@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.

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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.

@wolftune There is this thread from 2024. I think it might have passed me by at the time. I see your point about it being clearer about what it does, but on the other hand, it's not something I've really thought about, so I don't think I will suddenly change my language immediately based on this. It's quite a big thing to do, and I think I would need to see that there is a larger consensus in the general voting community that this is the best name, rather than just individuals deciding one at a time.

Edit - Thinking about it, "Choose-any" comes across as ambiguous to me. It could come across as "choose any one".

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?

@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.

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.

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.

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.

@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.

@multi_system_fan It's quite interesting, although allowing more than one round of voting changes things quite a lot, and there are probably also other alternatives that might be as good or better.

I don't think you could apply it to the metric being considered in this thread though.

@cfrank The problem of having an exactly proportional result whenever possible is that it drastically weakens the monotonic properties of a method. E.g.

2 to elect

99 voters: AB
99 voters: AC
1 voter: B
1 voter: C

The Perfect Representation criterion would demand the election of BC, even though A has 99% of the support with B and C having just 50% each. And I think that's too much of a demand.

And if you want the result "as close as possible", that pretty much just is the var-Phragmén method. And this has the same problems.

You could specify some sort of convergence requirement. Maybe this could be in terms of maximum variance.

Something to add here is the discussion of what it means to be proportional. I said above that I used the Perfect Representation In the Limit (PRIL) criterion. As discussed in this thread, most of the proportionality criteria that have been used for approval methods rule out methods that reduce to Sainte-Laguë in the case of party voting. A former member here went off the deep end insisting that those methods must then not be proportional in this thread.

But really it just shows that the criteria are not up to scratch. I acknowledge that PRIL is not perfect either, because it's not at all demanding in how a method reaches perfect representation, only that it happens in the limit.

For example, if you had the following ballots for party voting:

200 voters: A
100 voters: B

A method could pass by awarding the first 200 seats to A and then the next 100 to B. So in a 200-seat scenario, A would get all the seats. But obviously a method would have to be very contrived to do that, and it would likely cause it to break other symmetries and fail other criteria.

Another criterion I would demand for deterministic methods is that they would pass perfect representation when the number of elected candidates is a multiple of the number of voters (so 300, 600 etc. in this case).

But if you required that a method also only looked at voter ratios, rather than absolute numbers, we could massively reduce that problem.

2 voters: A
1 voter: B

This ballot would have to give perfect representation whenever the number of elected candidates is a multiple of 3, so the previous example would have to as well. But you could have:

201 voters: A
100 voters: B

This doesn't divide down further. But then if you also demanded monotonicity, it would have to give B at least as many seats as it would in cases where the B vote is lower. So:

3 voters: A
1 voter: B

B gets at least every fourth seat right from the start so the above case would do that as a minimum. And you could go further with the demands.

But PRIL works quite well with non-deterministic methods with fairly minimal demands. You probably only need to specify that each one is an independent pick.

There has been another update to the paper. The paper discusses how COWPEA Lottery is the only ABC (approval-based committee) method that is proportional and passes, monotonicity, strong candidate Pareto efficiency, participation, Independence of Irrelevant Ballots (IIB), Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA), Independence of Universally Approved Candidates (IUAC) and independence of clones.

Optimal PAV Lottery passes all of these except monotonicity. Both of these methods are obviously non-deterministic, but I think it's probably impossible for a deterministic method to pass all the criteria.

@marcus_sir I would agree with @cfrank that some examples would be good to get a feel for how it works. I've always tended to think that quota removal methods are fairly unsophisticated, and I believe MES falls into this category. See the thread here.

@cfrank There was a vote on electorama not that long ago Ranked Pairs with winning votes (as opposed to margins, which wasn't on the ballot) won the poll. It was the Condorcet and approval winner. In that poll I put approval as my top method.

@clay I have watched that video, so thanks for that. But the bottom line is that I am making an argument about semantics, not ethics. And you insist that it's an argument about ethics. There's nowhere to go from there.

@clay I think you totally missed the point of what I was saying. The thing I was disputing was:

@clay said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):

"ought" means "I would subjectively prefer that". this is ethics 101.

Ethics 101 does not determine what a word means. Words are used in English by English-speaking people in many ways, some informal, some formal and with varying degrees of vagueness etc. It does not matter if someone's meaning for a word is at bottom incoherent or that the thing they mean doesn't exist in real life. The word doesn't then not mean what they were using it to mean. Experts in ethics do not have ownership of the word "ought". So:

as i've pointed out, you cannot show me any actual objective physical law of nature that the word "ought" could possibly refer to. it's just expressing a vibe.

