Re: [Election-Methods] A Better Version of IRV?
Forest Simmons wrote (Sun Jul 6 16:36:32 PDT 2008 ): There is a lot of momentum behind IRV. If we cannot stop it, are there some tweaks that would make it more liveable? Someone has suggested that a candidate withdrawal option would go a long way towards ameliorating the damage. Here's another suggestion, inspired by what we have learned from Australia's worst problems with their version of IRV: Since IRV satisfies Later No Harm, why not complete the incompletely ranked ballots with the help of the rankings of the ballot's favorite candidate? The unranked candidates would be ranked below the ranked candidates in the order of the ballot of the favorite. If the candidates were allowed to specify their rankings after they got the partial results, this might be a valuable improvement. Forest Forest, To me in principle voter's votes being commandeered by candidates isn't justified. This particular horrible idea would create a strong incentive for the major power-brokers to sponsor the nomination of a lot of fake candidates just to collect votes for one or other of the major parties. How do you think it might be a valuable improvement? What scenario do you have in mind? And what do you have in mind as Australia's worst problems with their version of IRV? Why do you want to stop IRV? Do you agree with Kathy Dopp that IRV is worse than FPP? Chris Benham Start at the new Yahoo!7 for a better online experience. www.yahoo7.com.au Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [Election-Methods] Matrix voting and cloneproof MMP questions
James Gilmour wrote: Kristofer Munsterhjelm Sent: Sunday, July 06, 2008 12:10 AM Second, I've been reading about the decoy list problem in mixed member proportionality. The strategy exists because the method can't do anything when a party doesn't have any list votes to compensate for constituency disproportionality. Thus, cloning (or should it be called splitting?) a party into two parties, one for the constituency candidates, and one for the list, pays off. But is it possible to make a sort of MMP where that strategy doesn't work? I don't know about making it not work, but the 'overhang' provisions in some versions of MMP would, at least partly, address this problem. The version of MMP used for elections to the Scottish Parliament (no overhang correction) is wide open to this abuse, and we already have two registered political parties that could make very effective use of it IF they so wanted. The Labour Party and the Co-operative Party jointly nominate candidates in some constituencies. The Co-operative Party does not nominate any constituency candidates nor does it contest the regional votes. I don't doubt that the problem exists. After all, the term decoy list (lista civetta) comes from the Italian abuse of the system. Do you know of any countries that do have overhang provisions to ameliorate the problem? Basically, MMP is a rotten voting system, with or without the 'overhang' correction, and it should be replaced by a better system of proportional representation. Even though I think multiwinner methods should be party-neutral, I can see the appeal of MMP: parties are guaranteed to get their share of the vote, even if the constituency vote is disproportional. Thus they can't say that they were robbed of seats because of the quirks of the system. While in reality such complaints would be infrequent (because those who have power in a very disproportional system are those where the disproportionality swung their way), why have disproportionality when it can be avoided? If we generalize this, the list part of MMP is a patch to the disproportionality of the constituency method, to take advantage of explicitly-known properties (like party allegiance). That suggests that we use a proportional multiwinner method (like STV) for larger constituencies, and then award list seats (of a much smaller share than half the parliament) to patch up whatever disproportionality still exists - even if the multiwinner method is perfect, rounding errors regarding district size would introduce some disproportionality. At that point, the generalized MMP with STV sounds a lot like Schulze's suggestion for Berlin. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [Election-Methods] Matrix voting and cloneproof MMP questions
Rob LeGrand wrote: Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: (On a related note, has anyone tried to use Range with LeGrand's Equilibrium Average instead of plain average?) I don't recommend using Equilibrium Average (which I usually call AAR DSV, for Average-Approval-Rating DSV) to elect winner(s) from a finite number of candidates. AAR DSV is nonmanipulable when selecting a single outcome from a one-dimensional range, just as median (if implemented carefully) is, but it is manipulable when used as a scoring function in a way similar to how Balinski and Laraki proposed using median: http://rangevoting.org/MedianVrange.html You use movie site data for your AAR-DSV examples. Does AAR-DSV manipulability mean that a movie site that uses it would face difficulty telling users which movie is the most popular or highest rated? The manipulability proofs wouldn't harm them as strongly (since very few users rate all of the movies), but they would in principle remain, unless I'm missing something... Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [Election-Methods] A Better Version of IRV?
