[EM] An interesting scenario (spoilers, utility)
Hello, I have been adding some code to help investigate cases where Approval shows greater perception of spoiler than, say, IRV. To make the scenarios easier to visualize I just allocated six voting factions proportionately along 1D, positions ranging from -1 to 1. I found an interesting case with the candidate positions: .939, 0.333, -.06 (call them A, B, C) Approval showed perception of spoiler as 27%, whereas IRV, TTR, and FPP showed none. So I checked to see if it was consistent and what was happening. With six blocs the scenario looks roughly like this (with the pipe indicating the location of average utility for the bloc): ~3 CB | A ~1 BC | A ~1 BA | C ~1 A | BC Under IRV, all votes were sincere. Under FPP and TTR, the lone A bloc was compromising and voting for B. The result was that the sincere CW (either C or B) was always winning and no one perceived spoilers. Under Approval, the CB voters bullet-voted, the two B blocs voted for their top two candidates, and the A bloc bullet-voted. (A much rarer outcome had the BC faction bullet-voting, with the BA and A factions voting for both A and B, giving the same result as the other three methods. I think it's clear that this outcome was rarer because the BC voters are happier with settling for C than the A voters are with settling for B.) The result of this is that Approval was only electing the sincere CW half the time. Instead of alternating between C and B winning, C won by far the most often. B or A won rarely (and, I'd say, largely thanks to the AI confusion that results from one candidate winning most of the time). Note that C is easily the closest candidate to the median. Even when B has a majority win over C, B is still not likely to be the utility maximizer. Approval's success rate at electing the utility maximizer was thus nearly perfect (instead of 50%). I'm not sure what I think of this personally. I'm sure this scenario isn't any kind of general rule for Approval, but suppose that it was? Would it be a viable trade-off, to elect the utility maximizer more often, in exchange for more complaints about spoiled elections? Kevin Venzke Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] The oldest bad-example trick in the book
Instructions for how to make a method look bad: Contrive an example in which the main contending candidates barely differ by the method's own standard, but in which those candidates differ humungously and outrageously by some other standard. In order to achieve the latter condition as strongly as possible, it's typically necessary that the candidates are within one vote of eachother, in terms of the method's standard. Then say, Look how wrongly that method can choose! Try to sound especially outraged when you say that, as some here are already practiced at doing. And yes, it's true: In Kevin's MMPO bad-example, A, B, and C do almost identically, in terms of MMPO's own standard. No choice would be significantly worse than another in terms of that standard. But, in terms of the favoriteness standard, they differ drastically and dramatically. Has someone followed my above-supplied instructions? Sure. To the letter. So, because the candidates don't significantly differ by MMPO's standard, but differ outrageously by the favoriteness standard, guess which standard we notice? Yes, intuitively, you look at that and say that A or B should win. The winner should come from [A,B ]. In other words, if A doesn't win, then B should win. If B doesn't win, then A should win. You know it. I know it. Problem: The voters don't think so. (Remember them?) Why don't the voters think so? Because that's necessary in order to create the favoriteness-outrageous outcome of Kevin's MMPO bad-example. Early on in the discussion of that example, I asked who was wronged in that bad-example. Someone answered that the [A,B ] voters as a whole, were collectively wronged. But, as I discussed in my previous post about this, the A voters couldn't care less whether B or C wins. Therefore, it's a bit creative to say that they're wronged because B didn't win instead of C. C won precisely because and only because the A voters didn't care about B vs C, and the B voters didn't care about A vs C. In fact, strictly speaking, if you took a poll among the A voters, between B and C, C would win that poll. It's obviously fallacious to speak of [A,B] as a person who has been wronged--a resort of desperation needed because no one can point to a particular individual who was wronged. Mike Ossipoff Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] An interesting scenario (spoilers, utility)
