At 2001-04-11 15:15 +0100 Wednesday, Martin Harper wrote: ================== > >To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] >Subject: [EM] Approval Elections & Effective Weights > >Replies mainly in the text. > ... >Incidentally, you complain about me using the term "IRV" - you >say: the so called 'IRV' method > >I thought that this was the standard name: "Instant Runoff >Voting", or "IRV". What do you call it? > The term IRV is a minor term that is hardly used except in parts of the United States of America. I am not aware that it is used in the mathematical literature. The CVD does not like mathematics. It is just not a term that is respectable mathematically. When I once browsed to the CVD website and read about what Rob Richie said to either Senators or Congressmen, it didn't get mentioned that the CVD made up the dialect (i.e. not part of BBC English's vocabulalary), "IRV" / "Instant Runoff Vote". Mathematically it is fast sinking ship (at my PaP list is an example showing that it will give a power of 2 to a single IRV vote -- it is hard to guess what the fact is, but it seems the truth is that the power flops out rather than being perfectly constrained and I suppose it is perfectly fair to say that STV is going to get badly sucked down and have its credibility destroyed primarily because it has the CVD IRV method embedded in it -- all sorts of faults can be tolerated but not that one, but we have not heard the politicians say that...) That is just my opinion of the moment. Here is a private message I once got [with deletions done by me]: At 2000-05-04 22:08 -0700 Thursday, Gary D. Shapiro wrote: >... >> Santa Barbara. >> >... >>So in the meantime, groups such as ours put Choice Voting and >>IRV on the table. After all, I'm the guy who suggested the >>term "Instant Runoff Voting" to Robert Richie (on 2/29/96). >... > >>Gary Shapiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The month and the day of the day of the week are swapped and disordered so it certainly seems the message is as authentic as I know it is. >Sadly, my pet psychic was on holiday the day I answered Mr. >Davison's question, so I had no option but to answer the question >he actually wrote, rather than what might have been going on in >his brain. > Unlike other subscribers, there is less ground to traverse to fix up the errors in Mr Davison's texts, I have so far noted. ... >I believe I specifically said that it was a uniform probability >distribution. IE, there was a 50% chance of there being one 'B' >voter, and a 50% chance of there being no 'B' voters. > Where are the formulae and all the steps of the mathematical argument making the final case for that conclusion?. >> Unfortunately probabilities associated with utility theory are a well >> guarded secret. > >You really ought to tell Blaise Pascal that - he invented them >back in the Rennaisance some time. By now, they're comparatively >common knowledge - taught in schools and such, and used to help Nothing can be taught here without extreme and exacting lucid rigour. We shall assume associativity of addition and so on... >> The "effective weight" is defined by me so that it ends up with >>the meaning that people would think it ought have: it is the >>ratio x/y, where x is the number of FPTP votes that are required >>to offset y of another vote. >> There would not be an 'effective weight' if there is not a tie between two winner sets. ... >EG: As you know, Plurality (aka FPTP) has a spoiler problem, which >IRV largely eliminates. For example, a Nader supporter in the last >USA election might vote Gore in Plurality, to attempt to keep out >Bush. In IRV, however, they don't need to worry about that spoiler >problem, so they can safely vote Nader>Gore instead. On the other >hand, a Gore supporter would vote Gore in Plurality, and Gore in >IRV. > >This is going to be the case in all methods: a FPTP vote for a >candidate might be translated to a number of possible votes in more >advanced methods. How do you intend to resolve this? >-- I completely ignore that. Checking of the method that results can occur. There could be backtracking of some sort but I don't see that imposing the very good rules that the "IRV" method fails would lead to a good enough method. >And finally. > >Don wanted to know if Approval was used in any real elections, and >I answered that question. You do not agree that he meant or nearly meant what I said he meant. Maybe I should have said that the elections had to be repeating as well as governmental, large, and public, and used in a nation. It would be no good to find the name of a nation that only used positive-support ASVB once and never used it again. > Don also wanted to have details of actual >results, and I replied that I didn't have those details, so he'd >have to look for them himself. There is a further question now: >is/was Approval used in any public, country-wide, elections? > >According to the same paper I shamelessly plagiarised last time for >details of elections to professional bodies like the IEEE: > >> "In the former Soviet Union, many elections involved the >presentation of a list of candidates to the voters, and voters were >only allowed to cross names off the list: this system is equivalent >to allowing the casting of approval votes (for the candidates not >crossed off)...... In 1991 Oregon conducted a public referendum >involving five alternatives using approval voting." > How can we be sure you are not describing the Cumulative Vote. (or a variant, e.g. the newly coined "4/11/2001" ASVB method, which I am pleased to say, has been much commented on at this list. >So here we have the former Soviet Union using "Disapproval", which >is equivalent to Approval, and Oregon using Approval for a public >referendum. I do not know whether there have been any public >country-wide Approval elections since then - I've not looked or >particularly cared. As in my reply to the last question, I do not >have the results for any of the mentioned elections: primarily >because I don't care. Does that answer your question, Craig? I do not know which "Approval" variant Mr Harper is writing on. Perhaps he would help us all out by posting up an image of the ballot paper. Some forigners will be starting to get suspicious: Florida had ballot papers, and that is just one state. I presume states do not use Approval since it allows to moustached male voters who wanted 4 candidates and voted for 3, a lot less power than a row a kilometre long of hundreds of overweight ladies that emerged from strengthened low buses and who agreed at their earlier bingo/lotto meetings to vote for nearly 1/4 of the 20-50 candidates. Alternatively the story could be altered a little and the women could be replaced with the CVD and it staff that put pamphlets into envelopes. Can you you tell Mike Ossipoff to make available that function that is the exact probabilities that are used in the utility theory calculations. It would be a function of a function, wouldn't it Mr Harper?. I understood the explanation it got lost with the history of ancient France. Maybe Mike has redone the mathematics and in private e-mail he could send it to use and by that simple strategem his steely intent to keep the list uninformed of why an inferior version of the ASVB method, is a method that anybody in any nation, would want to use. I will follow the topic with interest. The British once calculated that the universe had 10**98 atoms or something. I questioned the popping in and out of the number 0.5, and the defence is to have a mathematician pop in, along with a lot of schools. If it gets worse and galaxies/stars start to pop in and out, the readers of the list would begin to tiresomely suspect you really were learning at the feet of the Approval supremos. The centre of the universe certainly could be tentatively suggested to be the boulder.bcn colorado website. Given how little it changes, I have not really looked at since 1996. > > Unfortunately probabilities associated with utility theory are > > well guarded secret. > >You really ought to tell Blaise Pascal that - he invented them >back in the Rennaisance some time. By now, they're comparatively >common knowledge - taught in schools easy on, <<"U. S. Schools">> - in other lands, maths is actually taught in maths classes and their public believes that. Martin continues... >and such, and used to help >make business decisions and suchlike under the pseudonym of >"Expected Value". -- In other words, the function must exist and the argument was that a function with an integral of 1 can be multiplied by x and integrated over x. Can you flesh out some of the missing parts of your defence of the 0.5 value that appeared in your exposition to me, of utility theory or of, of Mike's defective since ill-defined variant of my ASVB method. I invited private comments on how to get this ASVB method standardised.
