Reading "Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections" by Warren D. Smith

[Jack Waugh]

@rob said in Why isn't anyone talking about the elephant in the room?:

@jack-waugh said in Why isn't anyone talking about the elephant in the room?:

vote splitting leads the voters to obey the money signal

This I don't get. Isn't that a pretty minor issue in terms of what candidates spend money on?

This has nothing to do with what candidates spend money on. It has to do with how much money the public thinks they have, that they can spend on their campaigns, no matter whether they ever spend it, and if they do, no matter on what they spend it. It's about the potential, not the execution.

Smith asks, given that it costs almost nothing for a candidate to publish a statement of positions on the issues, claimed qualifications, endorsements, etc. via the WWW, why do campaigns still cost billions? Why do incumbents spend half the time that they ought to be spending on public service, instead dialing for dollars? Can you answer that, @rob?

Smith points out that when a candidate enters a race, the newspapers are quick to say how big the candidate's war chest it. Can you explain why that is? Hint: papers like to publish what readers want to read.

Have you heard of the Prisoner's Dilemma? Do you think maybe something like the Prisoner's Dilemma applies to voters who face vote splitting in the electoral system they have to use? Hint 0: voters are prisoners. Hint 1: the Prisoner's Dilemma only talks about two prisoners. Think of extending it to more-count of prisoners than just two, where the optimal group outcome is thwarted if even a few defect. How much trust will you feel toward your fellow prisoners? Do you expect them to all adhere to the group benefit instead of what game theory says they will do?

He says this:

Instead, voters can, .... just score the good candidates high, not caring one whit about how much money they have ....

But wait, he says voters just "score the good candidates high." He completely ignores the fact that candidates still need to convince voters that they are "good", so there is still a need for money for advertising etc.

How much advertising do they need, to reach voters who want to know? One trusted website (maybe from a newspaper) would suffice. The cost of publication is about $10, and you need maybe $500 to pay a good staff for wordsmithing. I could be off by a factor of 2, but not a factor of 1e6, which is what you have to explain.

No method fixes that problem, it is simply a different problem.

The problem belongs to the voting system, and methods that defeat vote splitting solve it.

Bizarre little article.

I think the wording of it makes certain assumptions about his audience and he never bothered to craft it for a wide audience and at some point, maybe I can do that, or some could collaborate on it. @Sass is good at explaining things.

Anyway, final point, I think this community would make better progress if we tried harder not to be a place for people to vent about other random things they don't like about the way the world works.

The money problem belongs wholly to the choice of voting system.

Again, a major fault I find with the Smith article is that it promotes Score as the sole solution. Even the title of the article concentrates on Score. There are many alternatives that should resist splitting quite strongly.

Let me give another analogy. Suppose you are driving a car and I am in there with you and I want you to shut the throttle, but you are not obedient nor cooperative, and suppose I am really desperate about it. If I try to force you by pulling up on your gas-pedal foot with my hands, I am not going to prevail, because your leg muscles are stronger than my arm muscles. But if I can cut the throttle cable, you shall lose control of the throttle and it will shut by the spring. Now here's the analogy. My pulling up on your gas-pedal foot with my hands is like trying to restrict political money. Political money is like water. It goes over, under, and around obstacles placed in its way, as Jim Mueller of Wisconsin says. But cutting the throttle cable is like changing to a voting system that resists vote splitting. Such a voting system decouples money from having much effect on elections, as cutting the throttle cable decouples the gas pedal from the throttle. Sure, money will still have some effect because by and large, the public is at least somewhat gullible by advertising. But the major effect, the Prisoner's Dilemma that takes away all power from the public at large in the voting booth, will be defeated. Many of the people who describe their position as "left" say (I think they're quoting Emma Goldman) that if voting had an effect, the ruling class would outlaw it. But these "left" never address by what mechanism the public is denied power via voting. Smith has shown that mechanism.

[rob]

@jack-waugh said in Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections:

The money problem belongs wholly to the choice of voting system.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this. Voting systems are a much more specific thing.

Trying to make them into something they aren't is one of many reasons why the community has made so little progress. This sort of forum becomes a dumping ground for people to vent about everything they hate about the way the world works. Mixing these things together just makes for muddled thinking and distraction from the core issues.

