Best posts made by cfrank

@rob especially if the state is a swing state, making it more difficult for the large parties to secure voters for their platform I think would be a significant influence forcing large parties and their candidates to more scrutinizingly determine the real interests of voters in those states. It may dilute the interests of less competitive states, but since the competitive states are crucial to obtaining the presidency, the large parties will still have to invest strongly in the interests of voters in those states in order to compete with alternatives (and obviously each other) for the crucial swing points. This may lead to something like an arms race of concessions, which happened in New Zealand in 1996 and led to the national adoption of a PR system, according to Arend Lijphart. Obviously that's quite a leap for the U.S., but maybe a less extreme analogue is not so far-fetched.

Maine is one of the thirteen most competitive states for elections according to a 2016 analysis (Wikipedia: Swing state), so I’m not sure their recent establishment is actually strategically foolish, although it’s possible that it wasn’t fully thought through. I agree it isn't clear.

I think it will definitely be interesting to observe how the current political apparatus responds to Maine--and apparently, more recently, and strangely, Alaska:

https://news.yahoo.com/alaska-is-about-to-try-something-completely-new-in-the-fall-election-193615285.html

Since Alaska is far from competitive, I do think this transition was in fact foolish for the reasoning you stated, but it remains to be seen. If we saw a state like Florida transition to a system like Maine's, it would be very interesting to study the relative differences between federal treatments of Florida, Maine, and Alaska as a case study for how "swingy-ness" might influence the effect of such voting system transitions. If Maine experiences an increase in federal power, it would be a good case for the remaining swing states to make a similar transition. If that occurred, the swing states would become a platform foothold for alternative parties to grow.

@andy-dienes in this example there are more scores than there are candidates. The same problems remains though when there are only three scores for three candidates, and I can see why this is a significant issue. With the method I described, no matter what the majority does with strict rankings, the middle candidate will win, even if the ballots are

A>B>C [99%]
C>B>A [1%]

Which is absurd. And without strict rankings, the majority can guarantee their top candidate’s victory by bullet voting anyway. I don’t like it but it is what it is. I think you’ve convinced me.

This is a minor attempt to modify Condorcet methods in a simple way to become more responsive to broader consensus and supermajority power. It’s sort of like the reverse of STAR and may already be a system that I don’t know the name of. In my opinion, the majority criterion is not necessarily a good thing in itself, since it enables tyrannical majorities to force highly divisive candidates to win elections, which is why I’ve been trying pretty actively to find some way to escape it.

For the moment I will assume that a Condorcet winner exists in every relevant case, and otherwise defer the replacement to another system.

First, find the Condorcet winner, which will be called the “primary” Condorcet winner. Next, find the “secondary” Condorcet winner, which is the Condorcet winner from the same ballots where the primary Condorcet winner is removed everywhere.

Define the Borda difference from B to A on a ballot as the signed difference in their ranks. For example, the Borda difference from B to A on the ballot A>B>C>D is +1, and on C>B>D>A is -2.

If A and B are the primary and secondary Condorcet winners, respectively, then we tally all of the Borda differences from B to A. If the difference is positive (or above some threshold), then A wins, and if it is negative or zero (or not above the threshold), then B wins.

For example, consider the following election:

A>B>C>D [30%]
A>B>D>C [21%]
C>B>D>A [40%]
D>B>C>A [9%]

In this case, A is a highly divisive majoritarian candidate and is the primary Condorcet winner. B is easily seen to be the secondary Condorcet winner. The net Borda difference from B to A is

(0.3+0.21)-2(0.4+0.09)<0

Therefore B would be chosen as the winner in this case.

Some notes about this method:
It certainly does not satisfy the Condorcet criterion, nor does it satisfy the majority criterion. These are both necessarily sacrificed in an attempt to prevent highly divisive candidates from winning the election. It does reduce to majority rule in the case of two candidates, and it does satisfy the Condorcet loser criterion, as well as monotonicity and is clearly polynomial time. It can also be modified to use some other metric in the runoff based on the ballot-wise Borda differences.

