FW: [Newspoetry] Financing Elections?

[DL Emerick]

Dear Joe,

 

I have long studied IRV and similar such mechanisms.  It has twin central
problems of citizen understanding and transparency of process.

 

Namely, as to citizen understanding, consider these notions.  It is hard enough
for some of our many voters to grasp how to vote now, on a ballot, making just
one and only one X on a series of alternative candidates, for a given office.
Add to that a second fact: a ballot doesn't contain a set of candidates for just
one office, but for many offices.  Suddenly, the voter imagines himself as
spending a long time in the voting booth.  His imagination is not an inaccurate
guide.  A significant fraction of voters will be both confused and angry, unable
to grasp the relationship between their ballot acts and the results of an
election.  Some of them will react with blame and accusations, in their
frustrations  They will make such claims as "it shouldn't take a rocket
scientist to cast a vote".  They will appeal to demagogues, ever lurking in the
limelight and the shadows of our political system, and ever willing to serve the
frustrated, illusorily.  Others of them will simply join the ranks of the
far-too-many who do not participate in elections now.  These two effects - of
implementing IRV - alone should deter pursuit of a technically better system.
It is simply far more sophisticated than the people are, generally.

 

However, transparency of the process is equally in jeopardy.  The only way to
"prove" the process is to follow it through the ballot tabulation process, step
by step, round by round, for the hundreds and thousands of ballots, as candidate
after candidate is "eliminated" - and to actually see, as it were, the actual
distribution of preferences on each ballot, as it is considered, counted and
recounted, again and again, until a victor emerges with a majority, after some
indefinite number of rounds of counting.  One could not, then, have simple raw
counts, as marginals, to examine a given counting, to see that the officials had
fairly counted the ballots.  And, as Ohio and Florida prove, officials are far
too adept at dishonesty and corruption, even in the present system's simple
process.  IRV would simply provide corruption with whole new ways of perverting
the will of the people - and in ways that are hardly detectable without complete
access to the actual ballots cast, for all offices, and even then, without
access to software and computer systems, independently built and operated.
Again, such technological sophistication would obscure the vital connection
between the act and the outcome, as to how the voting process and the voting
outcome may be viewed and understood, transparently.

 

I hope that I have simpler criteria for the feasibility of structural
improvements of elections.  Above all, I would say, the process can not demand
of the people sophisticated conceptualizations.  The people, alas, are just
simple folks, who like a certain directness of "cause" and "effect".  IRV does
not come at all close to meeting the needs of the many, better though it may be,
academically.

 

Sincerely, DL Emerick

 

(PS, I voted in IRV elections, for student government officers at MIT.  But, the
voting population there is pretty sophisticated, and the election officials were
without any taint of self interest.  Hence, of course, IRV is touted in such
circles as a superior mechanism, for such a population, to express its will more
completely, by use of a most sophisticated mechanism.  Those two criteria -- of
voter ability and of official integrity -- are simply, forever, non-extant in
the wider real world of general populations.  How an "elite" effectively and
efficiently engages in self governance is not necessarily role model for the
"masses" - a failing that many elites exhibit, daily, in impracticality.)

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