The problem with the article isn't that Warren was aiming it at the wrong audience, unless you mean that he was aiming it at what we referred to at the time as the "range voting cult," which ate up anything pro-range even if based on the flimsiest of logic. (sorry for getting political, but it seemed very similar to the "stop the steal" and pro-ivermectin crowds have done more recently.... basically an impressive demonstration of acrobatic straw-grasping)

I don't doubt that better voting systems can have a positive impact on lots of problems. When people have good tools to help them reach consensus rather than spending their time bickering and tearing each other down, things move forward and get better. Problems such as campaign finance are easier to fix when you have people working together rather than just battling against the other side just for the sake of beating them.

But Warren's little article does next to nothing to contribute to the discussion. His main point is that reducing vote splitting saves candidates from spending money arguing that they are going to be a front runner. Which, present day, is a tiny percentage of what their advertising and messaging is about. It is one of the most inane arguments I have heard.

And if we agree that vote splitting is problematic, why can't we just talk about how to reduce vote splitting, rather than try to find more supposed ways it is bad? You've already noted that the article gives no evidence that score is better than any other (non-choose-one) method at addressing money.

Can we please bring things back to voting methods, rather than going off on tangents? There are plenty of better places to debate those other things till the cows come home.

[Jack Waugh]

@rob said in Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections:

wrong audience, unless you mean that he was aiming it at what we referred to at the time as the "range voting cult,"

Where he mentions range voting, I'm asking you to just read in place of that, "any system that works strongly to mitigate vote splitting". I already said I disagree with his implication that Score is the only answer. The point he makes about money would apply to any system that splits votes, and it would be solved by any system that doesn't split votes. Your harping on the Score-only aspect after I already said I disagree with that part is not fair argumentation.

The audience he is addressing consists of people who are as intelligent as he is, in some of the same ways. It consists of people who don't need every point laid out in full, but for whom a hint suffices.

Problems such as campaign finance are easier to fix

I want you to understand that the article is not about "fixing" a "problem" of campaign finance.

little article

Ridicule is not argumentation.

spending money arguing that they are going to be a front runner.

They do not have to spend money to argue that. The mere report that they have the money suffices to convince the voters that they are front runners. I already pointed that out, so when you persist in coming back to your message about spending money, that's just casting aside what I said as though I had never said it, which is disrespectful of the rules of proper argumentation.

And if we agree that vote splitting is problematic, why can't we just talk about how to reduce vote splitting, rather than try to find more supposed ways it is bad?

Because when you are spreading the point about how problematic it is, you have reason to bring all the ammunition possible to your argument, to be more convincing, to convince more people to come over to our side, and to convince them faster. What do you have now with which to convince people that the survival of the human species depends on defeating vote splitting in the US? Do you think it likely that the human population crashes to zero before your daughter sees the age of 50 years?

[A Former User]

@jack-waugh said in Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections:

The audience he is addressing consists of people who are as intelligent as he is, in some of the same ways. It consists of people who don't need every point laid out in full, but for whom a hint suffices.

Seems a bit self-congratulatory no? Claiming sapienti sat has never felt to me like the best approach to convince a skeptic.

I agree Warren's articles are essentially directed at a cult, and to be entirely honest I think they have done more harm to voting reform efforts than good. They are full of hidden (and bad) assumptions, weird metrics, and strong personal opinions all under a veneer of objectivism, arrogance, and unwarranted certainty.

If his articles were any good, they would have passed peer-review and been published by now.

I am not even talking about Score in general, but specifically whenever someone links me to r*ngevoting dot org to try to prove a point it makes me lose all interest in the discussion.

[rob]

@jack-waugh said in Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections:

Problems such as campaign finance are easier to fix

I want you to understand that the article is not about "fixing" a "problem" of campaign finance.

Is it not about the need for money to finance campaigns? (specifically, the "inherent strategic need for candidates to expensively convince voters they are one of the "2 most likely to win" ")

@jack-waugh said in Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections:

little article

Ridicule is not argumentation.

The article is literally less than 400 words. It is little. That part is not ridicule.

@jack-waugh said in Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections:

The mere report that they have the money suffices to convince the voters that they are front runners.

Ok... yeah I didn't pick that up.