Continuing with the above example, suppose that the divisive majority attempts to bury B, which is the top competitor to A.
This will change the ballots to something like

A>C>D>B [30%]
A>D>C>B [21%]
C>B>D>A [40%]
D>B>C>A [9%]

And if the described mechanism is used in this case, we will find instead that C is elected. So burial has backfired if B is "honestly" preferred over C by the divisive majority, and they would have been better off indicating their honest preference and electing B.

And again, suppose that the divisive majority decides to bury the top two competitors to A, namely B and C, below D, keeping the order of honest preference between them. We will find

A>D>B>C [30%]
A>D>B>C [21%]
C>B>D>A [40%]
D>B>C>A [9%]

In this case, the secondary Condorcet winner is D, and the mechanism will in fact elect D, again a worse outcome for the tactical voters.

Finally, suppose that they swap the order of honest preference and vote as

A>D>C>B [30%]
A>D>C>B [21%]
C>B>D>A [40%]
D>B>C>A [9%]

Still this elects D.

As a general description, this method will elect the Condorcet winner unless they are too divisive, in which case it will elect the secondary Condorcet winner, which will necessarily be less divisive. I believe that choosing the runoff to be between the primary and secondary Condorcet winners should maintain much of the stability of Condorcet methods, while the Borda runoff punishes burial and simultaneously addresses highly divisive candidates.

@rob thanks. And apologies for being snippy before. You and @Andy-Dienes pretty much convinced me that score voting isn’t going to work.

@toby-pereira I totally agree with you here. And a point to supplement or maybe just reiterate your stance on “benevolent dictators,” there’s a definite survivorship bias there. The business dictators who fail don’t show up in the news, while the ones who succeed are often lauded as geniuses without due regard for the role of pure luck or factors totally unrelated to their supposed acumen. The same goes for stock market investors—many who come out on top end up believing they have a special intuition to “outsmart” the market, but when compared with randomly generated portfolios, their inclinations usually fare no better, and often do worse (due to their relative lack of diversity, they are not as robust against market volatility).

So basically, when uncertainty is involved, failure doesn’t always indicate a poor strategy, not any more than success indicates a good one. This reduces my confidence that business dictatorships actually tend to promote the success of a company.

@rob Good Lord you’re absolutely right. The internet is a bad place to get information, I just saw it attributed to him and didn’t look into it further. I haven’t read much Dostoyevsky, I just thought the quote was potentially relevant in terms of being met with hostility for expressing new ideas that are potentially complicated. But you’re right that I need to find a way to simplify the presentation.

I am not saying people who don’t follow me are imbeciles, I’m not trying to win points. I just don’t understand why there seems to be a general culture here of competition and shooting down ideas instead of cooperation and trying to build them up. It seems like we would all be making a lot more progress working as a team.

Anyway, I’ve already indicated the problems I was trying to solve. Most are the same problems we’ve all been trying to solve:

(1) How to balance the conflict between majoritarianism and consensualism;
(2) How to address the problem of strategic voting;
(3) How to create a system that is simple and meaningful and encourages compromise.

The last one is a pet peeve of mine, which is that (4) the cardinal values assigned to scores are arbitrary. This is in fact what led me to create this system, and why it is called an “ordinal score” system.

I believe I have successfully addressed all of the above things, but the “simple” part I suppose is a point of contention. The concept is simple, but the mathematics makes it look more complicated than it actually is, because it deals with probability distributions. The latest version of the system is just as good as if not superior to STAR, and with minor modifications it can be made even better. I’m not sure what else to say about it to make it appear worth looking into.

If you do watch the video, please excuse my brain fart at the beginning, I made it after a long day. @Jack-Waugh at least did watch it. I’ll definitely take a look into your material.

Here is the link: https://app.vmaker.com/record/SGSydGYcwOW9Vf6d

This is a first draft, what I am currently proposing is an additional weighting modification that directly addresses point (1), and it simultaneously improves (2) and (3) as well. I had actually considered weighted (S,P)-voting systems before, but I didn’t see the utility until @Marylander pointed out that the system is still more majoritarian than desired. The new system is explicitly indifferent between majoritarian and consensual influences in exactly the manner I explained in the first post of this topic, I.e. if half of the electorate scores one candidate the top score, but the whole electorate scores a different candidate the lowest nonzero score, then the system is typically indifferent between the candidates (to the first order of magnitude). Full consensual compromise with everybody mostly unhappy is comparable to half of the electorate happy and everybody else potentially fully disappointed.