This is indeed an interesting scenario. Something is particularly weak about those BC preferences. It could be one of two things: 1) Maybe you're using some kind of trimmed or decaying utility function, where the difference between a candidate who's 2/3 units away and one who's 1 unit away is negligible. Thus, your A voters are like Nader voters; so far out of the mainstream that the other two candidates appear more similar than they really are. So they bullet vote, holding out for a tiny chance of victory. The rest follows; the hapless BA voters give A a vote, to prevent the likely C win; the BC voters thus vote for C to ensure A doesn't win; and C's win is almost guaranteed. 2) Depending what you mean by six factions proportionally from -1 to 1, the BCA voters could have tiny BC preferences. They're either at 0.2 (if the factions are evenly-spaced points), which puts them .1 from B and .26 from C; or they're at 0.1 (if the factions are the center of evenly-spaced line segments) which puts them .1 from B and .22666 from C, a difference of only 0.06. In the second case, the B=()CA votes cause the AB=()C votes and not vice versa. But in either case, the two blocs together form an equilibrium; neither has much motive to change until the other one does. I wouldn't be surprised if there is an alternate equilibrium where the A voters approve B, and a more traditional chicken dilemma ensues. The funny thing is that this is both a chicken dilemma, and precisely the opposite of a chicken dilemma, at the same time. A's bullet vote could be seen as trying to provoke a chicken dilemma between B and C, but since B voters are not unified on their second choices, the fight ends up being played out between B voters, not between B and C. Or you could say that C is trying to cause a chicken dilemma between B and A, and, with the help of some extremely weak-willed CB voters, is succeeding brilliantly. Anyway: in real life, I think that the A voters would be able to see that if they changed, then the BC voters would change, and so the A voters would only continue to bullet vote if they really were largely indifferent about BC. Jameson 2012/2/28 Kevin Venzke step...@yahoo.fr Hello, I have been adding some code to help investigate cases where Approval shows greater perception of spoiler than, say, IRV. To make the scenarios easier to visualize I just allocated six voting factions proportionately along 1D, positions ranging from -1 to 1. I found an interesting case with the candidate positions: .939, 0.333, -.06 (call them A, B, C) Approval showed perception of spoiler as 27%, whereas IRV, TTR, and FPP showed none. So I checked to see if it was consistent and what was happening. With six blocs the scenario looks roughly like this (with the pipe indicating the location of average utility for the bloc): ~3 CB | A ~1 BC | A ~1 BA | C ~1 A | BC Under IRV, all votes were sincere. Under FPP and TTR, the lone A bloc was compromising and voting for B. The result was that the sincere CW (either C or B) was always winning and no one perceived spoilers. Under Approval, the CB voters bullet-voted, the two B blocs voted for their top two candidates, and the A bloc bullet-voted. (A much rarer outcome had the BC faction bullet-voting, with the BA and A factions voting for both A and B, giving the same result as the other three methods. I think it's clear that this outcome was rarer because the BC voters are happier with settling for C than the A voters are with settling for B.) The result of this is that Approval was only electing the sincere CW half the time. Instead of alternating between C and B winning, C won by far the most often. B or A won rarely (and, I'd say, largely thanks to the AI confusion that results from one candidate winning most of the time). Note that C is easily the closest candidate to the median. Even when B has a majority win over C, B is still not likely to be the utility maximizer. Approval's success rate at electing the utility maximizer was thus nearly perfect (instead of 50%). I'm not sure what I think of this personally. I'm sure this scenario isn't any kind of general rule for Approval, but suppose that it was? Would it be a viable trade-off, to elect the utility maximizer more often, in exchange for more complaints about spoiled elections? Kevin Venzke 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] STV vs Party-list PR, could context matter?
