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@lime said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

The Gibbard theorem showed that optimal voting takes any guesses or estimates of the positions of other voters into account.

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Gibbard's theorem just proves there's no single "best" strategy for voting in an election.

Let's read from the introductory part of the Wikipedia article on Gibbard's theorem:

for any deterministic process of collective decision, at least one of the following three properties must hold:

1. The process is dictatorial, i.e. there is a single voter whose vote chooses the outcome.
2. The process limits the possible outcomes to two options only.
3. The process is not straightforward; the optimal ballot for a voter depends on their beliefs about other voters' ballots.

I think you will agree with me that condition 1 does not apply to Score Voting if there is more than one voter, and that elections are possible in which condition 2 does not hold, either. That leaves us with a certainty that condition 3 holds. The optimal vote does not depend merely on the desire of the voter toward the candidates. It must also take into consideration whatever partial knowledge or probability estimates the voter feels in regard to the other voters.

The socially-optimal outcome is only possible if every voter is fully honest.

What grounds do you have for coming to such an opinion? I don't think it is correct.

Enforcing automatic strategy...

For what purpose do you introduce such a topic?

@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

In non-official channels of communication, I see urging "honesty" as problematic and dishonest. Voting is not an opinion poll; it is an exercise of political power. It's like steering a boat. When you command "right full rudder", it's not an opinion, but a muscular exercise that feeds into the whole dynamic of the boat's motion in accord with the Laws O' Physics (TM), the design of the boat, the propeller's rotational velocity, etc.

Or we could provide true information and help the system pick a better winner.

No, we can't. We don't have access to the true information. We have no means to extract this from the voters. Voters have free will and their own purposes and values. If we are studying what they do, we may indeed get a pretty good clue about their values, but we cannot guarantee to get it accurately. We don't have the power to coerce them into telling the whole truth about it.

@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

then I predict that Faction A will within a few elections figure out that it should use the maximum value (5) and minimum value (0) of the permitted range. I think factions don't usually voluntarily give up power. Elections are contentious.

Empirically, about 60% of voters choose to do so.

They choose to give up power? What situations was this empirical measurement made on? Was anything at stake based on the outcomes from the tallies? How many Score elections had the voters already experienced, where something important was at stake?

When asked if they'd prefer to have a voting strategy automatically executed for them,

Again, for what porpoise do you bring this idea into the conversation?

@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

What reasoning leads you to think that Score voters pushing exaggerated support hose toward compromise candidates tends to spoil elections? They are still giving more support to their true favorites. If enough proportion of voters are standing with them, that candidate can win.

Arrow's theorem, which implies that if voters base their on strategic considerations, there will always be spoiler effects.

What is the relevance? The Arrow theorem assumes strict ranking.

(Compare honest score voting, which is completely spoilerproof.)

"Honest voting" is a theoretical concept that can be useful in thought experiments and reasoning and the design of algorithms, etc. However, it does not describe a phenomenon that can happen in real elections in which something important rides on the outcome of the tally.

If people don't use the maximum number in Score, I'd say they are trying to support "None of the Above" (NOTA). We should require that NOTA is treated as a candidate in all elections and that the specification of the election state what shall happen in case should NOTA win. Some candidates for that are:

• new candidates sought for another attempt to elect someone to the office;
• office abolished

@lime you could also have a persistence diagram that shows the support level of each candidate at every possible cutoff. This produces “score proportion” profiles that indicate the fraction of voters who score each candidate at least a given score. It’s possible to define a dynamic threshold or even an integral across all thresholds.

@gregw that’s a good question, I think that would be a contingency clause. I’m no lawyer and I don’t know much of anything about those or the limitations about how they can be structured.

@Lime I agree with @Jack-Waugh. If we’re going to succeed in making any technical arguments then we will have to work with clear definitions and can’t afford to be loose with interpretations. It’s also dangerous territory to even bring up certain terms in the context of a legal argument, because terms that were previously undefined and may have left some room for interpretation are then liable to collapse into a narrower scope that sets a precedent. That means we have to be very careful, because if it gets screwed up once, it will be all that much harder to unscrew it in the future.

@lime said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:

...

I wouldn't add anything about tactics; much better to avoid discussing it. I'd rather encourage voters to give honest ratings of each of the candidates, so we can get rid of spoiler effects; instructing them on how to vote tactically (or worse still, instructing them to normalize ballots) increases the rate of spoiled elections.

I disagree.

First off, let's separate official communication about an election from communication from a person's or a group's political takes.

The official communication about an election should indeed avoid laying out or suggesting tactics. It should only state the freedom of movement the voter has in filling out the ballot without invalidating it, and how the tally will work to determine the winner.

In non-official channels of communication, I see urging "honesty" as problematic and dishonest. Voting is not an opinion poll; it is an exercise of political power. It's like steering a boat. When you command "right full rudder", it's not an opinion, but a muscular exercise that feeds into the whole dynamic of the boat's motion in accord with the Laws O' Physics (TM), the design of the boat, the propeller's rotational velocity, etc.

What reasoning leads you to think that Score voters pushing exaggerated support hose toward compromise candidates tends to spoil elections? They are still giving more support to their true favorites. If enough proportion of voters are standing with them, that candidate can win.

Urging "honest" votes as though the election were an opinion poll is just sucker bait. People who follow your urging are giving up power to their opponents.

The Gibbard theorem showed that optimal voting takes any guesses or estimates of the positions of other voters into account.

@lime said in State constitutions that require “a plurality of the votes” or the “highest,” “largest,” or “greatest” number of votes.:

I'm not sure why these would pose a problem for score, as phrased. Under score, the candidate with the largest number of votes wins.

You are getting into dangerous rhetoric. If we say that score points are "votes", it will sound as though we are not "one person, one vote". A vote in Score assigns a score to each candidate.

@lime well, people who oppose reform (aka those in power) will find ways to concoct detailed arguments against the adoption of any reform proposal, and questionable constitutionality is a low bar.

@gregw, then I predict that Faction A will within a few elections figure out that it should use the maximum value (5) and minimum value (0) of the permitted range. I think factions don't usually voluntarily give up power. Elections are contentious.

@jack-waugh that will work if everybody does it. However, it’s likely that people will not go through with that unless they have the same kind of discipline it takes not to constantly check stock values.