SACRW2: Score And Choose Random Winner from 2 complementing methods
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@Sass Agree that anything with randomness is bad. Can't speak to people's incentives to vote though. Having some degree of randomness doesn't necessarily make their vote "matter" less, at least not from a game theoretical point of view. Still I think anything with true randomness would never fly in any real world political election.
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@Sass said in SACRW2: Score And Choose Random Winner from 2 complementing methods:
You'll never get lay people on board with a blatantly non-determinative method.
On what grounds you come to that prediction? There is randomness in filling jury pools, and what juries do is extremely important as innocent people could be punished by the mechanism of the state. Moreover, people who I suppose have a libertarian bent, or at least, a mistrust of officialdom, keep suggesting, on Facebook, sortition to fill legislative seats and executive office in gov't.
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@Sass said in SACRW2: Score And Choose Random Winner from 2 complementing methods:
You'll never get lay people on board with a blatantly non-determinative method.
Why not? If the two methods elect the same person almost all of the time, while choosing between them randomly makes strategy impossible, people will understand.
I've often wondered about such a system, and if it provides a workaround for Gibbard's theorem. Design two voting systems that behave consistently if people are honest, but behave oppositely if people are strategic, and choose between them randomly, so that no one can predict whether a given strategy would help them or hurt them. I don't think you can pick two existing methods, though, I think you need to specifically design them to be contradictory.
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@Psephomancy I can't speak on behalf of other countries, but Americans are so used to voting strategically that they're having trouble understanding the concept of a voting method that allows honest voting, let alone one that encourages it. The Equal Vote Coalition was a bit bewildered when folks we're only scoring two or three candidates on STAR ballots in some early tests. The voters just had trouble internalizing the idea that they could support multiple candidates. If you try to tell voters you have a method that picks a random winner if they vote strategically, they won't understand it and the media will latch onto "random winner" and ignore everything else. I support systems that incentivize honest voting, but that can be done with many existing methods that don't rely on randomness.
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@multi_system_fan https://electowiki.org/wiki/Smith//Score
Good luck explaining the Smith Set to lay voters. -
Introducing randomness into an election is a bad idea on so many levels. For instance, what if you have a recount? But just the general idea of it will be, and should be, offensive to many. This is not the same as picking a jury, obviously. (a jury is supposed to be random)
I'm sure voters can wrap their heads around the idea of a system that doesn't punish honest/sincere voting. Some will still try to vote strategically for a while, but those voters will essentially average out and not cause a lot of harm. The main point is that a system that favors honest voting.
I suspect the reason people only scored a subset of the candidates (in STAR elections, I guess) is that they didn't know anything about the ones they didn't give a score to. That's exactly what I'd do... just give them all an implicit zero. Even though I fully understand the idea of supporting multiple candidates.
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@rob said in SACRW2: Score And Choose Random Winner from 2 complementing methods:
honest/sincere voting
Please consider the following system. The voters submit 32 hex digits as their vote. The tally sorts the votes, concatenates them together, and computes the SHA 256 hash of the whole. It interprets this result as an integer and divides the count of candidates into that. The remainder is used to indicate the winner.
Which votes are sincere?
STAR, Score, Approval, cardinal Condorcet [10]; equal-ranked Condorcet [6]; strictly-ranked Condorcet [4]; everything else [0].
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I misread your original post. I was thinking, collect rating ballots, use methods each of which is designed to pick a single winner, and choose at random from among the winners that the methods identify.
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@Jack-Waugh It sounds like you simply described a random voting system with the 32 bit hex thing. Not sure what you're after here. I don't think your vote can be sincere when the voter doesn't know how to do anything other than put a random number down.
Regardless, I'm saying no one is going to accept a voting method with randomness in it as you describe, even with your more reasonable options. It is a non-starter.
That said, I think several "reasonable" methods are hard to say what a sincere vote is, Approval being the most obvious one. But a ranked method it is pretty straightforward to determine what a sincere vote is.
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@Jack-Waugh 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". Imagine a Score voting system where whoever had the fewest points wins. A "sincere" vote under this system might be the exact opposite of a sincere vote under standard Score voting.
Under a system where the effects of your vote are be completely unpredictable, like the hashing one you described, I don't think your vote is capable of expressing anything about your preferences, since there is no way to tell in advance what any vote actually does.
Score Sorted Margins[100]; STAR[90]; Score[81]; Approval[59]; IRV[18]; FPTP[0]
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@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.