On 02/20/2012 03:34 AM, Richard Fobes wrote: On 2/19/2012 1:24 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 02/19/2012 06:18 AM, Richard Fobes wrote: ... More specifically, European politicians seem to be as clueless as U.S. politicians about what is needed to create jobs and restore widespread economic prosperity. Let me just say that, as a Norwegian, that does not match my experience at all. Ah, indeed Norway has a better political system than the main European nations (France, Germany, Spain, etc.). Also, oil exports put Norway in a much better position economically than what's going on here in the U.S. (and tighter budgets result in greater dysfunctionality). And, culturally, Norwegians seem to be enlightened more so than many other countries. I won't deny that oil exports help, but the other Scandinavian/Nordic countries seem to be doing well, too. For instance, the Wikipedia article on Sweden's economy says that the government budget has improved dramatically from a record deficit of more than 12% of GDP in 1993, and from 1998 to present, has run a surplus in every year except 2003 and 2004.. The US public debt, on the other hand, is around 60% of GDP. As for the people being more enlightened, do you think politics could have a feedback effect in that respect? One could imagine that a more civil state of politics, more focused on issues rather than who's electable or who can sling words in one-on-one debates the best, could in turn lead the people to be more interested in actual politics. (On the other hand, Warren does say the actual improvement due to democracy may be minor and that it's only compounding over time that makes democracies much better that non-democracies. He uses an example of Pakistan and what became the US having comparably similarly sized economies 300 years ago, but now the US's GDP/capita is 19 times that of Pakistan, which works out to about a 1% greater annual growth rate for the US.) The need for Norway to resist the European Union in its effort to bite off too much underscores my point about European nations, on average -- which implies a lack of wise leadership in both the EU and the countries that dominate the EU. I get the impression that, although some people wanted political integration from the start, the EU has mainly grown by exceeding its scope and then formalizing its new extended scope. It started off being special-purpose (as the European Coal and Steel Community), then grew from there into/was absorbed by the European Economic Community (depending on how you look at it). At that point, it had its own inertia and was no longer unambiguously subordinate to the national leadership. This is not a pattern unique to the EU. I think that has happened in the US, as well, although there the political climate may have supported the organizations' expansion, particularly in the cases of the DHS and TSA. One could of course say that the politicians have failed in reining in the Union's expansion of scope. To the degree they had a responsibility to keep the Union from growing, that is true. What I'm trying to say is that the Union is not without its internal dynamics: it did not simply rest while the politicians encouraged it to grow, but the bureaucracy had its own reasons to expand. A point about the EU: Personally I think that creating the Eurodollar as a monetary unit that is represented in currency was a mistake. Before the Eurodollar was instituted, I publicly (in The Futurist magazine) suggested that something called a Unidollar should be created as a monetary unit that is defined in a way that does not inflate or deflate with respect to tangible things and services, but without being available as a tangible currency. That would allow people in different countries to talk about monetary amounts in Unidollars without having to know the conversion rate for the country of the person they are talking to. (They only have to know the conversion rate between their country's currency and the Unidollar.) Would that be like the IMF special drawing rights? Perhaps a little, but if it were to be inflation-neutral, it would have to be adjusted, somehow. Things and services would still have different Unidollar prices in different economies, so the comparison would be limited. The fact that the EU leaders didn't anticipate the possibility of Greek and Italian (and other) defaults before they even instituted the common currency (and did not realize that just asking new EU nations to make a promise to spend taxpayers' money wisely, with no real way to back up those promises) reveals a lack of wisdom. I agree. Compromises sometimes fail to help either party, and moreso if the consequences haven't been considered thoroughly. As for the U.S., the biggest (but not the only) election unfairness occurs in primary elections as a result of vote splitting. Special interests -- the people who give the largest amounts of
Re: [EM] STV seat count, and start small and locally
