It's worth noting that Lisa Murkowski ran a write-in campaign when she was elected to the Senate in 2010 after losing the Republican primary, so despite the state being quite red they still can have the occasional competitive statewide election. IRV in that race would probably have helped Murkowski more since the Republican nominee was associated with the Tea Party and so the second preferences would've been from Democrats.
@Jack-Waugh I have to agree with Rob and Keith re: concerns about this being on topic. I had assumed that the Advocacy tab would be about projects directly related to the mission of the forum. A project to generally inform peripheral political actors such as minor parties about the consequences of the election methods that they advocate might be on mission. However, to focus on a single movement seems to mix voting method advocacy with trying to promote participation in that movement. That could turn the Advocacy category into a place for general political advocacy, which I think would be harmful because it could limit the participation of users with ideological views that are divergent from the userbase on topics unrelated to the mission. The Score voting movement cannot afford to be exclusionary.
Now, I can understand being frustrated with the way that the electoral reform movement tends to discuss elections only in the abstract, with little regard to the actual consequences of any of the discussed phenomena. But I think that questions of what to do with the increased political choice associated with Score voting are best left to other political movements.
It's been quite a while since we have held any sort of meeting about the forum. Now, obviously we shouldn't just hold meetings just for the sake of it, but one of the points of some of the later meetings I recall was ensuring that people fill various roles. Some of these people I have not seen here in a long time, i.e. several months to a year. I propose we hold a meeting on the following topics:
What day-to-day responsibilities have we assigned, and are they currently being filled? If not, do we need to recruit new volunteers?
What goals had we set for the forum at launch, and have we achieved them?
What new goals should we have for the forum?
Officially I think we turned 1 year old about a month ago, so it seems like a good time to start planning a meeting like this. I'm not in a huge hurry to hold this meeting, but I do want people thinking about it. People seem quite busy at the moment, so I'll plan for it to happen some time in May.
In this doc you can suggest things to cover at the meeting.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YMhr1PRCKOAeLn4gZ4Nnqhm0dbCNBdfANrl5KF-ctPA/edit?usp=sharing
You don't have to have a leadership position on the forum to attend or make suggestions, but I am specifically notifying the council members.
@cfrank , @micahscopes , @Jack-Waugh , @SaraWolk . (For completion I'll note I am also on the council.)
@cfrank The strategy is going to end up being the same as FPTP though. It doesn't seem to mix with contexts where the outcomes for candidates are binary (i.e. you're either a winner or a loser) very well.
It seems to make more sense in a context where there is a scarce resource to be distributed, like time given to different speakers. (Perhaps this makes it attractive to economists.)
While the most likely outcome of the New York Mayoral election is an uncontroversial win for Eric Adams, especially as he leads first preference polling, and in practice many voters do not use ranking even when the option to do so is provided, some polling has suggested non-monotonic scenarios.
Polling suggests that Eric Adams' worst matchup is against Kathryn Garcia. It tends to suggest that he would receive between 48% and 56% support. In contrast, he polls well against both Andrew Yang and Maya Wiley. No polls that have publicly released data about these pairwise matchups suggest he would do worse than 56% against Yang or 54% against Wiley.
However, Garcia is no lock to make the final round. If Yang finishes 4th, Garcia and Wiley would be nearly tied for elimination. There is limited information on what will happen if Wiley finishes 4th, but what information exists suggests that Garcia would be eliminated in a final 3 against Adams and Yang.
Here is an example of a poll that showed a nonmonotonic result:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/qvizm3xxx1jjvyv/dfp_tech_team_memo_nyc_rcv_2021_06_21.pdf
That said, I suspect that polls of the race may be overestimating voters' tendency to rank additional candidates just by explicitly asking about it. This reduces the chance of a paradox.
Unfortunately, New York City does not appear to release the actual ballot data, so if a paradox does occur, we might not be able to catch it. Related: https://www.thecity.nyc/2021/5/12/22433507/ranked-choice-voting-software-new-york-city
That said, they will release two preliminary reports that run through the IRV counting process before they have all of the ballots. This could be an effective demonstration of how chaotic the process can get if the absentee ballots change the ranking.
@cfrank This I'm quite sure is nonmonotonic because raising a candidate from unapproved to the bottom of your list of approved candidates can make a candidate lose a runoff they usually would win.
Consider applying this method to a two-candidate race. You have to approve both candidates for your vote to count.
@Jack-Waugh As I said before, I agree that advocating Score voting to social movements is on topic. Indeed, I recall at CES that Sara Wolk discussed projects by Equal Vote to help various political organizations set up Star Voting elections. I will also grant that it might be easier to influence a social movement as a member than as an outsider. However, I don't think that the Advocacy category should be used to recruit people for movements only tangentially related to electoral reform, or that have much broader scopes. Voting reform won't stay at the center of the discussion, because the broad scope of reasons to support or oppose that social movement will necessarily enter the conversation. It might technically stay on topic, but it will be off-focus.
