[EM] Law of electoral entropy

[Richard Lung]

Law of electoral entropy.

“The problem that has confronted modern democracy since its beginning
has not really been the representation of organised minorities – they
are very well able to look after themselves – but /the protection of the
unorganised masses of busily occupied, fairly intelligent men from the
tricks of the specialists who work the party machines/.”

HG Wells, 1918: In The Fourth Year.

Quoted by George Hallett with Clarence Hoag: Proportional
Representation. The key to democracy. (1937 ed.)

The law of electoral entropy proposes that the organised few (as in
parties) forestall the organisation of the many (as in government) by
disorganising the electoral system. --------------------

An organised electoral system was invented in its essentials by the
mathematician and statesman Carl Andrae, in the mid nineteenth century,
and soon after by Thomas Hare. -----------------

What Thomas Hare called "the Single Transferable Vote" is essentially a
statement of general choice. The particular choice, the least choice is
a single preference for a single majority. STV offers a multiple
preference for a multiple majority. -------------

In other words, with an X-vote, there is just one order of preference. A
ranked choice gives many orders of preference. STV is consistent in the
way it generalises the count, as well as the vote. From only one
majority, in a plurality count, STV allows many majorities. The more
seats, the more majorities, over one ever-shrinking minority of wasted
votes. Even an STV two-member constituency gives two majorities of
one-third the votes each, over a residual minority of less than
one-third the voters.-----------------------

The logic for STV is what sets it apart from other systems.As becomes a
general theory of choice, STV has far greater explanatory power, of much
more decisive information value, than any other voting method: the STV
election, in sufficiently large constituencies, for the proportional
count to discern it, mirrors social diversity, as do not other systems.
--------------------------

Clarence Hoag and George Hallett record that, in the at-large municipal
STV elections in American cities. They also observed STV elections
in-built primaries, for the most prefered candidates in any given party.

And government formation power is practical, by a transferable vote
across party lines, for coalition preference. This superior information
value of STV is the characteristic of an organised system.
------------------

STV was meant to give (Proportional) Representation of the People. JS
Mill hailed it as the saving of electoral democracy.

However, the law of electoral entropy intervened. Its first and most
decisive degrading or disorganising, of the Andrae and Hare system, was
to neglect the preference vote from most proportional elections, leaving
a mere X vote, or one-preference vote to count only for the organised
few, the parties, rather than the many, or all the people.

----------------------

By a century ago, during the First World War, HG Wells was already
having to avoid misunderstanding, by defining the organised voting
system, as opposed to its relentless disorganising by the meanest interests.

The HG Wells formula is proportional representation by the single
transferable vote in large constituencies. -------------

For, confining the vote to one preference, an X vote, no longer freely
transferable in a proportional count, and confining the choice of
candidates, to the relatively few, standing for one or few seats per
constituency, are two of the most effective ways of disorganising, or
decreasing the information value of an election by the general public.

-------------------------------

Entropy roughly means the natural tendency to disorder. The basic law of
entropy is the second law of thermodynamics, popularly known as the
running down of the universe. Or to borrow a phrase from the Irish poet,
William Butler Yeats: “Things fall apart.” --------------------

In a whole system, entropy cannot be reversed. But damaging tendencies
to disorder, in any specific area, can be countered by applying
beneficent organising power. Thus, the relentless tendency of the
organised few, to defeat the electoral organising of the many, can be
reversed, by promoting a general awareness of the organised electoral
system, which Australians call the quota-preferential method or STV, and
organising to promote it.------------

Richard Lung.“Democracy Science.”