@jack-waugh said in STAR vs. Score:

But systems that lead people to think (correctly or not) that strategy in nomination is no longer helpful to their cause, will likely lead to races having more than three candidates.

You are right that STAR isn't as good with more than three candidates.

What it comes down to, from my perspective, is that to reduce the incentive to strategically exaggerate (*), you need to minimize any reliance on "strength of preference."

STAR does this by doing a pairwise comparison as the last step. A pairwise comparison by its nature doesn't consider strength of preference (as you can see when it is a 2-candidate race in simple FPtP).

Condorcet methods try to do it all with pairwise comparisons. This reduces incentive to exaggerate even further. But since we can't guarantee there will be a Condorcet winner, we'll never get it to zero.

However, my position all along has been that getting it all the way to zero would be nice, but isn't necessary. If you get it close enough to zero, attempts to be strategic will have just as much chance of backfiring as they have of helping. A Condorcet method, including one with a very simple "tie breaking" formula, is good enough. STAR may or may not be good enough. Score is not good enough. Again, this is my opinion, but I it does come from a pretty solid game theoretical foundation.

* technically, incentive to exaggerate isn't the only thing we are trying to reduce. We also want to reduce vote splitting, which creates the incentive to strategically nominate, which in turn causes partisanship and polarization. Finally, we also want to aspire to "one person one vote", so each person has equal voting power. All of these things are accomplished by reducing the consideration of "strength of preference" in the tabulation.

@Ted-Stern Are you referring to this?

Consider this 5 winner example with clones for each candidate
Red: 61% vote A:5, B:3, C:0
Blue: 39% vote A:0, B:3, C:5
RRV Gives ['A1', 'C1', 'A2', 'B1', 'B2']
MES Gives ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'C1', 'B1']
SSS Gives ['A1', 'B1', 'B2', 'B3', 'B4']
Allocated score Gives ['A1', 'B1', 'A2', 'B2', 'A3']
STV Gives ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'C1', 'C2']

The code I ran (which I can share) was taken from the electowiki page written by the inventor Piotr Skowron and I confirmed with him personally that the result was correct. I suspect you have a bug.

@Jack-Waugh I mean that partisan voters will rank their candidate first and the main opposition last. So one (or both?) of the top contenders is likely to be eliminated early.

@jack-waugh That would be identical to Borda.

@brozai I see, yes according to what I've learned about it QV tends to incorporate the strengths of interests and not just the proportion of people with those interests. Depending on what is desired that may be a good thing or a bad thing. There has also been research on its resistance to collusion and it seems to hold up very well, which is a property that I definitely like.

I found this presentation very interesting:

Youtube Video

One point brought up by an audience member during the Q&A was that QV seems to illuminate the relative preferences of the electorate, which show up in the presenter's data as approximate Gaussian distributions and the grouping together of different strata of right-wing and left-wing groups, which does not occur without the quadratic cost.

@Keith said in S-TM:

If there was two candidates supported by the largest bloc of about 40% of the voters they would still fight with eachother.

Yes, but they would still both be supported by that 40% because they both don't want to do things that make them lose that block.
Positive the fact that they try to have the block bigger and bigger, but if the block is for example "Republican", it will remain "Republican" (as well as the 2 candidates who then end up in the automatic runoff).

Also, falling back to score is not something I would view as a problem

The problem is that if you end up in Score Voting then you might as well use Score Voting from the start, which is simpler (but has its downsides).

I believe this is resolved.

@Jack-Waugh, Thanks for working through all these examples. I, too, had some questions about the GF vote, or the more general instructions regarding always voting for every alternative subjectively preferred over the focus. For a GF vote to be instrumental in impeding termination, the G vote total would have to be at least a strict majority (that is: F > half, because equal to half is not sufficient), and the F vote total would have to be the maximum vote count and exactly equal to the G vote total. Thus it is possible for a GF vote to hinder termination. However, in addition to G blocking termination, G is preferred by the voter over F, so G blocking theloop termination with F as the final winner is also indicating the possibility for G to be a later focus and possibly a better final outcome.