@brozai I want to look into that Borda dominance scheme and see if it is different from my proposal. (EDIT: I totally do have access)

PFPP may be equivalent to a positional scoring rule at each election, but the prescription of the particular scoring rule and how it is allowed to change from one election to the next according to informative distributions is what makes PFPP different. For example, a thought I had earlier today was actually that if the distributions are allowed to update, then as fewer people over-use the higher score values, they become more potent when they are used. This can give voters an even stronger incentive against strategic bullet voting, since it will weaken their vote in the future when they may actually feel strongly about a candidate.

I'll read the PDF paper you linked and see if they coincide, if they do then I'll be happy because that means probably more analysis has been done on this system! Otherwise I'll try to illustrate points where I find that they differ. I think already the fact that the winner is called "generalized Condorcet" points to something different, since the methods I am proposing (at least on the surface, I could be wrong) have nothing to do with the Condorcet criterion.

@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.

Hi Jack, apologies for a late reply here, I believe I responded to you via email. I mentioned a little bit ago that I was concerned about notifications on the site, I don't know how we can address that except it appears that there was something I was missing. Notifications appear to be an "opt in" situation, for example I just changed my status on this topic to "Watching," so hopefully I will get a notification when you or anybody else replies.

I personally think it would be better for notifications to be a more passive, opt-out situation, because I think the site should be as conducive as possible to keeping the public conversations and posts easily available to the whole community, especially more recent updates to discussions. I also think I was just not used to the new format of this site compared to the old forum and I think it probably works great. We will have to see it in action once it goes public.

In my opinion though, the site appears to be virtually complete. The privacy policy and terms of use would be more urgent so that we can get the forum public. I also think inviting more people to the council is a good idea, since many of us will probably go through phases of being busier than usual and we want the train to keep rolling.

Also, can I be made an administrator/moderator?

@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.

@marylander @SaraWolk I added a few of my own suggestions to the document, and I contacted @Jack-Waugh about having a council meeting relatively soon.

My availability is very open as of now, I am free to meet virtually any time. Let's try to keep as many people in the loop as possible, so definitely notify anybody you think would be a good addition to the meeting.

@rob @Andy-Dienes @micahscopes

@rob I have already mentioned that the definition of a majority only applies in a constrained paradigm. My answer is that the question preconceives a paradigm that may be inappropriate, and that alternatives may be superior.

For example, let’s say we have two choices for lunch: peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, or fruit cups.

51% of the people at the lunch marginally prefer peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to fruit cups, but 10% of the people are allergic to peanuts. Furthermore, let’s say that 49% even strongly prefer the fruit cups to peanut butter.

Do you really think it’s a better idea to have peanut butter sandwiches than to have fruit cups?

I think it’s clear that empathy is necessary here to come to a sociable solution. A selfish majority rules paradigm doesn’t make any sense here and doesn’t produce a good outcome.

I don’t know of a good system, 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. I actually do think this would be a better system than straight up majoritarianism. Unfortunately it requires more effort on the part of the electorate.

This is a concept I had in mind which may already have been described, although not all of the logistics are necessarily hashed out and there may be issues with it. The idea is described below, but first I want to make a connection to “cake-cutting.” The standard cake-cutting problem is when two greedy agents are going to try to share a cake fairly without an external arbiter. An elegant solution is a simple procedure where one agent is allowed to cut the cake into two pieces, and the other agent is allowed to choose which piece to take for themselves. The first agent will have incentive to cut the cake as evenly as discernible, since the second agent will try to take whichever piece is larger. In the end, neither agent should have any misgivings about their piece of cake.

