Kind of similar to what I was doing in Codepen, for instance here:

https://codepen.io/karmatics/pen/eYJxXge

Mine looked like this (when there is only one of a particular vote combination, there is no number and colon on the left needed):

134: a[5] b[4] c[2] d[1] e[0] f[0]
64: a[5] b[4] c[3] d[1] e[0] f[0]
94: a[3] b[5] c[4] d[1] e[0] f[0]
70: a[2] b[2] c[5] d[2] e[0] f[0]
63: a[0] b[0] c[0] d[3] e[4] f[5]
55: a[0] b[0] c[1] d[3] e[5] f[4]
55: a[0] b[1] c[2] d[3] e[5] f[3]
48: a[0] b[0] c[1] d[3] e[5] f[5]
30: a[1] b[0] c[0] d[3] e[3] f[5]
30: a[0] b[1] c[2] d[5] e[5] f[4]

You can see I have a parser and all that.

This one worked with the format of data from an actual election in Maine, which is an ugly and bulky csv format:

https://codepen.io/karmatics/pen/eYJxoMa

I was doing this when I was hoping that Codepen embedding would be added to this forum, not sure if that is in the works. But I think if it was, having a standard format would gain a lot of traction here.

@bternarytau

This is a little nitpicky, but the notation

P(f(k, e) = c)

implies that k is random (because if k is fixed, then this probability would have to be either 0 or 1), but this is not stated.

Assuming that there are finite possible seeds and that each seed is equally likely to be chosen, we could write:
P(f(k, e) = c) = sum over s in S (I_c(f(s, e)))/|S|,
where S is the set of seeds, I_c(f(s, e)) = 1 if f(s, e) = c and I_c(f(s, e)) = 0 otherwise.

For many methods, |S| might need to be chosen in a way that depends on some limited information about the election, in particular the number of candidates (since for there to be an even 3-way tiebreaker, |S| needs to be divisible by 3 and so on). Methods that are "routinely" non-deterministic (such as random ballot) might also require the number of votes to select |S|.

@brozai right there can be, but there isn't always. When there isn't a single Condorcet winner or Copeland winner, as often as not there are three that are tied.

However I think it's still useful to study such methods, as you never know how voters' moods will change, and maybe a simpler method like one I listed can act as a stepping stone towards a more complex one.

Yeah, I'm ok with that. There's certainly nothing wrong with studying them, and it seems to be a good method if complexity isn't an issue.

And I totally understand why they published it the way they did. If all they did was provide a reason to switch to a better existing method, well.... that would be a pretty lame academic paper.

I just felt that their lead up was very good, they called out two real problems with IRV, then suggest that there are only two options:

we must consider which of the following approaches is preferable:
(1) deciding almost every election in a simple way—just elect the Condorcet winner—and rarely applying a more complicated backup plan, perhaps more complicated than IRV, or
(2) deciding many elections with a fairly complicated iterative elimination of candidates and transferring of votes, which may cause controversy when failing to elect a candidate who beats every other?

Without mentioning a third:
3) deciding almost every election in a simple way—just elect the Condorcet winner—and rarely applying the tried and tested IRV method

I should add, there are two kinds of complexity. IRV is complex in that it goes through this messy process which seems to delay election results (presumably because of its lack of precinct summability? I mean, computers are fast so that alone shouldn't be an issue. )

But IRV is easy enough to explain, and it has already been put into legislation, so all you have to do is copy and paste from, say, San Francisco's law.

The other kind of complexity is what we have with Stable Voting. It is recursive and seems pretty hard to explain, especially in a way that can be put into legal code.

@rob I like this concept, I was also trying to consider the prospect of interstate pacts. In the case of less competitive states, an alternative voting system pact might be set to go into effect only once a sufficiently "large" group of states enter into the agreement (maybe measured according to their electoral college points as you suggest), which could easily negate the difficulties of diminishing federal influence when competing with a large FPTP block.

I think electors tend to be mostly faithful to the interests of their states (at least as far as can be determined by the gerrymandered districts), especially I think since they have the pressure of public scrutiny to more-or-less rubber stamp the results as they come in, and hopefully they also have some humility in their own decision-making powers and confidence in the larger process. I do think it gets problematic because entrusting electors to distribute their votes according to a less black-and-white indication of state interests does give them significantly more political power and responsibility that they will also need to be held accountable for. Generally I don't mind the concept of electors/representative arbiters as long as the incentives are sorted out. The way I see it all we can hope for is a system that consistently gives results that are good enough for national success, and if such a system does the job that'd be just fine with me.

I also think it’s a good sign that we’re at the point of discussing potential issues with real large-scale implementation.

@multi_system_fan Thanks. I'm working on adding some new things that will make it better, as well as tie it to the more traditional pairwise matrix view. For instance I want to allow both this thing, and the pairwise matrix to appear side by side, and support mouse hover effects for both of them. (you could also just view one of the other)

I did some hover effects on the matrix some years back, but it would be especially cool if you could have the two things side by side, and when you hover over a pair of candidates on the matrix, or the connector line between the candidates on the "mesh" display, it would highlight relevant things in both graphics at once.

(this is for voting for restaurants, as we did at a previous job I had where they ordered lunch for us every day and we'd always waste time arguing about which one to get each day)
alt text

I'm convinced that allowing people to visualize this stuff quickly makes it less scary to them. Nobody wants to sort through tons of data, a picture can make a big difference.

