@jack-waugh said in Why isn't anyone talking about the elephant in the room?:

Sass has been saying,

He should come here and defend his positions. I see huge flaws in his logic and approaches, but don't want to feel like I'm attacking someone who isn't here to defend himself.

@andy-dienes @Sass I think this conversation has gotten off track again.

In my opinion, one of the biggest problems we struggle with as a movement is siloing. The research and academia world is very, very out of touch with the advocacy landscape and the politics of reform, and vice versa.

Worse, the strategies of each branch of the electoral reform movement; general voting reform, PR specific voting reform, gerrymandering, the electoral college, election integrity, etc, are often super out of alignment with each other. In a lot of cases each of these 'factions' has a pitch and strategy that makes sense in a vacuum, but together, they don't play nice and are maybe even harmful to each other. In many cases, these factions are pretty oblivious about each other. (Which is where a forum like this could help.)

Obviously, most of the researchers you cite are very well informed in their specialty areas, but I wouldn't assume that an expert in parliamentary systems and List PR would be well versed in STAR Voting, cardinal voting, or in proposals that might be able to get some overlapping outcomes from a very different mechanism. I wouldn't assume that gerrymandering experts are well versed in campaign finance reform (CFR) or that CFR advocates are well versed in PR.

While academia is often good at getting the right answers, I'm not convinced that they are good at asking the right questions and I think have done a pretty bad job in many cases at looking at politics and reform holistically and understanding the various intersections.

In terms of political viability, I think it's important to look at the landscape and the impact of each reform on those who have the power to pass it. For example, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact has passed in a lot of blue states but will have a harder time in red states because the electoral college benefits the Republican party. Until that changes this proposal is unlikely to pass and stick, regardless how much good it might do if it did.

Similarly, I think it's unlikely that a state where one party has gained an edge due to gerrymandering would pass a reform like PR that requires them to give up that edge. In a state like Wisconsin...

"Just look at what's happened in Wisconsin, where the state legislature has a supermajority with a minority of votes."

... I think it's unlikely that a faction that currently has a supermajority of seats and has an advantage from the existing system would pass a reform like PR that's specifically designed to ensure they give up that advantage. On the other hand, because they have a red supermajority they likely have a lot of vote-splitting within their fractured party, and might be more open minded to STAR, which would help, but wouldn't explicitly take away their power.

I'm in no way convinced that we should stop working on single-winner reform everywhere because PR could fix gerrymandering in places like Wisconsin. It may be politically viable and legal in some jurisdictions, but it's not legal or viable in the places that need it the most, at least not if voters actually understand the system and it's implications.

@Andy-Dienes, a lot of your posts rely very heavily on appealing to the opinions of authority figures in academia to convince us we are wrong in terms of our reform strategy. Then you link to 50 pages of articles without any indication to which points you think are persuasive or relevant. These articles make a ton of great points I agree with, but also raise multiple points that I find unpersuasive, that conflate causation with correlation, and that fail to control for other factors that absolutely are at play.

This isn't constructive and it doesn't set us up to find our specific points of agreement and check them off, or find our points of disagreement and discuss them. It sets us up to do what we've done in this thread, which is go all over the map arguing dozens of separate points at a superficial level while offending each other and then spending more time on the discussion than we'd intended.

If we want to get into the bigger picture we should start a new thread, but I think we should try and get back to talking about the number of candidates in a race, how different systems and mechanisms effect that, and what the ideal is.

@wolftune OK, that's fine. I don't disagree with your point. But I was clarifying in case your post was a response to my bit about the candidates that are the favourites of nobody, but obviously it wasn't.

But just to be clear anyway - when I was talking about not wanting to elect the favourite-of-nobody candidates, I wasn't referring to stopping the election of such candidates in principle. But we've discussed certain specific scenarios where we all seem to agree that electing the candidates that are the favourite of nobody isn't the best thing to do. And I was discussing ways to elect the candidates we would want to in this situation.

@lime said in What Multiwinner Method To Push For Local Boards?:

@toby-pereira said in What Multiwinner Method To Push For Local Boards?:

Well, SPAV is purely approval whereas SPAV + KP is scores, so which ends up being more proportional might depend on exactly how you define proportional and also how people vote in practice. There's always been the question with score voting of whether some voters will lose out by casting a more honest ballot but losing out strategically.

Thus my question in another thread, about whether Harmonic voting might lose the stable winner set properties of PAV. The stable winner set seems like it could provide some very strong strategy-resistance properties, similar to Condorcet in single-winner elections.

