/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>>469877
I have a direct link if you want to watch: https://securestream7.champds.com/hlssstc/AtlantaGALIVE/AtlantaGALIVE.m3u8?dt=1686010947360

This is playable in VLC.

https://www.atlantaga.gov/government/channel-26/watch-channel-26-live

The page.

>>469877

Missed the stream, but thanks so much for posting. You gonna make this regular, friend?

I did manage to catch Chase's speech. Was kinda corny, he does some odd pandering, but I'm still proud of him. We worked together at my first job years ago, it's nice to see him doing things even if I disagree with most of the capital L shit, he's at least based on stuff like this. Also seeing him trigger a runoff in Warnock v. Walker, and use the spotlight to advocate for ranked choice voting while DNC/GOP shiulls seethed was great.

>>469880
>and use the spotlight to advocate for ranked choice voting while DNC/GOP shiulls seethed was great.
Is it though? Considering instant runoff voting ("ranked choice voting") is a garbage alternative voting method that has never demonstrated its claimed ability to make more than two options competitive in elections despite considerable real-world use?

>>469881
Do you have that graph with sortition (randomly selected statistically representative sample group) voting

>>469881
>Is it though?

Yes, actually.

>Considering instant runoff voting ("ranked choice voting") is a garbage alternative voting method

What exactly is garbage about it?
I see literally no problem. I don't bother voting anymore, but back when I did, I would have appreciated it. It's a better system, because it destroys the idea of a "wasted vote."

And what do you mean, precisely, when you say it's "never demonstrated its claimed ability to make more than two options competitive"? What is the considerable real world use? Are there countries the size of mine which use it? How much use has it had, and what, in actuality, have been the results? Were there more votes for politicians outside of a party binary or not? There are plenty of places with way less binary political party systems than the US currently has, are any of them using it?

I'd prefer it to the current system we have here in the US - why wouldn't I?

>>469883
Not that anon, but look at the graph, the lower-end in group satisfaction for Runoff voting is in the same range as Plurality voting.

From the point of view of "electoral pessimism"

-The ruling class will always manipulate any system to the maximum of their advantage.
-Ruling class advantage and group satisfaction are inverse proportional.
-They would be able to push Runoff voting towards the same level of group (dis)satisfaction as exists now with Plurality voting.

The worst case scenario is that Runoff voting only decreases simplicity but does not increases group satisfaction.

If you go by the logic of this graph: Borda count, Score voting, and Approval voting have the better worst case scenario and therefor the electoral pessimist would choose one of those.

>>469882
Sortition achieves entirely different goals to voting methods, so it's difficult to compare it with common metrics used to analyze voting methods. These "voter regret" simulations place candidates on idealized political spectra and then measure the distance from candidate to voter along those spectra, attempting to gauge how closely and how often a voting method selects the candidate closest to the sum of voters. With simple statistical assumptions, however, we would expect that an average sampling of representatives with sortition would sum the politics of its sample towards the mean of an imaginary population-wide political spectrum. Keep in mind that elections only select from a stratum of society with the means to run for office in the first place (that's why ancient democrats considered all elections fundamentally oligarchic in nature)–before the mechanics of any voting method come into play to select the winners. Therefore we would expect sortition to select more representative politics from the population than even the best voting methods like Score and STAR Voting.

>>469883
>it destroys the idea of a "wasted vote."
It doesn't quite accomplish that, sadly. That's a piece of idealized propaganda commonly pushed by advocates like FairVote, but in reality IRV manifests the phenomenon of vote splitting similarly to plurality voting. In fact, is it often not safe for a voter to order candidates sincerely with IRV, especially when the underdog candidate actually has a chance of winning. Just like with plurality voting, the presence of more than two competitive options forces the voter into a situation where they have to abandon their preferred option to protect the lesser-evil option from losing. Here's a good video illustrating why this happens. It turns out in fact that this scenario arise so often that it's probably the main reason that every country and municipality that has used IRV for single-winner elections has remained locked in a system of two-party domination in its representative bodies. This includes use in Ireland, Malta, Fiji, and Australia. The example of Australia is especially illustrative because Australia has one chamber of legislature (their Senate) that uses the multi-winner proportional variant of IRV, single transferable vote, that actually does result in broad multi-party representation. Yet in spite of real third party representation in order parts of government which should nurture the strength and longevity of third parties, the Australian House which has used IRV for over 100 years has remained dominated by two parties for nearly the entirety of that time. In fact in every Australian House election the candidates and parties always send out these elaborate how-to-vote cards instructing their supports on the best way to vote tactically.

