Re: [EM] [CES #4445] Re: Looking at Condorcet

[robert bristow-johnson]

Clay Shentrup wrote:


Condorcet systems fundamentally try to maximize the wrong thing.



no.  excluding the cases where there are cycles (which is another 
topic), there is no quantitative metric to be "the wrong thing".  
Condorcet only imposes a logical consistency that, from a popular 
perspective and with the additional value that each vote counts equally, 
if some candidate is the "best" (from a popular vote POV) candidate for 
this single-seat office, then that candidate is better than each and 
every other candidate.  instead of having the candidates arm-wrestle or 
take some written exam or flip a coin, the measure of which candidate is 
"better" is simply the popular vote of the electorate.  if Candidate A 
is "better than" Candidate B, that is decided solely if more voters like 
Candidate A than voters who like Candidate B when voters are asked to 
compare and choose between the two.  that is what Condorcet 
fundamentally tries to do.  nothing other than that.



They try to maximize the odds of electing the Condorcet
winner, even though it's a proven mathematical fact that the
Condorcet winner is not necessarily the option whom the
electorate prefers.



i am no slouch at mathematics, Clay.  you (or Warren) have never proven 
that to me.  pointing to a page on rangevoting.org does not constitute 
proof.  and i don't see how you can since the ballots are different.  in 
the same manner that we compare ranked-choice voting to FPTP, but 
*assuming* that the single affirmative vote for FPTP is the same as the 
1st-choice vote in the ranked ballot, in that same manner you have to 
map the ranked ballot to a score ballot, and that requires some 
assumptions.  to compare apples to oranges, you must make assumptions.


and good definitions, like who/what is "the option whom the electorate 
prefers"?  is that the same as the "true, honest utility winner"?



Someone wrote:


Trouble is that the ballots ARE the voters' statements as to which
candidate IS the CW.  The above paragraph seems to be based on the
ballots sometimes not truly representing the thoughts of the
voters voting them.



i think the case they continue to make is that, compared to a Score 
ballot, there is some intrinsic knowledge that voters won't mark their 
ranked ballots as sincerely when they know it's Condorcet.  that's not a 
fair comparison.  how can you be making a fair comparison (apples to 
apples) when you assume one method gets sincere and informed voter 
participation and the other method does not?


On 2/3/12 11:06 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:

No, he's saying that when the CW and the true, honest utility winner 
differ, the latter is better. I agree, but it's not an argument worth 
making, because most people who don't already agree will think it's a 
stupid one.


as do i.  it's like saying that the Pope ain't sufficiently Catholic or 
something like that.  or that someone is better at being Woody Allen 
than Woody Allen.


but for the moment, would you (Jameson, Clay, whoever) tell me, in as 
clear (without unnecessary nor undefined jargon) and technical language 
as possible, what/who the "true, honest utility winner" is?  how is this 
candidate defined, in terms the preference of the voters?


--

r b-j  r...@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."




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Re: [EM] [CES #4429] Looking at Condorcet

[Andy Jennings]

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 2:05 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:

>
> How would you vote with SODA?
>

I would usually end up delegating to my favorite.  I'd look at their
ranking and if it was pretty good I'd delegate.  Otherwise, I'd probably
come up with my own ranking (perhaps based on theirs) and then choose a
cutoff and vote approval-style.

So my strategy would be pretty similar to yours, I think.



> (go ahead and think of your answer before you read mine)
>
> I think I'd almost always just delegate to my favorite with SODA. If I
> don't like my favorite's delegation order, that would make me reconsider
> whether they're really my favorite. If I decide they still are, I would
> consider whether I thought the difference between my preferred order and
> their predeclared preferences would matter. If I decide it does, then look
> for the best candidate I think has a chance, and vote for them and everyone
> better. Chances of me ever getting to that last step would around one in
> 10, I reckon.
>
> Jameson
>
> 2012/2/3 Andy Jennings 
>
>>  On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 10:09 PM, Richard Fobes <
>> electionmeth...@votefair.org> wrote:
>>
>>> On 2/2/2012 11:07 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>>>
 On 02/02/2012 05:28 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:

  I honestly think that honest rating is easier than honest ranking.
> ...
>

>>>  As a contrast, to me, ranking is easier than rating. ...

>>>
>>> I too find ranking easier than rating.
>>>
>>
>>
>> I go back and forth on this, myself.  Some thoughts:
>>
>> - If I had to rank more than ten candidates, I think it would be
>> difficult unless I put them into three or four tiers first.  Then, perhaps
>> I would choose to rank the candidates within the tiers or perhaps I would
>> leave them all tied if I didn't really care that much.  Thus, for me,
>> honest rating with just a few buckets is more basic than ranking.
>>
>> - If someone built a computer program that presented me pairs of
>> candidates at a time as Kristofer suggested, that would make it somewhat
>> easier.  I think I would still prefer to divide them into tiers first, but
>> if I divided them into tiers first, I might not need the pairwise
>> comparison hand-holding.  Also, suppose that I analyzed the candidates in
>> three different policy dimensions that I consider equally important and I
>> found that my policy preferences were:
>> Foreign Policy: A>B>C
>> Domestic Social Issues: B>C>A
>> Domestic Economic Issues: C>A>B
>> Now I prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A.  A cycle among my own personal
>> preferences when I compare them pairwise.  Then my output ranking would
>> depend on the order in which the pairwise questions were asked.  ??!?
>>
>> - If I were trying to cast an honest Approval Ballot, then I would think
>> about each candidate separately and decide whether I approve them or not.
>>
>> - If I were trying to cast a strategic Approval Ballot or a fully
>> strategic Score Voting Ballot, then I would first rank all the candidates,
>> then decide where to put my cutoff.  So I can definitely see the argument
>> of those who think that ranking is more fundamental than even approval
>> voting.
>>
>> - If I were trying to cast an honest Score Voting Ballot, I would have to
>> feel like there was an objective meaning for the various scores.  Then I
>> could consider each candidate separately and give them my honest scores.  I
>> probably wouldn't even normalize.  If I were going to normalize, then I
>> might as well go fully-strategic and vote approval-style.
>>
>> - If I were casting an MJ ballot, I think I would consider each candidate
>> separately and vote completely honestly, knowing that my vote was doing
>> everything it could to help any candidate where my score was higher than
>> society's median and, similarly, doing everything it could to hurt any
>> candidate where my score was lower than society's median.  I realize that
>> my vote would not be fully strategic if there were two frontrunners and I
>> liked both of them or disliked both of them, but in that situation, who
>> cares?
>>
>> - If a real election were being tabulated with Condorcet, I would vote
>> honestly.
>>
>> - If a real election were being tabulated with IRV, I would warn people
>> not to vote for minor candidates.
>>
>> Let me admit that a crucial point for me is that the only way to gain
>> Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives is to tell the voters to evaluate
>> each candidate independently and vote honestly, which may make me biased
>> towards rating methods.  FBC is very important to me and I'm still
>> skeptical of the FBC-compliant ranked-ballot methods recently proposed.
>>
>> ~ Andy
>>
>> 
>> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list
>> info
>>
>>
>

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Re: [EM] [CES #4429] Looking at Condorcet

[Dave Ketchum]

Ranking more than ten candidates?  Condorcet does NOT require such.   
However, if too many are running, you need to look for sanity:
. You may have preferences among those most likely to win - pick  
those you see as the best few of these.
. Also pick among the few you would prefer, regardless of their  
chances.  This voting will help them get encouraging vote counts even  
if there is no chance of their winning.

. Do not waste your energy on others.

Now do your ranking among these, hopefully having time to rank  
properly according to desirability, not caring, for the moment, as to  
winnability.


Dave Ketchum

On Feb 3, 2012, at 2:45 PM, Andy Jennings wrote:
On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 10:09 PM, Richard Fobes > wrote:

On 2/2/2012 11:07 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
On 02/02/2012 05:28 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:

I honestly think that honest rating is easier than honest ranking.
...

As a contrast, to me, ranking is easier than rating. ...

I too find ranking easier than rating.


As do I.


I go back and forth on this, myself.  Some thoughts:

- If I had to rank more than ten candidates, I think it would be  
difficult unless I put them into three or four tiers first.  Then,  
perhaps I would choose to rank the candidates within the tiers or  
perhaps I would leave them all tied if I didn't really care that  
much.  Thus, for me, honest rating with just a few buckets is more  
basic than ranking.


- If someone built a computer program that presented me pairs of  
candidates at a time as Kristofer suggested, that would make it  
somewhat easier.  I think I would still prefer to divide them into  
tiers first, but if I divided them into tiers first, I might not  
need the pairwise comparison hand-holding.  Also, suppose that I  
analyzed the candidates in three different policy dimensions that I  
consider equally important and I found that my policy preferences  
were:

Foreign Policy: A>B>C
Domestic Social Issues: B>C>A
Domestic Economic Issues: C>A>B
Now I prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A.  A cycle among my own  
personal preferences when I compare them pairwise.  Then my output  
ranking would depend on the order in which the pairwise questions  
were asked.  ??!?

...
- If a real election were being tabulated with Condorcet, I would  
vote honestly.


- If a real election were being tabulated with IRV, I would warn  
people not to vote for minor candidates.


There is no harm in minor candidates getting the few votes they  
deserve in IRV.  However, if the vote counters, as they work, see the  
deserving winner as momentarily having the fewest votes, this  
candidate will have lost.


Let me admit that a crucial point for me is that the only way to  
gain Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives is to tell the voters  
to evaluate each candidate independently and vote honestly, which  
may make me biased towards rating methods.  FBC is very important to  
me and I'm still skeptical of the FBC-compliant ranked-ballot  
methods recently proposed.


~ Andy

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Re: [EM] [CES #4445] Re: Looking at Condorcet

[Jameson Quinn]

>
>
>  Condorcet systems fundamentally try to maximize the wrong thing. They try
>> to maximize the odds of electing the Condorcet winner, even though it's a
>> proven mathematical fact that the Condorcet winner is not necessarily the
>> option whom the electorate prefers.
>>
>
> Trouble is that the ballots ARE the voters' statements as to which
> candidate IS the CW.  The above paragraph seems to be based on the ballots
> sometimes not truly representing the thoughts of the voters voting them.
>
>
> No, he's saying that when the CW and the true, honest utility winner
differ, the latter is better. I agree, but it's not an argument worth
making, because most people who don't already agree will think it's a
stupid one.

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Re: [EM] Majority-Judgement. Condorcet.

[Jameson Quinn]

2012/2/3 Ted Stern 

> On 03 Feb 2012 16:07:59 -0800, Kevin Venzke wrote:
> >
> > Personally I don't understand why one would want to spend time on a
> > method that you have to defend by saying "it might work anyway,"
> > even if as built the incentives are wrong.
> >
> > I like the idea of being able to test things, so I may be biased here.
> >
> > It's taking a shot in the dark. How fantastic must this method be,
> > for that to seem like a good idea? It's hard to believe one couldn't
> > go back and work out something that more reliably does whatever you
> > were going for.
> >
> > Also, if MJ is a serious proposal it should be called "median
> > rating" and use the Bucklin tiebreaker. You'd have a name that means
> > something and a tiebreaker that isn't a pain to solve. At the top
> > rating (the one we all agree might matter) the rules aren't even
> > different.
>
> Can anyone explain how Majority Judgment differs in practice from
> Bucklin with equal ratings allowed?  AKA Fallback Approval?  Or
> one of the many versions of Majority Choice Approval (another vague
> name, IMO)?
>

In practice? Not at all. Except there's a book about it.


>
> > The name is so bad. Imagine you hear that on the news and are trying
> > to figure out what it means. "Majority" doesn't tell you that much
> > (IRV already does majorities and they didn't even need to put it in
> > the name) and "judgment" refers to what? The voting. They're calling
> > it "judgment" though.  Puke. So dramatic and it doesn't even say
> > anything.
> >
> > The tie-breaker is the same thing really. It sounds neat and fair to
> > pull out median votes one by one, but in practice that isn't the
> > methodology, you really should use math. Try coding MJ and then see
> > how much code you could delete, how much less thought it would've
> > taken you, if you just wanted the Bucklin tiebreaker instead.
> >
>
> And you can delete even more code if it is just ER-Bucklin.
>

Yup. But most voters don't worry about lines of code.

JQ


>
> Ted
> --
> araucaria dot araucana at gmail dot com
>
> 
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>

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Re: [EM] Majority-Judgement. Condorcet.

[Jameson Quinn]

2012/2/3 Kevin Venzke 

> Personally I don't understand why one would want to spend time on a method
> that you have to defend by saying
> "it might work anyway," even if as built the incentives are wrong.
>

At worst, it's approval. Not so bad. There's good reason to think that it
will lead to more honesty than approval or range. People complain about
approval, they really want to distinguish their favorite. So this isn't so
much "it might work anyway" as "it probably has a bonus".


> I like the idea of being able to test things, so I may be biased here.
>

OK, I'll net you know when I've tested real human behavior on Amazon
Mechanical Turk.


>
> It's taking a shot in the dark. How fantastic must this method be, for
> that to seem like a good idea? It's hard to
> believe one couldn't go back and work out something that more reliably
> does whatever you were going for.
>

I really don't see it as that ugly.


