Topics created by tec

@tec referenda are interesting as an example, I would say they are more efficient in a sense, but the cost of that can be coherency. For example, referenda in California have led to incoherent policies, because the public often wants to have its cake and eat it too: the public wants service X, but simultaneously doesn’t want to pay for it, so they vote for X but also vote against tax increases that would pay for X. This effectively forces the government to borrow to reconcile public demands, which leads to debt that the public also doesn’t want.

The government then gets criticized for borrowing, but in a sense, that is misplaced responsibility—the direct translation of an incoherent set of policies is the source of the issue, and borrowing is a symptom. This shows that representatives also serve the role of taking on coherent responsibility for coherent policy decisions, but citizens’ policy referenda can undermine that role in the kind of situation I described. Probably, the effects of this kind are less severe or even negligible in smaller, more internally cohesive populations like in Switzerland.

Feedback is absolutely necessary, and structural issues as you indicate are major obstacles. If SAVE is a policy proposal generator, it seems to serve the role of a structured public forum. Is that accurate in your view? It seems like a more democratized form of a special interest group. How would the interests become translated into policy?

@tec Your programming skills are FAR beyond what I can do. I started exploring voting options about 7 months ago, and seeing that IRV sometimes selects an outcome that is clearly not the best choice, it occurred to me that looking at the second choice of the ballots of the runner up made sense. That led to a sort of double-elimination approach. Using a spreadsheet to lay out a few scenarios, it appeared that the approach had some promise. Unable to find anyone to help me, I managed to create some php webpages that can be used to evaluate scenarios. Testing with that I found some anomalies so progressed to a hybrid approach. So far, it's checking out just fine.

I like the visual layout that you provided, and I haven't seen anything with the "indifference lines". It's similar to this: https://ncase.me/ballot/, which you're probably familiar with. I'd like to be able to start with ballot numbers and then have them displayed, rather than being limited to manipulating the image (which I think is fantastic too).

I was wondering too if your program calculates the distance between the two other options and then sets the second choice as the closest one.

Here's a link to the crude pages that I put together: https://wethepeople.ca/WTP_IRV-DEp1tester.php

I would definitely like to collaborate with you on an "evaluation framework".

@Jack-Waugh, Thanks for working through all these examples. I, too, had some questions about the GF vote, or the more general instructions regarding always voting for every alternative subjectively preferred over the focus. For a GF vote to be instrumental in impeding termination, the G vote total would have to be at least a strict majority (that is: F > half, because equal to half is not sufficient), and the F vote total would have to be the maximum vote count and exactly equal to the G vote total. Thus it is possible for a GF vote to hinder termination. However, in addition to G blocking termination, G is preferred by the voter over F, so G blocking theloop termination with F as the final winner is also indicating the possibility for G to be a later focus and possibly a better final outcome.

For testing purposes I wrote voter-agent code for voting to stop the loop. This strictly speaking is not part of SAVE, but it does indicate what I think voters might do. Each voter-agent has a property called indifference, which is a fraction between 0.0 and 1.0. At 0.0 the slightest difference matters, while at 1.0 the voter is totally indifferent to the alternatives. All voters start at 0.0 and increment their indifference value (1) every time the focus is a Condorcet winner (because if we cannot improve upon a Condorcet winner we will eventually accept it), and (2) whenever the focus subjectively improves after having first moved away (when the focus move away, such as when in a majority cycle, we also want to be more accepting, but only as we're coming back). These are the five basic reasons for an agent to vote for the focus:

Ideal - the focus is close to the voter's subjective ideal alternative. Cluster - the best and the worst of the most recent focus alternatives are really close together. Top-half - the spread between the best and the worst is moderately close (3x indifference) and the focus is in the top half of that spread. Limited-gain - the focus is close to the upper limit to any potential future gains. Peak - the focus is as good or better than a focus that was followed by a movement away from the agent's idea.
All of these conditions except Peak use the indifference value. The conditions are ordered from most difficult to satisfy to the easiest to satisfy.

The reason I bring this up is because I think voters might well vote for loop termination on the off-chance they can get a better result more quickly. Which implies a vote to terminate usually does not mean "I really want to terminate now" but instead is the kinder and gentler "it is okay to terminate now". Under those circumstances, the GF vote is perfectly reasonable, and supports the possibility of termination without foregoing the chance to influence the next focus choice.

@Marylander: The submitted paper was describing a new collective choice procedure that can be thought of as a vote-moderated discussion, so yes, it would have been in the context of voting methods.

Given that a week has gone by with no one supplying a reference for "independence of eliminated alternatives", I'm just going to proceed as if the editor meant Arrow's IIA.