☠Toxic☠
. Ballots .

🄯 ☠ PiRited 2017-2024 by Joel ‘Twisty’ Nye, Arr Rites Reversed (ARR!)

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Nye, Joel ‘Twisty’
Toxic Ballots: How All Ranked Methods Defraud Elections
Joel ‘Twisty’ Nye
First edition

• part 0 lead-in
• 🄯☠ Copyleft
• Preface
• Introduction

OUTLINE

• Voting Method Families: Ordinal(ranked) methods manipulate voter support, while Cardinal methods measure them (eg Approval Voting).
  • Restrictive instructions to rank are immoral.
  • Voter support rated equally (like school grade reports) must not be censored by restrictive instructions, preventing such true data from being collected.
    • Ranked methods fail to count
    • Split votes always undercount by definition. (They are mutually exclusive and unequal, reducing voter support accounting.)
    • Implied oppositions (disfavor) are overcounted. (They nullify third/supported options from "pie chart" misrepresentations.)
  • Sophie's choice, a duressed decision.
    • American literature's most traumatized character. Nazi characters' terms: Choose one favorite, kill the rest.
    • Favor necessitates Disfavor (to variable degrees), and inequality versus reality.
    • It's not really a choice: the duressed decision would never be designed by the voter, forced to throw their 'children' under the bus.
    • If you won't play by their rules, all choices are killed (your ballot is nullified).
  • Two more words: SPLIT VOTE:
    • BY DEFINITION, a Split Vote must be an undercount of a voter's support.
    • Approval Voting acts like a voucher of voter satisfaction; they will be pleased that candidate got the win.
    • Approval Voting prevents Split Votes, no choice nullifies any other.
  • Kevin Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
    • "There are no ranked voting methods satisfying basic fairness criteria."
    • The Extremal Lemma: the process of ranking has counter-intuitive results. (No mix of highest favor & lowliest disfavor can ever yeild a balanced/average/non-extremal result.)
    • Differing ranked methods frequently yield differing winners; not honestly "counting" from the same data by realistic standards. ^(See "2015: Mind-bending Math")
  • What comes with the level playing field of Cardinal Method Measurement:
    • Important ballots invalidated/nullified within Ranking:
      • Sincere AND Strategic: Full voter support data will let them hedge bets against adversarial choices. They can have their cake and eat it too. No approval is penalized.
      • Third Party Triumph: Voters had falsely been told they are "throwing away their vote" when that action is rather done by ranking instructions. A percentage (including myself) would love to approve third parties of merit (and the promise of change) while opposing the entrenched duopoly of what Ralph Nader calls "Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber."
      • Complete Approval: It may sound non strategic to show support for all candidate choices, but that's still valuable information.
      • Complete Disapproval: A percentage of voters desire the option to express "a vote of no confidence for all given choices."
    • Level playing fields empowering real change.
      • In "Gaming The Vote" by William Poundstone, he discusses on page 210 (regarding the election of 1992):
        "It is easy to see that Perot could have won with approval voting if everyone who ranked him second had approved him and no one who ranked Clinton or Bush second had approved them. Perot could potentially have won by an approval-vote landslide, not just a single vote."
• Bibliography
  • 1770: Borda https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Charles_de_Borda
  • 1800: Jefferson & Madison Electoral Tie
  • 1951: Kenneth Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
  • 2005: "Approval Voting," Stephen Brams, 1st Ed 1983, 2nd Ed 2008
  • 2008: "Gaming The Vote" by William Poundstone
  • 2015: Professor David Kuhn, "Mindbending Math - Lecture 11 Voting Paradoxes" index