>
> Also, if MJ is a serious proposal it should be called "median rating" and
> use the Bucklin tiebreaker. You'd have
> a name that means something and a tiebreaker that isn't a pain to solve.At 
> the top rating (the one we all agree
> might matter) the rules aren't even different.
>
> The name is so bad. Imagine you hear that on the news and are trying to
> figure out what it means. "Majority"
> doesn't tell you that much (IRV already does majorities and they didn't
> even need to put it in the name) and
> "judgment" refers to what? The voting. They're calling it "judgment"
> though. Puke. So dramatic and it doesn't
> even say anything.
>
> The tie-breaker is the same thing really. It sounds neat and fair to pull
> out median votes one by one, but in
> practice that isn't the methodology, you really should use math. Try
> coding MJ and then see how much code you
> could delete, how much less thought it would've taken you, if you just
> wanted the Bucklin tiebreaker instead.
>

I didn't name it or choose the tiebreaker. I wouldn't have named it that or
chosen that tiebreaker. I am sure, however, that these issues are trivial,
compared to the fact that there's a book and academic articles promoting
MJ. Any median system will elect the same winner in any real election.

Jameson


>
> Kevin
>
>
>
> 
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
>

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Re: [EM] [CES #4437] Re: Looking at Condorcet

[Dave Ketchum]

On Feb 3, 2012, at 12:31 AM, Clay Shentrup wrote:

As far as I can tell, no amount of evidence will change DaveK's  
mind. But it's worth pointing out that Score Voting is superior to  
Condorcet in essentially every way.


* Lower Bayesian Regret with any number of strategic or honest voters
NOTE: Some would argue that maybe people are more honest with  
Condorcet, but if you look at this graph, the difference would have  
to be pretty enormous in order for Condorcet to outperform Score  
Voting (http://scorevoting.net/BayRegsFig.html). And there's some  
evidence it's actually the opposite — i.e. Score Voting inspires  
more honesty.


No comments on BR for now.



* Is simpler for voters.
  1) Ranked ballots tend to result in about 7 times as many spoiled  
ballots, whereas Score Voting REDUCES ballot spoilage.


Huh!  Was there bias by the measurers?  Both have voters use numbers  
for voting.  ANY number valid for Score could also be valid for  
Condorcet, which needs no more than to be able to read the numbers  
assigned to A and B by a voter and decide whether they say A>B, A=B,  
or A

IRV, by prohibiting equal ranks, demonstrates having more opportunity  
for spoilage.


  2) Even voters who can cast a valid ranked ballot will typically  
have no understanding of how the system works. E.g. we use Instant  
Runoff Voting in San Francisco, and experiments (plus my own  
experience asking around) has shown that the vast majority of people  
cannot correctly describe how the system works, or correctly pick  
the winner given a simplified hypothetical set of ballots. They  
generally assume it uses the counting rules of Borda ("you get more  
points the better your ranking is, and the most points wins"). So in  
reality, the same thing would happen with Condorcet. Whereas the  
principle behind Score Voting happens to match people's intuitive  
expectations, so it is simpler in that they will tend to just  
inherently understand it, the same way people understand restaurant  
ratings on Yelp.


Discussing IRV is not especially helpful here since it is somewhat  
more complex than Condorcet.


For Condorcet the basic is simply saying which candidate is liked best  
via assigned ranks - if more voters vote A>B than vote B>A, then B  
cannot be CW (liked better than each other candidate).


Score ratings say a bit more - how much better is A liked than B.   
Rating gets tricky when deciding how much - when wanting to say A>B>C,  
decreasing rating for B increases A's chance of winning over B but  
decreases limit for B>C, and thus increases possibility of C beating B  
(if other voters rate C about equal to B, this change could make C win  
the race).


* Is MASSIVELY simpler for election officials.


Condorcet is not especially complex - read the ranks from each ballot,  
counting which candidate is preferred for each pair of candidates, and  
then note which is the CW.


* Is more expressive, which is valuable for the 10% or more of  
voters who will choose to be expressive rather than tactical.


Score ratings are numbers to show how much each candidate is liked -  
questionable how accurate as to matching true liking.


Condorcet ranking only asks which candidate is better liked in each  
pair - a simpler question.


Condorcet systems fundamentally try to maximize the wrong thing.  
They try to maximize the odds of electing the Condorcet winner, even  
though it's a proven mathematical fact that the Condorcet winner is  
not necessarily the option whom the electorate prefers.


Trouble is that the ballots ARE the voters' statements as to which  
candidate IS the CW.  The above paragraph seems to be based on the  
ballots sometimes not truly representing the thoughts of the voters  
voting them.





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Re: [EM] Majority-Judgement. Condorcet.

[Ted Stern]

On 03 Feb 2012 16:07:59 -0800, Kevin Venzke wrote:
>
> Personally I don't understand why one would want to spend time on a
> method that you have to defend by saying "it might work anyway,"
> even if as built the incentives are wrong.
>  
> I like the idea of being able to test things, so I may be biased here.
>  
> It's taking a shot in the dark. How fantastic must this method be,
> for that to seem like a good idea? It's hard to believe one couldn't
> go back and work out something that more reliably does whatever you
> were going for.
>  
> Also, if MJ is a serious proposal it should be called "median
> rating" and use the Bucklin tiebreaker. You'd have a name that means
> something and a tiebreaker that isn't a pain to solve. At the top
> rating (the one we all agree might matter) the rules aren't even
> different.

Can anyone explain how Majority Judgment differs in practice from
Bucklin with equal ratings allowed?  AKA Fallback Approval?  Or
one of the many versions of Majority Choice Approval (another vague
name, IMO)?

> The name is so bad. Imagine you hear that on the news and are trying
> to figure out what it means. "Majority" doesn't tell you that much
> (IRV already does majorities and they didn't even need to put it in
> the name) and "judgment" refers to what? The voting. They're calling
> it "judgment" though.  Puke. So dramatic and it doesn't even say
> anything.
>  
> The tie-breaker is the same thing really. It sounds neat and fair to
> pull out median votes one by one, but in practice that isn't the
> methodology, you really should use math. Try coding MJ and then see
> how much code you could delete, how much less thought it would've
> taken you, if you just wanted the Bucklin tiebreaker instead.
>

And you can delete even more code if it is just ER-Bucklin.

Ted  
-- 
araucaria dot araucana at gmail dot com


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Re: [EM] Majority-Judgement. Condorcet.

[Kevin Venzke]

Personally I don't understand why one would want to spend time on a method that 
you have to defend by saying
"it might work anyway," even if as built the incentives are wrong.
 
I like the idea of being able to test things, so I may be biased here.
 
It's taking a shot in the dark. How fantastic must this method be, for that to 
seem like a good idea? It's hard to
believe one couldn't go back and work out something that more reliably does 
whatever you were going for.
 
Also, if MJ is a serious proposal it should be called "median rating" and use 
the Bucklin tiebreaker. You'd have
a name that means something and a tiebreaker that isn't a pain to solve.At the 
top rating (the one we all agree
might matter) the rules aren't even different.
 
The name is so bad. Imagine you hear that on the news and are trying to figure 
out what it means. "Majority"
doesn't tell you that much (IRV already does majorities and they didn't even 
need to put it in the name) and
"judgment" refers to what? The voting. They're calling it "judgment" though. 
Puke. So dramatic and it doesn't
even say anything.
 
The tie-breaker is the same thing really. It sounds neat and fair to pull out 
median votes one by one, but in
practice that isn't the methodology, you really should use math. Try coding MJ 
and then see how much code you
could delete, how much less thought it would've taken you, if you just wanted 
the Bucklin tiebreaker instead.
 
Kevin
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Re: [EM] Gaming the Vote

[Ted Stern]

On 30 Jan 2012 23:51:56 -0800, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>
> On 01/31/2012 01:48 AM, Ted Stern wrote:
>> I've been thinking that one way to spread information about
>> alternative voting systems might be to gamify one or more systems.
>
> [...]
>
>> Has anyone out there in the EM communities thought about this?
>
> I saw someone made a game out of gerrymandering. Did it work to raise
> awareness of the problem of gerrymandering? I don't know, but its
> results might give more information of whether doing something like
> that with voting would work.

One reason I thought that a voting game had promise was this article:

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/12/ff_cowclicker/all/1

If a silly game about clicking a cow can gain a following, wouldn't
something real have a chance?

Ted
-- 
araucaria dot araucana at gmail dot com


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Re: [EM] not fair.

[David L Wetzell]

>
>
> From: Jameson Quinn 
> To: EM 
> Cc:
> Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2012 16:25:26 -0600
> Subject: Re: [EM] not fair.
>
>
> 2012/2/3 David L Wetzell 
>
>> [sarcasm]Thanks for the constructive criticism of the model building
>> process.
>>
>> I'm so sorry I haven't had as many pseudo-experimental models to buttress
>> my args on this list.  They so commonly shed so much light on the matter,
>> it's no wonder you all agree on so much...[/sarcasm]
>>
>
> We actually do agree on a lot. We talk about the stuff we don't agree on.
>

dlw: 4 electoral rules in your consensus statement is not a lot of
agreement.
You're going back and forth on Approval vs Condorcet.  I believe I can get
some amens from some of our less techie readers here that it's rather
bewildering for them.

>
>
>>
>> Once again, you're the one w.o. any institutional backing.
>>
>
> OK, I'll go back to writing the voting server for Ubuntu then.
>

If political voting rules were only like such...

>
> Seriously, you can do better than sarcasm. I think "simplify, simplify,
> simplify" is in fact very constructive feedback on model-building. It's
> exactly what I want to hear when I'm doing it.
>

dlw: I said there were parts that I could leave out.
I'd rather start w. the whole and then drop feature by feature to see
what's driving the results.
It's something I learned in a Computer Science course I took as an
undergrad.

>
>
>>  I'm the guy defending a modified version of the status quo single-winner
>> electoral alternative.  The burden of proof is on you more so than me,
>> simply because the amount of time/energy spent educating folks about IRV is
>> o.w. a sunk cost that will likely have to be repeated if we theoretically
>> were to start over again.
>>
>
> Yes. What percent of US voters understand IRV? (Even if I substituted "US"
> with "Cambridge" or "SF", I doubt you'd reach even half.) The sunk cost is
> trivial relative to the size of the task.
>

Among progressive/centrist activists who are the movers and shakers of the
US's democracy, there's a lot higher understanding of IRV.

dlw

>
>
>>
>> dlw
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>>
>>> Please, stop talking, and start calculating. If you're not ready to
>>> calculate, then at least stop arguing with us, and start arguing with the
>>> fuzzy beast, until you are.
>>>
>>> Jameson
>>>
>>>  2012/2/3 David L Wetzell 
>>>
   dlw: When you try out a new piece of technology, you can't expect to
>> get it right right away.  A democracy is a function of both the rules and
>> people's habits.  If GOPers had seen that their party couldn't win then
>> some of them wd've voted Dem first and the CW wd have won
>>
>
> David!  That's the point!  That's the problem!  IRV promised that you
> could vote for your favorite candidate and that would not help elect your
> least favorite.


 dlw: They promised it to those who had to vote strategically way too
 often with FPTP.  They did not promise it was always true.


> it explicitly failed to do that on the second try.  In this town that,
> at least 3 years ago, had 3 major parties (so the spoiler wasn't some 
> kinda
> Ron Paul or Ralph Nader gadfly who had no hope of election but could still
> rob victory from the majority candidate).  In the context where the 3 (or
> more) candidates are *all* plausible, Condorcet would have elected a
> candidate where, by definition, no other candidate was preferred over this
> CW and, at least in the Burlington 2009 example, would not have suffered
> spoiler, punishment for sincere voting, non-monotonicity, and
> non-summability/transparency.
>

 dlw: non-monotonicity is not at fault here, unless you expect a large
 no. of GOP supporters to have a huge change of heart to support the Prog
 party firstNeither was there a problem with summability/transparency...

 And how do you know there wouldn't be other foibles that emerge as
 folks got adjusted to a Condorcet method?

 Perhaps the number of candidates would proliferate so much that it'd be
 a vote-counting nightmare...

 At the end of the day, 3-way competitive elections for single-seat
 positions are hard to sustain.  IRV wd have made the parties around the
 true center be the major parties.  Now, it seems that won't be the case...

>
> rbj: It *failed*, David.  (but it still beats Plurality and,
> unfortunately the voters of Burlington, who adopted IRV by 65% in 2005,
> tossed the baby out with the bathwater in 2010 and *really* did in 2011
> when they rejected the 50% threshold.)


 dlw: Depends on your loss-function and whether you take a single-period
 or multi-period assessment of the outcomes.
 I refuse to accept a pass-fail assessment of IRV wrt Burlington.  It's
 not appropriate.  It's playing into the hands of the opponents of el

Re: [EM] brainstorm'n electoral calculus on acid...

[David L Wetzell]

>
> 1. I disagree; I do not think IRV will do well in the scenario you
> describe.
>

Well that's why we'd need to try it out

>
> 2. It's too complex. We need toy models that focus on one aspect at a
> time, not anything that tries to be realistic. Think macroeconomics 101
> (saltwater), where anything that doesn't fit on one graph is put off until
> next year.
>

Nope.  The whole is more than the sum of its parts.  We can and should go
beyond Macro 101.