No, and I wasn't trying to. You just missed what I was saying. I'll repeat the example, but with a bit of added commentary for clarity.

Someone might say, "I suppose I ought to try and save those people drowning in the sea, but I don't really care about other people, so I'll just carry on eating my ice-cream."

I initially said this doesn't fit your definition of "ought" above because he's not expressing a subjective preference. You countered by saying:

that would be using "ought" as in society would prefer i do it. thus they might judge me for not doing it" or something along those lines.

(So therefore still a subjective preference.) But I then said actually, he could be referring, not to anyone's subjective preference, but to a moral framework that exists outside of his (or anyone else's) subjective preferences.

So therefore his use of the word "ought" does not refer to subjective preferences. It refers to this objective framework that he believes exists. Even if it doesn't exist. And however you cut it, it's still a long way from:

"ought" means "I would subjectively prefer that". this is ethics 101.

But I'm not sure how else to get the point across. OK, someone believes in ghosts. A ghost (by some definition) is the soul of a dead person that still in some manner inhabits our physical realm.

It doesn't matter if ghosts are real - this is what it means to be a ghost under this definition. Someone might say:

"A ghost is just an illusion. That's what it means to be a ghost."

It might be the case that all the ghosts that people have claimed to have seen are all illusions, and indeed that no "magical" ghosts exist, but this does not change the definition of what a ghost is. A definition can be of something that doesn't exist, or is at bottom incoherent.

That's all I'm saying. Words mean what people use them to mean. There is no dictionary in the sky that defines a word in a very specific way. And there is certainly nothing that cancels out the definition of a word based on the non-existence or incoherence of a concept.

If someone uses the word "ought" to refer to some objective morality, then that is what they are using the word to mean.

This is a silly argument anyway, and far removed from election by jury!

Edit - you do this routine of incredulity when you think people aren't getting what you're saying, but I could do the same on you here. Your lack of comprehension of what I am saying is staggering.

@clay said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):

@toby-pereira

And I would say that this is simply not the case.

and i just explained why you're wrong.

Well no.

toby said:

To expand on my previous point, someone might say "I suppose I ought to try and save those people drowning in the sea, but I don't really care about other people, so I'll just carry on eating my ice-cream."
So in this case it's not their subjective preference, not even a conflicting one.

that would be using "ought" as in society would prefer i do it. thus they might judge me for not doing it" or something along those lines. you're not making a sophisticated argument.

It's difficult to make a particularly sophisticated argument about the definition of a word. You're just saying that it must mean this. You are wrong. Maybe the person is using the word thinking that there is an objective ethical system. Lots of people think that. It doesn't matter if they are right or wrong. That is what you seem to be missing. Check with everyone in the world who has ever used the word and make sure they agree with you about how they are using the word and get back to me.

If you took a philosophical ethics course, you might be surprised at what is included.

philosophers whose works i've read and who were cited in my ethics treatise:

Derek Parfit — All Souls College, Oxford; Reasons and Persons (1984) and On What Matters (2011). The dominant moral philosopher of the late 20th century; source of the repugnant conclusion and the mere addition paradox, and of the reductionist view of personal identity that underwrites much of how veil arguments handle "who you might be."

John Rawls — Harvard, arguably the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century; A Theory of Justice (1971) introduced the veil of ignorance and the maximin/difference principle you criticize.

John Harsanyi — economist rather than philosopher, Berkeley, Nobel laureate 1994 for game theory; his 1953/1955 papers gave the expected-utility version of the veil argument and are the foundational text of utilitarian contractualism.

T.M. Scanlon — Harvard, What We Owe to Each Other (1998); the leading contemporary contractualist and the source of the "could not reasonably reject" standard.

David Hume — A Treatise of Human Nature (1739); the is–ought passage in Book III is the origin of the whole meta-ethical problem.

J.L. Mackie — Oxford (University College), Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977); the canonical statement of moral error theory and the argument from queerness.

Richard Joyce — Victoria University of Wellington, The Myth of Morality (2001) and The Evolution of Morality (2006); the main figure in evolutionary debunking arguments and moral fictionalism.

Peter Singer — Princeton/Melbourne, Animal Liberation (1975) and Practical Ethics; the best-known living utilitarian.

