Re: [EM] The structuring of power and the composition of norms by communicative assent
Juho Laatu wrote: If private and public opinions differ, then which is the manipulated one? If they deviate it is hard to imagine that the private opinion would not be the sincere one. That's because you are thinking of individual opinion. Consider: * private opinion informed by mass media, and likewise measured by mass elections with a secret ballot * public opinion formed in mutual discussion, and likewise measured by peer-to-peer voting with a public ballot It makes a difference when people act socially (inter-subjectively) amongst themselves, rather than alone. When they act alone, they are apt to be systematically manipulated as objects. Alone they have subjective truth (personal sincerity), but together they have communicative reason (mutual understanding or consensus). I think the common practice is to force privacy on everyone in order to allow the weakest of the society to keep their privacy. That's because you are thinking of an administrative context. Force is permitted in that context. We can be restrained from choosing our own voting methods, at the polling station. We can be forced to use the methods as provided, or to abstain from voting. The public sphere is different. There, people can choose their own means of expression. We cannot restrict them to a private voting method, except by violating the principle of free speech. And if that didn't stop us, the law would. It is true that public votes help implementing some features, but in most typical (low level) elections privacy has been considered to be essential. Privacy is essential, I agree, but it's insufficient. The secret ballot *does* work in state elections. I don't mean it any disrespect. But it will work even better when it's complemented by a public ballot in cross-party primaries. (That's what I argue, anyway.) -- Michael Allan Toronto, 647-436-4521 http://zelea.com/ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] The structuring of power and the composition of norms by communicative assent
Michael Allan wrote: Juho Laatu wrote: If private and public opinions differ, then which is the manipulated one? If they deviate it is hard to imagine that the private opinion would not be the sincere one. That's because you are thinking of individual opinion. Consider: * private opinion informed by mass media, and likewise measured by mass elections with a secret ballot * public opinion formed in mutual discussion, and likewise measured by peer-to-peer voting with a public ballot It makes a difference when people act socially (inter-subjectively) amongst themselves, rather than alone. When they act alone, they are apt to be systematically manipulated as objects. Alone they have subjective truth (personal sincerity), but together they have communicative reason (mutual understanding or consensus). Could not these domains work together? To my knowledge, that's what happens now. People discuss politics and find out what they're going to vote. Any sort of improvement on the availability of discussion, as well as of information of representatives' actions will help that domain. Then, when the voters actually decide to vote, they have privacy. Their opinions may change based on what they hear or discuss, but at the end, it's a private decision who they'll give their vote to. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Generalizing manipulability
On Jan 18, 2009, at 5:13 PM, Juho Laatu wrote: --- On Mon, 19/1/09, Jonathan Lundell jlund...@pobox.com wrote: - Why was the first set of definitions not good enough for Approval? (I read rank as referring to the sincere personal opinions, not to the ballot.) vi ranks, and vi is by definition the ballot. That's why the second definition introduces o. OK. I should say that is the way I'd like to read it. I'd like to take another shot at that. Steve's first definition: Let X denote the set of alternatives being voted on. Let N denote the set of voters. Let V(X,N) denote the set of all possible collections of admissible votes regarding X, such that each collection contains one vote for each voter i in N. For all collections v in V(X,N) and all voters i in N, let vi denote i's vote in v. Let C denote the vote-tallying function that chooses the winner given a collection of votes. That is, for all v in V(X,N), C(v) is some alternative in X. Call C manipulable by voter strategy if there exist two collections of votes v,v' in V(X,N) and some voter i in N such that both of the following conditions hold: 1. v'j = vj for all voters j in N-i. 2. vi ranks C(v') over C(v). The idea in condition 2 is that voter i prefers the winner given the strategic vote v'i over the winner given the sincere vote vi. This definition is stronger than *requiring* that vi be any particular ordering--in particular i's sincere preferences. That's very neat. Notice also that we get away with it because the ballot in this case is expressive enough to represent i's sincere preference ranking. That's not true for an approval ballot, which is why the second definition needs to introduce a separate preference order o. Finally, the definition says nothing about how voter i might go about *finding* v'i, or even how to discover for any particular ballot profile whether v'i exists. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Condorcet - let's move ahead
Dear Kristofer Munsterhjelm, you wrote (19 Jan 2009): So voters prefer MAM winners to Beatpath winners more often than vice versa. What method is the best in that respect? Copeland methods are the best methods in this respect. The fact, that the ranked pairs winner usually pairwise beats the Schulze winner in random simulations, is a direct consequence of the facts, that the Schulze winner is usually identical to the MinMax winner and that the MinMax winner usually has a very low Copeland score (compared to the winners of other Condorcet methods). Markus Schulze Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] IRV and Brown vs. Smallwood