Also, the Groups page lists which accounts have admin/mod privileges. Since it's tied to the forum software, it will update automatically.
@rob said in Under what scenarios will the Smith set differ from Copeland set?:
I don't know about your favorite Score - Sorted Margins (I don't see an electowiki page). Would you be interested in helping/advising so I can work it into my Codepens where I am trying to do a bunch of methods that use score-type ballots. (if you are a JS coder, feel free to fork it and add it yourself)
I think it was invented by @Ted-Stern. It uses score ballots. How it works is:
First, find both the total scores for each candidate, and the pairwise matrix for each candidate.
Candidates are seeded by their total score. For each adjacent pair of candidates in the ranking, we check whether their order in the ranking agrees with their pairwise matchup. If each pair agrees, then stop and take this as the final ranking. If at least one pair does not agree, select the pair with the smallest difference in score that disagrees and switch the candidates. Repeat until you end up with a ranking that has no disagreements between adjacent candidates.
@jack-waugh We could use tags to retain some of the information lost by cutting the number of categories.
@sarawolk I have indicated my availability.
@jack-waugh It is at the very bottom of the screen. It appears in the same place whether you are creating a new topic or editing the head post of an old one.
Edit: Send me a message if you are having trouble finding it.
@jack-waugh We could use tags to retain some of the information lost by cutting the number of categories.
@jack-waugh The amount of complexity in an IRV Yee diagram increases absurdly quickly as you add candidates, but I don't think there will be infinite complexity with a finite number of candidates the way fractals are infinitely complex.
@rob said in Why I'm now leaning toward Copeland//IRV as the best method to promote:
- the 440 elections monitored by FairVote that they had enough information to be able to determine whether there was a Condorcet winner.
How many of those elections reported the complete rankings of the ballots? In an election where the complete rankings are not reported, it will still be possible to determine the Condorcet winner if one candidate gets a majority of the first choices, and IRV will elect that candidate. However, if no candidate gets a majority of the first choices, then it will not be possible to determine the Condorcet winner. This could lead to selection bias in their dataset.
@rob said in Score Sorted Margins:
It sounds like an "iterate until it settles on an equilibrium" sort of thing. At first blush, I'm not 100% convinced it will always find an equilibrium. Has it been proven to?
Yes, it can be proven to always find an equilibrium.
Note that only adjacent candidates can be swapped in the ranking, and that when adjacent candidates are swapped, the only relation that changes is the one between those two candidates.
Thus if we start at a ranking in which A>B, and move to a ranking in which B>A, then at some step some point, A and B must have been adjacent, and then they must have swapped positions, implying that B beats A pairwise. So to move back to a ranking in which A>B, A would have to beat B pairwise. But A and B cannot both beat each other pairwise.
Therefore we cannot move from a newer ranking to an older one.
I'll grant that this system is probably too complex to be implemented in practice, but it's my favorite theoretically.
@jack-waugh How would the equal rankings be handled?
Also, you may want to look at the Nanson and Baldwin methods. They are Condorcet methods based on Borda that use an elimination process.
@jack-waugh I explained it in https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/213/under-what-scenarios-will-the-smith-set-differ-from-copeland-set/5
First, find both the total scores for each candidate, and the pairwise matrix for each candidate.
Candidates are seeded by their total score. For each adjacent pair of candidates in the ranking, we check whether their order in the ranking agrees with their pairwise matchup. If each pair agrees, then stop and take this as the final ranking. If at least one pair does not agree, select the pair with the smallest difference in score that disagrees and switch the candidates. Repeat until you end up with a ranking that has no disagreements between adjacent candidates.
@rob The complexity of IRV has slowed its spread, even though there are far more complex electoral rules. At public hearings to implement it somewhere new, it gets criticized for being confusing. I think people in the voting reform space tend to underestimate the complexity of hybrid voting methods like this one because they are composed of building blocks we already are familiar with, but for people not already initiated, having to explain all the building blocks means more of a chance to lose them before you get to make an argument. If I were to try to promote some Condorcet method, I'd probably go with something like Minimax, since the cycle-breaker is fairly simple but also in practice very similar to the cycle-breakers of some of the more highly regarded Condorcet methods.
(I will note that in my opinion, we will almost never see a Smith set with more than 3 candidates, and furthermore, if there is a cycle, all of the pairwise matchups will be close; 51-49 all 3-ways will be far more likely than 60-40 all 3 ways.)