@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. 😞

@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.

@brian-lackey I think the main point is to use this to prompt IRV advocates to look at this issue, yes. I do not have plans to spend lots of time making this happen myself though

@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.

@rb-j Right, no problem. I have since read your description/ proposed legislation and I understand you describe the method for resolving Condorcet failures as a simply choosing the plurality winner. (which is fine, in my opinion, because they are so rare)

@jack-waugh said in No CPU, No Photocell:

The tabulators would have to sort the ballots by their response for each race. Can this be done in a reasonable time, for a system that allows equal ranking?

I wasn't suggesting hand tabulators put it into this format, or even that there be hand tabulation at all.

I am simply suggesting that the "raw" data -- essentially the description of all the ballots -- be available to the public after the election so that members of the public (reporters, bloggers/tweeters with some tech skills, etc) can download and process it, so they can make sure the later stages of tabulation are done correctly. (as well as to do other types of analysis on the data, including making pretty graphs/visualizers)

Remember, you were saying that Score makes it harder to cheat by computer hacking (compared with, for instance, STAR or Condorcet methods), basing this on the idea that the later stages of tabulation (the actual calculations) are simpler with Score. I'm saying the later stages don't need to be simple, as long as they can easily be verified by the public.

As for the format I showed (which gives a count for each of the ballot possibilities, rather than just listing all ballots), that just makes it more compact so it is easier to download and process. If they are cardinal ballots, or they allow full rankings and possibly equal rankings, it would make it bulkier but still pretty compact compared to a full list.

Sounds good. I have thought over the problem of cutting out too many candidates with a large percentage of the vote in their ridings. Maybe re-programming my computer again to limit the party percentage to 5 and limiting the riding percentage to 10 will help people be more acceptable to the system although it would restrict smaller parties and independents.

@jack-waugh

Correct. It just falls back to regular IRV in the case of a cycle. And yes, cycles are expected to be very rare.

It isn't what I'd consider the best Condorcet method, but I think that is probably outweighed by the practical / strategic value of making it seem similar to a method that is already being used and otherwise has some momentum. I think it would be very easy to sell as simply being a variation of Ranked Choice.

I think if any municipality were to adopt it, it would then make it a lot easier to propose to the next municipality moving to RCV some sort of better Condorcet method. But really, I don't care, Bentham is fine as far as I'm concerned. I believe, in real world elections, it would be as immune to strategic voting and strategic nomination as any method.