A pairwise matrix without colors and hover effects / animation is extremely hard to make heads or tails of.... but all the better if you can show a simpler-seeming graphic that has each candidate on it only once.

@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 Left is right, right is wrong.

A pair of concepts that might have use when we think about cast ballots is "ballot token" and "ballot type". A ballot token then would be an individual ballot and a ballot type would be the equivalence class of all the ballots that say the same thing.

@cfrank Then whichever party has more candidates than the other is advantaged. This makes the clone failures even worse

@cfrank Geez I hate being boring and just agreeing with @Andy-Dienes again, but.... yeah. Cardinal ballots (i.e. 0-5) I think are the easiest for voters. Higher resolution cardinal ballots are even better, where it is practical. It makes sense for the votes I am proposing we do in this forum, since it gets more information out of each voter. (0-10 with as many decimal places as you want)

But really, the best methods will just ignore the information that goes beyond ranking, or if they do use it, it is as a last resort.

I'm not overly concerned with bullet voting, as those voters are choosing to not use all the power granted to them. I wouldn't characterize it as a vulnerability, any more than people choosing not to vote, or choosing to equally rank candidates (if that is allowed).

As for what I think is most sellable to the public: probably ranked not cardinal ballots, simply because RCV is a thing. I think you could sell a Condorcet method while just calling it RCV. Bottom-2-runoff is good in that it is the smallest change to RCV. A simple version of minimax is good because it can be based on a pairwise matrix alone, which makes it most easily precinct summable.

Recursive IRV is.... well I'm kinda obsessing over it at the moment. But I won't say more at the moment until I understand it better.

@rob I think it would also be interesting to get votes on what forum users consider the most important aspects of a voting system.

It would also probably be useful to get some kind of informal map of different voting systems plotted on a spectrum of relative characteristics. I think a triangular spectrum of stable vs. simple vs. consensual could be a good place to start.

@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.

@cfrank I think it's more of a multi-election system, and it's kind of orthogonal to whether there are multiple winners or what method is used to determine the winner (plurality, RCV, etc). It's about how many votes you can cast on a given issue, for situations where "one person, one vote" is effectively unfair to minorities who are affected more sharply then the majority by a particular question. (Disclaimer: this is all just my impression and I might have it totally wrong.)

So if you're on a city council and you'll be voting on 100 bills this term, and a lot of them are about stuff in other districts that you don't care much about, but a few are really important in your district, you could use more of your allotted votes on the ones you care about, so you're less likely to get overruled by people who don't know or care as much about it.

In some variants, each vote costs money, so a billionaire can buy as many votes as they can afford. But at $1/vote, even if they spend $500M to get 500M votes, they could only overrule sqrt(500M)=22,360 people who disagree and spend $1 each on their votes. So it's a way to allow people to buy as many votes as they want if there's an issue that's super important to them, but without letting the wealthy become dictators.

Since you cite the Modified Borda Count (which I guess is as described at http://www.deborda.org/modified-borda-count/ ), it would seem that you are thinking about cases where a collective decision is sought as a single choice among some number of alternatives. So an example might be Puerto Rico remains a "commonwealth", becomes independent, or becomes a State; that would be three options from among which only one can be settled on.

What are the grounds or justifications for constraining every voter from awarding so many points as she chooses (from within a range fixed in advance) to each candidate? An example system that is permissive in this regard is STAR Voting.

@toby-pereira said in Entropy-Statistic-Weighted Approval Voting:

While I don't think it would be a good method in practice

The 2 most popular voting systems in practice are IRV and plurality. Anything is a good method in practice 😄

@sarawolk said in The dangers of analysis paralysis in voting reform:

Our paper found that burial is strongly disincentivized in STAR.

Yes, that's exactly the problem. We're talking about the same issue from two different perspectives. The issue is that burial is so strongly disincentivized that it's catastrophic. (Much like how the death penalty for littering would be very good at disincentivizing littering, but very bad for society.)

STAR punishes burial by blowing up the country, which creates a game of chicken. The mixed Nash equilibrium of chicken involves blowing up the country with some small (but positive) probability.

The example given isn't a "strategic" vote in any way. That would be an extremely risky vote that would be as likely to elect Hitler as it would be to help ensure your favorite won the runoff. By definition if the turkey candidate is strong enough to make the runoff then it's strong enough to be a real threat to your favorite.

Risky? Yes. But it's still plausibly strategic, if you think Bush will back down.

This is especially bad since it's the kind of strategy I think candidates and campaigns will try to encourage (regardless of how bad the outcomes are). Candidates coordinate strategy; voters take cues from campaigns and political elites (which is why the two major-party nominees are always the top-2 winners). If voters were individually strategic and self-interested, the low probability of a tie means nobody would vote.

The strategy I showed above would probably be bad for society or even for individual voters, because it has a good shot at backfiring and electing Hitler. However, it can be good for Gore's probability of winning, if Gore thinks Bush will back down.

Empirically, this happens all the time. Adam Schiff spent millions trying to boost the Republican in California over Katie Porter. The DNC keeps intervening in Republican primaries to try and get them to nominate extremists. They keep doing this because they think it's good for their own personal chances of winning the election, not because they think it's good for the country overall. And generally, they're right—even though it risks electing Hitlers, it still helps them win seats.