Is there a place which lists the moderators, admins and such for https://www.votingtheory.org/? It would be good to have transparency about the people who helped to make this and their relevant affiliations.

@Jack-Waugh What STAR does is it renormalizes everybodies vote weight to give them the same impact. This is an attempt to reduce the amount of strategy needed. I do not think that it would outperform somebody who used optimal strategy with score. The point is that most people do not or cannot use optimal strategy. STAR then puts people bad at strategy on a closer level to those who are good at strategy. So I do not think you are wrong in what you say. If all people where fully informed, rational and strategic then score would likely be better. However, people are not any of those things in general. I do not think your like of argument will hold up under this consideration.

An example of where score produces a better outcome than score is

40% = A:5 B:0 C:0
31% = A:0 B:5 C:1
29% = A:0 B:1 C:5

Score give A and STAR gives B. This is an engineered and somewhat extreme example to illustrate the issue. Is 5 infinitely more than 0 or just 5. Is 5 weighted as 4 more than 1 or 5 times. There is no universal metric and different people will choose different metrics. STAR normalizes it all away and compares the two most favoured with full weight to each voter.

STAR is a simplified version of Baldwin's Method. When you think about it that way you see the intent.

@Marylander Modern cardinal multiwinner methods. I do not think he has ever looked into even the older ones like RRV. Otherwise why does he never mention them?

@SaraWolk said in Successive Rank Voting:

All voting methods which pass Later No Harm fail Favorite Betrayal Criteria,

Also worth pointing out that you must have "later No Harm" (non-compromising) or the chicken dilemma. Later no harm can cause you to get the wrong winner when everybody is honest but Chicken Dilemma stratigies only have pay off if the strategy is used effectively and can also cost you. In STAR the cost of the alternative vs the favorite is 1/5. ie if you want to minimally score a lesser evil you would give them a 1. This makes the chicken dilemma 5 times less incentivized than in Approval.

If you want to take this to the extreme you could argue that giving the lesser evil 1/5 of our favorite is too much. We could do STAR on a [0,100] scale or even more. Clearly this would allow more expression at the cost of complexity. If it was a zero to 1 million then I am sure your complaint about STAR would vanish. Fundamentally I do not think your issue is with STAR itself but in this one scenario where 5-STAR is not expressive enough. Where is the line where you would make a cut off on the ganularity?

@Jack-Waugh said in Advocate for Utilitarianism Within the Movement for a People's Party:

so my suggestion is that a good place to advocate for it is inside of the MPP.

If your statement is "we should convince MPP to adopt a utilitarian method" not "we should support the MMP" then I take no issue. Yes we should try to get all organizations big an small to adopt better methods. The CES is also doing this. It is not just about municipal elections but they are pushing approval in organizations too.

@Jack-Waugh said in Advocate for Utilitarianism Within the Movement for a People's Party:

Their stated intention from the start is to form a new major party.

Of course all new parties want that. My point was more that they are likely to be a small party not that they want to be one.

You are correct that more than half of the voters are not happy with the Dems or Republicans. However, the existing system gives huge strategic advantage to the top two existing parties. If you look to the peoples party in Canada (The PPC) they attempted a similar thing and got nowhere.

I do not question that they have good and noble goals within their ideology. However, their ideology is aligned with the Bernie movement. It has a stated political ideology and one which is basically left of the existing parties.

So yes lets tell them that that they are wrong about voting systems. But I think it goes outside this forum advocate for them and their ideology of democratic socialism. I do not want this to become a debate forum for economics. I love to debate economics and would be happy to debate why I think the Chicago or neo-Keynsian schools of economics are better than any centrally planned system. Just not here.

So if I was to "infiltrate" them I would want to change more than just their stance on voting. If you align with their ideological policy and want to try to push their agenda then great. If you want to try to get them on board with Cardinal systems then that is a perfect topic for this forum. However, my caution is to not advocate for the party or its policies here. I suspect it will degenerate into off topic discussions and bring division into the voting theory community. I would never tell you what to do. I just wanted to caution you.

Have a look at this.

https://www.lotuseaters.com/contemplations-9-or-how-voting-systems-determine-political-results-10-04-21

These are non-experts talking about this topic on a politics show. Electoral reform may be moving into the main stream. There is a follow up tomorrow where they say they will get into the details.

@Jack-Waugh The word strategy appears several times on that page. I do not now exactly how he coded the different strategies but I figure that could help you on your way to doing research.

I am unaware of any property called "the balance condition" and electowiki does not have such a page. Do you intend to refer to The Test of Balance given here. If so I think what you are saying is that in Nash equilibrium two systems which pass this criteria should behave such that the strategy of different factions cancel each other out and they both produce the same winner. The flaw in that logic is the assumption of an underlying symmetry in the size of groups and how that interacts with compromise/utilitarian or majoritarian winners. As I said above, STAR is majoritarian and Score is Utilitarian. In the absence of strategy these systems will give different winners. So even if all the strategy cancelled you would not expect the same winners.