FYI, FairVote Minnesota does not and never has had any legal connection to the national organization known as FairVote (though they obviously communicate and are collegial). The views of Tony Solgard are his, and not FairVote's. FairVote does not argue that Condorcet methods would violate the federal constitution, and would likely defend their constitutionality. I don't believe Tony Solgard has argued there is any problem with Condorcet methods with regards to the federal constitution either. Terry Bouricius - Original Message - From: Markus Schulze markus.schu...@alumni.tu-berlin.de To: election-meth...@electorama.com Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2009 11:52 PM Subject: Re: [EM] IRV and Brown vs. Smallwood Dear Terry Bouricius, you wrote (18 Jan 2009): FairVote is not responsible for reports by the League of Women Voters or lawyers writing scholarly articles. Tony Solgard was president of FairVote Minnesota when he wrote the quoted article in which he claims that Condorcet was unconstitutional in Minnesota. Also the report by the League of Women Voters of Minnesota refers to him as Tony Solgard, President of Board of FairVote Minnesota. Markus Schulze Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] The structuring of power and the composition of norms by communicative assent
Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: Could not these domains work together? To my knowledge, that's what happens now. People discuss politics and find out what they're going to vote. Any sort of improvement on the availability of discussion, as well as of information of representatives' actions will help that domain. Then, when the voters actually decide to vote, they have privacy. Their opinions may change based on what they hear or discuss, but at the end, it's a private decision who they'll give their vote to. I was thinking along the same lines, replying to your previous post! Here it is: Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote (previously): You may put it that way, but I think that goes the other direction as well: if it is true that distortions (by carrot or by stick, e.g vote-buying or coercion) degrade the public sphere so that one have to use a secret ballot in ordinary elections, then the distortions will remain when using a method that relies on public sphere information (that is, what you call communicative assent), yet the means of masking that distortion no longer applies, because it's no longer a private matter of voting, but a public one of discussion. Or to phrase it in another way: the distortions of action can be called corruption, since this is really what happens when you're letting the distortions govern how you act when you're supposed to be acting either in accordance to your own opinion, or as an agent of someone else. For obvious reasons, we don't want corruption, and we would seek to minimize it, but it's still a problem. Consider all three types of voting system, the two existing, and the third proposed: TABLE 1. SYSTEMATIC CORRUPTION OF VOTERS -- Voting System IndividualCollective -- State --manipulation by mass Electoral propaganda, financed by campaign contributions, or by influence peddling State Party discipline, -- Legislative the whipping system Vote buying, influence peddling Public Primary Social pressure from -- (Electoral and employer, school, Legislative) church, union, etc. * Vote buying, influence peddling - * family pressure is more nature-like than systematic, so consider it separately The secret ballot came into use to protect voters from the distortion. Presumably the distortion was real and sufficiently severe to need such measures. If we remove the protection, the distortion will again be uncovered. It may be a problem with society, or with the method, but it'll be there, whatever the cause. That protection will not be removed. No changes to the existing voting systems are proposed. On the other hand, we cannot extend the same protection to the public system, not even partially. To enforce a secret ballot would violate the guarantees of free speech in the public sphere. Ad hoc, people can make public voting a fact. We can take any of the corruptions (Table 1), and investigate it in detail. That's one approach. Another (as suggested in your other post) is to consider how the two categories of system (state and public) will interact. There could be a positive synergy between them, with the corruptions of the state being weakened by the public system, while those of the public system are filtered out by the state's secret ballot. I would argue this is generally true, for all of the corruptions listed in the table. The vote-buying effort would, of course, be a this-for-that endeavor. I provide money, you provide the vote - I buy your vote. After you've voted, I got what I bought, and I may buy another vote later. Alternately, it can be continual: for as long as you, as a proxy, mirror me, I'll pay you. Stop doing it and I stop paying. In both cases, the vote is the commodity. Only the latter case would apply, as the commodity is continuous. There is a single vote on the table, and the voter can shift it around or withdraw it, at any time. So the payments must be meted out continually in nickles and dimes (as you suggest), or deferred. These types of payment will be less attractive to typical vote sellers. They won't be banking their returns, but spending them immediately. In addition to this, and the other factors (i to iv) that weigh against vote buying, I would add: v) Vote sellers may be identified by pattern analysis, and simple record keeping. Once identified and marked with a probability label, their collective behaviour may be tracked. The tracks will lead to the vote buyers.