I'm willing to defend each part of the model here, but I think it as a
whole captures an environment where election rules have different effects
in a system where the center is somewhat opaque and parties are not
stationary or able to reposition themselves at will along the 1-d space
used by voters .

So "chicken"???
dlw

>
> jq
>

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Re: [EM] Kevin V. wrt anti-Approval Voting.

[David L Wetzell]

>
>
> -- Forwarded message --
> From: Kevin Venzke 
> To: em 
> Cc:
> Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2012 21:56:53 + (GMT)
> Subject: Re: [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...
> Hi David,
>
> I'm trying to make sense of this as an anti-Approval argument, since you
> say we don't want people to pursue the
> center "too doggedly." Did you explain what bad consequence follows from
> pursuing the center doggedly, though?
> I thought I understood your post as an "IRV is not so bad" argument, until
> I reached this line.
>

dlw: I guess I have probably given two different args here.
1. X*P is more important than X by itself and so Xoth-Xirv>0 isn't so bad
if Pirv>>Poth.
2. Whether Xoth is greater than Xirv is itself in question if there are
other considerations that matter besides nailing the center,
I think I make more clear what I mean by that in my brainstorm'n post.  I
view political preferences as somewhat haphazard and that the true center
is taking a random walk that we don't per se want to follow too much, given
how most important political changes, like HC reform, take time to make.

In my defense, I did always use |Xirv-Xoth| so I did not always formally
concede that Xoth was greater than Xirv, although I think I also argued
that it depends on the context which election rule is "best".  For the use
of the Condorcet method, it seems to work well when there are relatively
few candidates and voters and the voters know a lot about the options.  For
Range Voting, I like situations not unlike Olympic competitions, where
there's a simple, literal "objective" basis for comparison and the
judgements are made publicly immediately.  This is not like most political
elections.  I suppose since Approval Voting is a watered down version of
Range Voting, that is part of why I'm wary of its' use in politics as well.
 SODA tries to get at my concerns quite inventively, but I think it
combines enough concepts/practices that would be alien to the experiences
of US_American voters that it'd be quite hard to pitch and not per se much
better than an approval enhanced IRV within the US's 2-party dominated
system...
dlw

>
>

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Re: [EM] not fair.

[Jameson Quinn]

2012/2/3 David L Wetzell 

> [sarcasm]Thanks for the constructive criticism of the model building
> process.
>
> I'm so sorry I haven't had as many pseudo-experimental models to buttress
> my args on this list.  They so commonly shed so much light on the matter,
> it's no wonder you all agree on so much...[/sarcasm]
>

We actually do agree on a lot. We talk about the stuff we don't agree on.


>
> Once again, you're the one w.o. any institutional backing.
>

OK, I'll go back to writing the voting server for Ubuntu then.

Seriously, you can do better than sarcasm. I think "simplify, simplify,
simplify" is in fact very constructive feedback on model-building. It's
exactly what I want to hear when I'm doing it.


>  I'm the guy defending a modified version of the status quo single-winner
> electoral alternative.  The burden of proof is on you more so than me,
> simply because the amount of time/energy spent educating folks about IRV is
> o.w. a sunk cost that will likely have to be repeated if we theoretically
> were to start over again.
>

Yes. What percent of US voters understand IRV? (Even if I substituted "US"
with "Cambridge" or "SF", I doubt you'd reach even half.) The sunk cost is
trivial relative to the size of the task.


>
> dlw
>
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 3:06 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>
>> Please, stop talking, and start calculating. If you're not ready to
>> calculate, then at least stop arguing with us, and start arguing with the
>> fuzzy beast, until you are.
>>
>> Jameson
>>
>>  2012/2/3 David L Wetzell 
>>
>>>   dlw: When you try out a new piece of technology, you can't expect to
> get it right right away.  A democracy is a function of both the rules and
> people's habits.  If GOPers had seen that their party couldn't win then
> some of them wd've voted Dem first and the CW wd have won
>

 David!  That's the point!  That's the problem!  IRV promised that you
 could vote for your favorite candidate and that would not help elect your
 least favorite.
>>>
>>>
>>> dlw: They promised it to those who had to vote strategically way too
>>> often with FPTP.  They did not promise it was always true.
>>>
>>>
 it explicitly failed to do that on the second try.  In this town that,
 at least 3 years ago, had 3 major parties (so the spoiler wasn't some kinda
 Ron Paul or Ralph Nader gadfly who had no hope of election but could still
 rob victory from the majority candidate).  In the context where the 3 (or
 more) candidates are *all* plausible, Condorcet would have elected a
 candidate where, by definition, no other candidate was preferred over this
 CW and, at least in the Burlington 2009 example, would not have suffered
 spoiler, punishment for sincere voting, non-monotonicity, and
 non-summability/transparency.

>>>
>>> dlw: non-monotonicity is not at fault here, unless you expect a large
>>> no. of GOP supporters to have a huge change of heart to support the Prog
>>> party firstNeither was there a problem with summability/transparency...
>>>
>>> And how do you know there wouldn't be other foibles that emerge as folks
>>> got adjusted to a Condorcet method?
>>>
>>> Perhaps the number of candidates would proliferate so much that it'd be
>>> a vote-counting nightmare...
>>>
>>> At the end of the day, 3-way competitive elections for single-seat
>>> positions are hard to sustain.  IRV wd have made the parties around the
>>> true center be the major parties.  Now, it seems that won't be the case...
>>>

 rbj: It *failed*, David.  (but it still beats Plurality and,
 unfortunately the voters of Burlington, who adopted IRV by 65% in 2005,
 tossed the baby out with the bathwater in 2010 and *really* did in 2011
 when they rejected the 50% threshold.)
>>>
>>>
>>> dlw: Depends on your loss-function and whether you take a single-period
>>> or multi-period assessment of the outcomes.
>>> I refuse to accept a pass-fail assessment of IRV wrt Burlington.  It's
>>> not appropriate.  It's playing into the hands of the opponents of electoral
>>> reform by repeating their frames.
>>>
>>>
 rbj:  now, elections are something that we (any particular group of
 people) do not do every day.  it's not like you got your iPhone or iPad and
 it worked the day you bought it, and had trouble the second day, but you
 are willing to see how well it works the next day.  it's more like a
 high-rise building technique or bridge-building technique (e.g. Tacoma
 Narrows Bridge).  if you use some new technique and it fails the first time
 you use it, you better believe there will be hesitation and controversy the
 next time its use is proposed.  and very similar if it happens the second
 use.

>>>
>>> It depends on the severity of the loss.  You are exaggerating the
>>> practical bads of the election of a non-CW somewhat left of the CW.
>>> Micronumerosity says we got to not draw strong conclusions from very

Re: [EM] [CES #4429] Looking at Condorcet

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 02/03/2012 08:45 PM, Andy Jennings wrote:


- If someone built a computer program that presented me pairs of
candidates at a time as Kristofer suggested, that would make it somewhat
easier.  I think I would still prefer to divide them into tiers first,
but if I divided them into tiers first, I might not need the pairwise
comparison hand-holding.  Also, suppose that I analyzed the candidates
in three different policy dimensions that I consider equally important
and I found that my policy preferences were:
Foreign Policy: A>B>C
Domestic Social Issues: B>C>A
Domestic Economic Issues: C>A>B
Now I prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A.  A cycle among my own personal
preferences when I compare them pairwise.  Then my output ranking would
depend on the order in which the pairwise questions were asked.  ??!?


You could look at a (single-winner) voting method as a stand-in for a 
deliberative process. A ranked voting method tries to find the best 
common ranking given the data it has to go on, which are the votes 
themselves.


In the ideal case, you'd just have a deliberative process instead of the 
voting. There would be some back-and-forth and then you'd reach a 
consensus. The problem is that it doesn't scale.


But if a voting method is a stand-in for a deliberative process, then it 
makes sense that each voter's preference would be transitive. The voters 
would already have gone through an internal deliberative process to 
arrive at a ranking of the candidates they are considering. So if I'm 
right about that, then the voter would already know his own consensus 
ranking based on the "foreign vs social vs economic" tradeoffs and the 
relative weights they have to him.


In practice, things aren't that clean, but I think it works to show, 
intuitively, that people would have transitive rankings and so wouldn't 
encounter the internal cycle problem.


If a voter's internal ranking is transitive, then you would only need to 
ask him "X better than Y?" n lg n times for n candidates*, where lg is 
the base-2 logarithm. If not, you would have to ask him n^2 times. 
Condorcet-type methods could handle both cases - in the latter, n^2 
case, a pairwise method would incorporate intra-individual cycles by the 
exact same logic as it'd handle inter-individual cycles.


(As I have said before, I have been thinking about using Condorcet 
methods for getting a ranking out of preference comparisons where the 
individual may have internal cycles because the set is so large. Ranking 
pictures is a simple example of that, as there may be so many pictures 
that the person looks at different things when comparing X to Y than 
when comparing Y to Z. However, doing n^2 comparisons grows very quickly 
and becomes quite tiresome. Some amount of preprocessing may speed it up 
- like your "tiers" or an Approval first stage where the person is 
generous with the approvals but excludes that which he considers 
obviously uninteresting.)


* The simplest algorithm that achieves this bound is, in essence, an 
insertion sort that uses a binary search for each insertion. Its 
constant factor is better than say, quicksort, too, since all we care 
about is the number of comparisons, not the time it takes to insert.



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Re: [EM] brainstorm'n electoral calculus on acid...

[Jameson Quinn]

2012/2/3 David L Wetzell 

> What if the electoral space goes back and forth between a 2-d space and a
> 1-d space?
> For every election, there's a randomly generated weight given to the 2-ds
> that has some continuity over time.
> Like lets say that the weight given to one dimension at time t is vt and
> the weight to the other is 1-vt and vt is based on an xt variable that goes
> from negative infinity to positive infinity such that
> vt=Exp(xt)/(1+Exp(xt)) and xt= .8*xt-1 + ut and ut has a standard normal
> distribution.
>
> Now, let's postulate a cob-web model of decision-making.  
> 
>
> Existing party's candidates make decisions in 2-d space, using vt-1
> weights and some sort of friction that inhibits their ability to reposition
> within each of the two dimensions.
>
> OTOH, a new party's candidates enter into 2-d space anywhere based on the
> new period's weights.
> However, the new party makes its entrance decision based on a cost-benefit
> decision using the incorrect assumption that voters make decisions based on
> the 1-d of this period.
>
> However, voters actually decide based on the weighted average of this
> period and last periods' 1-d positions of candidates relative to them.
>  Let's just use a 2-period moving average for now.  They treat the prior
> period distance of the new party's candidate as the closest corner on the
> 1-d space...
>
> [There also needs to be some expected utility and fixed disutility from
> voting that determines who votes and who does not vote to enable the de
> facto center to be severed from the true center but that feature could be
> introduced later ]
>
> More importantly, we need some sort of "money" on the table to justify
> entrance and exit, movement and maybe the merger of parties.
> If I had to choose between endogenous voter-participation and endogenous
> party participation, the latter would be more relevant, since we're talking
> about the desirability of a 2-party vs multi-party system and the no. of
> parties really needs to be endogenous.  So how do we keep the "losers" in
> the game?  Obviously, there's going to be a certain taste for political
> participation that is based on the strength of their support which lets
> them absorb some losses.  [Another twist would be to also have a less
> valuable 3-seat election, using LR Hare, that would give two or three
> parties some additional cash-flow... and which could try out my IRV+ + Am
> forms of PR idea, with other election rules replacing IRV+.]
>
> Finally, we'd need to come up with a way to measure and assess the
> outcomes.
> Here we need a weighted average of the diff between the winner and the
> true center in 1d and the lack of variability of the winner in 2d.
> This allows that nailing the center, or electing the CW, is not the
> end-all-be-all for how to assess election rules.  We could compare and
> contrast the relative performance of election rules in three cases.  The
> first would be where all the weight is on the distance from the true
> center.  The second would be where all of the weight is on the stability of
> the winner in 2 d.  The third would be a mixture of the two, perhaps to be
> progressive 2/3rds on getting closer to the center and 1/3rd on the lack of
> variability.
>
> I think IRV+ will perform well in the mixture assessment.
>

> Any thoughts/suggestions?
>

1. I disagree; I do not think IRV will do well in the scenario you describe.

2. It's too complex. We need toy models that focus on one aspect at a time,
not anything that tries to be realistic. Think macroeconomics 101
(saltwater), where anything that doesn't fit on one graph is put off until
next year.

jq

Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

Re: [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...

[Kevin Venzke]

Hi David,
 
I'm trying to make sense of this as an anti-Approval argument, since you say we 
don't want people to pursue the
center "too doggedly." Did you explain what bad consequence follows from 
pursuing the center doggedly, though?
I thought I understood your post as an "IRV is not so bad" argument, until I 
reached this line.
 
Kevin
 

De : David L Wetzell 
À : EM  
Envoyé le : Jeudi 2 février 2012 22h12
Objet : [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...


http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7696446405100112491&postID=7962761243854932802
 

Dale Sheldon Hess has provoked me to explain my views about IRV wrt to a 1-d 
politics game.  

