@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.

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.

Also, the Groups page lists which accounts have admin/mod privileges. Since it's tied to the forum software, it will update automatically.

@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.

Update following the first preliminary results.

Last night, the NYC Board of Elections released a preliminary IRV count. These results included several test ballots that should have been cleared from the system before counting the actual votes. This suggests incompetence on the part of the NYC Board of Elections, but it would be unfair to blame this on IRV. The revised results have just been released. All in all, they suggest that the polling before the race was generally accurate.

The first preliminary count, which does not include absentee ballots, indicates that the final 3 candidates were Adams, Garcia, and Wiley. The chance that the absentee ballots change this is virtually zero.

Garcia and Wiley are virtually tied for elimination in the round of 3. The current preliminary count has Garcia ahead of Wiley by 347 votes in this round (about 0.045% of the non-exhausted vote). In the final round, Adams leads Garcia by 14,755 votes (about 2.1% of the non-exhausted vote). (If you read my original post about this election, you might note that these results are not surprising.)

With a bit more than 100,000 absentee ballots not considered in the computation, either outcome could conceivably change by the time all of the absentee votes are counted. Consequently, both the Garcia and Wiley campaign supporters believe that they could come back and win. But the Wiley supporters should be careful what they wish for. Wiley's head to head numbers against Adams were much worse than Garcia's in the pre-election polling. Unfortunately, because the NYC Board of Elections' implementation of IRV has been one of the least transparent in the US, we have no official data on the Wiley vs Adams pairwise matchup. If we did, I think it would clearly demonstrate that IRV still has a spoiler problem,since Wiley is far more likely to spoil a win for Garcia than become mayor herself.

@NevinBR said in Least-bad Single-winner Ranking Method?:

On average, in the long run, game theory voting will produce winners who are preferred by as many or more voters than the winner produced by any other method. In other words, there is no ranked-ballot voting system whose winners are preferred by more voters than the game-theory winner, over the long run.

So "optimal" means that the expected value of the margin between the winner selected by GTV and by some other system will always be non-negative?

@Jack-Waugh I meant that the directory of categories and topics should be on one page, and then for each topic the posts in that topic should have their own page separate from the directory.

Being able to order all topics by date irrespective of category (or grouped by category) would probably be a useful feature, though it's less useful in an archive than a live forum. It would also probably be useful to be able to order by number of replies, since topics that turned out to be important tended to also generate a lot of discussion.

Being able to search/filter posts by author, title, category, or some combination of each would be useful, but sorting by them might be of limited use. For the title, I might remember what the thread was about and could think of a few words likely in the title, but not the first word. Navigating a list of posts sorted by author feels unwieldy, since chances are that the person I want is somewhere in the middle, not among the first few or last few people listed.

Another filter might be whether a user participated in a topic, i.e. including not only the author but anyone who replied. Specifying multiple users to return only topics in which all of these users participated would be a more niche but potentially still useful.

I can think of some very niche sorts as well which might be useful for finding specific discussions, but those have more to do with what I personally think might have been useful for finding past discussions that I wanted to refer back to. Those would be by number of replies by a specific user, number of replies by a specific user to a specific user (if you still have the data for what each reply was to; possibly the initial post, but which could also be another reply), or number of replies from one user to another and vice versa.

I changed the default setting for new accounts to have external links open in a new tab but it does not appear to apply retroactively to accounts that have already been created. So everyone who already has an account will have to change it themselves.

My name (David Hinds) is on my account here, though I did keep the same handle from the CES forum. @Jack-Waugh it would be fine to put my real name in this post.

@Keith Out of curiosity, what in particular do you think he lacks knowledge about?

@nealmcb said in Pathological Scenarios for the New York Mayoral Election:

Anywhere with a detailed comparison of results from each release of the data?

Unfortunately it seems that the New York City board of elections has been removing the previous preliminary report with each release of a new one.

@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.

@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.

Update following the first preliminary results.

