Posts made by Toby Pereira

@multi_system_fan Yeah, it wasn't necessarily intended as an exhaustive list. Would you be able to clarify those methods in a bit more detail?

I know some people are against any lottery methods in principle, but we can still have academic discussions of their various properties and pros/cons. I discussed some of this here as well.

@toby-pereira said in The search for the "holy grail" and non-deterministic methods:

I actually think there are advantages to having non-deterministic PR methods. The main advantage is that you can get a better level of PR and you don't sacrifice proportionality by having small regions. If an ideology or party has 5% of the support across the country, then it should get about 5% of the representation. If you have regions with e.g. 5 representatives and it's done deterministically, it might get none. It also simplifies the process. PR methods can get very complex with all the calculating of quotas etc., whereas just picking ballots at random cleans this up. It also means that for politicians there are no "safe seats". There is always a chance of being ejected, so they have to appeal to as many people as possible, not just their usual fan base.

Single non-transferable vote is a simple non-deterministic method, but in practice it would give horrible results and strategising effectively would be required to make it proportional. Anyway, here are some of the lottery methods:

Random Ballot - This is single-winner in its normal form, but used in multiple regions across the country, it would give a form of nationwide PR. The pros are that its very simple to vote and to count, and the best strategy is to vote for your favourite. Cons are that it's very "knife-edge" with only one ballot per region affecting the result. Even very strong candidates are likely not to get elected.

Ranked multi-winner random ballot - This is where each region has multiple winners (say 6) and voters rank their top 6 candidates. Ballots are picked at random and the highest ranked non-elected candidate on each ballot is elected until all seats are filled. Pros are that it's still simple to vote and count, but specifically with several candidates elected in each region it's less knife-edge and each voter has several MPs that are "theirs". Particularly popular candidates are unlikely to miss out. A con is that as with normal random ballot, the number of ballots that have any say in the result is still equal to the number of elected candidates, so very low. It is also no longer completely strategy free.

COWPEA Lottery - See wiki description. Pros are that it's still simple to vote and count. Voting is approval style. Because multiple candidates can be approved on a single ballot, picking one ballot does not necessarily determine the next candidate to be elected so more ballots are picked. So a pro of this method is that more ballots are used to determine the election result than with random ballot making it more inclusive of the electorate. It's likely to be less knife-edge and more consistent in the results it produces in multiple iterations. It's probably a more "accurate" form of PR than random ballot. A con is that a voter has to decide how many candidates to approve and it's likely to be a slightly more complex process for them with more strategy involved as well.

COWPEA Lottery with layers of approval - Voters score or grade candidates. The actual values are irrelevant, but when a ballot is picked at random only the top layer of (relevant) candidates is looked at. A pro is that it gives voters more distinguishing power between candidates. The cons are that it becomes more complex and to vote optimally a voter would have to grade basically all of the candidates, which could be quite a lot of them.

COWPEA Lottery with KP Transformation - A score voting version. The KP transformation can give nice results in theoretical cases with honest voting, but I don't think it's probably useful in practice. Mentioned for completeness.

Weighing up simplicity and giving reasonable results, I think the two main candidates are Ranked multi-winner random ballot and COWPEA Lottery (the standard approval version). At the moment I'm leaning towards COWPEA Lottery as more ballots get used, and the results are likely to be theoretically better.

Also Droop Quota isn't a method. You can have e.g. largest remainder or highest averages methods that use the Droop quota.

@jack-waugh said in STAR-like method ("reverse STAR"?):

@rob OK, I'll bite -- what do you think is fairer, and on what grounds?

You're saying it's the fairest. I think the onus is on you to justify that!