Here's what I wrote, 
DSH:"Place a party directly in the center. Now, if I can place two more 
parties, I can always make your centrist lose. ALWAYS. And you can't move 
more-centrally to do anything about it (I can actually make it so that you can 
still win by moving AWAY from the center; how's that for perverse incentives!)"

dlw: Ah, but in this example, the two biggest parties are in fact close to the 
center(as I predicted)... and so the fact that the most centrist party doesn't 
win is relatively small potatoes. 

And as for the 3rd party candidate winning by going way from the center, that's 
a curiosity due to the uniform dist'n of voter preferences. That isn't 
realistic...

I've played with Yee's voteline thingy. The issue is with the uncertainty as to 
what is the center, since it's something that's dynamic. 

That's why I downplay the import of "center squeeze". The center can't be 
cordoned off by anyone and so to pick a rule based on how it pins down the 
center is like chasing after the wind. 

With both IRV and FPP, there's pressure to move twds the center by the biggest 
parties, it's stronger with IRV. Thus, the de facto center ends up becoming 
more closely tied to the true center.

Let's say a shift in voter preferences has D and R at the 70 and 71 penny marks 
and G sets up shop at 35. G wd win with both FPP and IRV, but both D and R get 
to move again. But there are rigidities that prevent them from moving too much 
too fast. And so the D's move to 55 and the R's to 56. And then G still wins if 
it's FPP, but with IRV then R wins. 

But what if D moves and R (perhaps stuck in FPP thinking) doesn't move, so the 
positions are 35, 55 and 70? In that case, G would win. 
Tragedy, right? But it can be expected that the next election will change 
things further so that the G's must move to the right(or merge w. the Ds) and 
the R must move to the L or merge with the Ds. 

The moral of the story is that parties are like the people groping around in 
the dark in Socrates' cave. They cannot choose exactly where on the spectrum 
they will be. But IRV helps us to adjust and makes the outcome closer to the 
center than o.w. with FPP. 

If Approval Voting had been used then D would have won by moving to 64. In fact 
all the parties wd be strongly encouraged to beeline for whatever the center 
seemed to be and with a shifting center, they'd all stumble and bump together 
in the dark. 

Whereas, the Gs by taking a stand at 35 at least they succeed in moving things 
to the left or maybe they'll get lucky... 

It's not an exact science, which is what it should be. We want people to pursue 
the center, but not too doggedly...

Sorry if that's fuzzy, but I think that's closer to real life...

dlw 
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[EM] brainstorm'n electoral calculus on acid...

[David L Wetzell]

What if the electoral space goes back and forth between a 2-d space and a
1-d space?
For every election, there's a randomly generated weight given to the 2-ds
that has some continuity over time.
Like lets say that the weight given to one dimension at time t is vt and
the weight to the other is 1-vt and vt is based on an xt variable that goes
from negative infinity to positive infinity such that
vt=Exp(xt)/(1+Exp(xt)) and xt= .8*xt-1 + ut and ut has a standard normal
distribution.

Now, let's postulate a cob-web model of decision-making.


Existing party's candidates make decisions in 2-d space, using vt-1 weights
and some sort of friction that inhibits their ability to reposition within
each of the two dimensions.

OTOH, a new party's candidates enter into 2-d space anywhere based on the
new period's weights.
However, the new party makes its entrance decision based on a cost-benefit
decision using the incorrect assumption that voters make decisions based on
the 1-d of this period.

However, voters actually decide based on the weighted average of this
period and last periods' 1-d positions of candidates relative to them.
 Let's just use a 2-period moving average for now.  They treat the prior
period distance of the new party's candidate as the closest corner on the
1-d space...

[There also needs to be some expected utility and fixed disutility from
voting that determines who votes and who does not vote to enable the de
facto center to be severed from the true center but that feature could be
introduced later ]

More importantly, we need some sort of "money" on the table to justify
entrance and exit, movement and maybe the merger of parties.
If I had to choose between endogenous voter-participation and endogenous
party participation, the latter would be more relevant, since we're talking
about the desirability of a 2-party vs multi-party system and the no. of
parties really needs to be endogenous.  So how do we keep the "losers" in
the game?  Obviously, there's going to be a certain taste for political
participation that is based on the strength of their support which lets
them absorb some losses.  [Another twist would be to also have a less
valuable 3-seat election, using LR Hare, that would give two or three
parties some additional cash-flow... and which could try out my IRV+ + Am
forms of PR idea, with other election rules replacing IRV+.]

Finally, we'd need to come up with a way to measure and assess the outcomes.
Here we need a weighted average of the diff between the winner and the true
center in 1d and the lack of variability of the winner in 2d.
This allows that nailing the center, or electing the CW, is not the
end-all-be-all for how to assess election rules.  We could compare and
contrast the relative performance of election rules in three cases.  The
first would be where all the weight is on the distance from the true
center.  The second would be where all of the weight is on the stability of
the winner in 2 d.  The third would be a mixture of the two, perhaps to be
progressive 2/3rds on getting closer to the center and 1/3rd on the lack of
variability.

I think IRV+ will perform well in the mixture assessment.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

dlw

Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

Re: [EM] [CES #4429] Looking at Condorcet

[Juho Laatu]

On 3.2.2012, at 21.45, Andy Jennings wrote:

> - If someone built a computer program that presented me pairs of candidates 
> at a time as Kristofer suggested, that would make it somewhat easier.  I 
> think I would still prefer to divide them into tiers first, but if I divided 
> them into tiers first, I might not need the pairwise comparison hand-holding. 
>  Also, suppose that I analyzed the candidates in three different policy 
> dimensions that I consider equally important and I found that my policy 
> preferences were:
> Foreign Policy: A>B>C
> Domestic Social Issues: B>C>A
> Domestic Economic Issues: C>A>B
> Now I prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A.  A cycle among my own personal 
> preferences when I compare them pairwise.  Then my output ranking would 
> depend on the order in which the pairwise questions were asked.  ??!?

A typical assumption is that the rankings of individuals are transitive. I 
think this is pretty much based on the assumption that people rate the 
candidates (unconsciously) anyway. Your three opinions were maybe 9>8>7, 9>8>7 
and 9>6>3 in terms of ratings. That means that your transitive preference order 
is C>A>B, and you do have valid (unconscious) ratings for the candidates.

The alternative approach would be that you indeed have cyclic preferences. But 
that maybe means only that you may behave strangely if you base your judgements 
on limited information. If you consider only foreign policy and social issues, 
you may end up saying B>C, but if you had remembered to think also about 
economic issues, you would quickly change your statement.

> - If I were trying to cast an honest Score Voting Ballot, I would have to 
> feel like there was an objective meaning for the various scores.  Then I 
> could consider each candidate separately and give them my honest scores.  I 
> probably wouldn't even normalize.  If I were going to normalize, then I might 
> as well go fully-strategic and vote approval-style.

I agree. Already normalization is strategic. (Or maybe you have been explicitly 
requested to give min points to the worst candiate, and max points to the best, 
in which case you could sincerely cast a sincere (re)scaled vote.)

> - If a real election were being tabulated with Condorcet, I would vote 
> honestly.

I agree. That is a good default strategy. (Strategic voting doesn't really make 
sense unless some expert that the voter trusts tells him to vote in some 
certain way. And also in this case the expert may well be wrong.)

> - If a real election were being tabulated with IRV, I would warn people not 
> to vote for minor candidates.

Also this approach makes sense. This is however not a complete strategy yet. If 
we look at Burlington, maybe also some supporters of a major (top three) 
candidate should not have voted their favourite. (Sometimes voting for the 
minor candidates is harmless , and also a useful tool to market the minor 
candidates for some secondary reasons.)

> FBC is very important to me

Could one say that Condorcet methods are FBC compliant enough so that you can 
recommend people not to betray their favourite 1) as the defaut rule if they 
are not told by experts to do otherwise or 2) as the default rule that is in 
practice valid in all lagrge elections, where voters make independent decisions 
on how to vote, and where their opinions are not fixed but can change all the 
time?

Juho




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Re: [EM] RBJ et al.

[Jameson Quinn]

Please, stop talking, and start calculating. If you're not ready to
calculate, then at least stop arguing with us, and start arguing with the
fuzzy beast, until you are.

Jameson

2012/2/3 David L Wetzell 

>  dlw: When you try out a new piece of technology, you can't expect to get
>>> it right right away.  A democracy is a function of both the rules and
>>> people's habits.  If GOPers had seen that their party couldn't win then
>>> some of them wd've voted Dem first and the CW wd have won
>>>
>>
>> David!  That's the point!  That's the problem!  IRV promised that you
>> could vote for your favorite candidate and that would not help elect your
>> least favorite.
>
>
> dlw: They promised it to those who had to vote strategically way too often
> with FPTP.  They did not promise it was always true.
>
>
>> it explicitly failed to do that on the second try.  In this town that, at
>> least 3 years ago, had 3 major parties (so the spoiler wasn't some kinda
>> Ron Paul or Ralph Nader gadfly who had no hope of election but could still
>> rob victory from the majority candidate).  In the context where the 3 (or
>> more) candidates are *all* plausible, Condorcet would have elected a
>> candidate where, by definition, no other candidate was preferred over this
>> CW and, at least in the Burlington 2009 example, would not have suffered
>> spoiler, punishment for sincere voting, non-monotonicity, and
>> non-summability/transparency.
>>
>
> dlw: non-monotonicity is not at fault here, unless you expect a large no.
> of GOP supporters to have a huge change of heart to support the Prog party
> firstNeither was there a problem with summability/transparency...
>
> And how do you know there wouldn't be other foibles that emerge as folks
> got adjusted to a Condorcet method?
>
> Perhaps the number of candidates would proliferate so much that it'd be a
> vote-counting nightmare...
>
> At the end of the day, 3-way competitive elections for single-seat
> positions are hard to sustain.  IRV wd have made the parties around the
> true center be the major parties.  Now, it seems that won't be the case...
>
>>
>> rbj: It *failed*, David.  (but it still beats Plurality and,
>> unfortunately the voters of Burlington, who adopted IRV by 65% in 2005,
>> tossed the baby out with the bathwater in 2010 and *really* did in 2011
>> when they rejected the 50% threshold.)
>
>
> dlw: Depends on your loss-function and whether you take a single-period or
> multi-period assessment of the outcomes.
> I refuse to accept a pass-fail assessment of IRV wrt Burlington.  It's not
> appropriate.  It's playing into the hands of the opponents of electoral
> reform by repeating their frames.
>
>
>> rbj:  now, elections are something that we (any particular group of
>> people) do not do every day.  it's not like you got your iPhone or iPad and
>> it worked the day you bought it, and had trouble the second day, but you
>> are willing to see how well it works the next day.  it's more like a
>> high-rise building technique or bridge-building technique (e.g. Tacoma
>> Narrows Bridge).  if you use some new technique and it fails the first time
>> you use it, you better believe there will be hesitation and controversy the
>> next time its use is proposed.  and very similar if it happens the second
>> use.
>>
>
> It depends on the severity of the loss.  You are exaggerating the
> practical bads of the election of a non-CW somewhat left of the CW.
> Micronumerosity says we got to not draw strong conclusions from very
> limited use of something new.  It tells us we need to turn away from our
> fallen human natures driven by our fears.
>
>>
>> rbj: on the other hand, if the technique was used 50 times before it
>> failed, you would more likely look at the failure as a fluke or outlier.
>>  elections happen once or twice a year (if you're politically active, if
>> you're not it's more like once in four years) and their consequences are
>> significant, in some cases worse than a building collapse.
>>
>
> dlw: Once again, assess the "damage" and take the longer view of how this
> will play into the next election.  If IRV had been continued the Prog
> candidate wd have moved to the right some to woo Democrats so the outcome
> wd have been preferred by most people.
>
> "a failure that occurs so soon after adoption might very well be an
> indication of something systemic, not just an outlier."
>
> dlw: It ain't necessarily so... and you got to consider the relative
> import of type one vs type two errors.  A sample of type 2 is not going to
> be powerful and when you try to make it powerful, you increase the
> likelihood of a type one error, ending the use of a good election rule
> before it had a chance to prove itself among a populace that understands it
> better.
>
>>
>>> dlw:To prevent all tactical voting is not the greatest good.
>>>
>>
>> The *primary* reason for adopting ranked-choice voting, the greatest good
>> promised, is to remove the *burden* of tactical vo

Re: [EM] [CES #4429] Looking at Condorcet

[Jameson Quinn]

It sounds to me as if, of all the methods you mentioned, you would prefer
MJ.

How would you vote with SODA?

(go ahead and think of your answer before you read mine)

I think I'd almost always just delegate to my favorite with SODA. If I
don't like my favorite's delegation order, that would make me reconsider
whether they're really my favorite. If I decide they still are, I would
consider whether I thought the difference between my preferred order and
their predeclared preferences would matter. If I decide it does, then look
for the best candidate I think has a chance, and vote for them and everyone
better. Chances of me ever getting to that last step would around one in
10, I reckon.

Jameson

2012/2/3 Andy Jennings 

> On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 10:09 PM, Richard Fobes <
> electionmeth...@votefair.org> wrote:
>
>> On 2/2/2012 11:07 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>>
>>> On 02/02/2012 05:28 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>>>
>>>  I honestly think that honest rating is easier than honest ranking.
 ...

