Reviewing Voting Methods

Quoted at length, an interesting piece (in the form of a book review) by the New Yorker on election methods. Take a deep breath:

The voting method that is used in Britain—and that has been kept on in some of its former colonies, including the United States—may finally be replaced. ... a national referendum on changing the country’s main voting system ... will be held in 2011. If Britain does switch, as most other developed countries already have, the cause of voting reform in holdouts like the United States, India, and Canada could get a boost.

["First Past the Post" or "Winner Takes All" ]

In the standard British style of voting, each elector casts one vote, and the candidate with more votes than any other is elected. This is known as “first past the post”; the winner just needs to get more votes than anyone else, not achieve any threshold (such as a two-thirds majority). It is also called “winner takes all,” to distinguish it from some other methods, which elect the top two or more candidates.

In a contest between two people for one job, first past the post seems to be merely common sense. But, as soon as there are three or more candidates on the slate, it can quickly go awry. ...

Add political parties to the picture, and the winner-take-all system looks even worse. A party’s share of seats in a parliament or a congress can diverge wildly from its over-all share of votes. ... In this year’s election, the Liberal Democrat Party won more than a fifth of the votes and less than a tenth of the seats. That’s because Lib-Dem supporters today ... are thinly scattered across the land.

In a country with just two political parties, winner takes all can deliver a proportionate parliament or congress. But that’s only because the supporters of political parties tend to live in clusters. Say that fifty-three per cent of American voters are Democrats and forty-six per cent are Republicans (mirroring the vote in last year’s Presidential election). Then imagine that the supporters of the two parties were spread evenly throughout the country’s districts ... In that case, the Democrats would win every seat and there would be no Republicans in Congress.

[Rank Voting and Two-Stage Votes]

... Jean-Charles de Borda, a French mathematician and a naval hero of the American Revolutionary War, ... Borda’s main suggestion was to require voters to rank candidates, rather than just choose one favorite, so that a winner could be calculated by counting points awarded according to the rankings. The key idea was to find a way of taking lower preferences, as well as first preferences, into account....

Unfortunately, this method may fail to elect the majority’s favorite—it could, in theory, elect someone who was nobody’s favorite. It is also easy to manipulate by strategic voting. ...

... [T]he astronomer and mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace, who was an important contributor to the theory of probability ... insisted on an over-all majority: at least half the votes plus one. ... Elections to the French National Assembly, and to the French Presidency, currently borrow from both Laplace and Condorcet. They use a two-stage method that guarantees a winning candidate with an over-all majority, by conducting a runoff round between the top two candidates from the first round. ...

[Proportional Representation]

... Another early advocate of proportional representation was John Stuart Mill, who, in 1861, wrote about the critical distinction between “government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented,” which was the ideal, and “government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people exclusively represented,” which is what winner-takes-all elections produce. ...

The key to proportional representation is to enlarge constituencies so that more than one winner is elected in each, and then try to align the share of seats won by a party with the share of votes it receives. These days, a few small countries, including Israel and the Netherlands, treat their entire populations as single constituencies, and thereby get almost perfectly proportional representation. Some places require a party to cross a certain threshold of votes before it gets any seats, in order to filter out extremists.

The main criticisms of proportional representation are that it can lead to unstable coalition governments, because more parties are successful in elections, and that it can weaken the local ties between electors and their representatives. ...

The alternative voting method that will be put to a referendum in Britain is not proportional representation ... Known in the United States as instant-runoff voting, the method was developed around 1870 by William Ware ...
...
[Instant Runoff]

In instant-runoff elections, voters rank all or some of the candidates in order of preference, and votes may be transferred between candidates. The idea is that your vote may count even if your favorite loses. If any candidate gets more than half of all the first-preference votes, he or she wins, and the game is over. But, if there is no majority winner, the candidate with the fewest first-preference votes is eliminated. Then the second-preference votes of his or her supporters are distributed to the other candidates. If there is still nobody with more than half the votes, another candidate is eliminated, and the process is repeated until either someone has a majority or there are only two candidates left, in which case the one with the most votes wins. Third, fourth, and lower preferences will be redistributed if a voter’s higher preferences have already been transferred to candidates who were eliminated earlier.