Sam Harris — PhD in neuroscience, BA in philosophy from Stanford; not an academic philosopher. The Moral Landscape (2010) argues science can determine values.

Alex O'Connor — degree in philosophy and theology from Oxford; a public commentator, not an academic. Cited for the emotivist "boo, murder" line, which traces back to A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson.

Non-philosophers cited on empirical grounds:

Richard Dawkins — evolutionary biologist, Oxford, The Selfish Gene (1976); gene-level selection, no standing in ethics as such.

Jean-Baptiste André and Nicolas Baumard — evolutionary/cognitive scientists at ENS and Institut Jean Nicod; their Nash-bargaining model of fairness intuitions is the relevant work, and Baumard's The Origins of Fairness (2016) is the book-length version.

Plato — the euthyphro dilemma is from the Euthyphro, though you invoke it without naming him.

i did not yell at any of my philosophy professors in college in 1998 and 1999, but i did have some good arguments with them.

That's good, but your posts on here suggest to me that you expect the first lecture on an ethics course to begin: "Here are some ethical systems that people have come up with over the years. They are rubbish. Now here's utilitarianism..."

To be clear, I wasn't arguing against random sampling, just thinking through why someone might be concerned about it.

@clay said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):

on "ought": you're arguing a massive straw man. no one ever said anything remotely close to "utilitarianism defines ought". i am simply stating the obvious fact that when people say "ought", they're just expressing a personal opinion as if it were an obective fact.

OK, what you did say was:

@clay said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):

"ought" means "I would subjectively prefer that". this is ethics 101.

And I would say that this is simply not the case. To expand on my previous point, someone might say "I suppose I ought to try and save those people drowning in the sea, but I don't really care about other people, so I'll just carry on eating my ice-cream."

So in this case it's not their subjective preference, not even a conflicting one. They're working under the assumption that there is a moral framework that exists outside their own subjective preferences (and choosing to ignore it). Whether they're right or not is beside the point when it comes to what they mean by "ought".

Of course, if we zoom out further, with no objective value judgements, we cannot actually say that election by jury is objectively the best system, or better than other specific systems. We can only say that it is better under certain assumptions that you have to smuggle in. For example, you mentioned the veil of ignorance earlier, but in reality we don't have a veil of ignorance. So for someone already in a comfortable position in society, they can happily not support it without being "illogical".

this is all so drastically "ethics 101" that i'm a bit at a loss for how helpful i can be here.

If you took a philosophical ethics course, you might be surprised at what is included. I can imagine you screaming and shouting at the lecturer.

OK @clay @cfrank, I read through the argument you two were having as best as I could!

The thing about sampling - cfrank's point was that with random sampling, some people's needs might end up getting underrepresented (which could result in worse outcomes overall - lower utility). I don't think the concern is completely unmerited. And a good voting system can only go so far in terms of eliminating this.

However, as Clay pointed out, there's more to this than geography and you can cut the population many different ways with minority groups all with their own concerns. By favouring just one minority, it could even have knock-on effects elsewhere. E.g. the people in that minority might mostly also be in some other interest group that ends up getting overrepresentation as a result.

Clay brought up the example of noise levels in two equally-sized cities and how actually things should still work out even in that case. But there are likely to be more complex examples where a small majority can essentially take all the power, which would not provide greater utility. But top-down meddling with the sampling can always have unintended consequences and you wouldn't be able to foresee every possibility where the utility isn't maximised.

For something like this, random sampling would be the simplest and should be seen as the default. Anything else would need great justification to show it would be warranted. And I'm not sure that's realistic. I think it's fine to ask the question, but overall I think random sampling would win out.

As for the utilitarianism debate - it's obviously a bit of a side debate in a way, but also relevant to every discussion that involves morality. I don't have a mathematical argument against it so we could leave it at that. It is also likely the simplest way to model things mathematically (when measuring the effectiveness of voting systems etc.) and is likely in any case to correlate quite highly with most people's ideas of morality in most realistic situations.

But I would actually push back on one or two things. On the definition of "ought" merely being someone's subjective preferences. I'd say that's not true. Utilitarianism can't prove what the definition of words are. Most people are not well versed in utilitarianism and when they say that someone ought to do something, they may (probably in fact) speak without consideration of utilitarianism, regardless of whether their moral framework is coherent at its roots. Also when I say "ought" I don't necessarily mean my own subjective preferences. I might say that I really want to do x but I ought to do y because it would help out other people, which doesn't contradict a utilitarian stance in any case.