Re: [EM] IRV and Brown vs. Smallwood
From: Markus Schulze markus.schu...@alumni.tu-berlin.de Subject: Re: [EM] IRV and Brown vs. Smallwood Tony Solgard was president of FairVote Minnesota when he wrote the quoted article in which he claims that Condorcet was unconstitutional in Minnesota. Also the report by the League of Women Voters of Minnesota refers to him as Tony Solgard, President of Board of FairVote Minnesota. Markus, I decided to read the LWV, MN report and it is rife with mistatements of fact and almost seems like it was written by Tony Solgard himself. Apparently the LWV, MN did not try out any different examples themselves that would have tested the false statements that were being fed to them by Fair Vote, MN and so merely repeated the lies and included the limited examples that backed up the lies about IRV/STV. Sad that the LWV, MN did not think to try out diverse examples so that they can see that in examples that correspond more closely to real-life elections, that IRV/STV does *not* find majority winners or solve the spoiler problem and causes a host of new problems. Fair Vote is truly one the most-skilled organizations at misleading the public that exists today. IRV/STV is essentially a sequence of plurality elections where ballots are treated arbitrarily unequally where voters are involuntarily excluded from participating in subsequent rounds even if they fully fill out the ballot whenever the number of candidates exceeds the number of ballot positions plus the number of positions to be filled. The unequal treatment of ballots in IRV/STV causes non-monotonicity, and a host of other undesirable, unfair outcomes. And if all that is not bad enough, IRV/STV eviscerates the public oversight and transparency of elections due to its being not precinct-summable and of exponential difficulty to hand count or to audit. That anyone would suggest that anyone should use such an inane voting method as IRV/STV is beyond my understanding - except if they are trying to help voting machine vendors profit by selling an all-new round of high-tech voting machines or if they are trying to implement a voting method that makes it much more difficult to detect vote fraud when it occurs. Cheers, Kathy Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] The structuring of power and the composition of norms by communicative assent
--- On Mon, 19/1/09, Michael Allan m...@zelea.com wrote: Juho Laatu wrote: If private and public opinions differ, then which is the manipulated one? If they deviate it is hard to imagine that the private opinion would not be the sincere one. That's because you are thinking of individual opinion. Consider: * private opinion informed by mass media, and likewise measured by mass elections with a secret ballot * public opinion formed in mutual discussion, and likewise measured by peer-to-peer voting with a public ballot It makes a difference when people act socially (inter-subjectively) amongst themselves, rather than alone. When they act alone, they are apt to be systematically manipulated as objects. Alone they have subjective truth (personal sincerity), but together they have communicative reason (mutual understanding or consensus). I see two valid ways to form opinions. - opinion formation based on mass media - opinion formation based on mutual discussion Individuals may use one or both approaches when forming their private opinion, and also when forming their public opinion (public ballot or other public expression of their opinion). I think the common practice is to force privacy on everyone in order to allow the weakest of the society to keep their privacy. That's because you are thinking of an administrative context. Force is permitted in that context. We can be restrained from choosing our own voting methods, at the polling station. We can be forced to use the methods as provided, or to abstain from voting. The public sphere is different. There, people can choose their own means of expression. We cannot restrict them to a private voting method, except by violating the principle of free speech. And if that didn't stop us, the law would. I don't see any big conflict. They are free to speak even if the society does not provide them with tools to prove to others how they voted. (And they can still tell others how they voted.) Juho It is true that public votes help implementing some features, but in most typical (low level) elections privacy has been considered to be essential. Privacy is essential, I agree, but it's insufficient. The secret ballot *does* work in state elections. I don't mean it any disrespect. But it will work even better when it's complemented by a public ballot in cross-party primaries. (That's what I argue, anyway.) -- Michael Allan Toronto, 647-436-4521 http://zelea.com/ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Generalizing manipulability
