Comments on: Does Australia exist?

By: Ads

Ads — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 01:21:07 +0000

20 bucks!!??? A few months ago i got a fine for $150 in the mail for an election i didn’t even think i’d missed. But still, compulsory voting rules. When else would you get to see all the halls of our country? Be they church, school, scout, norwegian club or boy’s brigade?

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 04:08:18 +0000

lol, Errol! You couldn’t make it up if you tried, could you? How about “Although Charlize Theron has never actually been to this country, her childhood liking for Captain Kangaroo qualifies her as yet another Australian winner”.

By: Errol

Errol — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 03:28:58 +0000

It’s a well-known rule of Australian journalism that any creditable accomplishment by a New Zealander becomes attributable to Australia on the completion of one day’s Australian residence by said Kiwi. Residence? They don’t even have to be conceived there! http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,8842284%255E601,00.html “Australia may well lay claim to an acting Oscar, too, as Renee Zellweger, who won best supporting actress for her role in Cold Mountain, revealed afterward that her parents met in Sydney. Her father, Emil, was born in Switzerland but was sent to Australia by his family during World War II, and became a surf lifesaver in Cronulla. He met Zellweger’s mother, a Norwegian nurse, Kjellfrid, in Sydney and later followed her to Texas when she found a job there.”

By: Daniel Lam

Daniel Lam — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 01:11:53 +0000

But if D is ranked dead last by all voters, then the points awarded to A, B, and C under Borda will all go up by the same amount, namely the total number of voters. So the winner remains the same. On the other hand, an additional candidate D can change the winner without winning itself. For example, if all the A>B>C voters all changed to A>D>B>C while everyone else puts D last, A will become the Borda winner instead of B. So Borda doesn’t satisfy the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA). Saari proves that if the notion of IIA is modified to take into account the number of other candidates ranked between a given pair of candidates, rather than just the binary question of which one is preferred to the other, then Borda satisfies this modified IIA, together with all of Arrow’s other conditions.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 00:58:37 +0000

I retract the comment immediately above. An extra candidate of the type described will just add one to the Borda value of all votes for the others.

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 00:31:33 +0000

A big problem with Borda is that the addition of a fourth candidate, D, ranked last by all voters, will change the relative value of higher preference votes.

By: Daniel Lam

Daniel Lam — Tue, 02 Mar 2004 00:04:11 +0000

Donald Saari has a convincing (to me) argument for the Borda count, including an argument that even a unique Condercet winner should not necessarily be elected. He uses the 3-candidate example that Condercet himself exhibited: 30 votes A>B>C 10 votes B>C>A 10 votes C>A>B 1 vote C>B>A 29 votes B>A>C 1 vote A>C>B A is the unique Condercet winner, while B wins the Borda count. Now consider this subset of ballots: 10 votes A>B>C 10 votes B>C>A 10 votes C>A>B 1 vote C>B>A 1 vote B>A>C 1 vote A>C>B These ballots are completely symmetrical with respect to the three candidates and so clearly define a three-way tie: in a very natural sense the ballots in this subset "cancel out" each other, and what you are left with is 20 votes A>B>C 28 votes B>A>C So B should win, as the Borda count suggests. Saari proves some theorems that say, roughly, that the Borda count is the only system that always respects such natural cancellations among ballots defining ties.

By: rea

rea — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 23:09:12 +0000

“surely they must know that our PM is known throughout the contemporary world as The Man of Steel” Y’all elected Stalin Prime Minister?

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 22:44:39 +0000

Daniel, if the relationship between the rest of the world and Oz was the same as between Oz and NZ, Dasgupta and Maskin would have claimed the credit for the whole idea of the STV. It’s a well-known rule of Australian journalism that any creditable accomplishment by a New Zealander becomes attributable to Australia on the completion of one day’s Australian residence by said Kiwi. BTW, didn’t we do well at the Oscars?

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 21:13:29 +0000

Jack, to be implementable, Condorcet must be modified to give a winner in every case, and the comparison depends on which version you want to use. The main divergence between Condorcet and STV arises because to win in STV you have to avoid early elimination, which normally means that you need to have a significant number of first-preference votes. In a system with two large voting blocs, this tends to work against centrist candidates. Iin this respect STV is closer to plurality voting in its properties than is Condorcet. The merits or otherwise of this are debatable. Arguably, when STV is used in a constituency system, it will come closer to proportional representation than will Condorcet, which will generally over-represent centrists.

By: novalis

novalis — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 21:11:31 +0000

This site convinced me that STV is a poor method.

By: shooting_star

shooting_star — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 21:08:27 +0000

jack lecou: thanks for the comment on Condorcet methods. I’ve been wondering that myself. For more information on voting systems, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method IMO, STV is functionally the equivalent of the caucus system, without the hassle of showing up at an inconvenient time. But it takes away the only part of the caucus system that makes it fun, the art of persuading voters for losing candidates to shift their preferences to your alternative. The other aspect of alternative voting systems that nobody talks about is how to winnow down candidate lists to a number (5 or 6, say?) that is manageable for the voter. In Washington State, the whole open primary system is in question because individual parties refuse to honor the result of an open primary election, based on the right of free association. If the object is to preserve the best-choice centrist compromise candidate into the final election, some solution must be found that is palatable to both mainstream and alternative political parties.

By: Kieran Healy

Kieran Healy — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 20:47:55 +0000

Yeah, don’t forget Ireland. And of course we are notoriously stupid, so if the public choice people think STV is too complicated, and Irish people do not, well …

By: John Quiggin

John Quiggin — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 19:54:46 +0000

Keith is right. Not only do we share Ireland’s voting system (not sure who came first on this one), but we copied Ireland’s version of the VAT/GST, with fresh food exempted. And of course the only international football competition that matters is Australia v Ireland (mixture of Australian and Gaelic rules).

By: Sasha Volokh

Sasha Volokh — Mon, 01 Mar 2004 18:18:35 +0000

They’re smart guys, but they’re also high-powered theorists, so I’m surprised their paper even mentions that one system is used in America and another in France. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, just you shouldn’t expect Eric Maskin (whom I respect greatly—he was an economics prof of mine about five years ago) to be the one to tie his recommendations to the real world and know what goes on in what country.