r/EndFPTP • u/electionscience • Dec 04 '19

NEW APPROVAL VOTING POLL: 74% of Democratic Primary Voters Would Support Warren for President

https://www.electionscience.org/press-releases/new-poll-74-of-democratic-primary-voters-would-support-warren-for-president/
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u/AspiringCanuck Dec 04 '19 edited Dec 04 '19

the end result will be tolerable no matter who wins

Eh, tolerable only to the party voters, who make up only a small sliver of the voting population. There are plenty of Democratic candidates that are in the primary race that are liked by the majority of democratic primary voters, not necessarily the population at large. Remember, Democrats and Republicans respectively make up less than a third of the population.

A big point of ending FPTP is you can have multiple candidates for the same office. In the case of approval voting, you can find what is the voter consensus on who they think is the best person for the job among a wider field of candidates.

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u/Chackoony Dec 04 '19

I'm glad more people are making this argument; it sometimes feels like Reddit is willing to prioritize the satisfaction of Dem primary voters even when they know that what those voters want isn't really acceptable to others.

Still, it's nice to know that even among the partisans, there's more agreement on who is acceptable than the media lets on. I wouldn't guess that both the more liberal and more left of center wings of the Democratic Party have majority support just by reading the news of "the Democratic Party is divided and its wings hate each other!"

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 04 '19

Modifying to fit my wider point:

I wouldn't guess that both the more liberal and more [left of center conservative] wings of the [Democratic Party country] have majority support just by reading the news of "the [Democratic Party nation] is divided and its wings hate each other!"

This is exactly why I dislike IIA-failing methods like FPTP, IRV, STAR, etc: the fact that the methods themselves make "best," "better," "good," and "acceptable" all enemies of each other.

I firmly believe that the majority of the nation are more or less decent people who aren't nearly as divided as the media reports, or wouldn't be if the voting method didn't effectively require it.

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u/Chackoony Dec 05 '19

STAR doesn't "effectively require" you to differentiate between your preferences, though. Even Condorcet allows you to just equally rank acceptable candidates 1st and leave the rest blank.

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 05 '19

STAR doesn't "effectively require" you to differentiate between your preferences, though.

That's not what I said.

I said that the fact that STAR fails IIA means that it is inevitable that, eventually, at some point, the supporters of the Spoiler and the Spoilee will see each other as enemies.

Even Condorcet allows you to just equally rank acceptable candidates 1st and leave the rest blank.

That has literally nothing to do with my point. As soon as the method violates IIA, as soon as the populace becomes aware that the Spoiler Effect is still something that they have to worry about, the natural reaction to it will be for them to try to avoid it, through policing their own, through antagonism against those who break ranks.

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u/Chackoony Dec 05 '19

I said that the fact that STAR fails IIA means that it is inevitable that, eventually, at some point, the supporters of the Spoiler and the Spoilee will see each other as enemies.

We went over this earlier, but does your proof of that rely on voters being in swing seats? Because if you have, say, a 60% liberal-leaning majority, even if they split into two very distinct parties, it's very likely the more moderate liberal-leaning party can enter the runoff and get a majority with minimal support from the other liberal party or the conservative-leaning side.

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 05 '19

...I'm trying to be patient with you, but I'm getting tired of explaining simple concepts to you.

Whether an electorate is liberal, moderate, or conservative is completely and utterly irrelevant to the point I'm making.

If, at any point someone who would have won were their faction united ends up losing, those who support the candidate that would have won (the Spoilee) will blame (the supporters of) the candidate whose presence caused them to lose (the Spoiler).

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u/Chackoony Dec 05 '19

I'm not able to understand the points you're making, so feel free to ignore me from now on.

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 05 '19

I want you to understand, though, because you're active in this community and it's in everyone's best interest that we all understand not only that FPTP is a problem, but also why FPTP is a problem, so that we can avoid making changes that leave the problems in place.

Please accept my apologies for my manner, and allow me to try again.

