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    Psephomancy

    @Psephomancy

    https://www.reddit.com/user/psephomancy
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    https://forum.electionscience.org/u/psephomancy

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    Best posts made by Psephomancy

    • Archives of other dead forums

      In addition to hosting the archive of forum.electionscience.org, it would be good to host the archives of election-related Yahoo Groups (and maybe Google Groups, if CES group is going away?)

      • [EM] Dumping election-methods Yahoo groups before the Dec 14 deadline
        Kristofer Munsterhjelm
      • Reddit: All election-related Yahoo Groups will be deleted in 24 hours

      I got some of the data from each of these, but I haven't gone through to see how complete they are:

      • ApprovalVoting [Citizens For Approval Voting]
      • AR-NewsWI ["Animal Right News- Wisconsin", not sure why listed]
      • AVFA [Approval Voting Free Association]
      • btpnc-talk [Libertarian Boston Tea Party Free Association, not sure why listed]
      • Condorcet [Membership approved]
      • electionmethods
      • EMIG-Wikipedia [Wikipedia Election Methods Interest Group]
      • instantrunoff-freewheeling
      • InstantRunoffCA [Membership approved]
      • InstantRunoffWI
      • RangeVoting [Automatically rejected]
      • stv-voting

      Total size of my dumps are probably <1.5 GB with all the duplicated content removed.

      Kristofer listed a few more groups that he downloaded. ArchiveTeam maybe got some that were not listed? Maybe others are floating around out there?

      Unfortunately, I think some of these were lost forever, because they were accessible only to members, and no members archived them (unless they did so without posting about it).

      posted in Request for Features
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy
    • Graphs and notes from Weber 1977

      I've been researching the history of utility simulations, and it seems the paper that started it all is Weber 1977 (though these technically aren't simulations, since he calculated closed-form expressions analytically). Anyway, the paper isn't OCRed or bookmarked or searchable, so I had to actually skim through the whole thing with my own eyes.

      Weber's "Effectiveness" is the same thing as Merrill's "Social Utility Efficiency", which is the same thing as Shentrup's "Voter Satisfaction Index", which is the same thing as Quinn's "Voter Satisfaction Efficiency": The utility of the winning candidate (totalled across all voters) , as a fraction of the distance between the average utility of all candidates (= average of many random winners) and the utility of the best candidate. For example, this winner would have a value of 75%:

      --------- Best candidate
      
      --------- Actual winner
      
      --------- 
      
      --------- 
      
      --------- Average of all candidates
      

      The paper doesn't have any graphs, just the expressions and a single table of a few Effectiveness values. I put the expressions into a spreadsheet and plotted various things, and verified against the table:

      Here is The Effectiveness of Several Voting Systems table from p. 19 of Reproducing Voting Systems, except in graphical form and with more values calculated:

      Effectiveness table.png

      • Standard is of course First Past the Post, and we all know how that works.
      • Vote-for-half is Approval voting, except that all voters use the identical strategy of approving half of the candidates.
        • This sounds similar, but is not the same, as Merrill's Approval strategy, in which all voters approve of any candidates of above-average utility (optimal from the voter's perspective, without any info from polls). Although this would be half approvals per ballot on average, it's not always half for an individual voter.
          • (In a quick test, it seems that the optimal strategy provides higher social utility than Weber's, but I haven't double-checked my code.)
          • (Weber does recognize that this is the optimal strategy, and says that voters using optimal strategy is assumed throughout the paper, but then … doesn't actually do that?)
      • Best Vote-for-or-against-k uses the Vote-for-or-against-k method, with k set to the value that maximizes social utility for a given number of candidates (about 1/3).
        • Vote-for-or-against-k, in turn, is the method in which voters can choose to vote for k candidates, or against k candidates. So this can be thought of as combined approval voting, but with every voter using this same strategy. (I assume these strategies were used just because they were easier to calculate analytically.)
      • Borda is Borda count

      Weber gets a Social Utility Efficiency of 82% for all two-candidate elections, while Merrill gets 100%. This is because Merrill normalizes utilities before finding the utility winner in each election. I think Weber's approach makes more sense, since I believe that elections with polarizing majoritarian winners beating broadly-liked candidates really do happen. WDS refers to this discrepancy, too, because honest Score voting could actually get to 100%:

      Note that when C = 2, achievable voting systems will not achieve zero BR. That error made in a previous study [17] probably indicates it had a computer programming “bug.”

