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.

@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.

@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?

@micahscopes said in Hello from Micah:

I'm especially excited about "cardinal voting systems".

I have found that everybody ends up there eventually

@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.

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.

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.

@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.

Hi @Jack-Waugh,

While I would never tell anybody what they should post on an open forum I would urge you to reconsider this post. Firstly because it seems off topic. Voting theory has remained quite nonpartisan and many theorists would like to keep specific political parties and movements out of it. It would bring division to something which would help everybody. Secondly, I think you have the sequence of events wrong. You need to end vote splitting before small parties are viable.

@masiarek There is some stuff here https://electowiki.org/wiki/Voting_links

Add to the page if you find more

Can you add a procedure section to the electowiki page? There are a few sections which talk about this but they all add a ton of justification. I just want the procedure.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

It does not necessarily mean that; it simply means that your ranking order is never disregarded. The problem is that if ranking order is disregarded, then it could motivate people to not rank & then you're back to square 1

I think this is only an issue in a ranking system.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

in a democracy, if you are part of the majority, then maybe you don't need to compromise; it's shitty but it's just a side-effect of democracy

Yes this is called the tyranny of the masses and is one of the major issues with majoritarian democracy. This is why I prefer Utilitarian democracy.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

how often does that happen in practice, that you are part of the majority? You can see that in practice it flip-flops, like a pendulum from left-to-right, precisely because there is rarely a majority candidate

And those like me get no say at all. I am a social liberal in a Country that flips between Neo-conservatism and progressivism. (If you do not know the terms look here ) I get no say even though I am a huge demographic. I suspect your system is less vulnerable to center squeeze than the regular IRV but I do not think that it has completely eliminated it.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

Because IRV-Prime fulfills condorcet & thus majority winner, a majority winner will always win; but then, as I mentioned, how often does this happen in practice?

It only does not happen in practice because the system makes it hard for such candidates to be viable. There are game theoretic effects. I posted about this recently in another thread.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

They "can't tell the difference" because the majority candidate wins (what I mean is, if a ranking system "not telling the difference" was electing CR in both cases, that'd be really terrible; but it ends up electing R in both cases)

Exactly. No ranking system can get around this issue.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

Though I agree that in the first scenario CR is more representative, I have to come back around to real-world practical: how likely would this be? That R would have a majority? I think it's almost certain that in practice there are centered people & they'd take a big enough chunk such that R does not have the majority, and then IRV-Prime would select the compromise candidate.

Maybe

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

More importantly, the will of the voters (even if shitty) does have to be respected; it's like the king in the little prince; if people saw a result like this, they'd immediately want to eliminate the voting system because they'd feel short-changed when a majority winner loses.

It depends on who you ask. In this situation

49 = L:5, CR:4
51 = R:5, CR:4

Lets say this was the 2016 presidential race and R=Trump while L=Hillary. A system that could find the CR candidate would have been better. Many people would see that immediately. Furthermore, you would only get such candidates in such a system. People often assume that you get the same candidates when you have different systems but this is false. Unviable candidates do not even show up.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

We just don't know - approval voting has never been used in a major election where campaigns would put significant funds into saying "bullet vote or I might lose."

Exactly. In all the real Approval elections that happened recently, that would have ruined their campaign. Running that campaign would make them look like a jerk

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

Then in fact CR does win (with IRV-Prime), even though only 2 voters ranked them as #1; these 2 voters seem like dictators, as far more voters ranked L as #1 & R as #1

This is a good example since there will always be a few voters of all orderings. I would make this point on your electowiki page.

In summary, you have made a better IRV at the cost of some complexity. I do not study ranking systems for reasons that should be clear by now so I cannot speak with any authority on how it compares to other ranking systems. IRV is likely one of the worst so I would not celebrate yet. Also, I would not make the bold claims about strategy or monotonicity without talking to a proper expert on such systems.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

my goal, as you've seen, is to give people no choice but to compromise

later-no-harm is the opposite of that. It is that no matter what you never need to compromise. Does the compromise candidate win in this situation when you use IRV-prime?

