@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.

@wolftune Certainly it blocks out plurality voting, and that should be plain to see even if you do not fully understand voting theory. I would say that it also blocks out options such as IRV because IRV does not account for all indicated support, but the reasoning for that argument would not be apparent without getting into voting theory. However, that discussion can possibly wait until someone actually suggests using IRV.

@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.

In order for such a system to effectively deter strategic voting, the best strategies in the component systems used need to be sufficiently different. Otherwise common vulnerabilities still can be exploited. The most useful strategy in Score and Condorcet is usually exaggeration, so I am skeptical that the two systems effectively complement each other.

There is also a risk that mixing many systems in this way could compound their strategic vulnerabilities rather than offset them.

Strategic voting in Condorcet methods often attempts to increase the size of the Smith set and force cycles. The same strategies could be used with this system since the size of the Smith set also indicates how many winners the Score-based methods are expected to return. Random selection can be exploited by running many similar candidates, since when the Smith set contains multiple candidates, cloning a candidate in the Smith set would cause the clone to be added to the Smith set.

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

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.

A deterministic approach that just treats ties as their own kind of outcome might be able to gain the advantages of the probabilistic approach while being able to dispense with the randomness. I didn't try to do that because runoff methods can end up with sequences of tiebreakers so that all candidates that might be involved in a tiebreaker might not have equal chance of winning overall, and also to make the criterion applicable to methods that aren't even mostly deterministic, such as random ballot.

I really like the Pairwise Sorted Margins methods that @Ted-Stern brought up (see: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/112/preference-approval-sorted-margins), although it probably introduces too many new concepts to voters to be effective for advocacy. There are two things that I like about it. First, it seems to be a logical extension of the runoff step in STAR. I expect that when there are more candidates, the value of the runoff step in STAR will be diluted, whereas the importance of the pairwise comparisons in Sorted Margins doesn't diminish with an increase in the number of candidates. Second, it does better against burying than most Condorcet methods, usually well enough to make it not worth attempting.

@rob A threshold might make sense to try to restrict the function of recall elections to removing incumbents has broadly lost credibility with the public, and not just when partisan opponents want to replay the previous campaign.

However, to stop that, it would probably be just as important to make recall elections more difficult to trigger, as a lowered chance of success might not discourage groups from initiating these kinds of recalls if they can still trigger them easily, since the groups that pushed for this recall already either don't seem all that discouraged by a low chance of success or aren't realistically estimating it anyway.

Recently, the Governor of California survived a recall election.

The recall election worked like this: there are two questions on the recall ballot. There is a yes or no vote on whether or not the governor should be recalled, and there is a plurality vote on who should replace the governor if they are recalled. If the "yes" side prevails on the first question, then the winner of the plurality vote becomes the new governor.

This procedure seems faulty, not only because plurality voting is being used to select the replacement, but because you'd expect that whether or not a voter would support recalling the governor would depend on who the replacement would be, but the voter must choose before that is known.

Before the recall, Democrats feared that Republicans would be able to use this to get their candidate into office without facing scrutiny. I would not be surprised if they respond to this by either making recall elections more difficult to trigger, or scrapping them altogether. However, in principle, recall elections provide an extra layer of democratic accountability for elected officials. A well-implemented recall election rule could be a good thing.

One way to fix the flaw that voters must make a binding choice of whether or not to recall the governor before the replacement is known might be to hold an election for the replacement before the vote on whether to recall the governor, or to make the recall vote nonbinding and hold a runoff between the governor and the proposed replacement if a majority votes to recall. However, it would probably be better for the recall to only require one election.

Another way might be for voters to vote yes or no on whether they would support replacing the governor with each proposed replacement candidate. If no one reaches 50% yes, then the governor is not replaced, otherwise, the person with the greatest percentage of yes votes wins. Note that this is similar to approval voting, but with the governor automatically having a score of 50%.

However, the simplest solution would be to simply hold another election where the governor and potential replacements are all just treated as candidates, as they would be in an ordinary election. This is probably the a better course of action than the "vote on each replacement" rule if a good single winner method is used to choose the winner, but it would be unsurprising if they just implement this using plurality to select the winner.

@BTernaryTau If a method is sequential, then for a deterministic method, I would treat the output as an ordered list of candidates. For a nondeterministic method, I would treat the output as a discrete probability space, where the outcomes are the different possible ordered lists with length equal to the number of winners, and the probability for each list is the probability that it represents the list of winners in the order that they are selected.

Then given a set of cast ballots B and a method m, we can define random variables W_B,1, W_B,2, ..., W_B,w (where w is the number of winners) representing the candidate who wins each round.

I would define the criterion as: for every set of cast ballots B, for every ballot b, for every nonnegative integer k<w, for every ordered set of k candidates W such that P({W_B,1, ..., W_B,k} = W) > 0, there exists some ballot b' such that both of the following hold:

1. For all positive integers i <= k, b(W[i]) = b'(W[i]) (referring to entries in W, not W_i)
2. If B' = {b_1, ..., b_n, b, b'}, and P({W_B',1, ..., W_B',k} = W) > 0, then for all candidates c, P(W_B,k+1 = c | {W_B,1, ..., W_B,k} = W) = P(W_B', k+1 = c | {W_B',1, ..., W_B',k} = W).

Essentially, a ballot b' can only cancel a ballot b at a round assuming a specific list of previous winners. (Since the method is nondeterministic, there might be multiple possible lists.) Each ballot b should have (possibly, but not necessarily different) cancelling ballots for all possible sets of winners. For b' to cancel b for a particular list of previous winners, the two ballots must give the same score to all candidates on that list, and adding them to the set of ballots cast either not affect the probability of electing any candidate next conditional on the list of previous winners being as assumed, or make it impossible for that list of previous winners to still be selected.

@wolftune Certainly it blocks out plurality voting, and that should be plain to see even if you do not fully understand voting theory. I would say that it also blocks out options such as IRV because IRV does not account for all indicated support, but the reasoning for that argument would not be apparent without getting into voting theory. However, that discussion can possibly wait until someone actually suggests using IRV.

@Casimir said in ICA/ICT/SICT - So what about "improved Condorcet" methods?:

Why would that be preferred? And does this only work when explicitly ranking/approving both, or also for bottom ranks? In that case one could state the rule as just: "A candidate is unbeaten if there is no other candidate that is ranked higher by more than half of all voters." Which also would be easier to calculate and visualize.

If ties count in favor of both candidates when they are compared, then at the bottom ranks, voters would want to make up a ranking for those candidates just because it would hurt whoever is put lower in the ranking.

Generally, this system reminds me of a system I thought about a while ago but I don't know if I wrote about it anywhere. (The thinking behind them is basically the same.) It works like Minimax Condorcet with co-equal ranks, but there is an approval-like cutoff in the ranking. For tied candidates above a ballot's cutoff, the ballot counts for both candidates in that pairwise matchup. For tied candidates below a ballot's cutoff, the ballot counts against both candidates in that pairwise matchup.

Ultimately the thing that I really don't like about that system is that the notion of a coequal ranking is deceptive: coequal rankings sound like they are intended to indicate that you support both candidates equally, but the system is designed so that they really serve a strategic purpose.

@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.