--- On Mon, 19/1/09, Jonathan Lundell jlund...@pobox.com wrote: On Jan 18, 2009, at 5:13 PM, Juho Laatu wrote: --- On Mon, 19/1/09, Jonathan Lundell jlund...@pobox.com wrote: - Why was the first set of definitions not good enough for Approval? (I read rank as referring to the sincere personal opinions, not to the ballot.) vi ranks, and vi is by definition the ballot. That's why the second definition introduces o. OK. I should say that is the way I'd like to read it. I'd like to take another shot at that. Steve's first definition: Let X denote the set of alternatives being voted on. Let N denote the set of voters. Let V(X,N) denote the set of all possible collections of admissible votes regarding X, such that each collection contains one vote for each voter i in N. For all collections v in V(X,N) and all voters i in N, let vi denote i's vote in v. Let C denote the vote-tallying function that chooses the winner given a collection of votes. That is, for all v in V(X,N), C(v) is some alternative in X. Call C manipulable by voter strategy if there exist two collections of votes v,v' in V(X,N) and some voter i in N such that both of the following conditions hold: 1. v'j = vj for all voters j in N-i. 2. vi ranks C(v') over C(v). The idea in condition 2 is that voter i prefers the winner given the strategic vote v'i over the winner given the sincere vote vi. This definition is stronger than *requiring* that vi be any particular ordering--in particular i's sincere preferences. That's very neat. Notice also that we get away with it because the ballot in this case is expressive enough to represent i's sincere preference ranking. That's not true for an approval ballot, which is why the second definition needs to introduce a separate preference order o. Finally, the definition says nothing about how voter i might go about *finding* v'i, or even how to discover for any particular ballot profile whether v'i exists. Yes, this is neat in the sense that there is no need to explain what the sincere opinion of the voter is and how the strategic vote will be found. A definition that would cover also Approval and other methods with simple ballots at one go would be nice too. Although it is sometimes difficult to say what a sincere vote in Approval is (could be e.g. to mark all candidates that one approves) I think it is quite natural to assume that each voter has some preferences (order), and that strategies mean deviation from simply voting as one feels and not considering the technical details of the method, the impact of how others are expected to vote and how one could get better results out (by e.g. voting or nominating candidates in some particular way). Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Generalizing manipulability
At 01:38 AM 1/18/2009, Juho Laatu wrote: I don't quite see why ranking based methods (Range, Approval) would not follow the same principles/definitions as rating based methods. The sincere message of the voter was above that she only slightly prefers B over A but the strategic vote indicated that she finds B to be maximally better than A (or that in order to make B win she better vote this way). That is an *interpretation* of a Range vote. In fact, they are just votes, and the voter casts them according to the voter's understanding of what's best. This has been part of my point: Range votes don't indicate preference strength, as such. Consider Approval, which is a Range method. If the voter votes A=BC=D, what does this tell us? We can infer some preferences from it, to be sure, and those preferences are probably accurate, because Approval never rewards a truly insincere vote. But does this vote indicate that the voter has no preference between A and B, nor between C and D? Of course not! Now, a Range vote. But the voter votes Approval style. What does this tell us about the voter preferences? *Nothing more and nothing less.* The voter chose to vote that way for what reason? We don't know!!! They are votes, not sentiments. Voters may choose to express relative preference, in Range, with some fineness of expression, but they may also choose not to make refined expressions, and all these votes are sincere, i.e., they imply no preferences that we cannot reasonably infer from them with a general understanding that the voter had no incentive to show preferences opposite to the actual. (Now, there is a kind of insincere voting that voters may engage in, but it isn't really rewarded, and voters will only do it when they expect it to be moot. And they may do this kind of insincere voting with any method whatever.) Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Generalizing manipulability
