Just bumping this again. Since cycle removal works quite cleanly for 3 candidates, you could have a STAR-type method where the top 3 by score go into the run-off instead of 2, and with the top 3, you then remove cycles and find the Condorcet winner.
Alternatively you might want to come up with a cloneproof measure to find the top 3, perhaps similar to the score excess method that I posted here, based on Chris Benham's approval opposition.
@bmjacobs absolutely, the problem is mainly public perception. Probably at some point if more accessible reforms are made, public awareness will gravitate to more sophisticated solutions.
@bmjacobs my intuition is that it will take a lot of education to convince the mainstream public that nondeterminism is a viable solution to certain voting theoretical problems. Putting that aside, what would your position be regarding auditing and transparency for a nondeterministic system, and whether this kind of system could be feasibly implemented without worries about rigging?
@k98kurz it’s really great you’re working on these kinds of reinforcement learning methods in this field, definitely something both very interesting and that can give us insight into how these systems work. Looking forward to hearing about any of the work in this area!
As said, voters can often face a dilemma of whether to approve someone or not. What counts as approval etc. If I approve my second favourite candidate, what if it turns out my favourite could have won after all?
Also under ranked voting, ranks have less of an obvious meaning so a voter doesn't have to feel they are explicitly endorsing a candidate when they rank them over someone else. Say my preference order is A>B>C and B and C are the frontrunners, but I hate both B and C while preferring B to C. I might happily rank A>B>C. But to explicitly approve B might be a step too far, even though it's the strategically optimal vote for me.
Also, it really invites people to say that it violates one person, one vote, and you have to explain why it doesn't.
@k98kurz said in Cumulative voting: more popular in corporations than in politics:
@cfrank the main issue with STV is that it is fairly complex, making it somewhat challenging to implement and also to follow the algorithmic logic with any real detail. I read through the ballot tallying report for an Australian Senate election a few years back, and it was awful and tedious -- iirc it was over 60 pages long. By comparison, a cumulative vote tallying report would just be one page of numbers.
It seems that MMP is a much simpler and easier method than STV that gives reasonable results. (Whether the official inclusion of parties is a problem or not is philosophical speculation considering that political parties exist in reality, but that is a separate matter.) Are there any other methods for proportional representation that are simple enough to be both practical and easily comprehensible to concerned citizens?
Proportional methods tend to just be more complex by their nature. But if you allow them to be non-deterministic then that goes away. E.g. COWPEA Lottery which uses approval ballots. Or if you have a region that elects, say, 6 candidates, voters just rank their top 6 candidates. Then you consecutively pick six ballots at random and elect the unelected candidate that is highest ranked on that ballot.
This type of method, while it doesn't guarantee a very proportional result in each region, would actually give better proportionality nationally than deterministic methods that use these smallish regions (like STV), and they also keep the election candidate-based, which other nationally proportional methods tend not to.
Random ballot with just one representative per region guarantees that honest voting is the best strategy, but I tend to think that it becomes too lotteristic at that point. With e.g. five or six chances to be elected (as in the above methods), particularly popular candidates would not be on such a knife-edge of being elected.
I also think that non-deterministic methods send out a good message - that there are no "safe seats", and that representing the electorate is a privilege and not some guaranteed right.
So while non-deterministic methods might be a tough sell, I personally prefer them for national parliaments.
@lime said in ABC voting and BTR-Score are the single best methods by VSE I've ever seen.:
Thanks for these simulations, they're definitely interesting @Ex-dente-leonem
That said, I think we might be making the mistake of getting sucked deeper and deeper into a drunkard's search. The simulation results here don't really say much, except that we haven't figured out a strategy that breaks Smith//Score or ABC voting yet. That's not surprising, given we only tested 5 of them.
The difficult part of modeling voters isn't showing that one strategy or another doesn't lead to bad results. It's showing that the best possible strategy leads to good results. There's nothing wrong with testing out some strategies like in these simulations, but these are all preliminary findings and can only rule voting methods out, not in.
Just because every integer between 1 and 340 satisfies your conjecture, doesn't mean your conjecture is true. You still need to prove your conjecture.
This isn't just hypothetical. The CPE paper shows very strong results for Ranked Pairs under strategic voting. This is well-known to be wildly incorrect: the optimal strategy for any case with 3 major candidates is a mixed/randomized burial strategy that ends up producing the same result as Borda, i.e. the winner is completely random and even minor (universally-despised) candidates have a high probability of winning.
The methodology here completely fails to pick up on this, because it only tests pure strategies (i.e. no randomness and everyone plays the same strategy). In practice, pure strategies are rarely, if ever, the best. Ignoring mixed strategies has led the whole field of political science on a 15-year wild goose-chicken-chase that would've been avoided if anyone had taken Game Theory 101.
What we really need (and which is unattainable right now for most methods) is to see what would happen in real life elections with real voters. Not under the assumption that a particular simplistic strategy model gives good results, and not even that the game theoretically optimal strategy leads to good results, but that real life voter behaviour would lead to good results.
The title says it all.
@casimir sure that makes some sense, but it also seems peculiar. STAR would double the number of candidates running, making it more difficult for voters to come to an informed understanding of the platforms of those candidates. At the same time, it would introduce a competition between the top two candidates for any party throughout the election, and who knows what kind of insanity that might induce: "We're both great, but I'm better" seems like an odd conflict to me. Or it could even be a good thing but it isn't clear.
Anyway, that's probably a conversation for a different thread, but essentially why I don't support STAR. I think BNR-score or BNR-approval would be preferable.
@casimir hmm I think it’s interesting as a system from the standpoint of tactical voting when nominations aren’t “adversarial,” but I worry how robust it is against strategic nominations—if parties nominate two clone candidates at a time, then it basically just becomes score with an added inefficiency. And I think score itself is fine, why not just do score? Parties are virtually guaranteed to engage in strategic nominations, because they already do right now.