I don't think its strategy resistance is as strong as it would be with ranked ballots. With approval voting, you still have to decide whether to approve candidates you don't like as much because you think they've got a better chance of being elected.

Schulze STV uses ranked ballots and reduces to the Schulze Condorcet method in the single-winner case. It's probably more strategically robust than an approval-based method that satisfies core stability.

My first impression is that it is too difficult to understand and explain.

@cfrank @Toby-Pereira
Thx for the tag assist. I live I learn!
I pray to the universal equalness of all people living today that we, somehow, achieve heaven on earth where life is good and that the future is promising. I pray that wars, poverty, climate destruction, depression, resignation are all things of the past. I make this prayer to god (as defined above) and that we realize our full human potential quickly and completely with no offsetting quid pro quo or "bad twist ending theater" to "balance out" this prayer. Amen.
That's how I pray. For a lot of stuff. To me, the one truism is the equaleness of all people. This one simple, self-evident fact, is the fuel that, with an appropriate efficient engine, can get us to where we all want to be.
So how do we funnel our equalness, all 8 billion's worth, into running this shit show?
The two burning questions 1) can we do it? Is there some way to harness the whim of all people, without anyone playing god and predetermining a rule book that can and will be exploited to nefarious ends? and 2) should we do it? If we have a machine that fits the bill, would it be a good idea to turn it on?
So anyhow, I apologize for not directly responding to your notes. The Federalist Papers, Constitution Convention, Pre-amble etc. are of great interest to me. I'm just trying to do something that is very different that I think will really help. Kind of, sort of, like Chastain's NASCAR wall ride. Hilarious btw if you haven't seen it!
As always, if at anytime I cross your perceived line of sanity, I apologize and of course don't expect a response.

@sarawolk

I seem to be getting e-mails now.

The next question is whether @Jameson-Quinn can log in. So far, he hasn't responded to me. Maybe he is busy on other activities and can't put priority on getting reconnected here.

Also I've been doing some work on my COWPEA paper to see if I can get it to publication standard. So hopefully that will happen at some point.

I've thought of a slightly-simpler variant on MARS: Each candidate's score is equal to their range score, plus the score of the strongest (highest-scored) candidate they majority-beat. Thinking through what properties this would have.

@cfrank yes, well I guess the problem can exist at a lot of different levels.

Individuals can certainly vote strategically, and effectively so, under FPTP. Under approval, they almost have to. (unless they truly do think in simplistic black and white "like" and "dislike" terms)

I am also concerned about forming parties and eliminating candidates through primaries (etc), which FPTP strongly incentivizes. To be honest, that is the biggest problem because it causes so much polarization.

I am less clear on how organizations could game it through computation, although I don't doubt it is possible. They certainly do that with gerrymandering, with a lot of sophistication.

@jack-waugh Depends on the context. I haven't spent a ton of time scouring their site because it infuriates me, but in my limited experience, their hard data on what voters actually put down on ballots tends to be pretty reliable. Their claims about what different voting methods do and don't do are usually pretty bunk all around, though.

@jack-waugh said in Code Readability:

That technique obscures what is dependent on what

Yeah, for stuff like that, I wait until a project becomes bigger to worry about it. It's easy to change it later if you need to be more rigorous about such things. For whatever it is worth, my suggestion is to relax a bit on such things, it might result in getting things working more quickly.

@jack-waugh said in Code Readability:

I had moved away from app-specific HTML for so long that I sort of forgot that you can load everything as scripts from the HTML.

I also do a fair amount of loading stuff this way. That is, load the script files dynamically. Can be really handy if you want to load an updated version of some code without restarting the whole app. This is a bit more complicated because it allows loading directly from a file (via src property of a script tag), or actually reading the text of the js file, and inserting that into a script tag.

(I wouldn't leave it this way on any kind of production app, but it is handy while building something out)

let loadAllJavascript = (isReload) => { var filteredPath = 'http://localhost:9999/js/filtered/'; // third item true to pull from sandbox files instead var files = [ ['ElemMaker', 'http://localhost:9999/js/library/', true], ['PopupBox', filteredPath, true], ['Scrubber', filteredPath, true], ['AccurateYoutubeTime', filteredPath, true], ['SynchronizerThread', filteredPath, true], ['VideoEventScheduler', filteredPath, true], ['VideoEventQueue', filteredPath, true], ['VideoPlayerNew', filteredPath, true] ]; for(var i=0; i<files.length; i++) { let scr = document.createElement('script'); if(files[i][2]) { if(!isReload) { // this (fetching the text then applying it // to script tag, rather than just setting the source // url) should not be necessary, but it seems to be // in this sandbox environment . fetch('./js/' + files[i][0] + '.js?' + Math.random()) .then((response) => { if (response.ok) return response.text() throw new Error('Network response was not ok.') }) .then((data) => { let scr = document.createElement('script'); scr.appendChild(document.createTextNode(data)) document.body.appendChild(scr); }); } } else { scr.src = files[i][1] + files[i][0] + '.js?' + Math.random(); document.body.appendChild(scr); } } }

@cfrank Consider a score system with a range of 0 through 5 by 1. Giving Harris a 1 would raise her chances of beating, say, Stein, who gets a 5 from me.

