Posts made by Toby Pereira

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.

This looks quite nice. Presumably for PR elections? I came up with something similarish when doing a mixed member system that used score/approval ballots, and you could vote for candidates and their parties together / separately.

I've seen weighted seats proposed before. It is a fairly intuitive idea, so nothing new. But my instinct is that I don't think it's such a good idea. I think there is something to be said for a parliament made up of people with equal power.

Would the weighting purely count towards their voting power in the elected body, or does it have other effects such as more time to speak?

I think one problem is that it there might be a "celebrity" effect. If multiple candidates are standing for one party, the best well known one is likely to take most of the power available to that party without necessarily being "better".

Also while it's based on votes, voters don't get a say in this weighting. I might prefer candidate A to B (from the same party, or having similar ideals) by a small amount but might still prefer them to have equal power in parliament rather than having all the power directed to A. So I'd have to weigh up what I think other people will vote for and then vote in the opposite direction to balance it out.

If democracy was working properly in the first place, there should be enough candidates out there to represent your views without having pin everything on potentially just one candidate - a single point of failure.

@cfrank said in Idea for truly proportional representation:

@Toby-Pereira I wonder what you think about this, since you have deeper knowledge of PR systems.

Just to let you know I've seen this, but I'll get back to you in the next few days. For some reason I'm not getting much time to post on here at the moment!

@A Former User said in Kennedy Jr’s Candidacy as a Route to Voting Reform:

This thread made me lose interest in this forum. RFK Jr. is a monster.

Just one person posting something you disagree with made you lose interest in the whole forum?

There is an online obituary if you want to read it here.

@cfrank While I'm not an expert in how to make methods pass particular criteria, participation seems to be a very hard one to get. Most of the methods that pass it seem to be simple adding up ones (e.g. FPTP, Borda, approval, score), although Descending Solid Coalitions and Descending Acquiescing Coalitions are slightly weird methods that do pass it apparently.

@cfrank said in Fixing Participation Failure in “Approval vs B2R”:

(6) Run a secondary, independent head-to-head election between the B2R winner and their adversary, with the following caveats:
--> Voters are not tied down in any way to their original preference between the B2R winner and the adversary, and can freely vote for either in the independent head-to-head. Also, voters who did not participate in the first round are fully allowed to participate in the final round. By default, voters' original ballots will be used to determine the preference, but voters may opt in to swap their rating either 0 or 1 times, whichever amount is necessary to indicate an advantage that they wish to disclose.
--> However, based on these swaps, we can count the net number of swaps that are advantageous to the adversary over the B2R winner compared with the original ballots. If this number is positive, the election proceeds as you would expect, with ties broken by the sort order. However, if the number is not positive, if the original head-to-head was in favor of the B2R survivor, and if a material difference would be incurred, then the adversary will be conferred an automatic +1 head-to-head advantage, and will also automatically win ties.

I find this part a bit hard to understand.

Also, if it's an independent head-to-head, do you mean a separate trip to the polling station, or just a separate part of the ballot paper? If it's a separate trip, then it would be impossible to manage the swaps and each voter's default position without losing anonymity.

@kodos I've changed it so new users have to register with an e-mail address. I don't think that's too onerous, and it should make the problem go away.

@kodos I'll have a look to see if I can find a way to change that or if it's "hardwired" in.

If you're pitting the winners of two methods against each other, what do you do if it's the same candidate? Are they just the winner, or does there need to be a final head-to-head between two candidates?

@kodos I also have admin powers but wasn't aware this was a thing either. But I've just looked at the user list in the admin section and it seems that you have no e-mail address by your name. That could be the problem. It might be worth trying to add an e-mail address to your account. I think you'll then need to verify it by clicking on a link that gets e-mailed to you or something.

@toby-pereira said in General stuff about approval/cardinal PR:

This project hasn't purely been altruistic - it's been helpful to me by laying everything out for reworking my COWPEA paper!

And the new version can be seen here (as I mentioned in the separate COWPEA thread anyway).

The paper has been updated and some errors corrected.

I've just learnt from Rob Lanphier on the election methods mailing list of the death of Jameson Quinn after an accident while hiking in Guatemala. This is very sad news and a lot of you will be familiar with Jameson from his contributions to the voting method community over many years. I used to communicate with him about cardinal proportional methods and he's the only person from the community that I've ever met in person, back in 2017 I think.

Rob's original message can be seen here and the message from his mother posting the news is here.

I discussed something similar here and there's a video here as well. There's a video as well which shows a potential ballot design.

In what I discussed the top voted candidate in each district was automatically elected in the first phase.

@matija Do you need the first step about the electing the candidate with most votes in each district but only if they have a Hare quota? You could just do the whole process using the PR system. Or just elect the candidate with most votes anyway and just use the PR system for the second ones to be elected.

I tend to think quotas are somewhat arbitrary.

@matija True. If individual ballot data can be used, then the funding that results from each could be split equally across the candidates approved on that ballot. But this still might not be very satisfactory.

@matija If public funding is proportional to votes, then I'd say it's easier with approval voting than ranks. With ranks, you could use top votes as you say, but then you might give less funding to the election winner (by IRV, Condorcet or whatever).

@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.