I am not much of an expert on Ordinal systems since failing monotonicity is a deal breaker for me but I do have a few comments

• You say that it finds the "least-polarizing candidate (in the Schwartz set)" which is a good thing and also that it has later-no-harm which I think is a bad thing. Later-no-harm means that no compromise was made and no compromise means that it is majoritarian (ie polarizing). Clearly this does not get the "least-polarizing candidate" overall so what is the importance of getting the least-polarizing candidate (in the Schwartz set)?
• I am not sure what you mean by "Find the instant-runoff voting (IRV) winners" in the procedure. Should it not be "Find the instant-runoff voting (IRV) winner" in the singular?
• I see no evidence for the claim that it is immune to dishonest strategy. Furthermore, I would not know how to rigorously classify dishonest strategy only strategy.
• I agree that it is better than standard IRV because it removes some situations where it would get the wrong winner. However, this does look more like a patch than a consistent system. In my experience, such systems often have holes.

Rob is such an underhanded person. He knows for a fact that Arrow's Theorem only applies to ranking systems.

Anyway, yes there is this strategy but it is rare that the polling is clear enough that it works. People tend to say that IRV is such a bad system that it evades the ability to game it. Since it is polarizing, nonmonotonic and majoritarian the effects are hard to predict. This means that trying to strategize is hard. It is sort of like saying having a car which is falling apart will prevent you from speeding. It makes it more risky sure but that is not a good motivation to not have something better.

In the end, it is really STAR which everybody should get behind.

@cfrank Score is not Majoritarian. It is Utilitarian.

Score is Utilitarian but does not adjust voter impact to reduce strategic incentives. STAR is Majoritarian but does adjust voter impact to reduce strategic incentives. I played with this issue a lot and came to the compromise that STLR voting was the best tradeoff.

https://electowiki.org/wiki/STLR_voting

Its also worth noting that some people actually prefer Majoritarian systems and think that the tyranny of the majority is justified. Many of these people are the IRV supporters. This makes STAR more desirable to them and therefor a good system to campaign for strategically.

@Jameson-Quinn did something like this for his VSE simulations.

@brozai Bear in mind that this was one of the systems used to choose Allocated Score so getting the same result is not a surprise. Also, SSS performed equivalently from my recollection. Allocated Score was chosen because there was some intuition that it was better than SSS in terms of strategy.

Glad you found my code accessible enough to edit. Changing it from a [0,5] may have been tricky since I might have assumed that in a few places. Anyway, there is a trade off between the two groups of metrics. We saw this a lot and eventually decided Allocated score was a good balance. If you do not think the PR method is worth perusing then good. There is enough out there already and getting alignment on allocated score was not easy.

As for the single winner method you could look into the VSE simulation Jameson did. I would also be interested in seeing how STLR does so if you decide to get into that code it would be great if you could add that.

I think it is too nuanced to really answer. On one hand yes because if somebody votes on the other side of the median for all the candidates than you they effectively cancel your vote. However, it is not really clear how that is done.

@brozai said in Distinguished Approval:

he AC ballots have 6/7 total ballot weight, but instead of being distributed (6/7, 6/7) as in Allocated Score distribute it (5/7, 1) for weak and strong support respectively,

Does this not break the independence from clones? How would it work in a case where the person supported 3 people (2 weak one strong)? It seems that the more weak support you have the more you have the ability to keep your ballot weight full for your strong support. If it is just one ballot weight for strong and one ballot weight for weak then that might work. You need to think about conservation of vote weight when you do arithmetic like this. When I invented SSS I had do come up with the concept of Vote Unitarity. Of course there are many ways to do this. For example when RRV was invented Warren did not pay attention to the need for such a thing. I later invented SDV to do what RRV does but with a further constraint to hold something constant.

@brozai said in Distinguished Approval:

I'll put a page up on electowiki and try to do some simulations against Allocated Score, possibly using your framework I found here!

If you write python I would suggest putting some code on the electowiki page. I have started doing this to make sure there is no ambiguity. If you follow the conventions I use in the votesim code then it will be the same as my examples on electowiki

@brozai said in Distinguished Approval:

I will say if you just use the ballots as approvals (and don't treat the levels of support differently) then there is no longer any incentive to strongly support a candidate---it doesn't make them more likely to get elected and you just open yourself up to getting exhausted sooner.

Yes, that is correct. So I guess that would be a bad system. But this is sort of tied into what I was saying. You need to keep your counting, exhaustion, etcetera consistent. If not there will be issues.

@brozai said in Distinguished Approval:

The main reason I see to support this over STAR is I think a lot of voters have a hard time stomaching that "some votes are worth more." Although I know that's not actually true and the ballots are all equally powerful, nonetheless it's unfortunately how many regular people interpret score ballots.

