Hello Dave,
Few remaining thoughts on this chain of mailings. Maybe not that much
of interest to all anymore (this got already quite detailed), but here
they come.
BR, Juho
On Aug 14, 2005, at 17:49, Dave Ketchum wrote:
On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 10:24:48 +0300 Juho Laatu wrote:
See my comments in the mail below.
BR, Juho
On Aug 14, 2005, at 05:57, Dave Ketchum wrote:
On Sun, 14 Aug 2005 01:11:32 +0300 Juho Laatu wrote:
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
Generally best to ignore US presidential elections, unless your
topic includes some of their peculiarities, such as the electoral
college.
Governor and mayoral elections are usually a better topic identifier
for electing a single winner.
Ok. Maybe the default setting for Condorcet elections in this mailing
list is: single winner election for for regular people (=that are not
EM experts) where number of voters is large (=large enough to avoid
analysing votes one by one), candidates are not specifically tied to
the background political structure(*), number of candidates is quite
small (typically less than 10). Some countries have presidents, some
don't. Some countries vote for governors and mayors, some don't.
Electing governors and mayors should be understandable and can involve
the millions of voters that an election method should be prepared to
handle.
Electing independents as President is possible, and does happen. By
the time such get elected there are volunteers for such as you
describe below.
But what does the term "elected" mean? I CANNOT vote directly for a
candidate for President - I vote for a slate of members in the
electoral college which, in turn, will elect a President (small states
elect 3 members; biggest states a few dozen).
US presidential elections are a strange case. I have never really
understood why one elects several people (slate) although the intention
is to give all votes of a state to one candidate. It would be so easy
to elect proportionally n candidates from one list, m candidates from
another etc. Maybe all this comes from days when the states had to send
a big group of men riding to Washington to make sure that the voice of
the state will be heard :-).
Political parties will identify a candidate for President, and have a
slate running in each state committed to voting for that candidate,
should that slate get elected.
Now let me muddy the waters with something doable per New York law. I
will get together with other EM members from New York to put together
a slate of 31 electoral college candidates - they likely see this as
the joke that it is, and we enlist friends if needed for the total.
We file this with myself as candidate for President and someone from
outside NY as VP.
Not believable that my slate gets elected - maybe enough nasty
words get said about the other candidates. I still cannot expect
election as President since I only ran in NY, so my slate could be on
their own as to who to vote for for President.
(*) With "specifically tied to the background political structure" I
refer e.g. to the US presidential elections that have some
interesting features. The two-party system makes of course two of the
candidates major candidates by default. The US presidential election
also leads to changing many people in the offices of Washington.
Condorcet method could in principle elect a US president that is a
centrist compromise candidate between the two major parties, that
would be a Condorcet winner, but that gets no votes that rank the
president first (see example below). Whom would the president appoint
as the secretary of state etc. if (s)he has only Republican and
Democrat first place supporters around (well, I guess there would be
volunteers :-). The point anyway is that US presidential elections
are not just about electing the most appropriate "single" winner but
one expects the elected person to have heavy support from a large
machinery, capable of rearranging Washington. This of course makes
independent candidates less credible.
34: A>D>B>C
33: B>D>C>A
33: C>D>A>B
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).
Question possibility of finding a special election deserving "some
additions".
I too have difficulties in finding credible examples. Maybe the best
one I found was an election with more than 100 candidates, no clear
leading candidates, in a multiparty country, most candidates linked
to the parties. => Ability to use generic names referring to
groupings/parties (option 4) would make voting easier and results
more sensible (less random).
Agreed 100 candidates could happen - but could it be expectable enough
to rate special provisions in law?
Probably not.
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.
Not clear. The string that includes "c>d" is exactly what I expect
for considering d to be ranked last.
The other string looks incomplete.
Sorry, I had a typo there. The second set should be a>b, a>c, b>c.
Candidate "d" thus will not get any points (for or against).
This is doable, but I claim is a bigger favor than D deserves.
Yes, the rule of ranking unlisted candidates last is a good guess of
what voters' opinions are.
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.
Not clear to me.
I'll explain my problem/solutions in other words. If there is a loop
a>b>c>d>a, based on our normal way of reading votes one can derive
also preference a>c from that vote. The loop could however be
expressed also in another way: b>c>d>a>b. Now we could derive c>a
from the latter vote. This contradicts the first (a>c) conclusion.
Are a>b>c>d>a and b>c>d>a>b similar votes or not? My first
interpretation was that they are, and I could not derive a>c nor c>a
from the (looped parts of the) ballots. My second interpretation was
that the order in which the loop has been written down has a meaning,
and then I could derive transitive preferences like a>c if the
letters "a" and "c" occur in that order (from left to right) (with
explicit or implicit ">" sign somewhere between them) in the ballot.
Still not clear what the voter has said or what it means. Seems like
the same loop whether broken at a or b - but hard to sort out
relationships.
I think you favour the first interpretation. In that interpretation it
is quite difficult to derive from the vote (a>b>c>d>a) what the voter
wanted to say e.g. about a vs. c. Maybe it is better not to assume
anything. I think this is not a very user friendly way of interpreting
the ballots. Maybe the user should write a graph with arrows between
candidates if he wants to describe complex loops (this gets tricky). Or
maybe (s)he should fill a matrix. Anyway, looped votes are probably
something normal voters should never use. They are complex and I don't
have any natural examples of looped opinions nor any good rules how to
write such opinions on the ballots in an easily understandable way.
(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.
I dislike on principle - we should have emphasis on individual
candidates.
Lack of need - not often do we have so many candidates which
voters cannot dispose of easily via truncation.
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?
Agreed that the semicolon is a usable way for the voter to say this.
I was asking what meaning it should have to the voter and the
counter. The counter needs to extract whatever meaning exists in
deciding Bush vs Gore.
The counter would fill the matrix as follows. (S)he starts with Bush.
One point will be added in the matrix for B>R, then one point for B>X
for all X that is a candidate that is not ranked in this ballot (i.e.
someone else than B, R, G, C). Then one adds R>X for all unranked X.
Then G>C, and G>X for all unranked X. And finally C>X for all
unranked X. Bush vs. Gore result was thus 0-0 in this ballot. (same
result for B-C, R-G and R-C)
Ok. Scoring within each bubble ok, as is scoring between ranked and
unranked, but no scoring between bubbles. Is it worth it?
Probably not worth it since regular voters will find ranking difficult
enough already without this kind of theoretical constructs.
(I could be interested in using this trick is some elections where only
voting experts or other technical experts participate. Maybe e.g. when
voting on the EM list on which voting methods are best :-).)
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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