On 02/26/2012 06:25 PM, Richard Fobes wrote: On 2/24/2012 1:01 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 02/23/2012 11:24 PM, Richard Fobes wrote: Kristofer Munsterhjelm asks: ... why do you propose rules that would make it harder for third parties to grow? ... What I promote is VoteFair ranking. It includes a PR-related portion -- called VoteFair partial-proportional ranking -- that gives representation to third parties that represent enough voters. This aspect of VoteFair ranking specifically makes it easier (not harder) for third parties to grow. Yes, proportional representation would make it easier for third parties to grow. On the other hand, in an earlier post, you suggested STV (which is a PR method and thus one would expect to have the same purpose as the VoteFair ranking) be used with two seats instead of three or five. In a five-seat district, assuming Droop proportionality, any group of more than a sixth of the voters can give their candidate a seat. However, in a two-seat district, the group has to grow to exceed a third of the voters to be sure of getting that seat; thus, smaller groups could be splintered (either maliciously by gerrymandering or simply due to bad luck), if there are few seats. I'm picturing double-size districts and electing two representatives per district. STV can use the ballot info to get that part right. However, getting fair proportional results beyond two seats per district (for any voting method) requires asking voters to indicate their favorite political party. That additional party-preference information then enables additional proportional seats to be filled. I'm not entirely sure what you're saying. If you're saying that you can't have more than two seats per district and still have proportionality unless you use party list PR, that's obviously wrong. But if you say that you can use an MMP compensatory mechanism to get proportionality beyond the effective threshold, then I get what you're saying. So I'll assume that :-) Using STV to fill more than two seats would lead to very unfair results in some situations. Those situations don't exist now, but they can (and I believe would) arise if the voting system changes (such as adopting STV). I think you said minor parties could get undue power in three-seat district STV with the two parties + minor situation that you have today, but I also guess that's not what you're referring to (since you say those situations don't exist now). So what kind of unfairness are you envisioning? STV with five-seat districts seems to work where it's been used, in the sense that it does produce multipartyism and the voters don't complain about vote splitting. At least if they do, I don't know it. MMP is a solution. The Norwegian parliament even combines MMP-like top-up with party list PR: if a party gets more than 4%, and the party gets a disproportional outcome from constituencies alone, then they get a share of the seats allocated for the purpose of compensating for that disproportionality. But if you're going to use MMP, why then use STV at all? Why not use party list (since you're going to ask the voters their party preferences) or Condorcet + MMP (since the MMP part can handle the disproportionality of single member districts just like it can the disproportionality of two-member districts)? Questions of where you draw your tradeoff line - in this case, of two members per district instead of one or five - can be very useful in understanding, and so I ask. (I tend to think that, all other things equal, seats allocated to STV is better than seats allocated to party list, because STV gives proportionality by what the voters want, not just proportionality per party. Party list PR is easier when the district sizes get large, but that's a matter of how many candidates you should have in each district before any residual disproportionality will have to be accepted or be handled by party-wise top-up.) Currently the tiny state of Rhode Island is so frustrated by what goes on in its state legislature that it is ripe for election-method reform. That state is so small that it is more local than the Los Angeles area. In other words, I agree that reform must start at the local level, but I think that some state-level changes would fit your idea of local. (I don't know if there are cities that are ripe for proportional improvements.) I know too little about US politics to comment, but if you're right, that's good, and I hope your strategy can work :-) Do you have any specific plans on how to advocate substantial electoral reform in Rhode Island? I'll add that here in the state of Oregon there was a ballot measure about adopting an open primary, so there are opportunities to adopt election-method change at the state level if it's the right change. (It failed; I opposed that change for what I hope are obvious reasons.) Was that a partisan or nonpartisan open primary? I continue to be
[EM] Jameson: SODA FBC
Jameson: You wrote: Still, again I have to ask you, Mike: where's SODA? You were right earlier that SODA fails FBC. But there are three mitigating factors. 1) Failure would be very rare; I hope to be able to be more precise about this in the near future. [endquote] I told you why that doesn't help. You can't assure a voter that SODA can't make them regret that they didn't vote someone else over their favorite. If you can't give that assurance, then voters will continue to favorite-bury. You continued: 2) Even when failure happens, SODA would never fail FBC without at least giving the non-betrayed favorite a chance to restore FBC by giving the win to the should-have-betrayed-for-them lower choice. (This is not mathematically necessary, but to make it untrue, you must divide the candidates in question into several clones, or give them a negligible fraction of their votes in delegated form, either of which makes an already-strained scenario completely implausible.) [endquote] You'd have to give more detail. The above paragraph isn't specific enough. You continued: 3) There is a polytime(?), summable fix for the method, which restores full FBC; though I admit it's an ugly hack. Basically, there's a way to use the co-approval matrix to check if FBC has been violated and make those