49 = L:5, CR:4
51 = R:5, CR:4

Or in ranking

49 = L> CR > R
51 = R > CR > L

CR should win under this situation given an ethos of Utilitarianism. I think IRV-Prime does find a good balance for a ranking system. However, ranks cannot tell between the first scoring and this

49 = L:5, CR:1
51 = R:5, CR:1

where R is the Utilitarian winner.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

I don't think those studies take into account the macro, i.e. what happens at large scale when large-scale targeted campaign ads kick in; a system must be immune to that

Yes, but you are assuming that such effects will have a net push toward bullet voting. I think it will be the opposite. Real world approval voting examples give evidence to that.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

It is not at all implying undemocratic; rather, it's saying that in a perfect all-way tie, a single voter chooses any winner they want

I am not sure that is correct. I need to double check

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

Later-no-harm is the main reason;

I have never viewed this as a good thing. It is equivalent to never making a compromise or consensus. I had always equated it with the majoritarianism we discussed in the last post. Your system shows that they are not the same (or that it fails later-no-harm).

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

my main worry is that if major parties feel that ranking a candidate after them will ruin their chances of winning, they'll encourage their supporters/voters to bullet-vote, which will degrade to ~plurality

This is why Cardinal systems are good. There have been studies showing people do not bullet vote.

If your system passes monotonicity, is not fully majoritarian and is at least as strategy resistant as STAR then I would begrudgingly support it. The reason why it would be begrudging is that it is easy to dismiss all ranking systems as low quality at the moment. Most people have a low resolution view of this topic so the narrative that rank implies poor quality is useful. If that was no longer true then I suspect that organizations like FairVote would use IRV-Prime to gain support for regular IRV.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

IRV-Prime simply satisfies the dictatorship mechanism

Dictatorship implies it is non-democratic. This is bad

@micahscopes said in Hello from Micah:

I'm especially excited about "cardinal voting systems".

I have found that everybody ends up there eventually

Why are you stuck on using a ranking system? A cardinal system will given you more information by definition so if you want to do something fancy it is typically simpler to calculate.

Non-monotonicity tends to come from sequential elimination. Cardinal methods that do this tend to be non-monotonic too (eg IRNR). The problem is that ranking forces you to do elimination.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

"Least polarizing candidate (in the Schwartz set)": I had hoped that my example on the page would clarify this (the example is supposed to signify R=Right, L=Left, CR=Center-right)

Right. I missed that. This is a huge advantage over IRV. If you are going to point out that STAR also gets the same winner as IRV you have to give an interpretation of the translation of ranks to scores. A reasonable interpretation is

47 = L:5, CR:4
39 = R:5, CR:4
5 = R:5
5 = CR:5, R:4

in which case CR wins (or my math is bad). In any case I see the argument you are trying to make. Consider

49 = L:5, CR:4
51 = R:5, CR:4

where R wins and the clear best winner is CR. This is why I invented STLR.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

"Dishonest strategy": I think the best definition here would be "voting counter to what I want (lying) to get something I want" - a great example would be to rank a non-favorite higher to eliminate a frontrunner so that your favorite can win - IRV prime is immune to it because the only way a candidate can win is by having a larger majority

I am no expert on these proofs but Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem would forbid this. Making such a claim will require a proof.

@marcosb said in IRV-Prime (meeting later-no-harm & Condorcet criterion; possibly immune to dishonest strategy?):

And in fact C wins in IRV Prime (so it does seem to satisfy monotonicity, so you may actually be interested)

Arrow's impossibility theorem would also forbid this. Passing it in a situation then IRV fails does not prove monotonicity. You are likely just shifting the failures to another spot. If this does pass either of these criteria that would make you very famous very quick. I am quite skeptical. My suggestion is for you to look into proofs.

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.

I found this great review of the social dynamics at work in partisanship and polarization.

https://youtu.be/luISUES6iOo

She covers a lot of literature and keeps it fairly neutral taking shots at both sides. It really only covers the USA but I would expect the core findings to apply to all peoples.

I have been asked many times why I think that Single Member Plurality is better than Party List. This is essentially why. In SMP you at least get the illusion of being able to vote for a person. Partisan systems like party list prime the voter to think in terms of in-group vs out-group from the onset. Sure Duverger's law means that SMP will degrade to something like this eventually but it will never be as bad in terms of negative voting.

This is why voter choice and expression is so important. Given that the act of voting for somebody is so psychologically powerful we want people to actually be able to express themselves. If we force voters to act out polarization it leads to polarization.

Even when we are talking about PR systems this matters. People will often think that something like MMP is good enough because it gets PR and has some regional representation. However, the ballot still uses choose one and is therefor unfit for use for the reasons in the video.