@sass said in S-2-1:

It's really weird reading a Score advocate claim that voting behavior should be based on hatred and fear. Score is all about consensus.

Agree completely. I mean I'm not a huge fan of Score but good voting systems should be about bringing people together toward something they can all be relatively happy with.

Instead, this sounds like someone is just raging against the machine rather than approaching it with a positive vision of a better future. Makes me feel like I'm in the wrong place.

Also, "Tongue Kiss" is super f****** gross. I'm genuinely repulsed and knowing that it's from the person who manages this site makes me want leave the entire forum.

Sorry Jack but this was my impression too. I'd recommend giving thought to how that sort of cranky-ranty-weird-angry-gross stuff comes off to people visiting here and considering participating. Rkjoyce did a lot of that on the old forum (example https://votingtheory.com/archive/posts?where={"topic_id"%3A342} ), but he wasn't the one actually running the forum.

@robla yes definitely, I agree. The separation here is not explicitly by ballot type, but the space of voting systems according to the way the graphic is constructed seems to be roughly split into two camps along an axis, where systems on one end of the axis seem to have cardinal/score-like ballots while those on the other end tend to have rank-order ballots. Somewhere in the middle of those for example is STAR, which has characteristics of both possibly due to the way the ballot is operated upon. Then there seem to be roughly two other dimensions (according to my rough embedding), and those dimensions in theory might somehow characterize the algorithms.

This specific map though is independent of how the systems are actually used, so the similarities being depicted will probably have a lot to do with the mathematical structure of the systems compared with the degree to which the similarities relate to how the systems operate in practice. As @rob is addressing, it would be more interesting to create a map using practical criteria based on empirical data rather than (and/or in addition to) absolute criteria.

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

Yes, many state laws and include clauses specifying which parts are intended to be severable.

Good that using severability is not be legally controversial when changing state law. "If not Score than Approval" would be a legally reasonable provision in a voting reform law.

@Jack-Waugh you’re right about For-and-Against, the modification I suggested is much less significant because it requires the pairs to match exactly, whereas For-and-Against counts all the positives and all the negatives. Just another example of how arbitrary the concept of “balance” in this formalism is. I liked your strengthening of the argument, you’re absolutely right about that as well, because it virtually eliminates any level of information voters might have about other ballots.

Maybe there is something more tangible that F-balance is trying to point to, but it isn’t clear what it might be. In my opinion, with respect to the concept of balance, the strengthened construction should by all reason send equal.vote back to the drawing board, especially if they can’t even formalize a valid counter-argument.

@toby-pereira said in Promoting Plain Score:

I don't see how adding half marks is simpler than doubling the range of integers.

If you have individual bubbles for 0-10, fitting all of them on one piece of paper gets hard. In addition, finding the bubble you want to use is hard.

The main distinction is between ≤6 bubbles (subitization range) vs. >6 bubbles. For more than 6 bubbles, finding the bubble you want requires a "search", which is mentally costly and discourages intermediate ratings (which are more complex).

Usually this is handled by breaking the problem down into two subitization steps. This makes finding the best bubble easy, and also makes it easy for voters who don't want that extra precision to ignore it.

@Marylander said in SACRW2: Score And Choose Random Winner from 2 complementing methods:

I think it is difficult to define a sincere vote as something completely isolated from its effects on the outcome, since I think that those effects are what give votes "meaning"

True, but with ranked methods, I think we can pretty easily define "sincere" to mean that you ranked them according to your actual preferences. Likewise under plurality, if I preferred Ralph Nader to Al Gore (in 2000), but voted for Gore because I thought Nader didn't have a chance, and preferred Gore to Bush... that's an insincere, strategic vote.

One shortcut to deciding what is a sincere vote is if you actually would vote the same way if you truly had no idea which of the candidates is more likely to win. If so, that is (in all cases I can think of) a sincere vote.

@rob said in Codepens:

So it is installed? Do I just do this?

Yes, you do.