Dear Kathy Dopp, Please stop referring to your report on IRV as peer-reviewed. That is an absolutely false statement. Peer-reviewed as used in the social sciences (and hard sciences too) typically means a blind review process where a journal editor sends a draft article to several reviewers whose identity is unknown to the author and vice versa. Typically good journals require that the author at least address the weaknesses noted by the reviewers; authors who refuse sometimes find their article rejected instead of published. You selectively took comments from a few people who agreed with your opinions and derisively dismissed those from experts who pointed out errors (such as your miss-understanding of Arrow's use of the Pareto Improvement Criterion.) Your report has so many errors of fact and analysis that any legitimate journal would require substantial re-writing before even considering it. Terry Bouricius - Original Message - From: Kathy Dopp [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com Sent: Monday, July 07, 2008 7:31 PM Subject: Re: [Election-Methods] A Better Version of IRV? Date: Sun, 06 Jul 2008 23:36:32 + (GMT) From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Election-Methods] A Better Version of IRV? To: election-methods@lists.electorama.com Message-ID: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii There is a lot of momentum behind IRV. If we cannot stop it, are there some tweaks that would make it more liveable? Hi Forest. I think we can stop that madness. I believe that the LWV, US will no longer be seriously considering supporting IRV since my writing a report on IRV's flaws - and that other State LWV groups and other State legislators where IRV was being considered are stopping their push for it. However, to answer your if question ... Someone has suggested that a candidate withdrawal option would go a long way towards ameliorating the damage. Here's another suggestion, inspired by what we have learned from Australia's worst problems with their version of IRV: Since IRV satisfies Later No Harm, why not complete the incompletely ranked ballots with the help of the rankings of the ballot's favorite candidate? But that would still leave the problem of having to count IRV elections centrally and alot of the other worst flaws of IRV (including its lack of fairness, cost, tendency to promote secret electronic vote counting, etc. Please peruse my report when you have a chance (It is only 11 pages plus appendices and endnotes and is well-organized to make it easy to read.): http://electionarchive.org/ucvAnalysis/US/RCV-IRV/InstantRunoffVotingFlaws.pdf The unranked candidates would be ranked below the ranked candidates in the order of the ballot of the favorite. While that might be a slight improvement, the better idea would be the one suggested in my paper (I heard it first from Charlie Strauss) that also fixes some of the counting problems of IRV elections. I.e. Let all the candidates (before election day) pick their own ranked choices of other candidates - and not the voters. This system has many advantages over IRV including: 1. gives the minor party candidates more political power 2. simpler ballots that do not confuse voters - i.e. voters only need vote for their top choice 3. The RCV ballots can be counted and summed much more easily because all the ballots of voters who voted for an eliminated candidate are counted the same way - no need for individual ballot examination and sorting, etc. I.e. Only the voters' first choices are needed to be summed for each precinct and reported to the central facility as always, to know who wins. 4. Much much easier to manually count and audit. If the candidates were allowed to specify their rankings after they got the partial results, this might be a valuable improvement. Having the candidates only rank incompletely ranked ballots would be an election nightmare, but having candidates rank all the other candidates and having voters only give their first choice, would work better than IRV, but I still think other voting methods are available that are superior. I believe that my email contacts with the LWV and with US Election Officials and others who have now been apprised of my report on the 17 flaws and 3 benefits of IRV will have the effect of stopping IRV from creating very additional serious problems with US elections. Look at the mess in San Francisco and WA now. Most election officials will not want to emulate those messes. The push for manual audits to verify the accuracy of machine counts, will make IRV virtually impossible to implement. Election integrity advocates, once they understand all the problems IRV causes, will oppose it. It is amazing to me that anyone would consider supporting IRV when it does not even solve the spoiler problem except in one case, and there are an amount of possibly subtotals that could be used to count votes for
[Election-Methods] Dopp:17. Unstable and can be delicately sensitive to noise in the rankings.
