Hi Dave,
I think I agree with you on that in normal elections (e.g. presidential
elections) and for normal voters the described additional voting
options are not needed and probably even harmful. The standard rules
(of allowing voters to give one linear list of candidates, maybe
allowing equal ranking, ranking unlisted candidates as last, and
deriving transitive preferences from the vote) are in most cases a very
understandable and sufficiently expressive way to describe the opinions
of the voters. My intention was to demonstrate that in most practical
cases the current default rules are the best rules (although one could
consider some additions in some very special elections).
I also embedded some responses to your questions in the mail below.
BR, Juho
On Aug 13, 2005, at 20:46, Dave Ketchum wrote:
Thanks to Juho for discussing some details.
While there have to be voters who would be tempted by each, if
available, they share a serious problem, and I will comment on each
below. They complicate the rules:
Voters must understand what is permitted, and what each facility
means.
Vote counters must have the same, unambiguous, understanding of
the meaning of each.
On Sat, 13 Aug 2005 12:52:32 +0300 Juho Laatu wrote:
Hello Dave et al,
On Aug 13, 2005, at 06:16, Dave Ketchum wrote:
I __do__ get to express my n x (n-1) / 2 pairwise preferences (part
or all, as I as a voter choose). I just am forced to be consistent.
If I vote A>B and B>Z, then I have voted A>Z. If there is a C for
which I have given no explicit specification, then my above partial
vote implies A>C, B>C, and Z>C.
I would add to the above ability to vote A=D. Relative to other
candidates it has the same meaning as voting the pair A>D or D>A. In
counting, two voters voting A=D has the same effect as one voting A>D
and one D>A - matters in wv; does not matter in margins.
Few observations about the ability to express the n x (n-1) / 2
preferences:
1) It would be quite easy to remove the rule of considering unranked
candidates to be ranked last. This could of course lead to unwanted
results like the most unknown and uninteresting candidate winning the
election. For this reason it is good that by default
unranked(/unknown) candidates are considered to be less preferred
than the ranked ones. In principle it would be ok to allow those
voters that know what they are doing to express their opinions also
more widely, e.g. a>b>c[cut] (which means that unlisted candidates
are not ranked last) or
How else would you count an unranked candidate?
I was thinking of two options. In a four candidate race vote "a>b>c" (d
is unranked) would be counted either as a>b, a>c, a>d, b>c, b>d, c>d or
as a>b, a>c, a>d.
2) a>b>others>c. The latter option introduces the risk of people
ranking widely the strongest competitors of their favourite candidate
last, even though that normally doesn't do them much good (would e.g.
lead to election of some unknown candidate in the case of three major
candidates).
This reads as doable - is it desirable enough to be worth the effort?
I dislike it, liking better leaving at the bottom all those not worth
mentioning (those worth mentioning as better than C are already
votable as such).
3) It would be also possible to allow circular rankings like a>b>c>a
(mentioning "a" twice means that the intention is to describe a
loop). Consistent voters do not normally have such looped opinions I
guess, but they could be used for strategic or counter strategic
reasons. (I don't however want to encourage this kind of voting since
I think that voting methods that use strategies and counter
strategies extensively are most probably not good enough to be used
in normal public elections anyway.)
Again, how do you count such a vote - assuming you claim it should
have meaning when counting)?
Yes, counting the votes gets more tricky. I think one natural counting
method would be to forget transitive preferences in a loop. Vote
"a>b>c>d>a" would then mean a>b, b>c, c>d, d>a, but not e.g. a>c.
(Alternatively one could derive also a>c, a>d, b>d from the example
vote above.) Unranked candidates (e) could be counted as usual => a>e,
b>e, c>e, d>e.
(Sorry about using the ">" relation in two ways above, both in the
ballots and when describing which matrix entries get the points.)
Of course, groups of voters can, together, create a cycle that the
counters must break - by deciding which leg of the cycle is weakest -
but there is no weakest leg if/when a single voter is allowed to do
this.
4) One option would be to allow candidates to be grouped. This could
be useful if the number of candidates is large. One could vote for
example Bush>Gore>Reagan>Republicans>Democrats>Greens ("Republicans"
will be interpreted here as "other Republican candidates than Bush
and Reagan" etc.).
Reads as doable. Desirable to encourage this type of thinking?
Not desirable if one can live without such markings. Some people may
also dislike the introduction of parties in general. As I wrote, in
situations where the number of candidates is very large (= too tedious
to list them all) and natural groupings exist this type of markings
could help the voters a bit. Can't however think of any good real life
examples at the moment.
Allowing individual Republican candidates to be ranked below the
generic "Republicans" item could be banned even if such use of group
entries would be allowed otherwise. This is to avoid the negative
effects discussed in case 2. It may be better to force voters to list
all republican candidates if they want to place one of them last. In
this way they are at least forced to see what kind of (maybe even
less wanted and totally unknown) candidates they are ranking above
the candidate they want to rank last, and probability of "unintended
stupid votes" would probably decrease.
Reads as doable. Sales pitch above sounds deservedly weak.
5) Yet another way of voting would be to use fragmented votes. One
could vote Bush>Reagan;Gore>Clinton, which means that Bush is
preferred to Reagan and Gore is preferred to Clinton but the voter
has not indicated anything about if (s)he prefers Bush to Gore or the
other way around, Bush to Clinton etc. I think voters that would be
interested in voting this way would still be quite consistent. It is
quite ok to have an opinion "Bush is nicer than Reagan but I don't
care if Republicans or Democrats will win (others may decide)".
Voters might dream they are being consistent. WHAT have they said to
the counters?
I think the semicolon was enough in the vote
"Bush>Reagan;Gore>Clinton". The vote should be read pretty much like
two separate votes "Bush>Reagan" and "Gore>Clinton" (of course counting
must be done so that one voter can not add several points to one matrix
entry by e.g. voting "a>b;a>b;a>b;a>b"). Did I answer your question?
The current (EM) default rules concerning ranking based ballots are
simple, in most cases they offer voters all the tools they need, and
they often stop voters making foolish things (like ranking their
worst enemies last or electing some unknown candidates). It could be
possible to allow e.g. some or all of the five special cases above to
be used but I doubt if they would bring more benefits than they do
bring problems in the form of making the system more complex and
inviting voters to do something stupid. Case 4 could maybe be helpful
if the number of candidates is large. I have also sometimes had
feelings like the example in case 5 myself. Note that combination of
cases 5 and 1 makes it possible to set separately any of the n x
(n-1) / 2 pairwise preferences.
Best Regards,
Juho
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Dave Ketchum 108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY 13827-1708 607-687-5026
Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
If you want peace, work for justice.
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