@rob said in Are Equal-ranking Condorcet Systems susceptible to Duverger’s law?:

So what is that algorithm? I mean, it could be Condorcet, and I have no problem with that, but I can't see how the term "proportional representation" applies. It just sounds like multi-winner.... there isn't anything proportional about it.
The only way the term "proportional representation" would apply (by my understanding of the term) is if we assume that there are some number of parties, and each candidate and each voter is in one and only one party. If a 3rd of the voters are in the Bull Moose party, then a third of those elected should be in the Bull Moose party. The further you get away from that, the less "proportional representation" seems to be a meaningful descriptor.
All of my complaints regarding PR (and with so many people's insistence that it is so much better than single winner methods such as Condorcet methods) are based on the assumption that voter X below is considered to have "better representation" if d, f and e are elected (because candidate d is very close to voter X), than if a, b and c are elected.

For the algorithm, you will be aware of Single Transferable Vote, which gives PR without any mention of parties. If voters happen to vote along party lines, it gives party PR, of course. That's just one example, without having to mention obscure methods invented by people on this forum.

And as for a, b, c versus d, e, f, I discussed that in the other thread here. I'm not sure it's worth quoting though because it's quite long.

@rob said in Are Equal-ranking Condorcet Systems susceptible to Duverger’s law?:

I guess the main thing that bugs me about it is that, in most cases, it's artificially forcing people into groups, which is what I hate about the system we have now. Maybe it would be more than two groups, and I guess that's better, but I just don't get the need to force people into groups and to entrench those groups.

Just on this bit, non-party-list PR doesn't force people into groups. You vote for (rank, rate, whatever) whichever of the available candidates you want, regardless of how much in common they might have with each other or which party or group they are perceived as being in. The PR algorithm then just elects the slate of candidates that best represents the electorate (according to its own algorithm). Voters are not then assigned one representative of those elected; they are all available as representatives. E.g. in a region with five representatives they are all "yours". At no point are you forced into a group.

@mosbrooker said in What would a perfect voting system look like?:

‘A’ is the leader and B is, somehow, the fairly chosen alternative. ‘A’ will spend a lot of time eyeballing B. The relationship will be contentious at the least and openly hostile at the worse.
And all people who are not A or B would have to suck it up and deal with the result of this fighting. Nothing substantial would get done. The island would spiral into a state of disrepair. They wouldn’t even know what to do if a pandemic hit.

I don't see why this should happen at all. A leader is ousted and someone replaces him/her. The old leader has lost the support of the masses, so people are free to ignore any "eyeballing" that may or may not take place, and I don't see why it should.

@mosbrooker It's not the continuous approval vote that is the main problem here. It's that the current leader gets to pick the new one. Are there not other methods for this? Like a vote. Even some sort of random pick.

@cfrank said in What would a perfect voting system look like?:

@mosbrooker allowing appointments of the successor doesn’t make any sense to me.

Me neither. I'm not sure what the motivation for this bit is. Other than being simple, but that's not enough.

If the leader appoints the new leader, you could just have two people bouncing the leadership back and forth between them without caring about what people think of them. Or even if you added a rule saying you can only be leader once, a large enough group of like-minded people could just pass it around.

Without getting into a definition of "representation" for now, I've always had the feeling that it's better to have a more diverse parliament that represents the electorate in a more proportional way than one that represents the electorate in the best way for a single candidate and then multiplying that by the number of candidates, if you see what I mean.

If you have single-winner constituencies and the single most representative candidate gets elected in each one, you could potentially end up with a lot of near-clones, and in a sense it seems to make having a large parliament a bit pointless.

In fact, it probably wouldn't end up that way because of geographical differences in voting behaviour, but that brings me onto the next point, which I believe is similar to that raised by @Andy-Dienes in the thread that this is an off-shoot from. You can get very different parliaments with exactly the same voting behaviour purely depending on the geographical distribution of the voters. You could end up with a bunch of near clones if there isn't much geographical difference in voter behaviour, or you could end up with something close to PR if you get geographical clusters of voters, or more likely something in between.

But since representatives make up the national parliament rather than simply act as an isolated representative for a group of people, I don't think such potential variation based on the same ballots is good voting method behaviour.

I think a method that gives similar results regardless of how one jumbles up the voters across the country is (all others things being equal) better than one that is very dependent on the geographical distribution of voters.

As Andy says, why split along geographical lines - why not let the voters just vote for what they want and the splits will come from that?