voters for whom it was violated virtually betray their favorite. Since, when that happens, it is the only way to give these voters a winner who they approved, it is not hurting them at all. There's also a slightly less-ugly, but imperfect, fix that merely makes the process in step 2 automatic; this would be good enough in practice. [endquote] Again, something more specific would be necessary. But, just from what you said, I suggest that the automated virtual favorite-betrayal that you suggested would change the method to an entirely different method, bringing with it a new set of problems. For those problems to show, so that their seriousness can be discussed, the suggestion in your above paragraph would have to be spelled out specifically, in detail. You continued: I believe that with these three factors, and most particularly the first one, SODA's FBC failure is tolerable. [endquote] As I said yesterday, even IRV's FBC failure would be tolerable, if voters weren't so resignedly over-compromising. An FBC failure can't be tolerable, because it means that you can't assure voters that it's safe to vote their favorite in 1st place. As I said, for the excessively timid, giveaway-resigned, over-compromising voter, probably won't do. You continued: And as for cooperation/defection: SODA without question solves that problem more completely than any of the alphabet soup you mention. [endquote] Nonsense. Methods and criteria are routinely designated by letter-abbreviations. You mean alphabet soup like SODA? You continued: (Though I'd still really appreciate it if you made quick electowiki pages for all of that [endquote] I definitely intend to, within the next few days. You continued: , because I'd bet that nobody but you actually knows what every one of those means ,and it would be considerate of you not to ask us to continually look up all the definitions and redefinitions in the archives). [endquote] Again, nonsense. You were reading the mailing list at the times when I defined each and every method and criterion that you're referring to. Most were initially defined in posts that named them in the subject line. All of the new method and criterion definitions of mine were posted during a period of a few months, from October or November to the present. Yes, new definitions should always be posted to the electowiki too. --even though a search at the archives page will quickly find recent references to a method or criterion name. So yes, I will definitely post the new definitions to the electowiki. By the way, how many times have I asked for the definition of IRV3/AV3? It's not at the electowiki either. The definition didn't come up in archives searches. Dave repeatedly refused to post its definition. Alright, a few of my new method definitions weren't posted with a subject line that named them, so I'll repeat here something I've several times posted: MMT and GMAT are defined at postings that name them in the subject line. MTAOC was defined in a posting that named it in the subject line. That posting consisted of pseudocode for an algorithm for determining which middle ratings are to be kept and which are discarded due to lack of mutuality, and for thereby re-calculating the candidates' numbers of middle ratings. As I've said several times: MCAOC is identical to MTAOC, except that the method is MCA instead of MTA. AOC is Approval, in which optional conditionality-by-mutuality is implemented as shown in the MTAOC pseudocode. AOCBucklin is ABucklin in which optional conditionality by mutuality is implemented in that manner. As I've said
Re: [EM] Jameson: SODA FBC
2012/2/29 MIKE OSSIPOFF nkk...@hotmail.com Jameson: You wrote: Still, again I have to ask you, Mike: where's SODA? You were right earlier that SODA fails FBC. But there are three mitigating factors. 1) Failure would be very rare; I hope to be able to be more precise about this in the near future. [endquote] I told you why that doesn't help. You can't assure a voter that SODA can't make them regret that they didn't vote someone else over their favorite. If you can't give that assurance, then voters will continue to favorite-bury. Actually, with SODA, it does help, because you can know ex ante (by looking at the predeclared preferences) when you are safe by FBC. That is, if you prefer AB, and B prefers A, or A prefers B, or A and B both prefer a certain viable C, then you are safe. Only if B prefers the most-viable third candidate C, but A is indifferent between B and C, then you might consider a favorite-betraying vote for B. And even then, it's only appropriate if A very nearly, but not quite, is able to win... not exactly the situation where favorite betrayal is the first thing on your mind. This is a specific enough circumstance that favorite-betraying strategy would never take off and become a serious factor in SODA. You continued: 2) Even when failure happens, SODA would never fail FBC without at least giving the non-betrayed favorite a chance to restore FBC by giving the win to the should-have-betrayed-for-them lower choice. (This is not mathematically necessary, but to make it untrue, you must divide the candidates in question into several clones, or give them a negligible fraction of their votes in delegated form, either of which makes an already-strained scenario completely implausible.) [endquote] You'd have to give more detail. The above paragraph isn't specific enough. You continued: 3) There is a polytime(?), summable fix for the method, which restores full FBC; though I admit it's an ugly hack. Basically, there's a way to use the co-approval matrix to check if