Oct 2007	#34

Please describe what you believe he's wrong about. He's not wrong very often, and when he is he likes to correct the site immediately.

http://math.temple.edu/~wds/homepage/electoral.txt

3. The electoral vote system does NOT somehow restore the balance of power between big and small states, allowing the small
states to have more say. (That goal IS accomplished by
giving each state 2 senators, regardless of its size.)
That is because the number of electoral votes
a state has, which is the same as the number of seats it
has in the House, is (up to roundoff) proportional to its population. Thus this system simply introduces more noise
and more risk of unjudgeable cliffhanger elections, with no compensating benefit.

The number of electors allocated to a state is not the same as the number of representatives in the House; from the U.S. Constitution, Article II, Section 1:

Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.

I'm actually receptive to the notion of abolishing the electoral college, because the states as entities (i.e. governments) no longer play a role in the selection of the Senators or Electors; giving the additional representation of the state to the people of that state, regardless of their number, seems useless and unfair. (The discretization effects are ugly, too; if it is to be preserved, doubling or tripling the number of electors and using proportional allocation would be much better.) But arguing that it does not give less populous states more influence (Smith), or that this influence never served a purpose (electionmethods.org, referenced earlier), rubs me the wrong way.

Yes, models are imperfect. But Smith used 720 different combinations of the 5 fundamental parameters in his simulations, and then got the average utility efficiency for hundreds of thousands of elections in each of those combinations. Score Voting won in all of them. And by a pretty good measure. It his hard to conceive of any obvious flaws in his simulations, whose correction could possibly make up the difference. Therefore I see those figures as being extremely reliable.

I agree it seems reliable, but the impossibility of experimental validation leaves me short on dogmatism, in a discussion; that's all.

Sure. Some people will think your simulation should model a society of 10% strategic voters and the rest expressive. Other people will believe that at least 60% of voters are strategic. So you just do simulations covering all of those values. If Score Voting wins under some models, but fails in other models, then you have the very tricky task of figuring out which of those models were closest to reality.

That's not the sort of difference I meant; I'm thinking more of those who would argue that:

Certain people "count less" than others.
Certain political trends are intrinsically bad (/good) and to be avoided (/mandated), even though they cause no harm (/benefit) to anyone.
and a number of similar bases for choosing an inherently harmful result.

Essentially, upon coming up with specifics, I'm realizing I was wrong; these do represent deviations from something that may reasonably be termed democracy -- i.e., Bayesian regret can be claimed as a uniquely democratic figure-of-merit.

(Which leaves the question of whether this "democracy" is the best principle, but there's always an axiom somewhere, and always someone who will dispute it.

)

Yes. You can more or less prove that.
http://rangevoting.org/UtilFoundns.html

The most compelling "proof" of it (aside from the fact that most every other social utility function can be disproved via reductio ad absurdum) is Harsanyi's observation that a rational voter should want the system that maximizes his expected utility (do not confuse that with expected value, since utility and money are not linearly related).

Close, indeed; but isn't that only valid as long as the rational voter doesn't know where the result falls, or equivalently, where he falls? (i.e., a non-pre-established or a highly dynamic political environment.) Still, I'll go with your label 'academic'; even if only rational and ignorant voters are guaranteed to prefer it, that's a strong argument for it as the best system if anything close to democratic ideals are accepted.

Here's a voting method that employs revealed preference:
http://rangevoting.org/CTT.html

I like that one, too, though it does scale... interestingly. I'm with fpp; I do learn fascinating stuff every time I get in an election discussion.

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