From Kathy Dopp's anti-IRV propaganda report: 17. Unstable and can be delicately sensitive to noise in the rankings. If an election is not resolved after 3 rounds of IRV then one is deep in the ranking for many people. This means noise in the rankings. Do people really study candidates they don't care much about? Thus the noise in the ranking for the most ill-informed voters is determining the outcome in deep rank run-offs. When a race is unresolved after 3 rounds of IRV, a better solution is to hold a real run off with the remaining candidates. Having winnowed the field, voters can now properly study their allowed few choices with the required care and presumably enough will to make the outcome not contingent on noise. Moreover, can you fathom how awful it would be to fill out a ballot ranking every candidate 10 deep? In Australia, voters are required by law to fill rank ever candidate running (generally 20) from 1 to 20. Do you think there is anything besides noise in the last ten? The saving grace on the Australian ballot is that generally there are only 2 questions, one with 3 to 4 rankings and one with about 20. Not like our USA ballots. Restricting the ranking depth of ranked choice ballots could improve IRV methods by reducing noise and making it easier for voters. No-one I gather is suggesting that in the US voters should be compelled to fully rank, so all this is silly crude stuff. In Australia, voters are required by law to fill rank ever candidate running (generally 20) from 1 to 20. The generally 20 figure is false. For Australian IRV elections there is rarely more than about seven candidates. The figure 20 is about right for elections to the Senate, which uses multi-member STV (corrupted into a quasi-list system). Elsewhere in the paper we read that IRV is inadequate because it can't guarantee that the winner will be elected with the support of a majority of all the voters who submitted valid ballots. Restricting the ranking depth of ranked choice ballots could improve IRV methods by reducing noise and making it easier for voters. But Kathy favours restricting ranking depth which of course has the effect of making this avowed aim much less likely. And of course restricting ranking doesn't make it easier for voters. If truncation is allowed, how could it? In fact it just makes it harder for some voters. Say there are many candidates and I judge that 2 of them are the front-runners, I have a preference between them but they are my 2 least favourite candidates. I am stuck with the same dilemma and strong incentive to use the Compromise strategy that I have in FPP. To have some hope of having an impact on the result I must insincerely rank my preferred front-runner above second-bottom. Chris Benham Start at the new Yahoo!7 for a better online experience. www.yahoo7.com.au Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [Election-Methods] Matrix voting and cloneproof MMP questions
Kristofer said: That could be an interesting way to solve the indecisive parliament or frequent government change problem where these exist. In order to recall the executive, they have to vote for a new coalition at the same time. They have kinda that rule in Germany.? The only way to remove their Chancellor is to nominate a replacement. There is a proposed alternative to MMP called Fair majority voting that solves some of its problems.? It has the same single winner + national party proportional vote system.? It has some problems of its own though. http://www.mathaware.org/mam/08/EliminateGerrymandering.pdf Basically, each voter votes for a party and candidate.? In each district, plurality is used to work out the winner (I think approval could also work). The fair number of seats for each party is worked out based on the party vote and a set of multiplers are determined so that each party gets the right number of seats. These multipliers are multiplied by the vote total of each candidate in the party. A party which got to few seats would be given a higher multipler. In effect, it flips the results where the margin of victory was small in order to bring all parties to their proportional totals. I am not sure what the best way to do the task that matrix voting tries to accomplish. Normally positions on the executive are not equal in value. There are free riding issues with selection of major posts.? For example, if you rank your party leader first choice as PM, you use up some of your vote for the other positions.? The solution could be to kick out anyone in the party who doesn't rank their own leader first choice, so all equally share the cost. In Northern Ireland, they use the d'Hondt system for allocating seats on the executive. This gives the larger parties an advantage as they get to pick first.? Also, the largest 2 parties get 1 seat each for free. Another option would be a fair division protocol.? If you had 2 equally sized parties, one party leader could split the executive positions into 2 and then the other party leader could pick one group.? This should mean that both groups have roughly equal value. Alternatively, one of the leaders could give each position a value and the other party leader can pick any group of positions such that the total adds up to less than half. If the first leader undervalues a position, the 2nd leader gets a powerful position for a low cost.? Likewise, if he overvalues a position, the 2nd leader will just not take it, giving him a larger share of the other positions. I am not such if this can be expanded to multiple parties of differing sizes. Also, there is the issue that there would be no coherent national policy on anything.? You could have one minister taking actions which cancel out the actions of another minister. (and both spending money doing it).? Ofc, this creates an incentive for them to work together and find a compromise. Also, budgets could be an issue.? One option would be to share tax income out proportionally. Each member of the legislature could decide what ministries their share is allocated to. Tax cuts/raises are an even bigger issue.? Raphfrk Interesting site what if anyone could modify the laws www.wikocracy.com Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [Election-Methods] Matrix voting and cloneproof MMP questions
On Jul 8, 2008, at 15:24 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: Even though I think multiwinner methods should be party-neutral, I can see the appeal of MMP: parties are guaranteed to get their share of the vote, even if the constituency vote is disproportional. use a proportional multiwinner method (like STV) for larger constituencies, and then award list seats (of a much smaller share than half the parliament) to patch up whatever disproportionality still exists - even if the multiwinner method is perfect, rounding errors regarding district size would introduce some disproportionality. I assume you want to have some level of regional representation. = At least large districts with multiple seats. You said you want the method to be party-neutral. = Maybe STV will do (I assume all party-like list (or tree) based methods would not be ok). If you use large districts and STV in each of them (separate candidates for each district) that should give you already quite accurate political proportionality (only some rounding errors left). If the size of the districts is small that would cut out some small parties (or not give them fully proportional number of seats). (Some tricks could be used to fix also the remaining rounding errors if needed.) My point is that if you are happy with large districts the MMP part (and separation of two different kind of representatives) is not necessarily needed. Juho ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [Election-Methods] Dopp:17. Unstable and can be delicately sensitive to noise in the rankings.