>>>
>>  As a contrast, to me, ranking is easier than rating. ...
>>>
>>
>> I too find ranking easier than rating.
>>
>
>
> I go back and forth on this, myself.  Some thoughts:
>
> - If I had to rank more than ten candidates, I think it would be difficult
> unless I put them into three or four tiers first.  Then, perhaps I would
> choose to rank the candidates within the tiers or perhaps I would leave
> them all tied if I didn't really care that much.  Thus, for me, honest
> rating with just a few buckets is more basic than ranking.
>
> - If someone built a computer program that presented me pairs of
> candidates at a time as Kristofer suggested, that would make it somewhat
> easier.  I think I would still prefer to divide them into tiers first, but
> if I divided them into tiers first, I might not need the pairwise
> comparison hand-holding.  Also, suppose that I analyzed the candidates in
> three different policy dimensions that I consider equally important and I
> found that my policy preferences were:
> Foreign Policy: A>B>C
> Domestic Social Issues: B>C>A
> Domestic Economic Issues: C>A>B
> Now I prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A.  A cycle among my own personal
> preferences when I compare them pairwise.  Then my output ranking would
> depend on the order in which the pairwise questions were asked.  ??!?
>
> - If I were trying to cast an honest Approval Ballot, then I would think
> about each candidate separately and decide whether I approve them or not.
>
> - If I were trying to cast a strategic Approval Ballot or a fully
> strategic Score Voting Ballot, then I would first rank all the candidates,
> then decide where to put my cutoff.  So I can definitely see the argument
> of those who think that ranking is more fundamental than even approval
> voting.
>
> - If I were trying to cast an honest Score Voting Ballot, I would have to
> feel like there was an objective meaning for the various scores.  Then I
> could consider each candidate separately and give them my honest scores.  I
> probably wouldn't even normalize.  If I were going to normalize, then I
> might as well go fully-strategic and vote approval-style.
>
> - If I were casting an MJ ballot, I think I would consider each candidate
> separately and vote completely honestly, knowing that my vote was doing
> everything it could to help any candidate where my score was higher than
> society's median and, similarly, doing everything it could to hurt any
> candidate where my score was lower than society's median.  I realize that
> my vote would not be fully strategic if there were two frontrunners and I
> liked both of them or disliked both of them, but in that situation, who
> cares?
>
> - If a real election were being tabulated with Condorcet, I would vote
> honestly.
>
> - If a real election were being tabulated with IRV, I would warn people
> not to vote for minor candidates.
>
> Let me admit that a crucial point for me is that the only way to gain
> Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives is to tell the voters to evaluate
> each candidate independently and vote honestly, which may make me biased
> towards rating methods.  FBC is very important to me and I'm still
> skeptical of the FBC-compliant ranked-ballot methods recently proposed.
>
> ~ Andy
>
> 
> 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] RBJ et al.

[David L Wetzell]

>
> dlw: When you try out a new piece of technology, you can't expect to get
>> it right right away.  A democracy is a function of both the rules and
>> people's habits.  If GOPers had seen that their party couldn't win then
>> some of them wd've voted Dem first and the CW wd have won
>>
>
> David!  That's the point!  That's the problem!  IRV promised that you
> could vote for your favorite candidate and that would not help elect your
> least favorite.


dlw: They promised it to those who had to vote strategically way too often
with FPTP.  They did not promise it was always true.


> it explicitly failed to do that on the second try.  In this town that, at
> least 3 years ago, had 3 major parties (so the spoiler wasn't some kinda
> Ron Paul or Ralph Nader gadfly who had no hope of election but could still
> rob victory from the majority candidate).  In the context where the 3 (or
> more) candidates are *all* plausible, Condorcet would have elected a
> candidate where, by definition, no other candidate was preferred over this
> CW and, at least in the Burlington 2009 example, would not have suffered
> spoiler, punishment for sincere voting, non-monotonicity, and
> non-summability/transparency.
>

dlw: non-monotonicity is not at fault here, unless you expect a large no.
of GOP supporters to have a huge change of heart to support the Prog party
firstNeither was there a problem with summability/transparency...

And how do you know there wouldn't be other foibles that emerge as folks
got adjusted to a Condorcet method?

Perhaps the number of candidates would proliferate so much that it'd be a
vote-counting nightmare...

At the end of the day, 3-way competitive elections for single-seat
positions are hard to sustain.  IRV wd have made the parties around the
true center be the major parties.  Now, it seems that won't be the case...

>
> rbj: It *failed*, David.  (but it still beats Plurality and, unfortunately
> the voters of Burlington, who adopted IRV by 65% in 2005, tossed the baby
> out with the bathwater in 2010 and *really* did in 2011 when they rejected
> the 50% threshold.)


dlw: Depends on your loss-function and whether you take a single-period or
multi-period assessment of the outcomes.
I refuse to accept a pass-fail assessment of IRV wrt Burlington.  It's not
appropriate.  It's playing into the hands of the opponents of electoral
reform by repeating their frames.


> rbj:  now, elections are something that we (any particular group of
> people) do not do every day.  it's not like you got your iPhone or iPad and
> it worked the day you bought it, and had trouble the second day, but you
> are willing to see how well it works the next day.  it's more like a
> high-rise building technique or bridge-building technique (e.g. Tacoma
> Narrows Bridge).  if you use some new technique and it fails the first time
> you use it, you better believe there will be hesitation and controversy the
> next time its use is proposed.  and very similar if it happens the second
> use.
>

It depends on the severity of the loss.  You are exaggerating the practical
bads of the election of a non-CW somewhat left of the CW.
Micronumerosity says we got to not draw strong conclusions from very
limited use of something new.  It tells us we need to turn away from our
fallen human natures driven by our fears.

>
> rbj: on the other hand, if the technique was used 50 times before it
> failed, you would more likely look at the failure as a fluke or outlier.
>  elections happen once or twice a year (if you're politically active, if
> you're not it's more like once in four years) and their consequences are
> significant, in some cases worse than a building collapse.
>

dlw: Once again, assess the "damage" and take the longer view of how this
will play into the next election.  If IRV had been continued the Prog
candidate wd have moved to the right some to woo Democrats so the outcome
wd have been preferred by most people.

"a failure that occurs so soon after adoption might very well be an
indication of something systemic, not just an outlier."

dlw: It ain't necessarily so... and you got to consider the relative import
of type one vs type two errors.  A sample of type 2 is not going to be
powerful and when you try to make it powerful, you increase the likelihood
of a type one error, ending the use of a good election rule before it had a
chance to prove itself among a populace that understands it better.

>
>> dlw:To prevent all tactical voting is not the greatest good.
>>
>
> The *primary* reason for adopting ranked-choice voting, the greatest good
> promised, is to remove the *burden* of tactical voting from voters so that
> they do not experience voter's regret the day after the election (which,
> here in Burlington, soured many voters that do not return to the polls,
> thus reducing participation in democracy).  i don't suggest that we can
> prevent all tactical voting, but the common burden of tactical voting, the
> tactic calle

Re: [EM] [CES #4429] Looking at Condorcet

[Andy Jennings]

On Thu, Feb 2, 2012 at 10:09 PM, Richard Fobes  wrote:

> On 2/2/2012 11:07 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>
>> On 02/02/2012 05:28 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>>
>>  I honestly think that honest rating is easier than honest ranking.
>>> ...
>>>
>>
>  As a contrast, to me, ranking is easier than rating. ...
>>
>
> I too find ranking easier than rating.
>


I go back and forth on this, myself.  Some thoughts:

- If I had to rank more than ten candidates, I think it would be difficult
unless I put them into three or four tiers first.  Then, perhaps I would
choose to rank the candidates within the tiers or perhaps I would leave
them all tied if I didn't really care that much.  Thus, for me, honest
rating with just a few buckets is more basic than ranking.

- If someone built a computer program that presented me pairs of candidates
at a time as Kristofer suggested, that would make it somewhat easier.  I
think I would still prefer to divide them into tiers first, but if I
divided them into tiers first, I might not need the pairwise comparison
hand-holding.  Also, suppose that I analyzed the candidates in three
different policy dimensions that I consider equally important and I found
that my policy preferences were:
Foreign Policy: A>B>C
Domestic Social Issues: B>C>A
Domestic Economic Issues: C>A>B
Now I prefer A to B, B to C, and C to A.  A cycle among my own personal
preferences when I compare them pairwise.  Then my output ranking would
depend on the order in which the pairwise questions were asked.  ??!?

- If I were trying to cast an honest Approval Ballot, then I would think
about each candidate separately and decide whether I approve them or not.

- If I were trying to cast a strategic Approval Ballot or a fully strategic
Score Voting Ballot, then I would first rank all the candidates, then
decide where to put my cutoff.  So I can definitely see the argument of
those who think that ranking is more fundamental than even approval voting.

- If I were trying to cast an honest Score Voting Ballot, I would have to
feel like there was an objective meaning for the various scores.  Then I
could consider each candidate separately and give them my honest scores.  I
probably wouldn't even normalize.  If I were going to normalize, then I
might as well go fully-strategic and vote approval-style.

- If I were casting an MJ ballot, I think I would consider each candidate
separately and vote completely honestly, knowing that my vote was doing
everything it could to help any candidate where my score was higher than
society's median and, similarly, doing everything it could to hurt any
candidate where my score was lower than society's median.  I realize that
my vote would not be fully strategic if there were two frontrunners and I
liked both of them or disliked both of them, but in that situation, who
cares?

- If a real election were being tabulated with Condorcet, I would vote
honestly.

- If a real election were being tabulated with IRV, I would warn people not
to vote for minor candidates.

Let me admit that a crucial point for me is that the only way to gain
Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives is to tell the voters to evaluate
each candidate independently and vote honestly, which may make me biased
towards rating methods.  FBC is very important to me and I'm still
skeptical of the FBC-compliant ranked-ballot methods recently proposed.

~ Andy

Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

Re: [EM] Jameson: MJ

[Jameson Quinn]

2012/2/3 MIKE OSSIPOFF 

>  *I'd said:
>
> ***>* But I'd told how easily a strategic faction can take advantage of and 
> beat*>* a sincere-voting faction.*>**
> Not to my satisfaction.
>
> [endquote]
>
> Of course that won't do.
>
> If you want to claim that my statements referred to were incorrect,
> then you need to tell why you think so.
>
> Please repeat them then. (Doing so in the first place would have saved us
both time.)

>
> I clearly told how, in MJ, a strategizing faction can take advantage of a 
> sincere faction. Which
> part of that description do you disagree with? Be specific.
> *
> I'd said:
>
> ***>* Thanks, Kristofer, for confirming my conjecture: MJ strategy is like 
> RV*>* strategy.*>**>* This is for sure: In a u/a election, MJ's strategy is 
> the same as that of*>* RV: Max-rate the acceptables and*>* min-rate the 
> unacceptables.*>**
> This is not true. If sending a message about the relative value within
> either group is worth more than a thousand times less than winning the
> election, the rational strategy is to use the top two and the bottom two
> ratings.
>
> [endquote]
>
> Incorrect. In a u/a election, the all-important thing is ensuring that no
> unacceptable candidate wins.
> **>* I conjecture that, in a non-u/a, 0-info election, MJ's strategy is*>* 
> likewise identical to that of RV: Max-rate the*>* above-mean candidates and 
> min-rate the below-mean candidates.***
> As above.
>
> [endquote]
>
> Strategy whose purpose is the the outcome of the current election is called 
> "instrumental strategy".
>
> It's usually or always what we're referring to when we speak of a method's 
> voting strategy.
>
> I was talking about instrumental strategy. That can be, and often is, more 
> important than
> sending a message. But sure, if what you want is to send a message about a 
> merit-difference among the
> candidates for whom you'd vote for in instrumental Approval voting, then of 
> course you might not do
>
> instrumental voting.
>
> We're humans, not robots. We always have both short-term instrumental and
long-term instrumental (which you mistakenly call non-instrumental) goals.
I agree that usually the former dominate. But in MJ, unless they around a
thousand times stronger, they do not lead to the strategy you posit.

>
> Sometimes, in mock elections, in rating the candidates,
> I have slightly differed from instrumental voting in order to express a 
> difference.
>
> But, above, I was talking about instrumental strategy. Maybe you wouldn't do 
> instrumental
> strategy. One thing for certain is that anyone who considers it a u/a 
> election will do
> instrumental strategy.
>
> Mike Ossipoff
>
>
> 
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
>

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Re: [EM] Majority-Judgement. Condorcet.

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 02/02/2012 09:40 PM, MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote:


MJ:

Thanks for all the answers about MJ strategy.

But I'd told how easily a strategic faction can take advantage of and
beat a sincere-voting faction.

And, if the contest is close, then even a small difference in sincerity
could decide which faction's candidate wins.

And that amounts to a co-operatioin/defection problem too.

No amount of speculation or discussion of MJ's other strategy issues or
mystique will make that go away.

Thanks, Kristofer, for confirming my conjecture: MJ strategy is like RV
strategy.


Don't forget the rest that I said, though. Maximal MJ strategy is like 
RV strategy. A Homo Economicus would vote Approval-style in a one-shot 
election. He might do so even when he thinks there are going to be 
elections after this one -- or he may not (as Jameson Quinn says).


