@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.)
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.
Also, the Groups page lists which accounts have admin/mod privileges. Since it's tied to the forum software, it will update automatically.
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.
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.
@keith-edmonds said in New Thiele-type proportional voting method:
@marylander I do not see what you are getting at. Is that a free riding strategy?
28/75 > 1/3
If you expect to win lots of seats, you can increase your voting power by giving your preferred candidates less than a max score.
The optimal score is (1/2)*(s/(s-1)) where s is the number of seats you think you can win.
Edit: This is a problem because it means that the method will favor larger parties even more so than either standard SPAV or RRV, since this is something that parties need a high seat count to be able to take advantage of. In fact it makes the method not really proportional. For example, with ballots:
4: A[1/2]
1: B[2/2]
Party A will win every seat no matter how many seats there are.
@keith-edmonds I don't think there are monotonicity implications for having more than 2 candidates in the runoff. Obviously lowering a candidate's score will not help them place in the top cut after the first round, because Score itself is monotonic. In the runoff, lowering a candidate's raw score will either decrease their runoff score and not change the scores of the other ballots (if it was above the minimum score before being lowered) or increase the runoff scores of other candidates by pushing down the minimum for that ballot.
To me, this seems like a dilution of STAR. If the lower end of the top cut is weak (e.g. we have an election with 12 candidates, 3 of whom are serious, and 9 of whom are not), then very few ballots actually get normalized.
A final consideration is that if, for example, there are 3 slots in the runoff, and the two most popular candidates are something like a "center-left vs center-right split", then it would be an advantage for the center-right candidate for the third slot to go to a left-wing candidate as the votes that gave a full score to that candidate will not normalize (unlike in STAR), and the same goes the other way around. Again I interpret this as a dilution of STAR. I also see it as a possible strategic voting issue because if candidates in the lower end of the top cut are not strong enough to be threats to win, then the threat of a strategy of raising favorable match ups backfiring is less of a deterrent, unlike in STAR.
@jack-waugh Good to know (although perhaps it would have been better to post this earlier than you did if there was one last Tuesday.)
@jack-waugh Yeah, I don't like this page much. I think he makes a lot of assumptions just to be able to attempt to estimate the impact of the various reforms he discusses. (For one thing, he assumes that they won't interact with each other, but I think it is clear that things like "black suffrage" and "gerrymandering" should be expected to interact: I'd expect getting rid of gerrymandering to increase the value of black suffrage).
One issue with monarchies that Smith doesn't take into account just by treating it like a random winner is that the selection procedure of the monarch is frequently civil war, more often than in democracies. Obviously a civil war is more costly than an election (including by random ballot).
Given the limits on his estimates, he should be more careful about making controversial claims just based on them.
@rob said in Collaborative Coding for Simulation:
Yeah my feeling -- and it is more of a feeling than anything I've been able to mathematically reason -- is that for a normal voter to try to do this is going to be beyond their capabilities. They might try, but they are probably equally likely to do something has a negative effect as to have a positive effect. And if it does have a positive effect, it will be an extremely subtle one.
I think there are simple cases where it might be possible for voters to use Condorcet strategy, if only because a campaign might be able to figure out some burial scenario and try to communicate to their voters "do this, just trust me." I have center-squeeze cases in mind in particular: often when the plurality winner has 1 pairwise win and 1 pairwise defeat to the (sincere) Condorcet winner, they'll win if their voters bury the sincere Condorcet winner. If the plurality winner's pairwise victory is large enough, the risk of this strategy is low. But the campaign itself would have to push this, since voters are not very good at figuring out strategy when left to their own devices.
@rob said in Collaborative Coding for Simulation:
Finally, I don't know how to algorithmically do strategic voting under IRV or Condorcet. It seems like a voter needs to be able to guess with a great deal of precision how others will vote in order to effectively rank the candidates in anything other than your sincere preferences.
Usually in Condorcet, strategy involves trying to force a cycle. But you will then have the task of determining whether doing this is beneficial for you.
A general case for voting strategy might be to define some sort of distance between two elections based on the number of ballots changed (but perhaps assigning different weights to each ballot-vote combination, since some voters wouldn't want to participate in a strategy as it undermines what they want, also, if your supporters aren't easily persuaded to vote strategically, they might require higher weights; the weights would represent the difficulty of convincing a voter to cast a specific vote), and then a naive approach might be to find the election with a different outcome of nearest distance to the election that is expected, then for each voter to choose from the votes that they are willing to cast whichever vote either maximizes or minimizes the distance from the expected election given their chosen vote and the nearest different outcome, depending on whether they prefer it or not.
One challenge with this idea is that strategy is local, so the distance won't be valid everywhere. Another is that it doesn't take into account uncertainty in our estimates.
I think that this is a bit of a ways off from being something you could usefully code, but I think it could develop into a useful model.
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.)
@keith-edmonds I don't think there are monotonicity implications for having more than 2 candidates in the runoff. Obviously lowering a candidate's score will not help them place in the top cut after the first round, because Score itself is monotonic. In the runoff, lowering a candidate's raw score will either decrease their runoff score and not change the scores of the other ballots (if it was above the minimum score before being lowered) or increase the runoff scores of other candidates by pushing down the minimum for that ballot.
To me, this seems like a dilution of STAR. If the lower end of the top cut is weak (e.g. we have an election with 12 candidates, 3 of whom are serious, and 9 of whom are not), then very few ballots actually get normalized.
A final consideration is that if, for example, there are 3 slots in the runoff, and the two most popular candidates are something like a "center-left vs center-right split", then it would be an advantage for the center-right candidate for the third slot to go to a left-wing candidate as the votes that gave a full score to that candidate will not normalize (unlike in STAR), and the same goes the other way around. Again I interpret this as a dilution of STAR. I also see it as a possible strategic voting issue because if candidates in the lower end of the top cut are not strong enough to be threats to win, then the threat of a strategy of raising favorable match ups backfiring is less of a deterrent, unlike in STAR.
@culi For runoff methods, a step beyond what you have labelled fab_irv might be either the Nanson or Baldwin methods.
@bettervoting Westminster system parliaments elect a speaker who has the job of maintaining an orderly debate. They are expected to be impartial, so they only vote in ties, and the votes they cast are expected to follow a set of formal rules that generally favor the status quo.
The Vice President getting a tiebreaking vote in the US Senate is related to this, since constitutionally they have a similar role (presiding officer), although the VP doesn't actually do this job very often. In general, the US lacks the norms of impartiality that bind speakers in Westminster systems.
I wouldn't call resolving ties in favor of the status quo a good system, but I think it is more important for legislatures to be representative than for ties to be resolved extremely precisely. If a tie in the legislature genuinely reflects a near deadlock of public opinion, 49.9% of the public getting their way over 50.1% is hardly a travesty.
@bettervoting Well, taking the 2-seat example super literally would imply that there's not much point in having the second seat.
@bettervoting Not as far as I know. I checked the Internet Archive to see if they had the image (they did archive some things from the forum but mostly from 2020), but I don't think they archived the thread.