I care little for IRV, which deserves an early death, but think of needs of Condorcet, which also uses a ranked ballot. On Tue, 8 Jul 2008 08:28:24 -0700 (PDT) Chris Benham wrote: From Kathy Dopp's anti-IRV propaganda report: 17. Unstable and can be delicately sensitive to noise in the rankings. If an election is not resolved after 3 rounds of IRV then one is deep in the ranking for many people. This means noise in the rankings. Do people really study candidates they don't care much about? Thus the noise in the ranking for the most ill-informed voters is determining the outcome in deep rank run-offs. When a race is unresolved after 3 rounds of IRV, a better solution is to hold a real run off with the remaining candidates. Having winnowed the field, voters can now properly study their allowed few choices with the required care and presumably enough will to make the outcome not contingent on noise. Moreover, can you fathom how awful it would be to fill out a ballot ranking every candidate 10 deep? In Australia, voters are required by law to fill rank ever candidate running (generally 20) from 1 to 20. Do you think there is anything besides noise in the last ten? The saving grace on the Australian ballot is that generally there are only 2 questions, one with 3 to 4 rankings and one with about 20. Not like our USA ballots. Restricting the ranking depth of ranked choice ballots could improve IRV methods by reducing noise and making it easier for voters. No-one I gather is suggesting that in the US voters should be compelled to fully rank, so all this is silly crude stuff. In Australia, voters are required by law to fill rank ever candidate running (generally 20) from 1 to 20. Ranked voting is valuable via allowing voters to favor more than one candidate. It is wasteful and destructive if it demands that they rank candidates beyond their desires. The generally 20 figure is false. For Australian IRV elections there is rarely more than about seven candidates. The figure 20 is about right for elections to the Senate, which uses multi-member STV (corrupted into a quasi-list system). Elsewhere in the paper we read that IRV is inadequate because it can't guarantee that the winner will be elected with the support of a majority of all the voters who submitted valid ballots. Majority is a word that makes sense for Plurality elections. Associating it with other election methods ranges toward useless and destructive. Demanding that every voter rank every candidate means that each candidate must be ranked by 100% of the voters - a majority without value for each. Even with voters choosing how many to rank (or to approve in Approval) getting ranked or approved by more than half does not mean a useful majority - some other candidate could earn the win via stronger backing. Restricting the ranking depth of ranked choice ballots could improve IRV methods by reducing noise and making it easier for voters. The obvious way to reduce noise is to not demand it (discussed above) and educate voters that introducing noise is wasteful and can be destructive, Restricting ranking depth can accommodate inadequate equipment - which should be replaced by adequate equipment - this should be a moderate expense to accommodate the occasional voter who desires such. But Kathy favours restricting ranking depth which of course has the effect of making this avowed aim much less likely. And of course restricting ranking doesn't make it easier for voters. If truncation is allowed, how could it? In fact it just makes it harder for some voters. Say there are many candidates and I judge that 2 of them are the front-runners, I have a preference between them but they are my 2 least favourite candidates. I am stuck with the same dilemma and strong incentive to use the Compromise strategy that I have in FPP. To have some hope of having an impact on the result I must insincerely rank my preferred front-runner above second-bottom. Chris Benham -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek 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. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