In any event, I think that MJ provides enough protection, were the 
majority's default sentiment to vote honestly, that they would not feel 
the need to vote strategically simply to head off a worse outcome. 
Furthermore, if there is some amount of strategy going on, the voters 
don't have to go all the way to a maximal ballot to defend their 
outcome. All they need to do, in order to support X over Y, is to vote X 
and Y on the other side of their respective medians. As the fraction of 
strategists goes to unity, the exaggeration needed goes to the maximum 
possible.


Thus, if the voters aren't rational economic men (and turnout is 
evidence in itself that they aren't), the voters default to honesty 
(i.e. don't reason like Warren did), and the parties can't push large 
swathes of the people to vote strategically, then you shouldn't need to 
vote Approval style in an MJ election.


In other words, in an MJ election, there's a certain room for honesty. 
If you get past this headroom, then you should vote somewhat 
strategically. If you get further past it, you should vote more 
strategically still. But as long as you're in the first area, then you 
have to get a lot of your friends to vote strategically too to make a 
difference.


So the whole thing hinges on whether people will vote strategically even 
though they may not benefit over voting honestly. It's like a 
multiplayer prisoner's dilemma where, if some fraction f all defect, 
they get a greater payoff and the rest gets a sucker's, but if a 
fraction less than f tattles, they get the same payoff as if they 
hadn't. Would ordinary people defect? I don't think so, if f were large 
enough, because people are decent (i.e. not Homo Economicuses).



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[EM] Jameson: MJ

[MIKE OSSIPOFF]

I'd said:

> But I'd told how easily a strategic faction can take advantage of and beat
> a sincere-voting faction.
>

Not to my satisfaction.

[endquote]

Of course that won't do. 

If you want to claim that my statements referred to were incorrect,
then you need to tell why you think so. 

I clearly told how, in MJ, a strategizing faction can take advantage of a 
sincere faction. Which
part of that description do you disagree with? Be specific.

I'd said:

> Thanks, Kristofer, for confirming my conjecture: MJ strategy is like RV
> strategy.
>
> This is for sure: In a u/a election, MJ's strategy is the same as that of
> RV: Max-rate the acceptables and
> min-rate the unacceptables.
>

This is not true. If sending a message about the relative value within
either group is worth more than a thousand times less than winning the
election, the rational strategy is to use the top two and the bottom two
ratings.

[endquote]

Incorrect. In a u/a election, the all-important thing is ensuring that no
unacceptable candidate wins.

> I conjecture that, in a non-u/a, 0-info election, MJ's strategy is
> likewise identical to that of RV: Max-rate the
> above-mean candidates and min-rate the below-mean candidates.


As above.

[endquote]

Strategy whose purpose is the the outcome of the current election is called 
"instrumental strategy".

It's usually or always what we're referring to when we speak of a method's 
voting strategy.

I was talking about instrumental strategy. That can be, and often is, more 
important than
sending a message. But sure, if what you want is to send a message about a 
merit-difference among the 
candidates for whom you'd vote for in instrumental Approval voting, then of 
course you might not do
instrumental voting.

Sometimes, in mock elections, in rating the candidates,
I have slightly differed from instrumental voting in order to express a 
difference.

But, above, I was talking about instrumental strategy. Maybe you wouldn't do 
instrumental
strategy. One thing for certain is that anyone who considers it a u/a election 
will do 
instrumental strategy.

Mike Ossipoff

  
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

Re: [EM] "Compliant SODA?": seeking a SODA version which may meet more criteria

[Jameson Quinn]

2012/2/3 Kristofer Munsterhjelm 

> On 02/03/2012 02:26 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>
>> Of course, in most real-world elections I've ever heard of, 4 candidates
>> are plenty. So is there a way to fix SODA to make those pesky
>> 5-candidate scenarios go away? Analogously, Condorcet's paradox arises
>> for 3 or more candidates, but you can make 3 candidates paradox-free if
>> you require a 2/3 supermajority, and continue to etcetera with an
>> arbitrarily high supermajority.
>>
>
> I thought 2/3 supermajorities always were transitive. How would you make a
> supermajority cycle with many candidates?
>

oops, you're right.

 One possibility would be for predeclared candidate preferences to be a
>> single approval ballot, rather than a preference ordering. That way, in
>> the scenario described above the delegator candidates could not disagree
>> on the order of preference of the target candidates. This would actually
>> simplify SODA rather than complicating it.
>>
>
> Could you use a rated method instead of a ranked one for the candidate
> delegation orders?
>

Looked at that. Doesn't work.

Looking at the predeclare-approval idea... I think that if you assume that
there are three known candidates who, between them, get delegated votes
from over 75% of the electorate, and that these candidates predeclare
before the others, then I think that there may be a "correct strategy" for
all candidates for turning a preference order into predeclared preference
order. So basically, for up to 4 effective candidates, it would works
without a voodoo dependence on Sicilian candidate strategy in predeclaring
the approval ballots.

Jameson

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Re: [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...

[David L Wetzell]

the cart comes after the horse, not before it.

Just as you cannot beat the Smiths with bullets in the Matrix,
you cannot beat fuzzy monsters with Numbers. Graphs. Diagrams...

There's gotta be some messy speculation about how to boil it down first...

dlw

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 11:04 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:

>
>> dlw: I know.  I'm still grappling w. the fucking fuzzy monster in my
>> head...
>>
>
> Numbers. Graphs. Diagrams. These are the weapons which beat fuzzy
> monsters. Not words.
>
>
>>  ...reasserting our positions verbally has no value.
>>>
>>
>> dlw: I'm saying ...
>>
>
> ummm.
>
> JQ
>

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Re: [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...

[Jameson Quinn]

>
>
> dlw: I know.  I'm still grappling w. the fucking fuzzy monster in my
> head...
>

Numbers. Graphs. Diagrams. These are the weapons which beat fuzzy monsters.
Not words.


>  ...reasserting our positions verbally has no value.
>>
>
> dlw: I'm saying ...
>

ummm.

JQ

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Re: [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...

[robert bristow-johnson]

On 2/3/12 6:00 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
I consider the whole "encourages big parties to follow the moving 
center" thing to be so ridiculous as not to bear argument,


i do too.  fully agree.

given that, as DSH points out, the center is one of the worst places 
to be in IRV.


as evidenced in the town where i live.  Democrats should just be 
cleaning up here because of fringe support from both the left and the 
right and we haven't had a Dem mayor for 3 decades.  friggin' 
unbelievable.  (and it looks like we won't again this year.  with a 40% 
threshold, the GOP candidate who lost the IRV in 2009 is almost certain 
to be elected mayor, and will likely not get 50%.)


Sure, it does a better job than plurality. But if you want a system 
which preserves two parties but makes them track the center, and you 
think that US exceptionalism means this is a two-party nation by nature,


even though i would not recommend Obama to say this in public, the 
notion of U.S. exceptionalism is a cancer in our national self-image.  
that notion has caused millions of unnecessary deaths worldwide and will 
likely plunge the planet into an environmental and spent-resource 
nightmare within 100 years.


then you have a great array of systems which will accomplish your 
goal, and IRV is not one of them.


it appears that Condorcet favors the centrist candidate more than IRV or 
FPTP (e.g. Burlington 2009) because it is not opaque to 2nd-choice 
preferences in any case (FPTP doesn't even collect 2nd-choice 
information and IRV is opaque to it until your 1st choice is eliminated) 
and it's less likely that left or right wing voters will vote for the 
other extreme as their 2nd choice than choose the centrist.  even though 
that may be the case, that is no reason to adopt Condorcet.  the reason 
to use Condorcet is it elects the simple-majority choice (with equally 
weighted votes) of the voters when that alternative is offered in 
reference any other alternative.  and, as a practical matter, we, as a 
people, gotta choose one of those alternatives.


--

r b-j  r...@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."




Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

Re: [EM] re Unger wrt tabulation

[robert bristow-johnson]

On 2/3/12 10:41 AM, David L Wetzell wrote:



dlw:   I do change my mind.  The fact I haven't wrt IRV is
because I
   got a good case and it is a huge non sequitur to
presume that
   "the" solution to the US's political problems is for it to
   become an EU-style multi-party system


 RBJcareful, David.  a hard-won reform that performs
poorly the
   *second* time it's used, sets *back* the movement for voting
   reform.  it's important that we get this right, not just
change it
   from the status quo.


dlw2: But it didn't perform poorly.


other than electing the wrong candidate (and all the anomalies
that resulted), i guess it didn't do too bad.


When you try out a new piece of technology, you can't expect to get it 
right right away.  A democracy is a function of both the rules and 
people's habits.  If GOPers had seen that their party couldn't win 
then some of them wd've voted Dem first and the CW wd have won


David!  That's the point!  That's the problem!  IRV promised that you 
could vote for your favorite candidate and that would not help elect 
your least favorite.  it explicitly failed to do that on the second 
try.  In this town that, at least 3 years ago, had 3 major parties (so 
the spoiler wasn't some kinda Ron Paul or Ralph Nader gadfly who had no 
hope of election but could still rob victory from the majority 
candidate).  In the context where the 3 (or more) candidates are *all* 
plausible, Condorcet would have elected a candidate where, by 
definition, no other candidate was preferred over this CW and, at least 
in the Burlington 2009 example, would not have suffered spoiler, 
punishment for sincere voting, non-monotonicity, and 
non-summability/transparency.


It *failed*, David.  (but it still beats Plurality and, unfortunately 
the voters of Burlington, who adopted IRV by 65% in 2005, tossed the 
baby out with the bathwater in 2010 and *really* did in 2011 when they 
rejected the 50% threshold.)  now, elections are something that we (any 
particular group of people) do not do every day.  it's not like you got 
your iPhone or iPad and it worked the day you bought it, and had trouble 
the second day, but you are willing to see how well it works the next 
day.  it's more like a high-rise building technique or bridge-building 
technique (e.g. Tacoma Narrows Bridge).  if you use some new technique 
and it fails the first time you use it, you better believe there will be 
hesitation and controversy the next time its use is proposed.  and very 
similar if it happens the second use.


on the other hand, if the technique was used 50 times before it failed, 
you would more likely look at the failure as a fluke or outlier.  
elections happen once or twice a year (if you're politically active, if 
you're not it's more like once in four years) and their consequences are 
significant, in some cases worse than a building collapse.  a failure 
that occurs so soon after adoption might very well be an indication of 
something systemic, not just an outlier.





As far as we know, the sort of graft discovered about the
Progressive party's mayor was par for the course, but it got
revealed as part of a campaign to hurt the Prog party.


the political and legal difficulties of the Kiss administration is
non sequitur.  the failure of IRV in 2009 does not stem from any
political failures afterward.  the failure of IRV is because it
didn't do in 2009 what it was promised to do.  it literally did
not protect voters from a spoiler situation that (if IRV continued
to be the law) leads to tactical voting.


To prevent all tactical voting is not the greatest good.


The *primary* reason for adopting ranked-choice voting, the greatest 
good promised, is to remove the *burden* of tactical voting from voters 
so that they do not experience voter's regret the day after the election 
(which, here in Burlington, soured many voters that do not return to the 
polls, thus reducing participation in democracy).  i don't suggest that 
we can prevent all tactical voting, but the common burden of tactical 
voting, the tactic called "compromising", is avoidable and *should* be 
avoided where at all possible.


--

r b-j  r...@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."




Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

Re: [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...

[David L Wetzell]

>
>> *dlw:JMKeynes* stated that creative thinking begins as a "grey, *fuzzy*,
>> woolly *monster*" in one's head. my idea is still under development
>> and it very well may remain a heuristic due to the phenomena of theglobal 
>> underdetermination of 
>> science.
>>
>> JQ: Certainly, nothing you've said so far is unreasonable for that; a
>>> one-dimensional spectrum with an unknown shift between elections, voters
>>> with some bias towards the top two parties from the last election, and
>>> parties with some cost for mobility, especially with an inability to switch
>>> positions, trying to maximize their win percentage with the least movement.
>>> I believe that in such a model, IRV would be closer to Plurality (ie, bad)
>>> than it would be to any other good system (approval with reasonable voter
>>> strategy, Condorcet, MJ, Range, or SODA). I hope we could make some kind of
>>> a bet, and that my expected winnings plus my curiosity would be enough to
>>> make it worth my while to actually do the test.
>>>
>>
>> You'd need to model a random walk of the center that alters all of the
>> positions and the difficulties of mobility of parties.  It's easier for a
>> new party to locate anywhere, but then it's gotta take time to gain
>> voter-support.  I think thereby that voter-participation (or lack thereof)
>> cd also be a relevant factor and the use of a 2-d model.
>>
>
> It sounds to me as if you're leaving yourself an out. When you're making a
> model to explain a basic behavior, you need to be able to reduce it to the
> essentials. If one of those essentials is something that can't work in
> silicio, OK. But the epicycles you're talking about are the kind of thing
> you add to make your model fit reality better, not to get basic behaviors
> like center-following.
>

dlw: I know.  I'm still grappling w. the fucking fuzzy monster in my
head...