At 03:57 PM 1/18/2009, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: Wouldn't it be stricter than this? Consider Range, for instance. One would guess that the best zero info strategy is to vote Approval style with the cutoff at some point (mean? not sure). Actually, that's a lousy strategy. The reason it's lousy is that the voter is a sample of the electorate. Depending on the voter's own understanding of the electorate, and the voter's own relationship with the electorate, the best strategy might be a bullet vote. Saari showed why mean cutoff is terrible Approval strategy. What if every voter agrees with you but one? The one good thing Saari shows is that this yields a mediocre outcome when /1 voters prefer a candidate, but also approve another above the mean. Essentially, the voter doesn't need to know anything specific about the electorate in a particular election, but only about how isolated the voter's position *generally* is. For most voters, zero-knowledge indicates a bullet vote unless there are additional candidates with only weak preference under the most-preferred one, such that the voter truly doesn't mind voting for one or more of them in addition. However, it would also be reasonable that a sincere ratings ballot would have the property that if the sincere ranked ballot of the person in question is A B, then the score of B is lower than that of A; that is, unless the rounding effect makes it impossible to give B a lower score than A, or makes it impossible to give B a sufficiently slightly lower score than A as the voter considers sincere (by whatever metric). Yes. Indeed, I've suggested that doing pairwise analysis on Range ballots, with a runoff when the Range winner is beaten by a candidate pairwise, would encourage maintenance of this preference order. Think of Range as a Borda ballot with equal ranking allowed and therefore with empty ranks. (Not the ridiculous suggestions that truncated ballots should be given less weight). If a voter really has weak preference between two candidates, the obvious and simple vote is to equal rank them. But then where does one put the empty rank? There are two approaches, and both of them are sincere, though one approach more accurately reflects relative preference strength. There are ways to encourage that expression. But here is the real problem: trying to think that a zero-knowledge ballot is somehow ideal is discounting the function of compromise in elections. That is, what we do in elections is *not only* to find some sort of supposed best candidate, but also to find compromises. That's what we do in deliberative process where repeated Yes/No voting is used to identify compromises, until a quorum is reached (usually a majority, but it can be supermajority). Deliberative process incorporates increasing knowledge by the electorate of itself. It extracts this with a series of elections in which sincerity is not only expected, it's generally good strategy. In that context, approval really is approval! If a majority agrees with your approval, the process is over. I consider election methods as shortcuts, attempts to discover quickly what the electorate would likely settle on in a deliberative environment. As such, it is actually essential that whatever knowledge the electorate has of itself be incorporated into how the voters vote. And that's what happens if, in a Range election, voters vote von Nuemann-Morganstern utilities. They have one full vote to bet. They put their vote where they think it will do the most good. They can put it all on one candidate, i.e., bullet vote. They can put it on a candidate set, thus voting a full vote for every member of the set over every nonmembe, i.e., they vote Approval style. They can split up their vote in more complex ways. What they can't do in this setup is to bet more than one vote. I.e., for example, one full vote for A over B, and one full vote for B over C. If we arrange their votes in sequence, from least preferred to most, the sum of votes in each sequential pairwise election must total to no more than one vote. Calling them VNM utilities sounds complex, but it's actually instinctive. If we understand Range, we aren't going to waste significant voting power expressing moot preferences. Suppose someone asks you what you want. But you understand that you might not get what you want. You prefer ABCD, lets say with equal preference steps. You think it likely that A or B might be acceptable to your questioner, but not C or D. You have so much time to convince your questioner to give you what you argue for. How much time are you going to spend trying to convince the person to give you C instead of D? You might mention it, but you wouldn't put the weight there unless you thought that the real possibilities were C or D. Voter knowledge of the electorate is how elections reach compromise, and it's very important. Of course, there is
