Re: [EM] Survey of Multiwinner Methods
On 1/7/13 4:04 PM, Greg Nisbet wrote: Hey, I'd like to get a sense of what sorts of multiwinner methods are currently known that are reasonably good and don't require districts, parties, or candidates that are capable of making decisions (I'm looking at you, asset voting). I will once again mention that there is a Condorcet multiwinner method implemented in the CIVS voting system that you can try out right this instant if you are so inclined. In fact, this proportional method gets used pretty frequently by the rather numerous CIVS users. See: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/proportional.html By the way, I am happy to host other methods if people want to integrate them into the CIVS code base, which is publicly available. -- Andrew attachment: andru.vcf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] A modification to Condorcet so that one can vote against monsters.
On 4/14/12 8:31 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On 4/14/12 3:45 AM, ⸘Ŭalabio‽ wrote: ¡Hello! ¿How fare you? It is tedious to rank hundreds of candidates, but sometimes monster is on the ballot and all unranked candidates are last. If the field is so polarized that the voters idiotically refuse to rank other serious candidates other than their candidate and the evil candidate has followers, the bad candidate might win. I suggest that Condorcet should have a dummy-candidate: 0 The ranked candidates. 1 The unranked candidates. 2 The dummy-canditate. 3 The monsters. All unranked candidates have higher ranks than the monsters. One can then rank the monsters by how terrible they are. Basically, it is a way to vote against monsters in Condorcet without having to rank all of the hundreds of also-rans. all this is complicated crap that gunks up elections. it has an ice-cube's chance in hell. I've been observing experimentally how people use a Condorcet election system in practice over the past ten years (since 2003) and in fact the use of a dummy candidate to signal approval has become increasingly common. It seems to be intuitive, at least to web users, and effective. I do agree that trying to distinguish 0 vs. 1 is probably overly complicated. -- Andrew attachment: andru.vcf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Fast Condorcet-Kemeny calculation times, clarification of NP-hardness issue
On 3/4/12 5:44 PM, Warren Smith wrote: On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 3:44 PM, Richard Fobes electionmeth...@votefair.org wrote: Finally, after reading the articles cited by Warren Smith (listed at the bottom of this reply) plus some related articles, I can reply to his insistence that Condorcet-Kemeny calculations take too long to calculate. Also, this reply addresses the same claim that appears in Wikipedia both in the Kemeny-Young method article and in the comparison table within the Wikipedia Voting systems article (in the polynomial time column that Markus Schulze added). One source of confusion is that Warren, and perhaps others, regard the Condorcet-Kemeny problem as a decision problem that only has a yes or no answer. This view is suggested by Warren's reference (below and in other messages) to the problem as being NP-complete, which only applies to decision problems. Although it is possible to formulate a decision problem based on one or more specified characteristics of the Condorcet-Kemeny method, that is a different problem than the Condorcet-Kemeny problem. --the optimization problem is at least as hard as the decision problem.You are erroneously creating the impression I somehow was unaware of this, or that you somehow have here got some new insight. Neither is true. I might try to say all this in a more friendly way than Warren does, but he is 100% right about all the technical issues here. This is basic computer science. Nothing fancy and no judgment calls are involved. -- Andrew attachment: andru.vcf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Poll on favorite voting methods
Someone set up an online poll on CIVS regarding people's favorite voting methods. The results are tabulated using Condorcet methods but the ballots are available in case you want to analyze them with some other method. It permits write-ins, too. To vote or to see the results, go to: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/vote.pl?id=E_796e3353eb67365c Cheers, -- Andrew attachment: andru.vcf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] finding the beat path winner with just one pass through the ranked pairs
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Rob LeGrand wrote: Markus wrote: the runtime to calculate the strongest path from every candidate to every other candidate is O(C^3). However, the runtime to sort O(C^2) pairwise defeats is already O(C^4). So you cannot get a faster algorithm by sorting the pairwise defeats. Can't you sort O(C^2) items in O(C^2 log C) time if you use a O(n log n) algorithm such as heapsort? Yes, this is correct. In practice quicksort is faster than heapsort (though not asymptotically). The strongest path algorithm is solved in O(C^3) using the Floyd-Warshall algorithm, applied to a different commutative semiring (max, min) than the usual (min, +). However, faster algorithms are known for solving the same problem (all-pairs shortest path). For example, there is a paper by Melhorn and Priebe that shows how to solve it in O(C^2 log C) expected time. I don' t know if these faster algorithms work on all commutative semirings, though. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Methods
