The Saxophone Man’s second calling

Peter Lindener pushes a preferential voting system

Peter Lindener is not like most people at Stanford.

 

He is in his early 50s, has no formal college education, no faculty position and is perhaps best known around campus for playing his saxophone in White Plaza on sunny afternoons.

 

When asked about Lindener, faculty members The Daily interviewed for this article gave brief answers or declined to comment. There is something more to Lindener than his saxophone suggests.

 

Beyond music, Lindener is passionate about revolutionizing democratic systems. Though hesitant to admit it — he insists the type of math behind his ideas is meant to optimize the choices for ice-cream flavors and pizza toppings at parties — Lindener says that his research seeks to provide a way to revolutionize the architecture of democracy.

 

While the ideas behind his claim haven’t gained much traction, they have been published.

 

Lindener and Joey Durham, a graduate student at UC-Santa Barbara who met Lindener when Durham was a senior at Palo Alto High School, published a paper in the pro-preferential-voting-system journal Voting Matters. It’s viewable online, and Lindener always has a few copies on hand.

 

The paper, titled “Moderated Differential Pairwise Tallying: A Voter Specified Hybrid of Ranking by Pairwise Comparisons and Cardinal Utility Sums,” seeks to address Condorcet’s paradox — which states that voters’ collective preferences can be cyclic even if individuals’ are not — and solve some fundamental problems associated with voting in its current form.

 

Their research could be relevant to situations like the 2000 Presidential election, when votes for Ralph Nader in Florida were, in practical terms, votes for then-Governor George W. Bush. The ultimate policy preferences of voters who chose Nader but would have preferred then-Vice President Al Gore to be elected before Bush bore less weight in a system where voters can only up-vote a single candidate. Alternatively, some voters did not choose their preferred candidate (Nader) because they felt that a vote for him would have been “wasted.” 
Lindener and Durham sought to eliminate this idea of a “wasted” vote and design a form of ranked-voting democracy.

 

The “wasted vote” problem is generally studied in a very small subfield of economics called social choice theory, which was developed largely by Kenneth Arrow, a Stanford professor emeritus of economics and 1972 Nobel Prize laureate.

 

In an email to The Daily, Arrow wrote that he had never heard of Lindener or his paper. He initially agreed to read and comment on Lindener and Durham’s paper, but did not respond to subsequent requests for comment.

 

Lindener has contacted other professors at Stanford with the hope of getting his work reviewed and to see that a class is taught at Stanford about social choice theory.

 

Mechanical engineering professor David Beach was one of these professors. After Beach confirmed that he had met Lindener and received his paper, he added, “I think that’s already more than I should say, I’m going to decline to comment further.”

 

Lindener also contacted Todd Davies, associate director of the symbolic systems program. He too confirmed that he had spoken with Lindener via email and received his paper, but had not yet had a chance to look over it thoroughly because of his research load.

 

No professor contacted for this article nor, according to Lindener, any professor Lindener has given a copy of the paper to has affirmed or challenged his ideas. Lindener said faculty members who received his paper would most often decline to take calls or respond to emails from him.

 

Even though faculty members keep their distance, the University does not disenchant Lindener.

 

“There’s no place like Stanford in the world,” he said. Lindener added that it can get tiresome to be ignored, but “on the flipside, they let me play my horn here.”

 

Faculty members aren’t Lindener’s only target audience.

 

“I don’t need to effect governmental change,” Lindener said. “I need to let the leaders of tomorrow know what’s possible.”

 

On that front, Lindener appears to have slightly more success. Rafael Cosman ’15 first met Lindener at Stanford a few weeks ago.

 

“I was walking through White Plaza and I see this weird guy with a huge bushy white beard playing a saxophone,” Cosman said. “He tells me who he is. I tell him who I am, and pretty soon, he tells me about his interest in voting theory.”

 

Cosman was a bit overwhelmed at first by the paper, which he said was a “hefty read,” but soon became excited.

 

“I don’t think Peter [Lindener] would ever say that, but it’s a pretty awesome voting system, way better than anyone has ever implemented before,” he said.

 

It is difficult to assess the significance of Lindener’s work since so few academics will discuss it.

 

But regardless, Lindener is happy to be on the Farm. He spoke passionately about his work, but his face lit up when he discussed the “youngsters”: students who come up and talk to him, and, he hopes, perhaps one day will take his research one step further.

 

“I’m thankful [Stanford] is intellectual enough that this can go forward, and I’m trying to hold my own,” Lindener said.

 

In Lindener’s words, his work is about producing a “more prosperous world.” Whether or not anyone agrees with his math, Lindener has spent the past seven years of life working to develop a system that he believes would politically empower the most people in the most effective way.