      (I think Weber mentions this, too, but assumes that everyone would normalize to min/max and so it would end up equivalent to Approval. But now I can't find it. Maybe that was another paper. I'll edit this later.)

      Here's "Vote-for-k":

      Vote for k.png

      • Vote-for-1 is just FPTP
      • Vote-for-half is the value of k that produces the best social utility for a given number of candidates, when every voter uses it, as above.

      Here's "Vote-for-or-against-k":

      Vote for or against k.png

      • Vote-for-or-against-1 is the same as "negative vote" or "bipolar voting" or "balanced plurality voting".
      • Best Vote-for-or-against-k is just value of k for a given number of candidates that provides the highest social utility when every voter uses it, as above.

      These all use the "random society" model, so not super realistic, but still useful for relative comparisons of methods and for verifying Monte Carlo simulations against.

      (I was going to transcribe the expressions here for other's convenience, but math markup doesn't work yet.)

      posted in Simulations
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy

    Latest posts made by Psephomancy

    • RE: Project to Identify Score-Based Voting Supporters

      The "Select a precinct" drop-down is empty and doesn't allow me to go any further.

      posted in Advocacy
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy
    • RE: Serial Approval Vote Election

      @tec said in Serial Approval Vote Election:

      These are binary choices, and as such the honest response is also the best strategic response.

      That's only true if there are only two candidates...

      posted in New Voting Methods and Variations
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy
    • RE: Graphs and notes from Weber 1977

      So I noticed a discrepancy while reproducing these statistically. Vote-for-1 tends to be too high, and Vote-for-(n-1) tends to be too low:

      fptp has same problem Effectiveness,_1000_voters,_100000_iterations.png

      (Vote-for-(n-1) is essentially Anti-plurality voting. )

      These should be the same, according to him:

      It is interesting to observe that the vote-for-k and vote-for-(n-k) voting systems are equally effective.

      Plotting just those two, it seems to just be a consequence of Weber calculating for infinite voters vs me simulating finite numbers of voters:

      10 voters, 100,000 iterations:

      Effectiveness,_10_voters,_100000_iterations.png

      100 voters, 100,000 iterations:

      Effectiveness,_100_voters,_100000_iterations.png

      1,000 voters, 100,000 iterations:

      Effectiveness,_1000_voters,_100000_iterations.png

      100,000 voters, 100,000 iterations (took 3 hours):

      Effectiveness,_100000_voters,_100000_iterations.png

      (Standard and Vote-for-1 are the same thing, but implemented differently, so I was plotting both to make sure there wasn't a bug in one.)

      I don't really understand why this happens, but good to keep in mind that number of voters does matter in these kinds of simulations.

      posted in Simulations
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy
    • RE: Too Dependent on One Person

      [I don't know why replying to another thread posted in this thread]

      posted in Issue Reports
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy
    • RE: Too Dependent on One Person

      @Jack-Waugh Likewise, I can't make a time commitment, and I don't have experience with that software, but could figure them out in an emergency, and could at least be a backup plan until someone more web-focused volunteers.

      • I know: git, BitBucket, SSH, Ubuntu
      • I don't know: mailer, DBMS, nginx, NodeBB, javascript
      posted in Issue Reports
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy
    • RE: Waterfox

      @Jack-Waugh Yeah, I don't know, either. I basically run two browsers now because a few extensions aren't supported in one, but a few websites don't work in the other. 😕

      posted in Issue Reports
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy
    • RE: Waterfox

      @Jack-Waugh I guess I should have specified "Waterfox Classic". 😕 It still doesn't work there.

      posted in Issue Reports
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy
    • RE: Too Dependent on One Person

      @Jack-Waugh What is "SSH stuff" exactly? I'm familiar with using SSH to log into my home Ubuntu server and run commands remotely, etc.

      posted in Issue Reports
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy
    • RE: Waterfox

      @Jack-Waugh I don't know javascript well but I see:

      SyntaxError: import declarations may only appear at top level of a module www.votingtheory.org:27

      posted in Issue Reports
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy
    • Waterfox

      https://forum.electionscience.org/t/the-new-forum-is-open/920/3?u=psephomancy

      https://www.votingtheory.org/ is working for me. Do you have Javascript disabled?

      @Jack-Waugh

      Actually it's probably because I opened it in Waterfox? Does it use javascript that only works in certain browsers?

      The landing page at https://www.votingtheory.org/ doesn't need any javascript, does it? It could just be bare HTML?

      posted in Issue Reports
      Psephomancy
      Psephomancy