At 11:58 AM 6/27/2013, Benjamin Grant wrote:
Hi, first a quick note: I havent been
commenting because real life stuff, work, etc
has been keeping me busy, but I fully intend to
go back and answer any posts sent to me via the
list(s). If just that my time and focus comes in bursts and droughts. ;)
Second note, I continue to thank all who are
being helpful to me in the journey.
Now, I asked my friend, who hasnt read up on
election stuff to come up with a good method I
was wondering what someone intelligent would
come up with, with no prior exposure to election science.
Note: the thought experiment I asked of him had
many basic constraints, for example, the
requirement that a voter be able to go and vote
on a single day within ten minutes, and that
there would be ten candidates, among others.
Right away, you have created difficult conditions
for the election. Crucial: the state of voter
knowledge of those ten candidates. In many
elections, voters will only know their favorite,
or maybe top two. The same may be true of the "worst."
This is the method he suggested:
· Present the people with the ballot of
10 candidates and ask them to pick their top three and their bottom three.
· Every time a candidate is picked in a
person's top three, the candidate gets a +1.
Every time a candidate is picked in a person's
bottom three, the candidate gets a -2.
So he's biasing in favor of eliminating
candidates seen as "worst." Some people have that opinion or desire.
The four candidates the person did not pick
for either get +0. (Sidebar: For N number of
candidates, you have MOD(N/3) positives,
MOD(N/3) negatives, and the rest are left neutral.)
· At the end of the night, we add up the
scores and the candidate with the highest score
wins--even if the score is negative.
Its very interesting, and I in my newness to
this all dont immediately the warts, but since
every method has them, I assume this one does too?
Yup. It's range voting, all right, with some
quite arbitrary restrictions. The maximum
positive vote is half of the maximum negative.
So, simplified example. I'll only consider two candidates first, A and B.
66: A +1
34: A -2, B +1.
The rules seem to *require* a top three choice
and a bottom three choice. So we can add the votes in this way:
The voters don't really care about the other
candidates, maybe don't even know who they are,
but to comply, they "donkey vote," as happens in
Australia, where full ranking is mandatory. These
votes are evenly distibuted among the remaining
candidates, so that there are roughly equal
numbers of positive and negative votes for each,
except that one candidate is *unknown*, so nobody votes for or against Unknown.
Unknown wins, in spite of the fact that
two-thirds of the voters prefer A. Or B could
win, under easy-to-imagine conditions.
What the system does is to give extra power, not
balanced power, to "dislike," and in a
deterministic system, not one that repeats
elections seeking a majority. A saner way to
accomplish the purpose of that is to require a
higher margin in a normal majority-seeking voting system.
What is commonly missed by naive students of
voting systems is that voting systems are
*simulations* or attempts to side-step normal
deliberative process, which in democratic
organizations *always* require majority consent
for any decision. The common vote-for-one, repeat
the election until a majority appears, has been
used for many centuries. It works. We can make it
more efficient with an advanced ballot, but we go
down the Plurality road -- away from democracy --
if we don't require an explicit majority.
It is my sense that advanced ballots can find a
true majority in two polls. The second poll is
*informed* by the first, a point that Robert's
Rules emphasizes in their discussion of the
Instant Runoff Voting method -- and in their
version of that method, they *require an absolute
majority,* not the faux "last round majority" of
IRV, where a majority of voters may easily have
voted *against* the IRV winner. The Robert's
Rules editors lament the loss of that informed
election. Where majority failure still exists,
with a decent polling system, it should stull
usually be possible to predict, from the ballots,
the likely optimal winner -- *or close enough in
social utility that the difference isn't worth
the trouble of an additional poll.*
I have just formally suggested EMAV, Evaluative
Majority Approval Voting, a modified Bucklin
system that uses the range ballot that drives
Bucklin voting as a way to handle multiple
majorities and majority failure. This comes out
of almost a decade of considering these issues in detail.
It is not an *entirely new idea.* Bucklin voting
in Oklahoma was proposed with fractional vote
values. It was rejected by the Oklahoma Supreme
Court, not for that reason, but because it
required voters, under some conditions, to add
additional preference votes. The idea is essentially Range.
I commonly have suggested that Range ballots show
an explicit approval cutoff. Many devices have
been proposed for that, but a simple one is to
set the approval cutoff at midrange. That
represents the election expected value. This is
what a Bucklin ballot essentially does: Bucklin
ballots are approval ballots, with the approvals
being in ranked categories. Why would one want to
approve a candidate who is below the election expectation?
(A point that you missed, Benjamin, in your
discussions with Warren, is that "expected value"
means "value" times "probability." So expectation
already includes whatever information the voters
have about the "strategic situation." It's normal
human choice, we place our power into choices
that we expect are realistic, generally.)
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