So this is my attempt to apply that kind of procedure to political parties and representatives. Forgive my lack of education regarding how political parties work:

• There should be a government body that registers political parties and demands the compliance of all political parties to its procedures in order for them to acquire seats for representation;
• (Eyebrow raising, but you might see why...) Every voter must register as a member of exactly one political party in order to cast a ballot (?);
• Each political party A is initially reserved a number of seats in proportion to the number of voters with membership in A; the fraction of seats reserved for A is P(A). however
• For each pair of political parties A and B (where possibly B=A), a fraction of seats totaling P(A~B):=P(A)P(B) will be reserved for candidates nominated by A, and elected by B; these seats will be called ambassador seats from A to B when B is different from A, and otherwise will be called the main platform seats for A;
• Let there be a support quota Q(A~B) for the number of votes needed to elect ambassadors from A to B, and call P(A~B) the ambassador quota of party A for B. If E(A~B) is the fraction of filled A-to-B ambassador seats (as a fraction of all seats), I.e. nominees from A who are actually elected by members of B, then A will only be allowed to elect P(A~A)*min{min{E(A~B)/P(A~B), E(B~A)/P(B~A)}: B not equal to A} of its own nominees. That is, the proportion of reserved main-platform seats that A will be allowed to fill is the least fraction of reserved ambassador seats it fills in relation to every other party, including both the ambassadors from A to other parties, and the ambassadors from other parties to A.

This procedure forces parties to also nominate candidates that compromise between different party platforms in order to obtain seats for any main-platform representatives. If a party fails to meet its quota for interparty compromises, it will lose representation. On the flip side, this set up will also establish high incentives for other parties to compromise with them in order to secure their own main-platform representation. In total, this system would give parties high incentives to compromise with each other and find candidates in the middle ground, which will serve as intermediaries between their main platforms.

Basically, here the outlines indicate seats open to be filled by candidates who are nominated by the corresponding party, and the fill color indicates seats open for election by the corresponding party:

Seats with outlines and fills of non-matching color are ambassador seats, and seats with matching outline and color are main platform seats. In terms of party A, by failing to nominate sufficiently-many candidates who would meet the support quota Q(A~B) to become elected as ambassadors from A to B, or by failing to elect enough ambassadors from B to A, party A restricts its own main platform representation and that of B simultaneously. By symmetry the reciprocal relationship holds from B to A. Therefore all parties are entangled in a dilemma: to secure main-platform representation, parties must nominate a proportional number of candidates who are acceptable enough to other parties to be elected as ambassadors.

To see that all needed seats are filled in the case of a stalemate, where parties refuse to nominate acceptable candidates to other parties and/or refuse to elect ambassadors, the election can be redone with the proportions being recalculated according to the party seats that were actually filled.

The support quotas collectively serve as a non-compensatory threshold to indicate sufficient levels of inter-party compromise. Ordinary PR is identical to PR with ambassador quotas but with all support quotas set to zero, whereby there is no incentive to nominate compromise candidates.

The purpose of this kind of procedure is twofold: firstly, it should significantly enhance the cognitive diversity of representatives, and secondly, it should significantly strengthen more moderate platforms (namely those of the ambassadors) that can serve as intermediaries for compromises between the main platforms of parties. Every party A has a natural “smooth route” from its main platform to the main platform of every other party: The main platform of A should naturally be in communication with ambassadors from A to B, who should naturally communicate with ambassadors from B to A, who should naturally communicate with the main platform of B.

Also, this procedure gives small parties significant bargaining power in securing representation. Large parties will have much more representation to lose than the small parties that are able to secure seats if the small parties refuse to elect any ambassadors, so rationally speaking, large parties should naturally concede to nominating sufficiently many potential ambassadors whose platforms are closer to the main platforms of those small parties. The same rationale holds for the potential ambassadors nominated by small parties, who also should tend to have platforms closer to the main platform of the small party.

Finally, this system creates significant incentives for voters to learn about the platforms of candidates from other parties who stand to reserve seats for representatives.

@rob that seems reasonable to me. A long while ago I was trying to consider score distribution metrics of the form

Avg*F(Stdev/Avg)

where F is a decreasing function (probably exponentially) and F(0)=+1. The metric scales directly with the distribution, but it’s only sensible for scores that aren’t negative unless you do a canonical shifting by the minimum score. It might also be considered a bit haphazard and computationally obnoxious, since standard deviations are annoying.

