@toby-pereira said in Entropy-Statistic-Weighted Approval Voting:
While I don't think it would be a good method in practice
The 2 most popular voting systems in practice are IRV and plurality. Anything is a good method in practice
@toby-pereira said in Entropy-Statistic-Weighted Approval Voting:
While I don't think it would be a good method in practice
The 2 most popular voting systems in practice are IRV and plurality. Anything is a good method in practice
I'd just like to say this looks great and I'm very interested in seeing more! Quantile-normalization like this is very common in statistics. This has one especially nice advantageâit eliminates the "arbitrary number" criticism often made of score voting, which is that voters can assign arbitrary scales to their feelings of support/opposition for candidates that might not line up. Quantile normalization gives an equivalent, statistically well-defined scale for every voter.
@toby-pereira said in Easy-to-explain Proportional (Multiwinner) elections:
By the way, Satisfaction Approval Voting can only be described as semi-proportional. You're wasting part of your vote on candidates that aren't elected. It's like SNTV except that you can split your vote up. They both have similar problems to FPTP.
They might be easy to explain, but they're not worth explaining!
You're right, of course, but that's why I like to bring up SAV as an "obvious" system with an obvious flaw (spoilers). Then I explain how PAV/SPAV fix that flaw with a minor change--split a vote only after a candidate is elected, not before.
@masiarek said in "Problematic" Ballot Exhaustion examples - RCV IRV:
We need three small, illustrative elections to demonstrate each âproblematicâ box separately (avoid âLess Problematicâ Exhausted Ballots).
Really I'd just hammer IRV over and over again on participation failure. Exhausted ballots are a non-issue.
We need to find better names than "monotonicity" and "participation" that are easy to explain. Monotonicity is a complicated six-syllable word that, in everyday speech, literally means "boringness"âno wonder nobody cares. Rename it the basic @#$%ing sanity criterion.
Advertisement: a candidate is declared the winner and starts celebrating; then somebody comes up and explains they've found extra votes for the candidate, and the candidate suddenly loses. End with "Last year, Nick Begich lost the Alaska election because voting authorities thought he had too many votes. How could voting for someone make them lose? Don't let it happen here. Vote no on IRV."
@toby-pereira said in The dangers of analysis paralysis in voting reform:
Also for a score-based method, I'm still not convinced that STAR is the method. I said on the Election Methods list the other day that while basically all methods fail Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA), STAR seems to do so in a more wilful way. I'll just quote myself:
That's kind of interesting, because I took you as saying the opposite (which is also my understanding of STAR): that STAR doesn't have to fail IIA (or clone-independence), but intentionally chooses to do so because this leads to a slightly better outcome. With STAR, the optimal strategy is for every party to run 2 candidates, which gives every voter at least two choices they can feel comfortable with.
As an example, I'd much prefer a situation where both Biden and Kamala Harris were listed separately on the ballot so I could rank Harris higher (and help her win the runoff). Right now, I'm not happy with any of the candidates in the race; on a simple left-right scale I'm close to Biden, but I disapprove of him for reasons of competence. (But I'm sure as hell not supportive of any other candidate...) With STAR, every voter should have at least two choices they consider tolerable.
Personally, I think of STAR as just reversing the primary-then-general order: we have a general election to choose the best party (the score round), and then a "primary" where we pick the best nominee by majority vote.
2 years later
I think Saari showed in his book that Cycle Cancellation//Condorcet is equivalent to Borda!
@sarawolk said in The dangers of analysis paralysis in voting reform:
@toby-pereira said in The dangers of analysis paralysis in voting reform:
Ranked Robin
We are planning to come back to the original intention around Ranked Robin, which is to stop branding Condorcet as a whole bunch of systems to fight between, and move to calling them one system, Ranked Robin, with a variety of "tie breaking protocols" a jurisdiction's special committee on niche election protocols could choose between. Honestly, specifying Copeland vs RP vs Minimax is way beyond the level of detail that should even be written into the election code or put to the voters.
Equal Vote's point with the Ranked Robin was never to say that Copeland is better than Ranked Pairs is better than Smith/Minimax. The point is that these are all equivalent in the vast, vast majority of scaled elections and that Condorcet as a whole is top shelf so it should be presented to voters as a better ranked ballot option. Ranked voting advocates should support it. The main reason Condorcet is not seriously considered is because of analysis paralysis and a total lack of interest in branding and marketing for simplicity and accessibility.
