Monthly Archives: October 2023

[*231020]

‘1.|0 An absolutely enormous effort has lately (probably since around the early 1990s) sprung up to promote or invent particular existing or novel voting methods. One of these methods ‘ranked choice voting’ (RCV) (formerly called ‘instant runoff voting’) has received enormous financial backing. Consider the ‘FairVote’ organization, which receives millions of dollars yearly to (mostly) promote the ‘ranked choice voting’ method.

As will be explained later, this ‘ranked choice voting’ method would bring about a disaster for what is generally be perceived to be democracy.

‘2.|0 There exist other efforts (some far more acceptable) to reform voting systems, such as Math PhD Warren D. Smith’s favored ‘range voting’ (also known as ‘score voting’, and referred to here as broad range voting), which appear to be workable, but lack the simplicity necessary for the utilization of hand counted paper ballots. See:

fairvote (dot) org/who-we-are/financials/

https://rangevoting.org/ForGreens.html

https://rangevoting.org/

‘3.|0 In reality, every nation is ultimately ruled by a tolerant majority, a majority conditioned to be intolerant, or some benevolent or sadistic minority. Pathological aggressive sadistic and extremely ambitious minorities that promote intolerance and strife are always present, and populations must possess cultural resources to disrupt the intolerance, violence, and social degeneracy that they constantly instigate.

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:::::::::: by RKJoyce ::::::::::
I will begin posting new material as of October, 2023.
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[*231201]

‘0.|0 This post is here to provide a slightly technical description of this blog’s ‘riffs’ and ‘posts’ labeling method for finding posts and ‘riffs’ that remind readers of concepts and terms that relate to matters while they are being discussed. You can simply ignore these labels when they are not of help, and simply omit them in comments

‘1.|0 Various passages in the posts will be marked by ‘riffs’. These riffs are short labels that refer to passages that may provide requisite definitions and expositions. This labeling scheme is optimized to expedite the find function of word processors, and also reference to passages in printed documents.

‘2.|0 In each riff ”X.|Y’, ”X’ will be in base_10 notation and ‘.|Y’ will be in base_8 (i.e. octal) notation. This is because base-8 numbers are much easier to divide by 2. Note that 1/4 is expressed as ‘0.25’ in base 10, but 1/4 is expressed as ‘0.2’ in base 8, since base_10 1/4 = base_10 2.5/10 = ‘0.25’, but base_10 1/4 = base_8 2/8 = base_8 ‘0.2’.

Note that the digits ‘8’ and ‘9’ never appear in octal numbers. This riff marking scheme will serve us well. An example of a reference to a riff is (‘vide’ or ‘see’) ‘376.|4 [^200715] (see below).

‘3.|0 Nominally ‘dated’ designators such as ‘[^YYMMDD]’ will reference designatums (‘targets’) such as ‘[*YYMMDD]’, which will be placed in posts in order to simplify reader access. Blogging system-assigned (‘platform’ or infrasystem assigned) publication dates may differ from these author-assigned reference dates.

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Extra clues for those who would rather not have to recall 6th grade ‘number theory’

The so-called ‘numbers’ written on paper are actually just symbols for designating actual ‘designatums’ that are concepts in the abstract mathematics world, not the physical one. The symbol ‘479.25’ is a physical designator of an actual abstract mathematics world (real) number. So we can use differing ‘symbol systems’ to designate the various numbers of the mathematics world.

Base ten positive real numbers can be represented as:
(…C⛌10³ + B⛌10² + A⛌10 + Ω⛌1 + a⛌(1/10) + b⛌(1/10)² + c⛌(1/10)³…)

Base eight positive real numbers can be represented as:
(…C⛌8³ + B⛌8² + A⛌8 + Ω⛌1 + a⛌(1/8) + b⛌(1/8)² + c⛌(1/8)³…)

So (base 10) ‘479.25’ can be represented in base ten as:
4⛌10² + 7⛌10 + 9⛌1 + 2⛌(1/10) + 5⛌(1/10)² + 0⛌(1/10)³ = base-10_479.25

And (base 10) ‘479.25’ can be represented in base eight as:
7⛌8² + 3⛌8 + 7⛌1 + 2⛌(1/8) + 0⛌(1/8)² + 0⛌(1/8)³ = base-8_737.2

That was great fun, wasn’t it!

[*231019]

‘1.|0 Several,but far from all, of the following series of posts will be devoted to explaining the need for something called ‘trimmed range voting’. Ever since the horrifically invidious U.S. presidential ‘selection’ of 2004 I have been working very hard on voting method analysis. Only fairly recently I have discovered that others have been doing analysis of the same subject, but from completely different perspectives. Some of those people are academics, some are computer engineers, mathematicians, economists, political analysts, and so on. They have one thing in common: they are all well-credentialed, but nonetheless behaving like rank amateurs. And all of their theories are cockeyed and actually harmful. Yet many ultra-rich institutions spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting some of their complicated, pathological voting systems.

‘2.|0 After 19 years of working independently of the mostly unrealistic voting theorists I have discovered that the ‘trimmed range’ voting system (or perhaps something quite similar to it) is the only method that can possibly sustain what could possibly be described as democracy. With the trimmed system, we can vote for up to (more or less) seven contenders, granting each one either five or four or zero votes. Such balloting is simple in that the votes could easily be hand counted locally — simply summed up locally — prior to being forwarded to larger tabulation pools.

‘3.|0 There must be no voting or tabulation machines involved, and mail-in voting, with its fatal security issues must be severely restricted. Most importantly, the public must be lifted out of the Disneyland political theories it has constantly been indoctrinated into. The public must learn that they always have power craving, sadistic sociopaths constantly seeking power all around them.

‘4.|0 Until the ‘trimmed range’ voting method is adopted, there will always exist ‘party lock-in’ whereby a few (practically speaking, two in the U.S.) essentially kindred political parties will always be easily able to use the spoiler effect to completely block any contenders who might actually work for non-sadistic governance.

‘5.|0 Since the trimmed range method differs greatly from the ‘single selection’ (‘choose one’, or ‘plurality’) method, some people mistake it for the lavishly promoted, but profoundly pathological ranked choice voting (RCV) scheme. The trimmed range voting method could not have less in common with preferential voting or ranked choice voting. Parse carefully where I said -// we can vote for up to (more or less) seven contenders, granting each one either five or four or zero votes //- (vide ‘2.|0). So each and every one of, say, four individual contenders could have four votes cast (and counted) for them. They do not need to be in sequence, or with each non-first-place one placed below another, which would drastically reduce voter authority. As I recall, several methods are utilized in Australia, none of them are the trimmed range method, and they have mostly led to tyranny. Trimmed range voting could be considered a special simplified form of ‘broad range voting’, whereby zero, one, two, three, four, or five votes could be granted.