@sass Ok well I don't know what you mean by "competitive elections." The elections RCV-Hare have been used in seem quite competitive. I have often used the 2018 San Francisco mayor election as a good example of a competitive election that RCV-Hare did a great job with. irvmayor.png

But you said "3+ competitive factions," which I'm not sure what you mean by that. What qualifies as a faction? In the election above, Mark Leno and Jane Kim campaigned together, and were often "co-endorsed" by newspapers and organizations. To me, that's the sort of thing that should happen. I don't know whether you consider Leno and Kim as a single faction or two factions, or really what you mean. Could you give us a definition of "competitive" or "competitive factions"? For instance, does "competitive" mean "highly polarized, with significant portions of the electorate utterly hating at least one front runner"? Or simply "very close"?
alt text

Hi all,
Sorry for the delay, but this thread was recently brought up again as an example so I'd like to post a comment addressing the Code of Conduct issues raised.

Making the forum welcoming for new (and old) people is important. To that aim, we do have a code of conduct that can be helpful.

It includes this: "Please make an effort to stay on topic and to not waste people's time. Keep in mind that this is a volunteer-driven project, and that time contributed by participants and moderators is appreciated and valued. Try to keep all discussions relevant to voting theory and reform efforts. Avoid sweeping generalizations or assumptions."

I am posting to indicate that I have not abandoned the simulation project; I am gradually trying to progress it. I don't expect a response unless you think I have left something important out or am painting myself into a corner with the design choices I am laying out.

I asked myself: What are we going to read from the file directories and how will what we read figure in during prompting and execution?

At the indicative level, a voting system declares what form of ballot it requires.

Tactics, at the indicative level, will be able to answer given a ballot form, are they capable of generating ballots conforming thereto.

So, when the user selects a voting system, the app will offer the tactics that can produce ballots for that system.

Since tactics will have an indicative level and an executive level, they must comprise at least two files, so it makes sense to use a directory for each tactic.

So there will be one directory containing the subdirectories for the voting systems and one directory containing the subdirectories for the tactics. There is no need for the hierarchy of directories to reflect any kind of categorization of either. So, for example, there will not be a directory of ranking voting systems nor a directory of rating voting systems nor a directory of Condorcet-compliant voting systems, etc.

Example declarations of ballot types:

{ [0]: 'rating', finite: false, /* Continuous -- allows floating-point ratings. */ min: 0, max: 1, } { [0]: 'rating', finite: true, range: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5], /* like STAR */ } { [0]: 'ranking', equal_ranking_allowed: true, }

Here's Approval:

{ [0]: 'rating', finite: true, range: [0, 1], /* Approval */ }

@michaelossipoff said in Ranked Robin Disadvantages -:

River adds a clause to RP, & loses the autodeterence of wv RP & MinMax.

Could you explain more? How does it lose autodeterrence? I was under the impression that River(wv) was effectively minmax with fewer spoilers.

@jack-waugh said in Waterfox:

@psephomancy, do you still love Waterfox Classic?

I switched to regular Firefox about a year ago, sadly. I still have Waterfox for occasional use of the add-ons that aren't supported anywhere else anymore, but I don't use it regularly; it's just not viable anymore. 😞

@jack-waugh I'd like to find an explicit example eventually if possible. I haven't fully formalized the criterion as I imagine it yet. In terms of the loose "mere existence" criterion, there are definitely examples, since the modification can be applied to any voting system, and if you consider any voting system non-additive, then we can use that one.
For the updated concept, I think both the concept itself and the concept of what it means for a system to be additive need improved formalization. Do you think you can suggest what it means for a system to be additive mathematically?

@toby-pereira On a ranked ballot you can't show if a 2nd choice is as good as a 1st choice or as bad as a last choice. In practice, ranked methods have to constrain how many candidates can be ranked. There are a few different ways you can look at it, but here's why I think it's the most expressive on the table (excluding cardinal methods with a bigger range)

the ability to vote on every candidate no matter how many there are, The ability to show preference order The ability to show degree of support on a 6 rating scale.