At first glance, this is an appealing approach: it is guaranteed to produce a clear winner, and more voters will have a say in the election’s outcome. Look more closely, though, and you start to see how peculiar the logic behind it is. Although more people’s votes contribute to the result, they do so in strange ways. Some people’s second, third, or even lower preferences count for as much as other people’s first preferences. If you back the loser of the first tally, then in the subsequent tallies your second (and maybe lower) preferences will be added to that candidate’s first preferences. ...

Such transferrable-vote elections can behave in topsy-turvy ways: they are what mathematicians call “non-monotonic,” which means that something can go up when it should go down, or vice versa. ... In short, a candidate may lose if certain voters back him, and would have won if they hadn’t.

... [R]ecent work by Robert Norman, a mathematician at Dartmouth, suggests [a topsy-turvy result] would happen in one in five close contests among three candidates who each have between twenty-five and forty per cent of first-preference votes. With larger numbers of candidates, it would happen even more often. ... Burlington’s ... 2009 mayoral elections ... did go topsy-turvy.

... Kenneth Arrow, an economist at Stanford, examined a set of requirements that you’d think any reasonable voting system could satisfy, and proved that nothing can meet them all when there are more than two candidates. So designing elections is always a matter of choosing a lesser evil. ...

[Grade Voting]

There is something of a loophole in Arrow’s demonstration. His proof applies only when voters rank candidates; it would not apply if, instead, they rated candidates by giving them grades. First-past-the-post voting is, in effect, a crude ranking method in which voters put one candidate in first place and everyone else last. Similarly, in the standard forms of proportional representation voters rank one party or group of candidates first, and all other parties and candidates last. With rating methods, on the other hand, voters would give all or some candidates a score, to say how much they like them. They would not have to say which is their favorite—though they could in effect do so, by giving only him or her their highest score—and they would not have to decide on an order of preference for the other candidates.

One such method is widely used on the Internet—to rate restaurants, movies, books, or other people’s comments or reviews, for example. ...

[Approval Voting]

Approval voting, as used in the last round of old Venetian elections, is a rating system with just two grades: approved and not approved. ... The American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America, among others, use it for internal elections, though the larger Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, which also adopted it, came to have second thoughts.

Range and approval voting deal neatly with the problem of vote-splitting: if a voter likes Nader best, and would rather have Gore than Bush, he or she can approve Nader and Gore but not Bush. Above all, their advocates say, both schemes give voters more options, and would elect the candidate with the most over-all support, rather than the one preferred by the largest minority. Both can be modified to deliver forms of proportional representation.

The fact that they escape Arrow’s proof, though, doesn’t mean that approval and range voting have no hidden kinks or paradoxes. Whether such ideas can work depends on how people use them. If enough people are carelessly generous with their approval votes, for example, there could be some nasty surprises. ... Parties in an approval election might spend less time attacking their opponents, in order to pick up positive ratings from rivals’ supporters, and critics worry that it would favor bland politicians who don’t stand for anything much. ...

... Although almost any alternative voting scheme now on offer is likely to be better than first past the post, it’s unrealistic to think that one voting method would work equally well for, say, the legislature of a young African republic, the Presidency of an island in Oceania, the school board of a New England town, and the assembly of a country still scarred by civil war. If winner takes all is a poor electoral system, one size fits all is a poor way to pick its replacements....