And as I said in the first paragraph, I think more diversity in parliament is good - and as for what diversity is, it's the diversity people vote for, not the predetermined things that people might have in mind like race, sex, age etc.

The "average" position in parliament is still going to be similar to what you'd have with Condorcet winners, but I think you'd get a wider range of issues considered and debated. It's not simply that you'd get "extreme" views and these would get voted down anyway. You'd get people raising people's consciousness on issues that might not otherwise be considered - issues that aren't based on "extreme" politics, but that people simply aren't very aware of and would be happy to support if they were.

And I'm not sure I would want too much like-mindedness in a parliament anyway. And I think you'd be more likely to get conforming behaviour where people go along with what they perceive to be the group view and don't question something until it becomes too late.

I think it's different for companies with their "benevolent dictator". Some companies succeed and some fail under a dictator, but a country is far too important to have the possibility of failing and you can't trust it to a dictatorship, even if in some cases it might work out.

I still think that's too many categories actually as I think I said in the other thread. I certainly don't see the need to split single and multi-winner, because some stuff cuts across both categories. Essentially I'd have one forum for voting methods and then two or three for other stuff - e.g. forum matters, off-topic or whatver.

@rob said in Unfortunate “Publicity” for IRV a la Steve Forbes:

@cfrank Wow, what an idiot. He says:

despite what proponents proclaim, it’s not democratic. For instance, a person running in a multicandidate field could place third or fourth in the actual voting yet win the election.

WTF is "the actual voting"? The "actual voting" is ranked choice under IRV tabulation. The winner is the one that, um, wins.

If it makes any difference, in the accompanying video he says "the popular vote" rather than "the actual voting". I'm not sure if he wrote the article, or if it just has his name on because someone just made it from what he said.

@andy-dienes said in Paradox of Causality from Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem:

@toby-pereira said in Paradox of Causality from Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem:

And that's the one that always fails in reasonable methods

Approval passes IIA but fails universal domain

How exactly did Arrow define universal domain? On the Wikipedia, unrestricted domain is defined as "a property of social welfare functions in which all preferences of all voters (but no other considerations) are allowed", which is a bit vague. What does it mean by all preferences?

Does score fail? What about score that allows any number between the min and max score so that a full preference order can be inferred?

@robla said in Paradox of Causality from Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem:

Kenneth Arrow absolutely deserved his Nobel Prize, because Arrow's Theorem was (and is) a big deal. The exact choice of criteria was beside the point; what Arrow did was describe a few "common sense" criteria and then showed them to be mutually exclusive.

But my point is that we already knew that. Amongst Arrow's criteria is IIA. And that's the one that always fails in reasonable methods. It's not like some methds fail this, others fail that. How many methods are there that are just dictatorships, for example? It's IIA all the way. Arrow's Theorem can be reworded in plain English as "With a few reasonable background assumptions, any reasonable ranked-ballot voting method fails IIA." And that has been known for centuries. Arrow just dressed it up differently.

Well, aside from that, I think Arrow's Theorem is overstated in terms of its importance anyway. Pretty much all ranked-ballot methods fail IIA and if they don't they are unreasonable in some other manner. This has been known for ages anyway as it is a logical consequence of the Condorcet paradox.

So Arrow's Theorem was no great paradigm shift in our understanding. It's a non-event if you ask me.

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?

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.

Thinking about this, I don't think we even need five categories. I would just have one main one for everything this forum is really about, one for forum business as already suggested, and then one for off-topic - so three in total. Some discussions can cut across the categories, like a method that could have a single-winner or a multi-winner version. And as I know I'm not the only one who generally sorts by recency, it's not that important to have very specific categories.

@bternarytau said in Way too many categories:

@andy-dienes said in Way too many categories:

Single Winner
Proportional Representation
Other Reform Discussion
News / Advocacy / Projects
Meta / Forum Business

This seems like a good set of categories, though it does awkwardly place non-proportional multi-winner methods under "Other Reform Discussion".

I thought this as well. I think a better category would be Multi-Winner Methods rather than one for PR specifically.