That is the whole point of the run off. All ballots in the end are equally weighted. This separates it from something like STLR which is a modification to Score to make it work as intended. You should talk to @SaraWolk to see if this is actually a common complaint. I doubt it is and she has talked to a lot of people in campaigns.

@brozai said in Distinguished Approval:

Round 3 tallies:
35: AC : 6/7 total ballot weight
30: BD
A (25), B (30), C (35), D (30)

hmmmm should A not be 35*6/7=30? If that is just a calculational error then lets move on to the real issues. C is calculated without the surplus handling reduction to ballot weight. I cannot prove it without putting in more time than I have right now but I think this breaks proportionality or at a minimum causes a chance to free ride.

There may be more happening here than I see. A simpler system is to not treat the distinguished and non-distinguished differently in the calculation (ie just use them as approvals) but have the preference used in exhaustion. That system would work but there may be some weird strategy.

All in all this is not a bad idea and as far as I know it is new. My suggestion would be to make an electowiki page and start to try to get people to review it. @Jameson-Quinn would be a good person to ask. I think the strategy to try to beat Allocated Score is a good one since it seems to be the frontrunner. I would look at comparisons between the two.

@brozai said in Distinguished Approval:

0-5 scale may make for a visually crowded and confusing ballot

We could get around this with a hand writing reader or with computer voting.

@brozai said in Distinguished Approval:

More fine-grained scale leaves more room for weird edge case participation failures, condorcet failures, etc.

I am not sure that is true. Do you have evidence?

@brozai said in Distinguished Approval:

, it allows for more expressivity than approval

I agree that this is likely preferable to Approval. You are basically building a three level decision tree. IRNR tries to do this on a higher level.

The down side I see is that the strategy to optimize your vote is very complex. Also you loose the utilitarian advantage STAR has before the run off.

@brozai said in Distinguished Approval:

I'm also curious if I can rip off STAR-PR (aka Allocated Score ) to use this ballot format.

I am not sure I understand this method. Can you give a more detailed example with multiple explicit rounds for one ballot?

@rob said in Hello:

I know you think about candidates in absolute terms while I think relatively.

Not sure what you mean by thinking of candidates in absolute terms. I have always been emphatic that voters should score RELATIVE to the others on the ballot.

@rob said in Hello:

I'm not sure I understand your question (or what that has to do with it eliminating the negative effects of vote splitting, which to me is a completely different issue than how you resolve one particular scenario).

Proof by counter example is a perfectly rigorous method for mathematical proof. I pointed out a scenario where negative voting could not encode enough expression to resolve both vote splitting instances on the ballot. You reply by stating that Approval Voting (which I did not mention) will not encode all the information needed to resolve an issue unrelated to vote splitting.

@rob said in Hello:

The strategy is very similar to strategy in FPTP, but you've got more options.

Agreed. Vote splitting still exists but it is better than plurality voting.

@rob said in Hello:

I think it is common for voters to only have a strong opinion about a single candidate

This is what I was doubting in the last email. I would need some real evidence before I endorsed a system that baked that assumption into it.

@rob said in Hello:

I'm highly skeptical that various studies (that by necessity seek to answer very generalized questions) prove anything one way or the other, but I don't really care to debate that at this point.

I agree that it is hard to get a definitive answer. In the absense of a knowing I would stay away from restricting the expression of voters. This comes with a trade off in complexity where the spectrum is something like

plurality - Negative voting -IRV - Approval - Score - STAR

You need to be to the right of IRV to not have vote splitting and that is what I think is the most important.

Yes, I picked up on the same. I did say fairly neutral. I did not get the impression this was propaganda or misrepresentations.

@rob said in Hello:

I can say at least one advantage over Approval or STAR: it is far less mentally taxing to vote. You only put one mark on the ballot (per office)

They did a study on that an the cognitive load for single mark ballots were higher than score ballots. It is less effort to make the mark but more work mentally to decide what to do. This makes sense if you the strategic decisions which need to be made.

@rob said in Hello:

It doesn't put people in the weird position of saying "what do these numbers actually mean?" or "what does it mean to approve a candidate?" It better captures how people feel emotionally about an election -- typically one candidate jumps out as one they like the most, or one candidate jumps out as one they dislike. Instead of having to vote for the "lesser of two evils", they can just go ahead and say who is the most evil, if that is how they feel.

I just do not think that is true. Do you have any evidence people think this way?

@rob said in Hello:

Meanwhile it is very easy to explain how it reduces or even eliminates the negative effects of vote splitting.

I dont think it does. Can you explain how if there are two candidates I like and two I do not like how I express this?

@rob said in Hello:

Approval and STAR may well have mathematical advantages, but those advantages mean absolutely nothing if you can't sell them to a wider group than the dozen or so who regularly come to forums like these.

They are being implemented in real elections with thousands of voters. I do not think this is true for Negative Voting.