@toby-pereira I believe burial is significantly more risky with SQNV than with Borda, due to the general non-linear and unknown nature of the final normalized positional scores. Burying a second-favorite front runner below the top half of one’s ranks significantly increases the risk that a turkey will win, and “half burying” the second-favorite (placing them just above the half way mark) still may provide a fair deal of support for that candidate. It’s really risky to place turkeys above the half way mark unless absolutely necessary for the same reason.

This of course doesn’t necessarily stop turkey raising and burial from happening, but the non-linearity introduces significantly more severe deterrence against burial and turkey raising for a rational voter. At the same time, SQNV frequently elects the Condorcet winner (I would say “more frequently than score” for example, but that would be based anecdotally on the examples I’ve observed).

I think one step for analysis would be to see if SQNV elects the Condorcet winner in cases where Borda does not. My guess is that this happens quite often, which would be a heuristic indication that SQNV generally has better burial resistance than Borda.

@k98kurz 3-2-1 Voting comes to mind for a method which uses a proper negative vote in the form of a "reject" option which is treated differently

This issue is resolved, or at least, alleviated, as Eric Wilhelm has SSH access to the production and backup servers.

@jack-waugh Ok. although I ignore categories as I browse via the recent page

@Marylander said in Approval vs. IRV:

[IRV] will strike out everyone but the top two, then pick the most preferred candidate between the two.

The current system does that just fine.

I discussed in this thread how COWPEA can fail a multiwinner version of Pareto efficiency, which you could define as follows:

If every voter has approved at least as many candidates in set X as set Y, and at least one voter has approved more candidates in set X than set Y, then set Y should not be the winning set.

But I then countered in this thread that it might not actually be such a desirable property.

However, it does leave me wondering how optimal candidate Thiele voting would behave. Thiele's biggest failing is that it fails ULC, but with different candidate weighting allowed, a universally liked candidate would get all the power, so the problem might go away. But there might be residual problems when a candidate isn't universally liked, but is by certain factions, or if factions mix in a certain way. So I'm not sure if the problem would remain. Thiele would automatically pass the Pareto criterion above, though as said, it's debatable how desirable it is.

I think in general it would lead to more majoritarian but less purely proportional results than COWPEA.

@cfrank said in If there are only two candidates, could FPTP be improved upon?:

Do you really think it’s a better idea to have peanut butter sandwiches than to have fruit cups?

Food allergies are a special case where we "override democracy" for some greater ideal. That's very different and I don't think can be accounted for by voting.

Should I be able to claim an allergy (real or metaphorical) to a certain candidate? Claim that if that candidate gets elected, it will cause me to get physically sick or otherwise is simply intolerable? I think we'd have complete chaos, and it would no longer be democracy if such absolutes can be allowed. If someone is on the ballot, they should be considered a viable candidate, full stop.

I think it’s clear that empathy is necessary here to come to a sociable solution

I wish everyone was fully empathetic and cared for everyone else, rather than being selfish. Meanwhile my daughter wishes that unicorns were real and that cotton candy rained from the sky. 🙂 Seriously, though, that just sounds like wishful thinking, and the realization that that sort of thing doesn't work for large numbers of people is why voting was invented in the first place.

I'm all for systems that bring people together rather than driving them apart. There are ways to align people's interests with the goal being social harmony. But assuming they are that way to begin with? I don't see how that is going to work at all.

I have suggested one before involving allowing voters to send in ballots, making the candidates anonymous except for their score distributions, and then having the electorate vote on which candidate to select according to those score distributions only

Ok I missed that one but I don't understand it from your short description. Is this two votes? I don't understand why people would vote on score distributions when they don't know who the candidates are. Seems more efficient, and just as good, to just agree upon a formula for it ahead of time, so you don't spend millions of dollars bringing people in just to vote on how to resolve votes, for every single election. It sounds like all that would do would be make it more complex, and obscure any potential bad effects from being directly analyzed. But mostly, who is going to want to go in and vote on anonymous score distributions? I also don't see it having a positive effect with regard to the food allergy example, it's not like people would see someone giving a particularly low score to PB&J (not knowing that the choice is PB&J) and conclude that they must have an allergy, rather than just being picky.