But something like

Avg/2^(Stdev/Avg)

would elect C.

If there was a faster formula to get a decent measure of the spread, that would be nice. Possibly the IQR or some other quantile range could be a substitute, and we would have

Avg/2^(IQR/Avg)

or we could possibly involve the median as well somehow.

The ratio Stdev/Avg is also known as the coefficient of variation. Apparently there is another more robust measure of dispersion that is very easy to compute: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartile_coefficient_of_dispersion

QCD=(Q3-Q1)/(Q3+Q1)

Something like the metric

Avg/2^(QCD)

could possibly be applicable.

@rob yes, I do think it's easy to veer into political ideology territory, which is just a small step away, and it should be avoided or approached very cautiously. I do think sometimes an evaluation of the effects that a voting system might have on the quality of representation or government processes is valid, but should be done without asking loaded or aggressive questions, and probably there are other general policies in that regard that we should discuss in this forum. I may be guilty of this kind of rhetoric myself, I have no catalog of past transgressions to exhibit but I won't pretend or claim otherwise. It isn't easy to avoid making ideologically oriented judgments even without realizing. In any case moving forward I personally intend to avoid it, and I think we all should probably do the same and let mistakes be recognized. There are plenty of issues that are less controversial to examine here.

@Jack-Waugh, in my opinion (just having read through this now, and not to scold you) it does seem to me like your implicit claim would warrant more evidence. Anyway, I'll throw my cents in about what may be answers to your original questions. Even if the people of Germany hypothetically were not in charge of their government, it seems like a non-sequitur to conclude therefore that PR and voting rights would be either politically significant or a waste of time. Let's put the topic of Germany entirely aside: PR is used in 40/43 of the European nations.

@toby-pereira @mosbrooker and indeed (as you know) this ping-ponging is exactly the game Putin played with Medvedev and the Russian "presidency."

@rob It isn't totally clear to me how QV works in the context of any specific voting system, it seems to be that preferences are indicated with the votes that get quadratically more expensive as they are allocated on a single indicator. Or maybe it's just that for example exactly 2 votes on one indicator costs 4 credits total, and exactly 3 votes on one indicator costs 9 credits total, etc. Rank-order systems always seem to be too much work for the voters in my opinion. I just wanted to throw the concept out there because it appears to have some backing and research behind it, and I didn't see it being discussed here.

I'm still watching this lecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgU55B_wAas

And this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVS7dpgKohY

So far it seems as though QV encourages thoughtful engagement of voters on issues, and leads to sensible indications of social preferences. It also seems to be robust against collusion. I think it seems to mitigate bullet voting as well. Burial as @brozai points out is a sort of annoying issue, I'm not sure how that can be mitigated in a score system.

@toby-pereira surely there is an argument, which is that the degree of divisiveness of A and B somehow diminishes their overall fitness for election below the fitness of C. Formalizing that argument requires specifying how fitness is being measured and how it incorporates a measure of divisiveness.

If you use some metric as I describe just above, you arrive at one specific decision procedure that formally incorporates that sort of reasoning. I think something along those lines with some sort of STAR-like runoff could be a good system.

@mosbrooker allowing appointments of the successor doesn’t make any sense to me. Don’t take this the wrong way, I think the fantasy doesn’t take into account very real problems that exist with democracy. There are no checks and balances, there’s no constitution, there’s no protection for minorities, and there is no avenue to establish representation, or to create, enforce or validate laws. To me it seems mostly like a vacuous space for something more substantial to fill. What stops the society from devolving into an authoritarian mafia-run police state, or from being destroyed by warlike neighbors who want to take their crops, enslave their men and rape their women?

@keith-edmonds that doesn't make sense to me. Social choice theory is a subfield of economics, Kenneth Arrow was an economist. I have a textbook called "Economics and Computation," almost half the book is dedicated to voting theory. Maybe the analogy would be better if the engineer was a general practitioner and you were looking for a dermatologist, but in any case somebody who is trained as an economist is very well-suited to analyze voting systems.

I would like to hear more about what you have said in the past about why this system is not at all reasonable. I'm not sure what is so terrible about it, especially in a multi-winner context.