@sarawolk said in RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.:

The Supreme Court of Maine has once again ruled on the constitutionality of Ranked Choice Voting, again finding it to be unconstitutional.

In 2017 they had ruled that RCV was not compatible with Maine's requirement for a Plurality winner (the candidate with the most votes wins). In RCV, ballots are initially counted as votes for first-choice candidates, but those same votes can later be transferred or discarded, meaning the final winner may not be the candidate who received the most votes as originally cast.

...

It's worth noting that STAR Voting and Approval Voting both comply with the Maine Constitution's plurality winner rule. STAR Voting only finds the Plurality winner once, in the Automatic Runoff round. It clearly defines the vote as the runoff vote and defines scores as ballot data - not votes. Votes are never reassigned, transferred, or exhausted. Your vote goes to the finalist you prefer or counts as equal support for both, essentially like an abstain between those two. The candidate with the most votes wins.

This seems slightly tenuous. I don't think we can go by how STAR defines itself by saying that only the runoff is "the vote". Otherwise IRV / RCV could just redefine itself to declare that only the final runoff is "the vote".

The point is that it's surely about how this supreme court defines a vote, not how an individual voting method does.

@sarawolk said in Allocated score (STAR-PR) centrist clones concern:

In any case, I think that Clones are a much bigger problem in hypothetical math scenarios than they ever will be in real life campaigns, and if a faction can really pull off running 2 or 3 clones that all break through and win over voters then that's frankly impressive. The reality is that if voter behavior doesn't do them in, limitations in campaign funding and volunteer power likely will.

I'm not sure I really see this as a problem of clones specifically. If parties exist, then it's fairly normal for parties to field several candidates in a multi-winner election.

But I do think the particular voting behaviour in the example election is a bit "edge case", although it's still best to avoid vulnerability to it.

While people aren't likely to cast votes that are perfectly related to utility, I still see scores as more akin to utility than to something like money, where the increase in utility drops off the higher up the scale you go.

So what I'm saying is that I see a 5 and a 0 as in the same ballpark as a 3 and a 2, rather than the 3 and 2 being preferable for equity reasons.

How good score voting is generally is a separate debate obviously, but where it gives the same tie as a pairwise method, I don't see any reason in principle to prefer one result over another. But as a tie-break, it's probably fine to choose the result you might consider less divisive.

An interesting follow-up question would be whether you would consider divisiveness over score where there isn't an exact score tie (but is a pairwise tie still) or whether it's only useful as a tie-breaker. You could, for example, reduce C's score of 3 to 2. That way, the pairwise result is still a tie but on average scores, A and B are now marginally ahead of C despite being more divisive. Is there still an argument to elect C?

I suppose he's used that assumption because a hereditary monarch is essentially a leader arbitrarily picked, like in random winner (as opposed to random ballot). But this is obviously very simplistic. When you have an all-powerful monarch versus some other system, the entire political and cultural landscape is likely to be very different and that isn't modelled by this.

Well, it partly depends on what you do with equal ranks or incomplete ballots. If an unranked candidate is scored as 0 then a 4-3-2-1 system would be different from 3-2-1-0. But if it's done in a more sensible way, they would be equivalent.

I've been looking at this and I don't think it is the best. One (minor) problem is that when you're summing the scores, for voters that haven't had any candidates elected and also gave a score of 0 to the candidate in question, you get 0/0. Obviously you just need to count it as 0 to get it to work, but it can make one suspicious that there are problems lurking beneath.

But the main problem is that it fails scale invariance. Well it passes in a multiplicative way as it is defined on the wiki, but not if you add to the scores.

For example, if everyone scores 1 to 10 instead of 0 to 9 (so just adds 1 to every score), you can get a different result. KP + SPAV (also known as Sequential Proportional Score Voting or SPSV) passes this. I know it might seem unsatisfactory to "split" the voter with KP, but in terms of passing criteria, it seems to do the job.

@jack-waugh Right, I see. Though I think it's no better or worse than what I thought it was. Just arbitrarily favouring voters who approve a particular number of candidates. And it encourages putting up clones or non-entities accordingly.

@sarawolk I've seen the initial video, but not the 3-hour follow-up! I thought in the first video, the criticism of score was weird.

This method heavily depends on turnout for more accurate scores. What if turnout is extremely low and only extremists turn up to the polls?

