Raph Frank wrote:
On 8/26/08, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
 Inputs are ranked ballots. Each voter starts with a weight of one. The
quota is Droop (Hare does much worse).

Can a voter skip ranks and also is there a limited number of ranks?

If you allow rank skipping, then a voter can distinguish between

A>B>>C
and
A>>B>C

E.g.
A:1
B:2
C:10

and

A:1
B:9
C:10

In the second case, the voter will only compromise and vote for B if A
can't get elected even after 9 rounds.


In fact, the notation could include the number of skipped ranks

A>>>B

This means
A:1
B:4

i.e.

A>(empty)>(empty)>B

That would cause exhaustion. Here's an example with six candidates, single winner.

10: A>>>D
10: B>>>E
10: C>>>F

The quota is 50% + 1, or 16. However, none of the candidates get more than 10 votes.

If the ballots are fully specified, then by pigeonhole, once all ranks have been included, each candidate must have got one vote per voter. Thus some candidate will be above quota.

One could perhaps fix this by equal-ranking all remaining candidates last, below any specified rank.

 For all of those voters that voted for the winner, reweight their weights
by (new weight = old weight * (votes for winner - quota)/(votes for
winner)).
 Don't alter the quota, but in all other respects, restart the election with
the winner removed from all ballots, as if he never entered. Keep on doing
this until enough candidates have been elected.

It might be worth recalculating the quota based on exhausted ballots.
Otherwise, your method might end without electing enough candidates.

You can just recalculate the Droop quota using the new seat total and
the reweighted number of votes.

For example, assuming 100 voters and 4 seats

Q = 100/(4+1) = 20

After round 1, your reweigting will decrease the effective number of
ballots by 20 and seats to 3.  This has no effect on the quota
(assuming no exhausted ballots)

Q = 80/(3+1) = 20

This means that you can just keep recalculating the quota to take
account of exhausted ballots.

It should have no effect on ballots that aren't exhausted, since the reweighting reduces the nominator by a quota, and the election of a seat reduces the denominator by one, thus canceling out.

Say there are k votes for the winner, and all weights are 1. The quota is Q < k. Then the sum of the new weights is k * (k - Q) / k. Cancel out the factor of k and we get (k-Q). Call the number of those who didn't vote for the winner r. Then the quota was (r + k)/(numseats + 1). Afterwards, we have

(r + k - Q) / (numseats),

which has reduced the numerator by a quota, and the denominator by one, which was what we wanted.

Another option for weightings is to weight each ballot at

w = 1/(candidates elected + 1)

If the ballot was voting for a candidate who gets elected, its
'candidates elected' count goes up by 1.

This also achieves proportionality.  It works like proportional approval voting.

Does that pass Droop proportionality? It looks like D'Hondt.

 That's it. For the single-winner case, the method reduces to Bucklin, which
is monotonic. I'm not sure if the method is monotonic in the multiwinner
case as well, but I think so.

 According to my simulation, the method isn't as proportional as STV.

What does this mean?  It looks like the method meets Droop
proportionality, so should be proportional.

It means that if voters and candidates have binary opinion profiles and vote in order of Hamming distance (number of opinions where they disagree) to each candidate, ranking those with greater Hamming distance lower and breaking ties randomly, then the difference of the proportion that hold the "yes" stance on some issue or issues in the assembly differ more from that proportion in the population, on average, than would be the case for an assembly elected using STV.

The simulation shows different scores even among methods that satisfy Droop proportionality. QPQ does best, then STV, then this.

If sims are showing non-proportional effects, it probably means that
votes are 'bleeding' over into other parties.

If I vote

A1>A2>B1

I could end up helping party B get seats instead of my favourite
party.  A better vote (from my point of view) would be

A1>A2

This means none of my vote bleeds over into party B.

That makes sense. Bucklin passes Later-no-help while failing Later-no-harm, thus producing an incentive to truncate ballots. IRV (and thus STV) passes both, but pays for it by being nonmonotonic.
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