"I hope a lot of people run against me": dealing with vote splitting using "Approval Voting"

A Kingston City Councillor recently was joking, in a serious way, that the best strategy for an incumbent to keep his or her Council seat was to encourage as many people as possible to run against him or her. The incumbent's name recognition would be worth a good chunk of votes and the other candidates would split the rest. In a municipal election, with no opinion polls, it would be very hard for support to coalesce around just one of the challengers.

You might recognize this as the classic problem with plurality or first-past-the-post voting systems. The problem is a common one.

Here is another municipal example, and I'll explain below why I mention it. In the 2006 municipal election for mayor of Kingston, there is a good chance that a third place candidate played a spoiler role:

Harvey Rosen: 16,278 votes

Rick Downes: 15,548

Kevin George: 5,870

I bet many voters in Kingston would be interested in doing something about vote splitting.

So, what to do?

Well, attempts at voting reform for provincial elections in Ontario and British Columbia have failed at the ballot box recently and I can't see a lot of enthusiasm for mounting another top-down voting reform effort in the near future.

But what if we allowed municipalities to experiment with different voting systems? That is, allow voting reform to be driven at the grassroots level, and perhaps spread to provincial and federal elections later on.

I have been reading a new book that came out last year called "Gaming the Vote" by William Poundstone. It's a very well-written book about the problems with voting systems. One of the voting systems considered there is a very simple change from our current voting system and gets rid of the vote splitting problem. It is called Approval Voting and is used by the UN to select the Secretary-General.

The way approval voting works is simply this: voters can vote for more than one candidate. You simply vote for the candidates that you approve of. Voting for the candidate that you really prefer does not preclude you also voting for your preferred choice out of the front-runners. The candidate with the most number of approval votes wins.

I would draw your attention to the results of a simulation displayed in a graph on page 239 of Poundstone's book (created by a friend of mine from graduate school, Warren D. Smith) which shows that approval voting does quite well in that it tends to have a low "Bayesian Regret". Loosely speaking, it's good at minimizing the unhappiness of voters on the whole towards the results of the election. First-past-the-post is one of the worst systems by this measure.

Approval voting would also be easy to implement on a legal level in Ontario. As far as I can tell, we would not have to modify the Municipal Elections Act. We would only have to delete Ontario Regulation 101/97 subsection 3(2)(b) which says "The deputy returning officer shall reject from the count...all votes in a ballot for an office, if votes have been cast for more candidates for the office than are to be elected."

Of course there are other voting systems, but most of them would require amending the municipal elections act because vote counting is slightly more complicated.

Let the grassroots begin voting system reform in Ontario at the municipal level!

Sometimes I wish I could be Jon Stewart

Neil Reynolds, Toronto Globe and Mail columnist, former global warming denier and now, it seems, a mitigation skeptic, wrote on Friday:

Without heroic government intervention, [economist Richard Tol] says, climate change will probably cause damage equal to losing two years of economic growth [a few percent of income according to the abstract of Tol's paper] - co-incidentally the same damage caused by an average recession.

Neglecting the fact that Tol's paper, published by Bjorn Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus Centre, omits the Stern Review from its Table 1. list of studies on the 'estimates of welfare loss due to climate change', and underestimates damage from climate change...

If there were a flood and 50 million people in Bangladesh perished, world 'wealth' would decrease less than 1 percent - they would mostly be poor people. Lomborg and Tol would then claim that we could make that up with a year or two of economic growth?!

I wish I were Jon Stewart so I could sit there in stunned silence, as only he can, and then say, "Yeah... flood... 50 million poor people die, then after a year or two of global economic growth we'd be all square again ... WTF".

Parliament High?

Jane Taber writes that

Senior Liberal strategists are now referring to the Ignatieff OLO (Opposition Leader's Office) as “Parliament High” because of the legions of inexperienced young people who populate it.

Is this really a fair assessment? I hope not because the OLO is a Prime Minister's Office (PMO) in waiting and more and more in the last few decades the PMO functions like the Canadian federal government's executive branch (as opposed to the full cabinet).

Ms. Taber's article is worth responding to, I would think.

Don't underestimate young people!

The NDP is making it hard for me to be sympathetic

I hope NDP candidate Michael Byers had a recent change of heart about pricing fossil carbon emissions with a carbon tax considering what he wrote yesterday in this article, and I hope he wasn't believing one thing and helping to destroy it by saying another during the 'green shift' debate last year.

The point was brought to my attention today very clearly here and here.

What to do about the Poker Run?

I wrote a letter to the Kingston Whig Standard today concerning an event this weekend in the Kingston Canada and Thousand Islands region called the "Poker Run". Large powerful motorboats are shown off to spectators while they travel up and down the St. Lawrence River. About 100 boat crews and tens of thousands of tourists come to the area to see the boats and come especially to Kingston, Ontario. On the other hand, this event and its gas-guzzling marine craft are not very compatible with Kingston's official vision of being Canada's most sustainable city.

For a little background, read this article in the Whig
and this TV news report and This editorial in the Whig

I've tried to propose an idea that I think could help make some progress. It's based on local greenhouse gas offsets and triple bottom line accounting: finding solutions with financial, environmental, and social benefits.

Dear Editor,

Several readers of the Whig-Standard have written about this past weekend's
Poker Run event.

I would like to take the discussion about the Poker Run, its greenhouse gas
emissions, and Kingston's vision to be Canada's most sustainable city, in a
different direction.

First, I would disagree with one of the letter writers. The planet is not
doing fine. Global warming is a real threat, especially to future
generations. The greenhouse gas emissions from the Poker Run impose a real
cost on the whole world by contributing to global warming.

On the other hand, the Poker Run contributes a lot to local economic
activity in the Kingston region.

I would suggest that if we, the City of Kingston, benefit so much from the
Poker Run, it is only fair that we assume the responsibility for its
greenhouse gas emissions. I would further suggest, therefore, that we, and
perhaps not the powerboaters, purchase high quality greenhouse gas offsets
that cause the reduction of the greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere, and
cancel the emissions from the Poker Run.

That elsewhere could be in Kingston itself. In fact, based on some
calculations that I have done, the total amount of greenhouse gas emissions
from the Poker Run boats is roughly comparable to the greenhouse gas
emissions coming from one year's venting of anaesthetic gases from surgeries
at Kingston's hospitals. Technology, from an Ontario company called
Blue-Zone, exists to recover and recycle these expensive chemicals, but it
costs a little money up front, and who can blame our hospitals for having a
hard time coming up with extra money to recover anaesthetic gases. So (and
this is the crucial point) if someone provided the funding to do that every
year, then emissions would be prevented that otherwise would continue. As an
aside, hospitals would actually benefit in the future from being able to
obtain anaesthetics at lower cost.

Perhaps there is a way for local merchants, people concerned about global
warming, Kingston hospitals, powerboating enthusiasts, an Ontario technology
startup, and Kingston's branding as a sustainable city to make a little
progress together?