So then "Ranked Robin" is just supposed to refer to Condorcet methods in general?
I think that's a good strategy, but the presentation on the website made me think that Ranked Robin means Copeland//Borda specifically.
q-Condorcet methods use quotas other than 50% to declare a Condorcet winner; for example, a 2/3-Condorcet method declares a candidate to be the winner if they defeat every other candidate by a margin of 2/3. By Nakamura's theorem, the q-Condorcet winner is guaranteed to be acyclic for all voter profiles if and only if q = (n_candidates - 1) / n_candidates
. The same quota also guarantees that a q-Condorcet method is participation-consistent.
Working on this more. Right now I have some interesting questions, like: What if q depends on the number of ballots involved in cycles? Could some method satisfy Condorcet-like properties for a "mostly acyclic" electorate, but otherwise fall back on some other method? And do so in a way that still satisfies participation?
This seems like a nice way to smoothly interpolate between Condorcet and non-Condorcet methods (like score), depending on whether the optimality criteria for Condorcet are satisfied.
@toby-pereira said in Cycle Cancellation//Condorcet:
One thing you could do is look at every possible triple separately (similar to how Condorcet looks at pairs separately). So within each triple you remove cycles and get the pairwise comparisons for the candidates within that. Then you could do some sort of Ranked Pairs or Rivers process to "lock in" certain triples, but it's a case of deciding how to judge which are the ones to lock in first.
OK, having read more about split-cycle, I think I've come to the conclusion that simple cycles (i.e. a path that starts and ends at A, without repeating any points other than A) are more likely to work than triples. An explanations of split-cycle:
Consider a simple cycle. Affirm all defeats in this cycle other than the weakest. Repeat for all possible simple cycles.
So, it's a kind of local minimax.
So you can restrict yourself to a single simple cycle at a time, and maybe consider within this group who the local winners are?
@cfrank said in Cycle Cancellation//Condorcet:
Does this end up being different from ranked pairs? It has a kind of a co-âranked pairsâ flavor.
Yes, it's slightly different. Very roughly (this isn't actually a correct characterization), you can think of it as being "all the places where Ranked Pairs, River, and Schulze agree" (all three methods return a winner selected by Split Cycle).
TBC, Split-Cycle isn't resolute (it oftenâand by often I mean like 1% of elections :pâreturns multiple winners). So it's more of a way to winnow down the set of potential winners.
@cfrank said in Cycle Cancellation//Condorcet:
Identify the kth weakest edge. If it is part of a cycle, remove it. Otherwise, set kâ>k+1.
This is different from Split-Cycle. Actually, I think it's equivalent to Minimax.
@gregw said in State constitutions that require âa plurality of the votesâ or the âhighest,â âlargest,â or âgreatestâ number of votes.:
This will sound weird, but could enacting legislation call for score voting, but have a provision to use approval voting if score is found unconstitutional?
Yes, that's called a severability provision.
An improvement on STAR that restores almost-full compliance with all of Score's properties, without being much more complex than STAR.
dominator
to loser
, but not from loser
to dominator
, eliminate loser
.As a bonus, this method satisfies the strategy-free criterion (see the electowiki article on Score DSV), and basically every other strategy-resistance criterion.
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
No, we can't. We don't have access to the true information. We have no means to extract this from the voters. Voters have free will and their own purposes and values. If we are studying what they do, we may indeed get a pretty good clue about their values, but we cannot guarantee to get it accurately. We don't have the power to coerce them into telling the whole truth about it.
That's true. We can't perfectly measure every voter's true preferences. So then shouldn't we be encouraging voters to give preferences as close to honesty as possible, to make sure we have as little error as possible?
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
"Honest voting" is a theoretical concept that can be useful in thought experiments and reasoning and the design of algorithms, etc. However, it does not describe a phenomenon that can happen in real elections in which something important rides on the outcome of the tally.
$20 says it does.
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
What grounds do you have for coming to such an opinion? I don't think it is correct.
I think that's just the definition of the "best result" under a given metric. Regardless of what social welfare function you pick, that social welfare function will be maximized if voters are honest.