For testing purposes I wrote voter-agent code for voting to stop the loop. This strictly speaking is not part of SAVE, but it does indicate what I think voters might do. Each voter-agent has a property called indifference, which is a fraction between 0.0 and 1.0. At 0.0 the slightest difference matters, while at 1.0 the voter is totally indifferent to the alternatives. All voters start at 0.0 and increment their indifference value (1) every time the focus is a Condorcet winner (because if we cannot improve upon a Condorcet winner we will eventually accept it), and (2) whenever the focus subjectively improves after having first moved away (when the focus move away, such as when in a majority cycle, we also want to be more accepting, but only as we're coming back). These are the five basic reasons for an agent to vote for the focus:

Ideal - the focus is close to the voter's subjective ideal alternative. Cluster - the best and the worst of the most recent focus alternatives are really close together. Top-half - the spread between the best and the worst is moderately close (3x indifference) and the focus is in the top half of that spread. Limited-gain - the focus is close to the upper limit to any potential future gains. Peak - the focus is as good or better than a focus that was followed by a movement away from the agent's idea.
All of these conditions except Peak use the indifference value. The conditions are ordered from most difficult to satisfy to the easiest to satisfy.

The reason I bring this up is because I think voters might well vote for loop termination on the off-chance they can get a better result more quickly. Which implies a vote to terminate usually does not mean "I really want to terminate now" but instead is the kinder and gentler "it is okay to terminate now". Under those circumstances, the GF vote is perfectly reasonable, and supports the possibility of termination without foregoing the chance to influence the next focus choice.

another way to look at the difference between EPA and AS (at least, on approval ballots) is that EPA spends ballot power such the variance in amount spent per utility gain is exactly minimized, and AS spends ballot power such that the variance in amount spent per utility is exactly maximized. Despite their similarities, in that respect they represent two ends of an extreme.

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

@rob said in votevote.page is live:

To be clear, I wasn't suggesting limiting to basic colors like that because that defeats the whole purpose. My suggestion would be pick the colors purely visually from a palette (a small 8x8 palette for 64 colors would be perfect), or using a color picker.

Oh gotchu. Yeah not a bad idea

Expecting people to set up a custom dataset is fine, if it's that kind of app.

Oh no, that's not actually what I meant. What I envision is that the default is to use the current color data. But there's a drop down to use other stuff.

For example, in Wikipedia there's a common example given of cities in Tennessee trying to elect a new capital. Each city's preferences are based on their X,Y coordinates and distance from each other. I could totally add this as a dataset as well (with even more cities probably)

And then at that point I think the logical next step is to make one of the drop down options "custom" where the user can enter arbitrary data. This might also actually make this toy somewhat useful. Like if someone already has votes from a scored election and is wondering how the outcome would've differed under a different scoring method, they can enter that data here simulate it all

But the default would still be color-based unless the user specifically decides they wanna go with something else.

@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.

@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.

Codesandbox

If you have a github repo, you can automatically deploy to CodeSandbox.io to give a sandbox for your creations.

Here's an example I'm working on: https://codesandbox.io/s/github/paretoman/votekit

Embeds

Also, we might be able to embed examples here: https://codesandbox.io/docs/embedding

But that is something that would have to be specifically set up somehow on NodeBB, and I don't really know about that. For now, a link is good.

@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.

@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.

@cfrank said in Ordinal Score Voting, Weighted Variation:

I do think that those things tend to be correlated in voting systems, and that tendency I am referring to as the “rigid/loose” spectrum of voting systems. Do you agree? Does that make sense?

I'm not seeing where rigid and loose come in. What makes a system rigid or loose? Are you saying that Cardinal vs Ordinal ballots is the difference? Otherwise I'm not sure how those terms apply.

Or are you speaking of things that aren't game theoretically stable (i.e. hall of mirrors) as being loose?

You also use the terms elastic and flexible, which I don't know what you are referring to. And you continue to use the term consensuality and distinguish it from utilitarian, but again, it is not clearly defined.

@marylander Your criticisms are definitely fair and especially I hadn’t considered the midrange score devaluation problem, but I also agree that the calibration of the distributions is probably not an example that would reflect actual use. A winning candidate in this system probably needs to effectively pass thresholds of support of various kinds.

Also, any distribution or class of distributions could be selected as the prior, and more sophisticated methods could be implemented to update the distributions such as Bayesian statistics. It could be that a fixed distribution is chosen, I think the order statistics of uniform variables is not a terrible idea as the initial. But anyway it’s also all somewhat arbitrary, choosing a distribution is the same kind of problem as choosing cardinal score values. Furthermore with relevant updating the midrange support candidate will inform and reinforce the potential for compromise in future elections.

The irrelevant ballot problem can be fixed by simply ignoring or disallowing any ballots where the same score is given to all candidates, or more strictly any ballot that does not make use of both the minimal and maximal scores. I am not sure why right-skewed distributions would be problematic, in fact that is part of the functionality of the system.

@rob I am now formatting the dates that are associated to the posts.

Topics used to show all the details, including creation date. I no longer show any details for them, just the title of the topic.

I believe there were no other contexts in which dates showed up, just those two.

Of course, post headers themselves show up in three contexts: posts for a topic, a single post, and search results.