>
> We both agree that parties will not follow the center well under
> plurality, and that they will under some other system(s) (such as honest
> Range). I'm saying IRV will be more like plurality, you're saying it will
> be more like the good systems. We should not have to build more than a
> simple model to test this. Until we build that model, reasserting our
> positions verbally has no value.
>

dlw: I'm saying that it's possible that closely following the center might
be a curse in disguise(since people can be fickle and it takes time to
bring about serious changes).  We need to bridge following the center and
not following the center and IRV+ might be what does that...

>
>> I'm also guessing from my fuzzy monster that both the distance of the de
>> facto center from the true center and the stability of the de facto center
>> are going to be worthy of consideration, not unlike how mean-variance
>> models are used to evaluate stocks.
>>
>>>
>>> Otherwise, I'm tired of debating this back and forth. I'm an empiricist,
>>> not a platonist. (Middlebrow?)
>>>
>>
>> I'm not a gambler and not very peculiarly endowed at this point.  (I was
>> a prof of Econ in Idaho, but apparently my car started leaking
>> carbon-monoxide close to the beginning of my time in ID, and that took a
>> toll on me.  I needed some time off and when I started looking for work
>> again it was the great recession.  That was when I began to study electoral
>> reform seriously and it is why I'm currently a tutor  (and a writer of
>> political science fiction apparently).)
>>
>
> OK, understood. So that means we have to try even harder to make the model
> simpler; simple enough so that my curiosity is enough to get me to test it
> out.
>

I'm game if others are.  I'd like to do some digging in the lit to see if
others have done something similar... I passed along to Dale Sheldon Hess
an article that modeled something like this.

I think 2 dims matter because there's more scope for epicycles and because
it seems relevant to the US's so-called democracy.  I don't think we need
to model participation in a  very complicated manner, but it is also
relevant for the US and it does help to capture how the de facto mean can
shift away from the true mean.  And I think 3rd parties are better at
moving to a new point on the graph, but there's gotta be something that
keeps them from automatically garnering all the votes close to them...
 This probably needs to be integrated with the model of voter
participation

dlw

>
>
>>
>> So I hope we can try doing something like this... as a way to push the
>> envelope from static models that presume parties are able to position
>> themselves where they choose.
>>
>> dlw
>>
>
>

Election-Methods 

[EM] re Unger wrt tabulation

[David L Wetzell]

>
>
>> dlw:   I do change my mind.  The fact I haven't wrt IRV is because I
>>got a good case and it is a huge non sequitur to presume that
>>"the" solution to the US's political problems is for it to
>>become an EU-style multi-party system
>>
>>
>>  RBJcareful, David.  a hard-won reform that performs poorly the
>>*second* time it's used, sets *back* the movement for voting
>>reform.  it's important that we get this right, not just change it
>>from the status quo.
>>
>>
>> dlw2: But it didn't perform poorly.
>>
>>
> other than electing the wrong candidate (and all the anomalies that
> resulted), i guess it didn't do too bad.
>

When you try out a new piece of technology, you can't expect to get it
right right away.  A democracy is a function of both the rules and people's
habits.  If GOPers had seen that their party couldn't win then some of them
wd've voted Dem first and the CW wd have won

>
>  As far as we know, the sort of graft discovered about the Progressive
>> party's mayor was par for the course, but it got revealed as part of a
>> campaign to hurt the Prog party.
>>
>
> the political and legal difficulties of the Kiss administration is non
> sequitur.  the failure of IRV in 2009 does not stem from any political
> failures afterward.  the failure of IRV is because it didn't do in 2009
> what it was promised to do.  it literally did not protect voters from a
> spoiler situation that (if IRV continued to be the law) leads to tactical
> voting.
>

To prevent all tactical voting is not the greatest good.  Since parties can
change their positions, to pressure the supporters of a major party that
refuses to move towards the true center is in the public interest, and that
requires allowing for the possibility of a "spoiler".

>
>   When the IRV rule didn't elect the CW in an unusually 3-way competitive
>> election, it became vulnerable to a serious campaign against it.
>>
>
> well the main group of detractors were not the supporters of the candidate
> that became the CW.  most of the CW supporters as well as the CW himself,
> opposed the repeal question in 2010.  most of the detractors were
> supporters of the plurality candidate that could not accept that one of the
> reason we adopted IRV in the first place was that sometimes it would not
> elect the plurality candidate.  if IRV always elected the plurality
> candidate, what point is there in adopting it?
>

See, follow the money... we can't point to reversals as definitive KOs of
particular rules, because people don't understand electoral theory and can
be manipulated too easily.

dlw

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Re: [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...

[Jameson Quinn]

2012/2/3 David L Wetzell 

>
>
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 8:38 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> 2012/2/3 David L Wetzell 
>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 5:00 AM, Jameson Quinn 
>>> wrote:
>>>
 I consider the whole "encourages big parties to follow the moving
 center" thing to be so ridiculous as not to bear argument, given that, as
 DSH points out, the center is one of the worst places to be in IRV.
>>>
>>>
>>> I said "follow" and I presume that one cannot pinpoint the center...  In
>>> my heuristic, we get to see the numbers, but the parties don't.  They can
>>> choose direction and to move a little or a relatively lot, but they cannot
>>> stake any point, cuz it will change.
>>>
>>>
>> Enough words.
>>
>> If you propose a model that is well-specified enough to be tested in
>> silicio, we'll talk.
>>
>
> *JMKeynes* stated that creative thinking begins as a "grey, *fuzzy*,
> woolly *monster*" in one's head. my idea is still under development
> and it very well may remain a heuristic due to the phenomena of theglobal 
> underdetermination of 
> science.
>
> JQ: Certainly, nothing you've said so far is unreasonable for that; a
>> one-dimensional spectrum with an unknown shift between elections, voters
>> with some bias towards the top two parties from the last election, and
>> parties with some cost for mobility, especially with an inability to switch
>> positions, trying to maximize their win percentage with the least movement.
>> I believe that in such a model, IRV would be closer to Plurality (ie, bad)
>> than it would be to any other good system (approval with reasonable voter
>> strategy, Condorcet, MJ, Range, or SODA). I hope we could make some kind of
>> a bet, and that my expected winnings plus my curiosity would be enough to
>> make it worth my while to actually do the test.
>>
>
> You'd need to model a random walk of the center that alters all of the
> positions and the difficulties of mobility of parties.  It's easier for a
> new party to locate anywhere, but then it's gotta take time to gain
> voter-support.  I think thereby that voter-participation (or lack thereof)
> cd also be a relevant factor and the use of a 2-d model.
>

It sounds to me as if you're leaving yourself an out. When you're making a
model to explain a basic behavior, you need to be able to reduce it to the
essentials. If one of those essentials is something that can't work in
silicio, OK. But the epicycles you're talking about are the kind of thing
you add to make your model fit reality better, not to get basic behaviors
like center-following.

We both agree that parties will not follow the center well under plurality,
and that they will under some other system(s) (such as honest Range). I'm
saying IRV will be more like plurality, you're saying it will be more like
the good systems. We should not have to build more than a simple model to
test this. Until we build that model, reasserting our positions verbally
has no value.


>
> I'm also guessing from my fuzzy monster that both the distance of the de
> facto center from the true center and the stability of the de facto center
> are going to be worthy of consideration, not unlike how mean-variance
> models are used to evaluate stocks.
>
>>
>> Otherwise, I'm tired of debating this back and forth. I'm an empiricist,
>> not a platonist. (Middlebrow?)
>>
>
> I'm not a gambler and not very peculiarly endowed at this point.  (I was a
> prof of Econ in Idaho, but apparently my car started leaking
> carbon-monoxide close to the beginning of my time in ID, and that took a
> toll on me.  I needed some time off and when I started looking for work
> again it was the great recession.  That was when I began to study electoral
> reform seriously and it is why I'm currently a tutor  (and a writer of
> political science fiction apparently).)
>

OK, understood. So that means we have to try even harder to make the model
simpler; simple enough so that my curiosity is enough to get me to test it
out.


>
> So I hope we can try doing something like this... as a way to push the
> envelope from static models that presume parties are able to position
> themselves where they choose.
>
> dlw
>

Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

Re: [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...

[David L Wetzell]

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 8:38 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:

>
>
> 2012/2/3 David L Wetzell 
>
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 5:00 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>>
>>> I consider the whole "encourages big parties to follow the moving
>>> center" thing to be so ridiculous as not to bear argument, given that, as
>>> DSH points out, the center is one of the worst places to be in IRV.
>>
>>
>> I said "follow" and I presume that one cannot pinpoint the center...  In
>> my heuristic, we get to see the numbers, but the parties don't.  They can
>> choose direction and to move a little or a relatively lot, but they cannot
>> stake any point, cuz it will change.
>>
>>
> Enough words.
>
> If you propose a model that is well-specified enough to be tested in
> silicio, we'll talk.
>

*JMKeynes* stated that creative thinking begins as a "grey, *fuzzy*, woolly
*monster*" in one's head. my idea is still under development and it
very well may remain a heuristic due to the phenomena of the global
underdetermination of
science.

JQ: Certainly, nothing you've said so far is unreasonable for that; a
> one-dimensional spectrum with an unknown shift between elections, voters
> with some bias towards the top two parties from the last election, and
> parties with some cost for mobility, especially with an inability to switch
> positions, trying to maximize their win percentage with the least movement.
> I believe that in such a model, IRV would be closer to Plurality (ie, bad)
> than it would be to any other good system (approval with reasonable voter
> strategy, Condorcet, MJ, Range, or SODA). I hope we could make some kind of
> a bet, and that my expected winnings plus my curiosity would be enough to
> make it worth my while to actually do the test.
>

You'd need to model a random walk of the center that alters all of the
positions and the difficulties of mobility of parties.  It's easier for a
new party to locate anywhere, but then it's gotta take time to gain
voter-support.  I think thereby that voter-participation (or lack thereof)
cd also be a relevant factor and the use of a 2-d model.

I'm also guessing from my fuzzy monster that both the distance of the de
facto center from the true center and the stability of the de facto center
are going to be worthy of consideration, not unlike how mean-variance
models are used to evaluate stocks.

>
> Otherwise, I'm tired of debating this back and forth. I'm an empiricist,
> not a platonist. (Middlebrow?)
>

I'm not a gambler and not very peculiarly endowed at this point.  (I was a
prof of Econ in Idaho, but apparently my car started leaking
carbon-monoxide close to the beginning of my time in ID, and that took a
toll on me.  I needed some time off and when I started looking for work
again it was the great recession.  That was when I began to study electoral
reform seriously and it is why I'm currently a tutor  (and a writer of
political science fiction apparently).)

So I hope we can try doing something like this... as a way to push the
envelope from static models that presume parties are able to position
themselves where they choose.

dlw

Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

Re: [EM] "Compliant SODA?": seeking a SODA version which may meet more criteria

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 02/03/2012 02:26 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote:

Of course, in most real-world elections I've ever heard of, 4 candidates
are plenty. So is there a way to fix SODA to make those pesky
5-candidate scenarios go away? Analogously, Condorcet's paradox arises
for 3 or more candidates, but you can make 3 candidates paradox-free if
you require a 2/3 supermajority, and continue to etcetera with an
arbitrarily high supermajority.


I thought 2/3 supermajorities always were transitive. How would you make 
a supermajority cycle with many candidates?


(Warren says, on his singlepeakedness theorem page, that any N-way 
Condorcet cycle with N > 3 can be reduced to a 3-cycle; just draw a 
chord to create a 3-cycle.)



One possibility would be for predeclared candidate preferences to be a
single approval ballot, rather than a preference ordering. That way, in
the scenario described above the delegator candidates could not disagree
on the order of preference of the target candidates. This would actually
simplify SODA rather than complicating it.


Could you use a rated method instead of a ranked one for the candidate 
delegation orders?



Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

Re: [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...

[Jameson Quinn]

2012/2/3 David L Wetzell 

>
>
> On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 5:00 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:
>
>> I consider the whole "encourages big parties to follow the moving center"
>> thing to be so ridiculous as not to bear argument, given that, as DSH
>> points out, the center is one of the worst places to be in IRV.
>
>
> I said "follow" and I presume that one cannot pinpoint the center...  In
> my heuristic, we get to see the numbers, but the parties don't.  They can
> choose direction and to move a little or a relatively lot, but they cannot
> stake any point, cuz it will change.
>
>
Enough words.

If you propose a model that is well-specified enough to be tested in
silicio, we'll talk. Certainly, nothing you've said so far is unreasonable
for that; a one-dimensional spectrum with an unknown shift between
elections, voters with some bias towards the top two parties from the last
election, and parties with some cost for mobility, especially with an
inability to switch positions, trying to maximize their win percentage with
the least movement. I believe that in such a model, IRV would be closer to
Plurality (ie, bad) than it would be to any other good system (approval
with reasonable voter strategy, Condorcet, MJ, Range, or SODA). I hope we
could make some kind of a bet, and that my expected winnings plus my
curiosity would be enough to make it worth my while to actually do the test.

Otherwise, I'm tired of debating this back and forth. I'm an empiricist,
not a platonist. (Middlebrow?)


> Sure, it does a better job than plurality. But if you want a system which
>> preserves two parties but makes them track the center, and you think that
>> US exceptionalism means this is a two-party nation by nature, then you have
>> a great array of systems which will accomplish your goal, and IRV is not
>> one of them.
>
>
> Now, who is being ridiculous?
>

See above.

