At 12:42 AM 11/26/2008, Kevin Venzke wrote:
Hello,
--- En date de : Mar 25.11.08, Abd ul-Rahman
Lomax <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> a écrit :
> If we must have a
> single ballot, and a single winner, period, Range Voting is
> actually a trick: it is the only relatively objective method
> of assessing the expected voter satisfaction with an
> outcome, turned into an election method. It's ideal
> because it's designed that way. (The only fly in the
> ointment is the charges about strategic voting, but I've
> been arguing that this is based on a total misconception of
> what we are doing when we vote.)
I don't understand how you reconcile the two ideas here. Range is
"objective" and "ideal because it's designed that way" based on the
idea that voters have internal utilities and, if they vote them exactly,
under Range voting, the best candidate according to overall utility
will be elected every time.
The "only relatively objective method" is not
Range Voting, itself, it is the study of Bayesian
regret using reasonably simulated internal,
absolute utilities (To be most accurate, it would
use the "HH" scale, "Heaven-Hell," which does
make the assumption that the absolute worst
possible outcome and the absolute best possible
outcome, with an effectively unlimited universe
of candidate, have equal values for all voters.)
in simulated elections. From these utilities, the
best candidate in a simulated election. The value
for each candidate is determined by some
reasonable algorithm, either by relatively simple
assumptions, or by the positions of the
candidates in an n-dimensional issue space, or
some other means. To take this further,
simulations would be guided by actual voter
preferences and intensities from polls.
That is, the performance of an election method
may depend on which kind of preference profiles
exist among the voters, not only upon the method
or how the voters decide to vote.
From the voter utility profiles, a preference
list is easily constructed. Actual voter
behavior, then, can be simulated, using various
kinds of voting strategy, from "fully sincere" in
Range, to maximally strategic, designed to
maximize personal voter outcome. That's tricker,
to be sure. However, within the simulation,
"maximally strategic" votes take place when the
voter "has accurate knowledge of the preferences
of others," and thus their likely votes.
Once this is done, with a large number of
elections, the deviation of the actual method
results, under various voter strategy profiles,
from the ideal result is determined, as a
"regret" value. The best method, when comparing
two methods, is considered to be the one with the lowest average regret.
"Ideal" assumes maximizing overall utility, i.e.,
the sum of the individual HH utilities, which are
both absolute and, we assume, commensurable (we
would want to minimize the number of voters
tossed into Hell, or close to it, and maximize
the number who experience a Heavenly result;
however, so far, only the sum is considered, to
my knowledge, in the work that has been done. In
real elections, it's possible that the ideal
winner would minimize the Hell results until the
worst utilities are above some level, this is
what true, functional organizations do, because
they value group unity and every time someone is
totally shut out of a decision, their position
neglected, the functional group becomes smaller.
Over many elections, this can have a major impact
on the success of the organization. Tyranny of
the majority is highly dysfunctional. However,
such is the state of the art, to my knowledge, of election simulation.)
(Note: this is *my idea* of Warren did or should
have done. What he *actually* did may differ in
some respects. Perhaps someone will point us to a
more accurate description. The approach is as I
described, *relatively* objective. If I'm
correct, Warren settled on Range Voting as a
result of his utility studies, not the reverse.
But, again, he or someone else could correct that.)
Prior to the use of this method, voting systems
were compared using voting criteria, and systems
either pass a given criterion or they don't. And
no method satisfies all proposed election
criteria, and, I've elsewhere argued, some
criteria commonly considered reasonable and
important *must* be violated in order for the
method to produce results that we would
rationally -- and following actual practice in
small democratic organizations with access,
because of the scale, to much more sophisticated
decision-making methods than are possible with a single ballot.
This is the "relatively objective method of
assessing" election outcome. When it's easy to
determine, in a real situation, the absolute
individual voter utilities, "fully sincere Range
Voting" implements it as a method. That is, if
the voters are honest, or if their "votes" are
determined for them by some objective method --
such as a measurement of tax impact based on,
say, the previous year's income tax return --
this obviously would produce an objective result
that could be considered ideal. In real
elections, of course, determining absolute,
commensurable utilities may not be possible.
(There are voting systems involving lotteries and
real bets made by voters that should encourage
the voting of absolute utilities, but these aren't being considered here.)
However, I stated "average voter satisfaction."
This represents normalization. It assumes that
the full satisfaction of all voters is equated,
and likewise the minimal satisfaction, given a
particular candidate set. This produces
normalized utilities. Because of the simulations,
which assume a full absolute utility profile, we
can then determine reasonable "fully sincere
votes." We can then sum these to determine a
somewhat different optimal winner, and assess
regret from actual outcomes based on that.
In real elections, voter behavior will deviate
from those "fully sincere" votes. (Fully sincere
means disclosing true preference strength, within
the resolution of the method.) It deviates from
it for two reasons: (1) voters don't care to put
that much effort into rating, it's easier to
rank, generally, because it only involves
pairwise comparisons; however, voters usually
only have meaningful preferences between a few of
the candidate pairs involved. And (2) voters are
accustomed to elections being a choice, or a set
of choices, and choices are normally made within
a context that considers outcome probabilities
where choice power is used to choose between
realistic possibilities, not merely to compare the value of each outcome.
So: How does Range, with realistic voting
patterns, compare with other methods. Range does
*not* produce zero regret. It produces relatively
low regret. If fully sincere voting could be
somehow guaranteed -- probably impossible -- it
would always choose the ideal winner (within
certain restrictions, basically normalization).
So there are two deviations from the ideal. The
first is from normalization, and the second is from strategic voting.
Range *with strategic voting* is better with
respect to regret than any other method that has
been simulated, to my knowledge. There is an
exception: Top Two Runoff Range Voting beats
Range. That's not surprising. It would detect and
fix some of the deviations due to normalization and strategic voting.
Now, to prevent the advantage that knowledgeable
voters would have from being able to vote
accurately, should we damage the outcome averaged over all voters?
This is the implication of the argument that we
should prevent "strategic voting" as it applies to Range.
To be continued.
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