>I'd prefer it to the current system we have here in the US - why wouldn't I?
To put it bluntly, IRV basically functions as the Trojan Horse of Alternative Voting Methods. It's an overly complicated voting method which doesn't get third parties elected in practice while simultaneously bringing new pathologies of its own that can sometimes upset voters enough that they repeal it and return to the even worse plurality voting. The 2009 Burlington, Vermont mayoral election is a good case study. Meanwhile the well has been poisoned ("We tried alternative voting methods, they don't work!") and people cynically from on from the idea of effective reform without trying out far superior alternatives like Approval, Score, and STAR voting.

>>469884
Yes, this is a decent analysis of that graph. One thing to note is that the boundaries on the right side of the bars represent how close a voting method gets to choosing the optimal outcome when voters are completely sincere, while the left boundaries for each method are simulations of highly tactical voting. Note how the outcomes for IRV at its most tactical basically reproduce the same outcomes as plurality voting; this is another way to understand why IRV reproduces the same two-party domination in representative bodies as plurality voting. We should be especially wary of outcomes when voters are voting in their most tactical manner, because this is what the powerful and influential would most benefit from and like to see happen.

>>469886
Interesting, so we need a another axis on the graph that displays the actual "representative depth" of the different democracy systems to be able to make a meaningful comparisons between sortition and various electoral schemes.

>>469892
Actually, you might be able to apply this concept of distance-based voter-candidate "utility" in comparisons between voting methods and sortition after all. You would not actually need another axis, the issue is rather that voting systems analysis doesn't normally take into consideration the fact that the pool of candidates in an election is itself a biased sampling of the politics of the population at large. If you were to visualize this political space where every candidate and voter can be placed on an axis or set of axes (which is itself idealized for the purpose of running simulations; there's plenty of politics that don't really exist on a spectrum of positions), the area occupied by the candidates who actually run for office is going to be smaller than the area occupied by the whole population. A real election might look something like this, where the three candidates running reside in an area skewed away from the population center. Sortition would naturally produce governing politics near the population center (after averaging through a large enough representative body) because it sidesteps all the issues with sampling bias that arise from elections and voting methods.

>>469884
>The worst case scenario is that Runoff voting only decreases simplicity but does not increases group satisfaction.

The increase in "complexity" doesn't seem that significant to me, though - I mean, it's not a difficult concept to understand. How dumb are voters supposed to be?

>If you go by the logic of this graph: Borda count, Score voting, and Approval voting have the better worst case scenario and therefor the electoral pessimist would choose one of those.

What are those, though?

I looked up Borda count just now, and it sounds almost the same as instant runoff, like it sounds like just "ranked choice, but with assigned number values." Score voting appears to literally just be another approach to ranked choice, but interestingly also seems to be the most complex.

Except for approval voting, these all just appear to be other forms of ranked choice. This seems like splitting hairs, frankly, especially when I said "ranked choice" and not "instant runoff" specifically.

>>469887

Ok, they should still support ranked choice, but they should put it into a specific different method of ranked choice then.

>>469896
> they should still support ranked choice, but they should put it into a specific different method of ranked choice then.
There are two broad classes of voting methods: those that involve ranking the options on a ballot (e.g., IRV, Borda Count, Condorcet methods) and those that involve rating each option independently (e.g., Approval, Score, STAR voting). The crucial difference is that rating-based voting methods allow one to give multiple options the same score if they desire. While there some ranking-based voting methods such as Tideman Ranked Pairs ("Rp" in this image) that produce very impressive results, frankly rating-based voting methods tend to produce better results than all but the most complicated ranked-choice voting methods.