Hizballah: Enemy of the State

Tony Badran writes what is perhaps the most lucid interpretation and analysis of Hizballah's operational philosophy, in Lebanon and as an extension of Iran's regional policy. This piece should be read in full, below are some excerpts:

The recent tension in South Lebanon, choreographed by Hezbollah against UNIFIL under the guise of spontaneous protests by villagers, has been used by the party to reassert its equation of “the Resistance, the people, and the army”— the three mutually-reinforcing pillars which, Hezbollah maintains, are alone responsible for safeguarding the country’s security. The core premise of this mantra, however, has its origins in Iran’s Islamic revolutionary doctrine.

...

The absence of any reference to the “state” in this formula, and its substitution with the category of “people” is not accidental. ...

...

Dissociating the peoples from their governments in the Arab world was and remains a vital aim of the Iranian revolutionary regime. ...

...

That is the essence of Hezbollah’s formula. Much like the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hezbollah operates in a parallel universe; it forms a parallel military and presides over a parallel society, which “coordinate” with the armed forces and interact with the state only in order to neutralize the state’s ability to challenge the party’s autonomous, parallel existence. All of which of course makes a mockery of those in the West advocating dialogue with Hezbollah to encourage its further “integration” into the “political mainstream.”

As party official Mahmoud Qomati explained in 2009, Hezbollah seeks to integrate the state into “the axis of the army, the people, and the Resistance.” This of course merely echoed a central theme in the thinking of Hezbollah, articulated by the party’s deputy secretary general, Naim Qassem, in a June 2007 article in An-Nahar revealingly titled “How Does the Rest of Society Integrate into the Resistance?”

...

Mineral-Rich Afghanistan

The Economist's Democracy in America blog comments:

Such extraordinary mineral wealth could drive a renaissance of the country's real economy, generating tens of thousands of high-wage jobs for locals, turning the trade balance strongly positive, enabling investment in infrastructure and education, funding water conservation to increase productivity in agriculture, and stabilising democratic rule while incentivising transparency and good governance—if Afghanistan were Australia. Unfortunately, rather than a highly educated, secular, demographically homogenous monolingual society, Afghanistan is a mostly illiterate, fanatically religious society composed of rival ethnicities speaking different languages, riven by bloody clan feuds and a 30-year-long ideological civil war. Oh, plus, it's ruled by a government, or a collection of governing cliques, that already may be the most corrupt on Earth—and that was before they found out there's a trillion dollars waiting for whoever gets the keys to the Ministry of Mines.

From the NYTimes:

The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials.

The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe.

An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the “Saudi Arabia of lithium,” a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys.

The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.

While it could take many years to develop a mining industry, the potential is so great that officials and executives in the industry believe it could attract heavy investment even before mines are profitable, providing the possibility of jobs that could distract from generations of war.

...

The value of the newly discovered mineral deposits dwarfs the size of Afghanistan’s existing war-bedraggled economy, which is based largely on opium production and narcotics trafficking as well as aid from the United States and other industrialized countries. Afghanistan’s gross domestic product is only about $12 billion.

“This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy,” said Jalil Jumriany, an adviser to the Afghan minister of mines.

...

Instead of bringing peace, the newfound mineral wealth could lead the Taliban to battle even more fiercely to regain control of the country.

The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan’s minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced.

Endless fights could erupt between the central government in Kabul and provincial and tribal leaders in mineral-rich districts. Afghanistan has a national mining law, written with the help of advisers from the World Bank, but it has never faced a serious challenge.

...

At the same time, American officials fear resource-hungry China will try to dominate the development of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, which could upset the United States, given its heavy investment in the region. After winning the bid for its Aynak copper mine in Logar Province, China clearly wants more, American officials said.

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The mineral deposits are scattered throughout the country, including in the southern and eastern regions along the border with Pakistan that have had some of the most intense combat in the American-led war against the Taliban insurgency.

The Pentagon task force has already started trying to help the Afghans set up a system to deal with mineral development. International accounting firms that have expertise in mining contracts have been hired to consult with the Afghan Ministry of Mines, and technical data is being prepared to turn over to multinational mining companies and other potential foreign investors. The Pentagon is helping Afghan officials arrange to start seeking bids on mineral rights by next fall, officials said.