What do you care about? Electing majority winners? A Condorcet method will always elect a Condorcet winner if voters are honest (but not necessarily if they're dishonest). Maximizing social utility? Score voting does that with honest voters (but not always for dishonest voters). Maximizing the number of voters who see their favorite candidate elected? FPP does that with honest voters (but once again, can't with dishonest ones).
No matter which social welfare function you come up with, that social welfare function will do better at its job if it has accurate information than if it has inaccurate information.
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
The Gibbard theorem showed that optimal voting takes any guesses or estimates of the positions of other voters into account.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. Gibbard's theorem just proves there's no single "best" strategy for voting in an election. The socially-optimal outcome is only possible if every voter is fully honest.
Enforcing automatic strategy only improves outcomes if either:
A) we think only one side will behave strategically, or
B) we're not that likely to .
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
In non-official channels of communication, I see urging "honesty" as problematic and dishonest. Voting is not an opinion poll; it is an exercise of political power. It's like steering a boat. When you command "right full rudder", it's not an opinion, but a muscular exercise that feeds into the whole dynamic of the boat's motion in accord with the Laws O' Physics (TM), the design of the boat, the propeller's rotational velocity, etc.
Or we could provide true information and help the system pick a better winner. If we're not going to let voters be honest (as many of them choose to be), what's the point in anything but a maximal lottery? If voters provide true, accurate information, the outcomes are better; when people vote honestly in score, the outcome is the utilitarian winner.
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
then I predict that Faction A will within a few elections figure out that it should use the maximum value (5) and minimum value (0) of the permitted range. I think factions don't usually voluntarily give up power. Elections are contentious.
Empirically, about 60% of voters choose to do so. When asked if they'd prefer to have a voting strategy automatically executed for them, 57% refused. When asked whether they thought voting systems should automatically execute strategic voting, opponents outnumbered supporters 2:1.
https://www.proquest.com/docview/304273753?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true&sourcetype=Dissertations & Theses
@jack-waugh said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
What reasoning leads you to think that Score voters pushing exaggerated support hose toward compromise candidates tends to spoil elections? They are still giving more support to their true favorites. If enough proportion of voters are standing with them, that candidate can win.
Arrow's theorem, which implies that if voters base their on strategic considerations, there will always be spoiler effects. (Compare honest score voting, which is completely spoilerproof.)
@jack-waugh said in MARS: mixed absolute and relative score:
If people don't use the maximum number in Score, I'd say they are trying to support "None of the Above" (NOTA).
I don't see how those are logically related. If we want a NOTA option, I'd think that would be a situation where every candidate gets a score of <50%, or instead we could explicitly include an option for reopening nominations.
Hmm, I really like this idea in theory. Have you worked out what criteria it complies with?
The simplest, best way to minimally change score while protecting chicken-resistance would be some kind of Mutual Majority//Score. Balinski and Laraki give a criterion they call "mutual majority for rated ballots". However, I'm not sure that's the "best" way to define mutual majority when working with score voting.
The Balinski and Laraki form of mutual majority assumes the amount of support for a solid coalition is determined by the raw number of voters who rate X & Y above a certain threshold. Score is generally based on measuring the total amount of support from voters, including strength of support. What if we tried defining "mutual majority" in terms of total support?
Mentioning @jameson-quinn on this.
@gregw said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
âA 99 score is tactically useful for supporting your second-choice candidate when the first-choice candidate might not be popular enough to win.â
I wouldn't add anything about tactics; much better to avoid discussing it. I'd rather encourage voters to give honest ratings of each of the candidates, so we can get rid of spoiler effects. Instructing them on how to normalize ballots increases the risk of a spoiled election.
I'm not sure why these would pose a problem for score, as phrased. Under score, the candidate with the largest number of votes wins.
@gregw said in STLR - Score Than Leveled Runoff might not be too complex for voters:
My concern with Score is more with habits than tactics. Radicals might habitually be inclined to give their favorites the top score and everybody else the lowest score, while moderates may usually be more nuanced, giving radicals, over time, an advantage.
This would give radicals less influence over the election overall: if they're radicals, their "favorites" will be too radical to win, and they'll lose all their influence by not rating any more moderate (electable) candidates.