Every method depends on turnout for more accurate results. No reason has been given for why score should suffer any more than any other method in this regard.

@cfrank I've seen a few as well which I've deleted, but they're not overwhelming the board or anything, so I wouldn't want to make anything worse for any new users we might get, which isn't that many anyway! So I'd probably say leave it for now, but keep an eye on the situation.

@sarawolk said in RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.:

@toby-pereira
In RCV a vote is the voters top choice in the first round and each round following. The first round finds the Plurality winner and if that candidate has a majority of active votes the election is called right then and there, but if that winner has a plurality of votes but not a majority of active votes, the system may reject that and go on to find a separate winner by reallocating or exhausting those votes. That's why it's not a Plurality method.

In STAR Voting the first round never determines a winner because votes haven't been awarded to candidates yet. That always happens only once in STAR Voting and the candidate with the most votes always wins.

Right, so you're saying that because the IRV counting process could end after any round, it is necessary to call each round a vote.

However, IRV does not need to use the counting process where it stops in the round when a candidate first has a majority. It could just continue until there are two candidates left and just call that final round "the vote". It would never affect the (first place) result, but would just require a bit of extra counting.

But regardless, as I say, I'm not sure a voting method's own definition of what a vote is would hold any weight against what a court says a vote is.

And even if we allow that, by calling just the final run-off in STAR the vote, the method is also excluding most of the candidates from the voting process, which I think might be considered unconstitutional.

Obviously it's not me you would be arguing against, but these are just things that I can imagine might come up.

@sarawolk said in RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.:

@toby-pereira
In RCV a vote is the voters top choice in the first round and each round following. The first round finds the Plurality winner and if that candidate has a majority of active votes the election is called right then and there, but if that winner has a plurality of votes but not a majority of active votes, the system may reject that and go on to find a separate winner by reallocating or exhausting those votes. That's why it's not a Plurality method.

In STAR Voting the first round never determines a winner because votes haven't been awarded to candidates yet. That always happens only once in STAR Voting and the candidate with the most votes always wins.

Right, so you're saying that because the IRV counting process could end after any round, it is necessary to call each round a vote.

However, IRV does not need to use the counting process where it stops in the round when a candidate first has a majority. It could just continue until there are two candidates left and just call that final round "the vote". It would never affect the (first place) result, but would just require a bit of extra counting.

But regardless, as I say, I'm not sure a voting method's own definition of what a vote is would hold any weight against what a court says a vote is.

And even if we allow that, by calling just the final run-off in STAR the vote, the method is also excluding most of the candidates from the voting process, which I think might be considered unconstitutional.

Obviously it's not me you would be arguing against, but these are just things that I can imagine might come up.

@sarawolk said in RCV found unconstitutional in Maine.:

The Supreme Court of Maine has once again ruled on the constitutionality of Ranked Choice Voting, again finding it to be unconstitutional.

In 2017 they had ruled that RCV was not compatible with Maine's requirement for a Plurality winner (the candidate with the most votes wins). In RCV, ballots are initially counted as votes for first-choice candidates, but those same votes can later be transferred or discarded, meaning the final winner may not be the candidate who received the most votes as originally cast.

...

It's worth noting that STAR Voting and Approval Voting both comply with the Maine Constitution's plurality winner rule. STAR Voting only finds the Plurality winner once, in the Automatic Runoff round. It clearly defines the vote as the runoff vote and defines scores as ballot data - not votes. Votes are never reassigned, transferred, or exhausted. Your vote goes to the finalist you prefer or counts as equal support for both, essentially like an abstain between those two. The candidate with the most votes wins.

This seems slightly tenuous. I don't think we can go by how STAR defines itself by saying that only the runoff is "the vote". Otherwise IRV / RCV could just redefine itself to declare that only the final runoff is "the vote".

The point is that it's surely about how this supreme court defines a vote, not how an individual voting method does.

Just bumping this thread because of a discussion on the EM mailing list about participation.

While it is claimed that this method passes participation, the discussions very much led to the conclusion that it does not, unless defined in a very weak way.

There are situations where someone's expected utility can be reduced by voting.

It might be that given we don't know from the ballot what the utilities are, there is a possible way to come up with utilities so that participation would not be violated. But that's just the same as saying that we can't prove from the ballot information alone that participation has not been violated. Very weak.