FBC has been violated and make those voters for whom it was violated virtually betray their favorite. Since, when that happens, it is the only way to give these voters a winner who they approved, it is not hurting them at all. There's also a slightly less-ugly, but imperfect, fix that merely makes the process in step 2 automatic; this would be good enough in practice. [endquote] Again, something more specific would be necessary. But, just from what you said, I suggest that the automated virtual favorite-betrayal that you suggested would change the method to an entirely different method, bringing with it a new set of problems. For those problems to show, so that their seriousness can be discussed, the suggestion in your above paragraph would have to be spelled out specifically, in detail. You continued: I believe that with these three factors, and most particularly the first one, SODA's FBC failure is tolerable. [endquote] As I said yesterday, even IRV's FBC failure would be tolerable, if voters weren't so resignedly over-compromising. An FBC failure can't be tolerable, because it means that you can't assure voters that it's safe to vote their favorite in 1st place. With SODA, you can give that as a solid ex-ante guarantee to most voters, just not quite all of them. This is unlike the situation in most voting systems, where you can make no solid guarantees before the vote unless you can make them to all voters. As I said, for the excessively timid, giveaway-resigned, over-compromising voter, probably won't do. You continued: And as for cooperation/defection: SODA without question solves that problem more completely than any of the alphabet soup you mention. [endquote] Nonsense. Methods and criteria are routinely designated by letter-abbreviations. You mean alphabet soup like SODA? I wasn't saying that SODA was superior because you used acronyms and I didn't, I was just using a collective term to refer to your proposals. I'm sorry if you found it offensive, there was no disparagement intended, and certainly not on the basis of names. You continued: (Though I'd still really appreciate it if you made quick electowiki pages for all of that [endquote] I definitely intend to, within the next few days. You continued: , because I'd bet that nobody but you actually knows what every one of those means ,and it would be considerate of you not to ask us to continually look up all the definitions and redefinitions in the archives). [endquote] Again, nonsense. You were reading the mailing list at the times when I defined each and every method and criterion that you're referring to. Most were initially defined in posts that named them in the subject line. All of the new method and criterion definitions of mine were posted during a period of a few months, from October or November to the present. Yes, new definitions should always be
Re: [EM] STV seat count, and start small and locally
Currently the tiny state of Rhode Island is so frustrated by what goes on in its state legislature that it is ripe for election-method reform. That state is so small that it is more local than the Los Angeles area. By the way, does anyone on the list have any news at all about the Rhode Island Voting Commission? I think it would be to the interests of basically everyone on this list to see that their report is sensible, yet despite having written to every city and town clerk in the state, I haven't been able to get any further news on the commissions members, schedule, or work. Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] STV seat count, and start small and locally
2012/2/29 Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com Currently the tiny state of Rhode Island is so frustrated by what goes on in its state legislature that it is ripe for election-method reform. That state is so small that it is more local than the Los Angeles area. By the way, does anyone on the list have any news at all about the Rhode Island Voting Commission? oops, wrong name. I mean the RI Voter Choice Commission, established by H 6176. I think it would be to the interests of basically everyone on this list to see that their report is sensible, yet despite having written to every city and town clerk in the state, I haven't been able to get any further news on the commissions members, schedule, or work. Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] The oldest bad-example trick in the book
Hi Mike, Personally I don't think anyone is wronged in the MMPO example. I just don't think voters would accept it, and it would be difficult to advocate. People will ask how the outcome can possibly make sense and I don't think you can reassure them by asking who's wronged. The issue isn't really favoriteness but the near lack of any votes at all. Most people expect winning candidates to have their own positive support, not just lack of opposition. That said, the voters could see themselves as wronged if they felt it was strategically advisable under the method to truncate. You suggest that if the A voters really preferred B (the other big candidate) to C (tiny candidate) then they should have voted for A and B? I for one can't see myself doing that. The apparent front- runners are A and B and I wouldn't vote for the worse frontrunner under MMPO. It makes more sense to try to deter burial attempts than to defend against an extremely unlikely C victory. But I don't want to discourage you from supporting MMPO. The first method I ever invented was in effect MMPO on approval ballots. I have a soft spot for this mechanic. Kevin Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