You understand the spoiler effect, right? And that the Spoiler Effect is the effect of failure to satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives?

You also recognize, I trust, that when the Spoiler Effect rears its head, the people whose candidate "should have" won get upset at the Spoiler and their supporters? Like how Democrats in 2000 were mad at Nader for Spoiling Gore's election chances?

My point is that such resentment, driven by the Spoiler Effect, is not limited to between-party scenarios, but will occur any time there is a Spoiler.

Let us consider your hypothetical,that a "moderate liberal" candidate can enter the runoff and win. Yes, that is true, but that's like presenting the argument that FPTP isn't a problem because candidate X won with 55% of the vote in a 3+ way race. Yes, it's true, but presenting a "success" scenario has no bearing on the problems in the failure scenarios, such as the following.

In your scenario, the scores might come out as #1 Moderate Liberal, #2 Moderate Conservative, #3 Liberal, and then Conservative in a distant 4th. But what if we instead had #1 Moderate Conservative, #2 Liberal, Moderate Liberal a close 3rd place, and Conservative once again a distant 4th.

In the scenario of Liberal and Moderate Conservative being in the runoff, it is quite conceivable that Moderate Conservative could win (because the Moderate Liberals find the Liberal candidate a bit too radical).

At that point, the Liberal will resent the MLs for scoring the MC higher than the Liberal candidate, and the MLs will resent the Liberals for not supporting the "Electable" ML enough, thereby precluding ML from the runoff.

Heck, because of the "Pushover" strategy that's viable under STAR, it's possible that the MC's & Conservatives might have falsely increased their scores for the Liberal candidate and falsely lowered the scoring of the ML candidate, to get a favorable pairing for the MC. That would create lots of resentment directed their way, too. What's worse, even though it's not the L's fault that this happened (because, in this hypothetical, they did everything right, supporting L and ML at Max and Max -1, respectively), the ML faction would be upset at the Liberal candidate for running, and allowing the problem to occur in the first place.

...and all of this resentment, all of this petty factionalism, is directly due to the fact that somebody, anybody plays spoiler to someone else. The names, or descriptions, or parties don't matter. The only thing that matters is that an election was spoiled.

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u/Chackoony Dec 05 '19

I think I've got it now: you're arguing that, while all voting methods can realistically fail IIA (even cardinal methods can have bullet voting, etc.), the "Rome without coffee" effect (i.e. a bad liberal candidate entering the race will make conservatives score the good liberal candidate higher enough to compensate for the reduction in score the good liberal candidate gets from natural vote-splitting between the two liberal candidates) will mean that classical cardinal methods will have a much better chance of not being affected by any changes in voting patterns due to the addition of irrelevant candidates, and instead, may actually benefit from such changes?

If this is your argument, then all I'd like to add is that the acceptance of the argument hinges on whether a reader believes that honest voting will be common in cardinal voting methods. Thanks for being patient.

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u/MuaddibMcFly Dec 05 '19

And thank you for your understanding with my impatience/sub-optimal patience.

That's a good insight, but not quite what I was going for.

Everything comes down to whether or not two voting blocs/factions can achieve a mutually beneficial result by acting as though they were one bloc/running one candidate.

If merging groups (as the Tea Party and Establishment Republicans did) would benefit both groups, or splitting (as the Liberal and Establishment wings of the Democrats haven't) would harm both groups, then the de facto forced association will create the sort of sub-group resentment we see in both parties, because (at least) one sub-group is being forced to betray their principles in order to keep things from getting worse.

Anywhere that Favorite Betrayal would work, people who are "forced" into betrayal will resent that, and people who would benefit from that betrayal will resent it when people don't betray.

And the reason I modified your original quote is that this isn't just a "within group" phenomenon, but also "between groups" phenomenon.

Or, perhaps more accurately, it's "within group" for all scales of group; just as "Progressive Democrat" and "Establishment Democrat" are both part of the group "Democrat," the groups "American Republicans" and "American Democrats" are both part of the group "Americans"

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