One other form of politics that's usually ignored in voting method analysis is it's assumed that the politics an electoral candidate claims to support to an informed voter are the same politics they will fight for once in office. You may have the best possible voting method that chooses the optimal candidate considering voter preferences, but that doesn't count for much if they just end up betraying all their voters once in office anyway. Class and institutional pressures on governance decision making are going to differ between elections and sortition because it's much harder to corrupt candidates chosen at random than ones that have to spend money to win elections.

>>469896
>This seems like splitting hairs, frankly, especially when I said "ranked choice" and not "instant runoff" specifically.
The sad reality is that every advocate who throws around the nebulous "ranked choice voting" these days is in practice referring to IRV. FairVote started pushing this terminology because they like to conflate the single-winner instant runoff voting with its multi-winner variant, single-transferable voting–thinking that they're pulling off some kind of epic swindle to get proportional representation. Unfortunately if IRV fails to get third parties elected then you haven't built any of the power needed to obtain the substantially bigger and more difficult reform of proportional representation. It's not a clever swindle, it's a shitty motte-and-bailey fallacy that confuses people who don't know anything about the issue and wastes the time of everyone else who has to deconstruct it every time they want a serious discussion about alternative voting methods.

>Score voting appears to literally just be another approach to ranked choice, but interestingly also seems to be the most complex.
IRV goes through a complicated step-wise algorithm to determine its final winner that grows non-linearly in computational complexity the more candidates you have in an election. Borda count, approval voting, and score voting in contrast all use the same simple math to get their winners: you simply sum up the numbers and the highest number wins. The difference between them is not in how a winner is determined, but what sort of information a voter is allowed to express on their ballot.

>>469888
So we also need a method of evaluating what factors lead people towards honest vs tactical voting

>>469894
>distance-based voter-candidate "utility"
Sounds like this is the more generalized metric

>Sortition would naturally produce governing politics near the population
Sure but most people don't grasp statistical effects. Explaining why randomized statistically representative sampling is a really robust method, where all avenues for inserting bias have been beaten out, is really hard. Producing all those comparisons with electoral system might be necessary. I would even go as far as stating that we'd have to run an electoral and sortition system in parallel until we can prove by example that these statistical effects are real.

>>469896
>The increase in "complexity" doesn't seem that significant to me, though - I mean, it's not a difficult concept to understand. How dumb are voters supposed to be?
It's not about people being dumb it's about how much mental resources you require people to spend. If you can get good results with less brain juice, you leave more brain juice for other cognitive activities.

>Except for approval voting, these all just appear to be other forms of ranked choice. This seems like splitting hairs, frankly, especially when I said "ranked choice" and not "instant runoff" specifically.
Fair enough but consider that the main point was about focusing attention on having a bearable worst case scenario.

>>469897
Sure, corrupting a randomized selection process or the random subjects it picks, that will be very rare. Sortition probably makes it quite impossible to make corruption into a self-reproducing system.

That said it would not be hard to make election promises binding contracts. Enforcing contracts certainly is weaker than the structural anti-corruption tendencies in sortition. However it should be possible to improve the accountability for politicians upholding their election promises.

I guess if you have the option to implement a new political structure, go with sortition, but if you can't, apply as many bug-fixes as you can to the old one.

>>469902
>Explaining why randomized statistically representative sampling is a really robust method, where all avenues for inserting bias have been beaten out, is really hard.
Is it really, though? The ancient Greeks understood this at least two millennia before the Law of Large Numbers was proven mathematically.

>>469905
Not sure how to reply to this.
Ancient Greek was also one of the few instances of sortition democracy that we know off. If it was easy to spread this concept why wasn't it implemented more often ?