Jameson


>
> My whole point is that it's much more important to push for the strategic
> use of multi-winner elections in part of the US's system, rather than chase
> our tails around trying to figure out the best single-winner election rule.
>  You all cannot agree.  I think it's because in fact the diffs aren't that
> great and there's no good reason that IRV can't be immunized from a
> Burlington-like reversal.
>  dlw
>
>>
>> Jameson
>>
>> 2012/2/2 David L Wetzell 
>>
>>>
>>> http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7696446405100112491&postID=7962761243854932802
>>>
>>> Dale Sheldon Hess has provoked me to explain my views about IRV wrt to a
>>> 1-d politics game.
>>>
>>> Here's what I wrote,
>>> DSH:"Place a party directly in the center. Now, if I can place two more
>>> parties, I can always make your centrist lose. ALWAYS. And you can't move
>>> more-centrally to do anything about it (I can actually make it so that you
>>> can still win by moving AWAY from the center; how's that for perverse
>>> incentives!)"
>>>
>>> dlw: Ah, but in this example, the two biggest parties are in fact close
>>> to the center(as I predicted)... and so the fact that the most centrist
>>> party doesn't win is relatively small potatoes.
>>>
>>> And as for the 3rd party candidate winning by going way from the center,
>>> that's a curiosity due to the uniform dist'n of voter preferences. That
>>> isn't realistic...
>>>
>>> I've played with Yee's voteline thingy. The issue is with the
>>> uncertainty as to what is the center, since it's something that's dynamic.
>>>
>>> That's why I downplay the import of "center squeeze". The center can't
>>> be cordoned off by anyone and so to pick a rule based on how it pins down
>>> the center is like chasing after the wind.
>>>
>>> With both IRV and FPP, there's pressure to move twds the center by the
>>> biggest parties, it's stronger with IRV. Thus, the de facto center ends up
>>> becoming more closely tied to the true center.
>>>
>>> Let's say a shift in voter preferences has D and R at the 70 and 71
>>> penny marks and G sets up shop at 35. G wd win with both FPP and IRV, but
>>> both D and R get to move again. But there are rigidities that prevent them
>>> from moving too much too fast. And so the D's move to 55 and the R's to 56.
>>> And then G still wins if it's FPP, but with IRV then R wins.
>>>
>>> But what if D moves and R (perhaps stuck in FPP thinking) doesn't move,
>>> so the positions are 35, 55 and 70? In that case, G would win.
>>> Tragedy, right? But it can be expected that the next election will
>>> change things further so that the G's must move to the right(or merge w.
>>> the Ds) and the R must move to the L or merge with the Ds.
>>>
>>> The moral of the story is that parties are like the people groping
>>> around in the dark in Socrates' cave. They cannot choose exactly where on
>>> the spectrum they will be. But IRV helps us to adjust and makes the outcome
>>> closer to the center than o.w. with FPP.
>>>
>>> If Approval Voting had been used then D would have won by moving to 64.
>>> In fact all the parties wd be strongly encour

Re: [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...

[David L Wetzell]

On Fri, Feb 3, 2012 at 5:00 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote:

> I consider the whole "encourages big parties to follow the moving center"
> thing to be so ridiculous as not to bear argument, given that, as DSH
> points out, the center is one of the worst places to be in IRV.


I said "follow" and I presume that one cannot pinpoint the center...  In my
heuristic, we get to see the numbers, but the parties don't.  They can
choose direction and to move a little or a relatively lot, but they cannot
stake any point, cuz it will change.


> Sure, it does a better job than plurality. But if you want a system which
> preserves two parties but makes them track the center, and you think that
> US exceptionalism means this is a two-party nation by nature, then you have
> a great array of systems which will accomplish your goal, and IRV is not
> one of them.


Now, who is being ridiculous?

My whole point is that it's much more important to push for the strategic
use of multi-winner elections in part of the US's system, rather than chase
our tails around trying to figure out the best single-winner election rule.
 You all cannot agree.  I think it's because in fact the diffs aren't that
great and there's no good reason that IRV can't be immunized from a
Burlington-like reversal.
dlw

>
> Jameson
>
> 2012/2/2 David L Wetzell 
>
>>
>> http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7696446405100112491&postID=7962761243854932802
>>
>> Dale Sheldon Hess has provoked me to explain my views about IRV wrt to a
>> 1-d politics game.
>>
>> Here's what I wrote,
>> DSH:"Place a party directly in the center. Now, if I can place two more
>> parties, I can always make your centrist lose. ALWAYS. And you can't move
>> more-centrally to do anything about it (I can actually make it so that you
>> can still win by moving AWAY from the center; how's that for perverse
>> incentives!)"
>>
>> dlw: Ah, but in this example, the two biggest parties are in fact close
>> to the center(as I predicted)... and so the fact that the most centrist
>> party doesn't win is relatively small potatoes.
>>
>> And as for the 3rd party candidate winning by going way from the center,
>> that's a curiosity due to the uniform dist'n of voter preferences. That
>> isn't realistic...
>>
>> I've played with Yee's voteline thingy. The issue is with the uncertainty
>> as to what is the center, since it's something that's dynamic.
>>
>> That's why I downplay the import of "center squeeze". The center can't be
>> cordoned off by anyone and so to pick a rule based on how it pins down the
>> center is like chasing after the wind.
>>
>> With both IRV and FPP, there's pressure to move twds the center by the
>> biggest parties, it's stronger with IRV. Thus, the de facto center ends up
>> becoming more closely tied to the true center.
>>
>> Let's say a shift in voter preferences has D and R at the 70 and 71 penny
>> marks and G sets up shop at 35. G wd win with both FPP and IRV, but both D
>> and R get to move again. But there are rigidities that prevent them from
>> moving too much too fast. And so the D's move to 55 and the R's to 56. And
>> then G still wins if it's FPP, but with IRV then R wins.
>>
>> But what if D moves and R (perhaps stuck in FPP thinking) doesn't move,
>> so the positions are 35, 55 and 70? In that case, G would win.
>> Tragedy, right? But it can be expected that the next election will change
>> things further so that the G's must move to the right(or merge w. the Ds)
>> and the R must move to the L or merge with the Ds.
>>
>> The moral of the story is that parties are like the people groping around
>> in the dark in Socrates' cave. They cannot choose exactly where on the
>> spectrum they will be. But IRV helps us to adjust and makes the outcome
>> closer to the center than o.w. with FPP.
>>
>> If Approval Voting had been used then D would have won by moving to 64.
>> In fact all the parties wd be strongly encouraged to beeline for whatever
>> the center seemed to be and with a shifting center, they'd all stumble and
>> bump together in the dark.
>>
>> Whereas, the Gs by taking a stand at 35 at least they succeed in moving
>> things to the left or maybe they'll get lucky...
>>
>> It's not an exact science, which is what it should be. We want people to
>> pursue the center, but not too doggedly...
>>
>> Sorry if that's fuzzy, but I think that's closer to real life...
>>
>> dlw
>>
>> 
>> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list
>> info
>>
>>
>

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[EM] "Compliant SODA?": seeking a SODA version which may meet more criteria

[Jameson Quinn]

In exploring SODA's criteria compliance, I've realized that 4 candidates is
a bit of a magic number for SODA. For many criteria, the non-compliant
scenarios for SODA require at least 5 candidates: one "threat candidate"
who will win unless three of the other four can pool their votes; 2
"delegator candidates" for whom the delegation order matters; and 2 "target
candidates" who can win if they get the votes from both delegator
candidates. The delegators both prefer either target over the threat, but
each delegator prefers the two targets in a different order.

Of course, in most real-world elections I've ever heard of, 4 candidates
are plenty. So is there a way to fix SODA to make those pesky 5-candidate
scenarios go away? Analogously, Condorcet's paradox arises for 3 or more
candidates, but you can make 3 candidates paradox-free if you require a 2/3
supermajority, and continue to etcetera with an arbitrarily high
supermajority.

One possibility would be for predeclared candidate preferences to be a
single approval ballot, rather than a preference ordering. That way, in the
scenario described above the delegator candidates could not disagree on the
order of preference of the target candidates. This would actually simplify
SODA rather than complicating it.

I've explored some other ideas, and the above is the only one I've found so
far which works, but from my exploration it seems possible that there are
others.

I'd like to further explore this "compliant SODA", and hear other
suggestions of how to sweep the annoying 5-candidate scenarios under the
rug. However, this is just exploration for now; as a serious proposal, I'm
leaving SODA as it is.

Jameson

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Re: [EM] Sparring over AV vs IRV at Least of All Evils...

[Jameson Quinn]

I consider the whole "encourages big parties to follow the moving center"
thing to be so ridiculous as not to bear argument, given that, as DSH
points out, the center is one of the worst places to be in IRV. Sure, it
does a better job than plurality. But if you want a system which preserves
two parties but makes them track the center, and you think that US
exceptionalism means this is a two-party nation by nature, then you have a
great array of systems which will accomplish your goal, and IRV is not one
of them.

Jameson

2012/2/2 David L Wetzell 

>
> http://www.blogger.com/comment.g?blogID=7696446405100112491&postID=7962761243854932802
>
> Dale Sheldon Hess has provoked me to explain my views about IRV wrt to a
> 1-d politics game.
>
> Here's what I wrote,
> DSH:"Place a party directly in the center. Now, if I can place two more
> parties, I can always make your centrist lose. ALWAYS. And you can't move
> more-centrally to do anything about it (I can actually make it so that you
> can still win by moving AWAY from the center; how's that for perverse
> incentives!)"
>
> dlw: Ah, but in this example, the two biggest parties are in fact close to
> the center(as I predicted)... and so the fact that the most centrist party
> doesn't win is relatively small potatoes.
>
> And as for the 3rd party candidate winning by going way from the center,
> that's a curiosity due to the uniform dist'n of voter preferences. That
> isn't realistic...
>
> I've played with Yee's voteline thingy. The issue is with the uncertainty
> as to what is the center, since it's something that's dynamic.
>
> That's why I downplay the import of "center squeeze". The center can't be
> cordoned off by anyone and so to pick a rule based on how it pins down the
> center is like chasing after the wind.
>
> With both IRV and FPP, there's pressure to move twds the center by the
> biggest parties, it's stronger with IRV. Thus, the de facto center ends up
> becoming more closely tied to the true center.
>
> Let's say a shift in voter preferences has D and R at the 70 and 71 penny
> marks and G sets up shop at 35. G wd win with both FPP and IRV, but both D
> and R get to move again. But there are rigidities that prevent them from
> moving too much too fast. And so the D's move to 55 and the R's to 56. And
> then G still wins if it's FPP, but with IRV then R wins.
>
> But what if D moves and R (perhaps stuck in FPP thinking) doesn't move, so
> the positions are 35, 55 and 70? In that case, G would win.
> Tragedy, right? But it can be expected that the next election will change
> things further so that the G's must move to the right(or merge w. the Ds)
> and the R must move to the L or merge with the Ds.
>
> The moral of the story is that parties are like the people groping around
> in the dark in Socrates' cave. They cannot choose exactly where on the
> spectrum they will be. But IRV helps us to adjust and makes the outcome
> closer to the center than o.w. with FPP.
>
> If Approval Voting had been used then D would have won by moving to 64. In
> fact all the parties wd be strongly encouraged to beeline for whatever the
> center seemed to be and with a shifting center, they'd all stumble and bump
> together in the dark.
>
> Whereas, the Gs by taking a stand at 35 at least they succeed in moving
> things to the left or maybe they'll get lucky...
>
> It's not an exact science, which is what it should be. We want people to
> pursue the center, but not too doggedly...
>
> Sorry if that's fuzzy, but I think that's closer to real life...
>
> dlw
>
> 
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
>
>

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Re: [EM] [CES #4429] Looking at Condorcet

[Juho Laatu]

On 3.2.2012, at 0.21, Jameson Quinn wrote:

> 2012/2/2 Juho Laatu 

> Attempt 1: It is difficult to write something like "a>b>c" on the ballot 
> paper, or to push buttons of the voting machine so that all the candidates 
> will be in the correct order.
> 
> Answer 1: Don't use such procedures. If you want to be sure that ranking at 
> least as easy as rating, use same ballots as with rating. You can derive 
> rankings from them.
> 
> This is a perfectly satisfactory answer (as long as the election method does 
> not reward dishonest strategy). But in my experience, it is used more to 
> dismiss than to answer the question; and for that, it does not serve.

I excluded strategic voting since different rated/ranked methods differ a lot, 
and this is maybe not that much linked to the actual rating/ranking procedure.

I used words that "dismissed" the problem. But actually I think rating style 
ballots (or ballots that can be used also for ratings) are pretty good and 
often the primary choice for ranked methods. In those cases where other 
approaches are better for ranking, there must be either additional benefits 
that balance the more complex voting procedure, or the procedure must be 
simpler.

I went through a number of different ballot formats in my head, including ones 
with consinuous scale on a line, ones with empty boxes for writing candidate 
numbers or ratings, and ones that included clicking and dragging on a computer 
screen. I didn't find any good examples where rankings would naturally lead to 
a ballot format that is more difficult to use, and the ratings style 
alternative would be less natural to use for rankings than this comples format. 
Do you have some good examples? Maybe in some extreme environments?

Juho




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