Also, are you suggesting it would be better than majority vote for a simple binary choice, i.e. two candidates? It doesn't seem like you could vote on score distributions for two candidates, so if not, this really doesn't apply.

@rob said in Way too many categories:

And while others here don't seem to have made this connection (yet?), to me the problem has gotten 100 times more urgent very recently, given that we're suddenly in an AI arms race, which a divided society is especially not ready for. It's sort of like nuclear weapons, except that generative AI spins gold right up until it destroys us all. And one nice thing about nuclear weapons is we can be pretty sure that the weapons themselves aren't going to decide on their own to wipe us out. Another nice thing about nuclear weapons is that the people who build them actually know how they work. (generative AI such as GPT-4 is essentially an enormous matrix of floating point numbers that no one on the planet truly understands why it works the way it does)
(hey I've been accused of being alarmist before. Usually I don't think I am. Here, yeah, I'm pretty freaking alarmist.)

I've quoted from a different thread because I think this discussion is possibly more relevant here.

I wrote a paper a few years ago making an argument against the future existence of superintelligent AI, based on anthropic reasoning. You might not agree with the argument or think it's a very strong argument, but I thought I'd leave it with you anyway!

@sarawolk said in Tweet by Star Voting regarding Multi Winner Voting:

Equal Vote as an org doesn't endorse any systems that don't eliminate vote-splitting and/or that waste ballot data, so MMP and STV don't pass our minimum bar but 'terrible' is a strong word. There are clearly pros and cons.

Hi Sara,

Point of clarification. My quote labels Party List and Single Member Plurality as terrible not MMP. I don't think that is too strong of a work for them (speak as me not as a director of equal vote. MMP is mediocre.

Azure (Microsoft) does in fact support Linux.

Notes remind me that the distro I used on Linode (now merged with Akamai) is Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS (bionic).

@toby-pereira Right, that's what I'm saying. I should have been more clear.

Approval, STAR, Ranked Robin, Score, etc. all pass the Equality Criterion. The Equality Criterion is literally the test of One Person, One Vote, ie an equally weighted vote, according to the Supreme Court, but because you're voting for multiple candidates and you're literally casting multiple votes, it really doesn't seem like it.

The Approval pitch that "the candidate with the most votes wins" explicitly defines an Approval as a vote and states that each voter can cast multiple votes. (This makes Approval comply with Plurality laws, but not "vote for 1" laws.)

So, explaining why Approval does pass One Person, One Vote isn't easy, especially on the scale needed. In any case, it's absolutely something CES needs to get in front of.

In contrast, in STAR and RCV your vote ultimately only counts for one candidate, or as an abstention between the finalists. Oregon, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania all have constitutions that requite voters to only cast a vote for one candidate, so this is important legally.

@jack-waugh I don’t follow.

@Jack-Waugh My apologies. I did not notice that your question about a voter favoring both front runners was directed to @Rob. I mistakenly thought it was directed to me based on a strategy WDS proposed in his paper for IRV simulations.

The WDS strategy assumes the two front runners are significantly distinct and any voter tempted to vote strategically would have strong preferences. If I recall correctly, the WDS strategy for IRV (Strategic Hare STV) was to give the maximal rank to the better of the two front runners and the worst rank to the lesser front runner, then use a moving average to fill out the ballot by giving the highest remaining rank to the next most likely alternative that was better than average and the lowest remaining rank to the next most likely alternative that was worse than average.

That strategy is certainly codable for a simulation, but it also seemed like a direct lead-in to your question about a why voter that liked both front-runners would vote strategically, and framed the question in the real world. Hence my response. Hopefully, it is at least an interesting scenario.