Let me see if I understand this. You are saying that "expensively convincing voters that they are one of the 2 most likely to win" is done.... wait, how again? Not by advertising or campaining, but simply by...

Ok, nevermind.

I see nothing of merit in Warren's argument. I really don't want to spend more time discussing it.

[rob]

@rob said in Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections:

@jack-waugh said:

Problems such as campaign finance are easier to fix

I want you to understand that the article is not about "fixing" a "problem" of campaign finance.

Is it not about the need for money to finance campaigns? (specifically, the "inherent strategic need for candidates to expensively convince voters they are one of the "2 most likely to win" ")

@jack-waugh said:

little article

Ridicule is not argumentation.

The article is literally less than 400 words. It is little. That part is not ridicule.

@jack-waugh :

The mere report that they have the money suffices to convince the voters that they are front runners.

Ok... yeah I didn't pick that up. (probably because it is so far fetched)

@jack-waugh said :

that's just casting aside what I said as though I had never said it, which is disrespectful of the rules of proper argumentation.

Give me a break. "Rules of proper argumentation"? If the point you are making is different than the one Warren was trying to make, just make your point rather that referring us to an article that appears to be untethered by a need for logic or rationality. And your argument that he doesn't have to explain everything because he is aiming it at people as intelligent as him.... uhhh, that doesn't make me want to be nice about it and play by your rules.

[A Former User]

@rob said in Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections:

The mere report that they have the money suffices to convince the voters that they are front runners.

Didn't even work so well for Bloomberg. Or Steyer. Or Delaney

[Jack Waugh]

Is it not the case that when a new candidate enters a political race, the news media are quick to report how much campaign money the new candidate has?

I was wrong to say that spending money to convince voters that one is a front runner doesn't have an important rôle and I was wrong to say that Warren says or implies that it dosn't.

We are still left with the situation that spending (and showing) campaign money is not just about communicating "Hey, I'm running, too, my name is ..." and positions on policy and claiming qualification and evidence of honesty, etc. How much money would it cost to communicate those things? Money is being spent and shown to convince voters who are the "front runners", who is "viable" in a self-fulfilling sense. Why should you support a voting system that makes it matter for purposes of evaluating ones alternatives as per game theory, who are the front runners, when alternative systems have been described that arguably eliminate or at least significantly mitigate that effect?

Choosing a voting system that makes it unnecessary to seek a bandwagon if you want to have political influence through your vote will substantially decouple money from elections. This will be much more effective than seeing the problem as unrestricted money and any solutions as ways to try to restrict it.

When the voting system leads the voter to seek a bandwagon, the voter becomes a marionette and it is money that is pulling the strings. Such an arrangement is incompatible with democracy or survival. 90% of our job as advocates for voting reform (I say it is not reform but revolution) is to cut those strings.

Do you agree with me that survival of humanity is at stake depending on making voting meaningful and establishing democracy or at least democratic republicanism?

[rob]

@jack-waugh said in Why score voting should decrease the importance of money in elections:

Do you agree with me that survival of humanity is at stake depending on making voting meaningful and establishing democracy or at least democratic republicanism?

Well, no.

I think having a good democracy makes life better though.

But I don't agree with the idea that the influence of money spent by campaigns would be significantly reduced by getting rid of vote splitting. They still need to spend money to convince people to rank them higher, rate them higher, or approve them. That doesn't magically go away when eliminating vote splitting. I just consider it a different problem.

And I consider that the polarized state of US politics is, right now, crisis level. We've never seen the country divided like this. I am not at all convinced this has to do with money influencing elections. That's simply not where extremism comes from. (unless you are counting corporations like facebook and twitter profiting off of the engagement that comes from divisiveness.... but I don't think that has anything to do with the link you posted)

Regardless, I think this thread sucks. Here's why:

If you weren't actually arguing for Score being significantly better than IRV, Condorcet, Approval, STAR, etc in this regard, you could have chosen a better title for the thread. After a bunch of back and forth, you said "your harping on the Score-only aspect after I already said I disagree with that part is not fair argumentation" and yet..... you chose the title of the thread, and you didn't bother, when posting, saying anything about it other than posting a link.

[Jack Waugh]

I logged in as "Admin" and moved this topic from the 101 category to Political Theory.

[rob]

@jack-waugh Ok. although I ignore categories as I browse via the recent page