“The Ministry of Mines is not ready to handle this,” Mr. Brinkley said. “We are trying to help them get ready.”

...

In 2004, American geologists, sent to Afghanistan as part of a broader reconstruction effort, stumbled across an intriguing series of old charts and data at the library of the Afghan Geological Survey in Kabul that hinted at major mineral deposits in the country. They soon learned that the data had been collected by Soviet mining experts during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, but cast aside when the Soviets withdrew in 1989.

During the chaos of the 1990s, when Afghanistan was mired in civil war and later ruled by the Taliban, a small group of Afghan geologists protected the charts by taking them home, and returned them to the Geological Survey’s library only after the American invasion and the ouster of the Taliban in 2001.

...

Armed with the old Russian charts, the United States Geological Survey began a series of aerial surveys of Afghanistan’s mineral resources in 2006, using advanced gravity and magnetic measuring equipment attached to an old Navy Orion P-3 aircraft that flew over about 70 percent of the country.

The data from those flights was so promising that in 2007, the geologists returned for an even more sophisticated study, using an old British bomber equipped with instruments that offered a three-dimensional profile of mineral deposits below the earth’s surface. It was the most comprehensive geologic survey of Afghanistan ever conducted.

The handful of American geologists who pored over the new data said the results were astonishing.

But the results gathered dust for two more years, ignored by officials in both the American and Afghan governments. In 2009, a Pentagon task force that had created business development programs in Iraq was transferred to Afghanistan, and came upon the geological data. Until then, no one besides the geologists had bothered to look at the information — and no one had sought to translate the technical data to measure the potential economic value of the mineral deposits.

Soon, the Pentagon business development task force brought in teams of American mining experts to validate the survey’s findings, and then briefed Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Mr. Karzai.

So far, the biggest mineral deposits discovered are of iron and copper, and the quantities are large enough to make Afghanistan a major world producer of both, United States officials said. Other finds include large deposits of niobium, a soft metal used in producing superconducting steel, rare earth elements and large gold deposits in Pashtun areas of southern Afghanistan.

Just this month, American geologists working with the Pentagon team have been conducting ground surveys on dry salt lakes in western Afghanistan where they believe there are large deposits of lithium. Pentagon officials said that their initial analysis at one location in Ghazni Province showed the potential for lithium deposits as large of those of Bolivia, which now has the world’s largest known lithium reserves.

For the geologists who are now scouring some of the most remote stretches of Afghanistan to complete the technical studies necessary before the international bidding process is begun, there is a growing sense that they are in the midst of one of the great discoveries of their careers.

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World's Furthest Leaning Tower

A view of the 160-meter Capital Gate tower, developed by the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Company, leans at 18 degrees -- over four times the angle of Italy's famous Leaning Tower of Pisa, has been recognized as the 'furthest-leaning man-made tower' in the world by Guinness World Records, local newspapers reported on June 6, 2010. (Getty Images via Daylife)

Abu Dhabi's High Tech Falcon Hospital

From CNN: 

...

The Abu Dhabi Falcon Hospital claims to be the largest of its kind in the world, employing 52 people and treating around 5,000 birds each year.

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"In the Middle East falconry has a different background. Even 70 years ago in the UAE most of the population were Bedouin living in the desert.

"It was hard to survive, so they used wild falcons to hunt meat. It wasn't a sport, it was a necessity for survival.

...

Muller said the hospital now treats all bird species and cares for falcons from all over the region, including Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. She said the owners are ordinary people who want the best for their birds.

The hospital has an array of high-tech equipment for treating sick birds, including an endoscopy unit that transmits live digital images to the waiting room, so the bird's owner can monitor the procedure.

...

"We can hospitalize more than 200 falcons at the same time, housed in individual rooms that have air conditioning. You can compare it to a hospital for humans, from the way it works to the equipment we have."