Last night, the NYC Board of Elections released a preliminary IRV count. These results included several test ballots that should have been cleared from the system before counting the actual votes. This suggests incompetence on the part of the NYC Board of Elections, but it would be unfair to blame this on IRV. The revised results have just been released. All in all, they suggest that the polling before the race was generally accurate.

The first preliminary count, which does not include absentee ballots, indicates that the final 3 candidates were Adams, Garcia, and Wiley. The chance that the absentee ballots change this is virtually zero.

Garcia and Wiley are virtually tied for elimination in the round of 3. The current preliminary count has Garcia ahead of Wiley by 347 votes in this round (about 0.045% of the non-exhausted vote). In the final round, Adams leads Garcia by 14,755 votes (about 2.1% of the non-exhausted vote). (If you read my original post about this election, you might note that these results are not surprising.)

With a bit more than 100,000 absentee ballots not considered in the computation, either outcome could conceivably change by the time all of the absentee votes are counted. Consequently, both the Garcia and Wiley campaign supporters believe that they could come back and win. But the Wiley supporters should be careful what they wish for. Wiley's head to head numbers against Adams were much worse than Garcia's in the pre-election polling. Unfortunately, because the NYC Board of Elections' implementation of IRV has been one of the least transparent in the US, we have no official data on the Wiley vs Adams pairwise matchup. If we did, I think it would clearly demonstrate that IRV still has a spoiler problem,since Wiley is far more likely to spoil a win for Garcia than become mayor herself.

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.

@Jack-Waugh I think it is difficult to define a sincere vote as something completely isolated from its effects on the outcome, since I think that those effects are what give votes "meaning". Imagine a Score voting system where whoever had the fewest points wins. A "sincere" vote under this system might be the exact opposite of a sincere vote under standard Score voting.

Under a system where the effects of your vote are be completely unpredictable, like the hashing one you described, I don't think your vote is capable of expressing anything about your preferences, since there is no way to tell in advance what any vote actually does.

Keep in mind that the characters displayed by a mobile keyboard vary by the input field. On Android, if I type into the URL field of a browser, the forward slash is in the first set, but if I type in a field like the one used on the forum, it is not. iOS behaves similarly although I am not exactly sure of which characters are available in the first set in a post field on this forum for iOS.

It might be difficult to find good separators in the first set.

This is less of a request and more of an effort to reopen discussion on an interesting idea that sort of wound up forgotten for various reasons that I won't go into here.

In the early days of planning this forum, @rob advocated for incorporating Codepens into the forum. (Archive link: http://www.votingtheory.org:3000/archive/posts?where={"topic_id"%3A734} ) He argued that it would be useful for users to be able to copy example elections that forum users came up with into codepens so that they can figure out what is going on in the example without having to do a lot of computations by hand. This seems like quite a good thing!

However, allowing users to embed codepen plugins into their posts seems like a possible security concern. Obviously it's unsafe to let people run arbitrary javascript on the site, even if the codepens require user permission before they can run. I don't know much about javascript or codepens so there may well be some obvious detail I'm missing.

What could safely be done with codepens on the site?

@Jack-Waugh It would depend on how incomplete rankings were dealt with, but the major parties would probably try to run many candidates to make it more difficult to eliminate them, and try to coordinate the bottom of their supporters' ballots to try to control the order in which their opponents are eliminated. Major parties would still have the advantage of just having more resources to communicate strategies to their supporters. On the other hand, they would face a disadvantage of being more prominent targets for opponents to try to eliminate early, and if these opponents are coordinated, even running many candidates won't help. However, if the major parties agree to coordinate with each other to keep minor parties from being competitive (or even just specific minor parties), they could make it very difficult for those parties.

Major parties could also use the fear that they will be eliminated first if they do not reach a majority to discourage defections to minor parties.

@NevinBR said in Least-bad Single-winner Ranking Method?:

On average, in the long run, game theory voting will produce winners who are preferred by as many or more voters than the winner produced by any other method. In other words, there is no ranked-ballot voting system whose winners are preferred by more voters than the game-theory winner, over the long run.

So "optimal" means that the expected value of the margin between the winner selected by GTV and by some other system will always be non-negative?