The discussion is from here onwards.

In terms of consolidation we have the electowiki, which is a good place to put stuff.

But you can search the forum quite easily. Click on the magnifying glass at the top and you can search for terms. I can normally find what I'm looking for fairly quickly. I would say this is better than for other discussion groups like Reddit or Facebook.

Just to clarify what's happening here:

A maximal lottery result can be something like:

A: 50%
B: 30%
C : 20%

where these are the probabilities of the candidates A, B and C being elected. So is non-uniqueness simply that sometimes there might be another probability distribution that is also optimal? E.g.

A: 55%
B: 35%
C : 10%

(Or maybe some sort of continuum of optimal results.)

You said that where preferences are strict and the number of voters is odd, there will be a unique solution. Is this simply because an even number of voters can lead to a head-to-head tie between two candidates, or is there something else more complex going on with an even number of voters? It seems intuitive to me that it's just because ties can happen.

In the case of ties, this isn't a problem unique to Maximal Lotteries. You can get ties in any voting method, e.g. FPTP and have to deal with that somehow. With a big election, ties will be rare. Obviously it's less likely with FPTP because it requires a tie at the top, whereas with Maximal Lotteries, there can be a tie between any pair of candidates potentially affecting the result.

It can be argued that in the case of more than one optimal lottery, it doesn't matter which one you choose because they are all optimal for the voters. Some will work out better for some candidates (a higher probability of election), but elections are about what voters want. They're not really about the candidates.

In the same way that a lottery generates the winning candidate, you can simply have a random mechanism to determine which lottery to use. I don't see this as a major problem in the general scheme of things.

@cfrank I've had a short look at it. The main conclusion seems to be that you can approximate maximal lotteries with balls in urns!

@cfrank I'll try and have a look in the next few days.

@cfrank I think lottery methods in general are interesting and worth looking into. Looking at the Wikipedia page, it seems interesting that this would satisfy participation but not monotonicity, which is the opposite of most Condorcet methods. So while some might criticise it for failing monotonicity (seen as easy to get in a Condorcet method), the prize is arguably better, since elections are really about voters rather than candidates.

@kaptain5 said in Professional Politicians skew towards altrusism? [study to read]:

In this study an interesting finding was that on average politicians we behaving altruistically (giving more to the other party than they would receive). On average over all sampled politicians were giving 49% of the prize to political opponents and giving 57% to in-group members. Compared to most other studies of the ultimatum game this is far above most people and very far above the rational expectation. The result is also remarkably consistent between countries. When the out-group and in-group results are combined this gives the result that the politicians surveyed are slightly altruistic in the game.
This one surprised me, I expected the politicians surveyed to be much more greedy.

I haven't properly read the paper but this bit is interesting, and I've been considering whether we should be surprised or not. Politicians certainly have a reputation for being greedy and corruptible. But a lot of people who go into politics probably do so for the right reasons - that they actually want to make things better for people and remove unfairness etc.

I think there is more corruption at the top, but this isn't most politicians. Plus I also think that higher-up politicians might still have some good principles, but these conflict with other things that get in the way of that - wanting to get in with the right people, make the right deals etc. So removed from politics, they still might make fair decisions. They just happen to be morally weak in certain ways.

This looks interesting. I'm not sure I've necessarily got that much to add though but I'll see what comes out...

You're looking at utility, but this is with real people rather than a simulation, so I wonder how this will work.

Are they voting for more abstract things in which case will you ask the participants for their honest utility rating of the options in addition to their actual votes? Or are they voting for options that directly benefit them in a clearer way - e.g. option 1 means voters A, B and C get this amount of money/chocolate etc.

It will be interesting to see equilibria emerging from repeated elections, and which methods are more stable in that respect. There is obviously the question of how relevant this would be in the real world. National elections generally take place several years apart and a lot can change in between, and so voters wouldn't be able to apply game theory in the same way as they would with multiple elections close together under the same conditions. And also I imagine people in the study are more likely to be "clued up" than the average member of the public.

So that raises a question - with multiple elections, will it just be the same conditions each time just to see how the methods behave in these ideal conditions, or will certain variables change to make it more "realistic", or possibly you'd model both? Both would be interesting in their own ways.