Hamad Al Ghanem regularly takes his falcons to the hospital for vaccinations and worming.

As a breeder of traditional saluki hunting dogs, and director of Abu Dhabi's Arabian Saluki Center, he is dedicated to keeping the country's cultural traditions alive. He is also a lifelong falconry enthusiast and owns about 35 falcons of his own.

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He told CNN that one of the historic reasons why falconry is so popular in the UAE is that several species of falcon migrate across the area in the late summer and autumn.

In the past, falconers would trap the wild falcons, train them, hunt with them, and release them. These days, falcons are captive bred and owned for many years.

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Ghanem says most Emirati families still keep falcons, although according to official figures there are about 5,000 falconers in the UAE. Falcons can cost between $5,000 and $80,000, depending on the bird's breed, sex, color and pedigree, he added.

Ghanem trains his falcons to hunt using live pigeons or ducks. Hunting is not permitted in the UAE, so falconers take their birds on hunting trips to countries such as Pakistan, Morocco and Sudan, where prey can include rabbit, Houbara bustard (a large bird), and even gazelle, he said.

...

Lebanese Army on Patrol: Sidon - May 2010

Lebanese special forces army, stand on their armored personal carriers as they patrol during the municipal elections in the southern port city of Sidon, Lebanon, on Sunday, May 23, 2010. Tens of thousands of Lebanese headed to ballot stations Sunday to vote in the third of four-stage municipal elections in south Lebanon. Thousands of Lebanese troops have been sent to the south to try to prevent municipal elections from triggering violence between political rivals.(AP Photo via DayLife)

Leb Web Digest 11.06.10

• NYTimes: Genetic links of Jewish Diaspora
• WaPo: UNSC Approves Iran Sanctions
• Tony Badran: Turkey and the Arabs
• NOWLebanon: Turkey's Zero-Problems Policy
• Michael Young: Hizballah to Target UN Resolutions on Lebanon
• Brookings: Parallels between USS Liberty + Gaza Flotilla Crises 
• AEI: Assessing the Strengths of Hizballah
• New Yorker: Islamism

Lebanon Loves Basketball

Supporters Lebanon's Riyadi club hold a big Lebanese flag during their basketball semi-final match against Iran's Mahram club at the 21st FIBA Asia Champions Cup tournament at Al-Gharafa Indoor Stadium in Doha on May 29, 2010. (Getty Images via DayLife)

Strange Goings On in Turkey

Since the deadly Israeli maritime raid pirate attack on the Gaza flotilla, and the resultant Turkish backlash (characterized by harsh rhetoric, a recall of the Turkish ambassador from Tel Aviv and a complete re-evaluation by Turkey of ties with Israel), Turkey has been rocked by a series of bizarre events.  These include the murder of an Armenian lawyer (who was representing the estate of a murdered Armenian journalist), the brutal slaying of the Roman Catholic church's top clergyman in the country (on the eve of his departure to Cyprus where the Pope is visiting) and a rocket attack on a naval base by Kurdish elements.

All of the above occurred within a week of the deadly flotilla attack and speculation (and conspiracy theories) is rampant over the nature of these attacks and the possibility that they could be linked to efforts to destabilize the country given its recent regional initiatives. Turkey has been aggressively building its credentials as a regional interlocutor and center of influence.  In addition to its heavy involvement in the Gaza Freedom Flotilla (much of the flotilla departed for Gaza from Turkish-occupied Cyprus, with crew and passengers being largely Turkish and with all deaths being Turkish), Turkey - along with Brazil - spearheaded a last-ditch effort at UNSC sanctions against Iran by brokering an 11th hour agreement to host an exchange of nuclear material for that country on its soil.  The country has also been active on Syrian-Israeli peace talks, as well as other fronts (Afghanistan-Pakistan, the Balkans, etc...).

European Debt Web

(via Flowing Data)