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, matt welland wrote: A ranked system cannot give the feedback that all the candidates are disliked (e.g. all candidates get less than 50% approval). It also cannot feedback that all the candidates are essentially equivalent (all have very high approval) Ironically by trying to capture nuances the ranked systems have lost an interesting and valuable part of the voter feedback. I disagree. To collect this information, all you have to do is introduce a choice approved and let voters rank relative to that choice. You can also add a choice disapproved to identify the candidates that most voters really hate. I have found that in practice using CIVS that it has been helpful to add choices like these. If nothing else it adds confidence that people are comfortable with the winning candidate. If you want to avoid introducing an artificial ranking among equally hated candidates, just let them be ranked identically. -- Andrew attachment: andru.vcf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] A design flaw in the electoral system
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Michael Allan wrote: Dear Juho and Fred, Your vote never made a difference. Most people feel uncomfortable or perplexed in this knowledge, and I think the feeling indicates that something's wrong. Juho Laatu wrote: I'm not sure that most people feel uncomfortable with this. Many have learned to live as part of the surrounding society, and they don't expect their vote to be the one that should decide between two alternatives. I certainly never expected my own vote to be decisive in an election. But knowing it has *no* effect on the outcome? This is unexpected and makes me uneasy. (more below) I think we should be a little more careful here. Just because a voter's vote has no effect on the outcome of an election does not mean that the vote has no effect. By voting you are affecting the margin of victory or defeat. And vote margins still matter to politicians -- they signal whether the politicians are taking the right positions and making convincing arguments. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Dodgson and Kemeny done right?
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Warren Smith wrote: Dodgson and Kemeny done right (F.W.Simmons) -Warren D. Smith, Sept 2011-- Simmons claims he had posted something called Dodgson done right which gets around the problem that with Dodgson voting it is NP-hard to find the winner, and supposedly Kemeny has a similar fix. I failed to find his post, but reading between the lines am attempting to try to determine what Simmons probably had in mind by reverse engineering, and/or the fact I had similar thoughts of my own a long time back. DODGSON: votes are rank-orderings of the N candidates. Output ordering: the one such that the smallest total candidate motion (distance moved, summed over all candidates on all ballots) is required to convert the input orders into the output order. Dodgson, by the way, is not merely NP-hard. It is higher in the polynomial hierarchy and has been shown to be complete for P^NP (parallel access to NP oracles). Probably worse than Kemeny! -- Andrew attachment: andru.vcf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] SODA false claim
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Warren Smith wrote: It is simply false to say SODA's simplicity (for either the voter, or the counters) beats any other system I know of. It is less simple than plain approval voting. Full stop. If you persist in making ludicrous statements, then you will hurt your credibility. I have to agree. SODA to me seems quite complex. It appears to pose difficult strategic decisions for candidates and even for voters. -- Andrew attachment: andru.vcf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] New Python library implementing voting methods
Python is a bit nicer than Perl, but if you implement your voting method in Perl, you can plug it into CIVS. Then people can and will start using it for real polls. For the software see: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/changelog.html Cheers, -- Andrew On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Juho Laatu wrote: There sure are many programmers on this list as you can guess also from the latest mails. Many of them have lots of voting related software. I don't know what languages people use, but Python certainly is a good general purpose tool. So maybe there is some interest in open libraries in this area. On this list there have been huge number of new proposed methods. Often it would make sense to have also running versions of them. Such programs would serve also as (exact) operational definitions of the methods. Let's see what people think about the ability to exchange also code in addition to text. Juho On 18.7.2011, at 1.58, Duncan McGreggor wrote: Hey folks, Not sure if there are programmers on the list (I'm new to it as of last week), but I thought I'd share just in case. I've pushed out an early release of a pure-Python voting methodologies library. Here's the announcement: https://launchpad.net/ballotbox/+announcements As the announcement states, it's only a partial set. The blurb also has links to PyPI, docs, download, and bug reporting. My interest in this started as a result of experimenting with self-organizing networked objects, and the need to elect a peer as a proxy in unreliable/hostile environments. Having dived into election methods, though, I've found it immensely fascinating... my efforts on this library have become a labor of fun and love :-) Bug reports deeply welcome, by the way! Thanks, d 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] Has this idea been considered?
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Russ Paielli wrote: As I wrote a couple days ago, I strongly suspect that any vote counting rules beyond simple addition will be extremely difficult to sell on a large scale. IRV may be a counterexample, but I suspect that (1) it has only been adopted in very liberal cities, and (2) it will never gain traction for major public elections. The more I think about it, the more I am starting to think that Range Voting is the answer. I'm sure Warren will be glad to hear that! One great advantage of Range is its ultra-simple counting rules. Its only real disadvantage is the equipment requirements, but those are not insurmountable. An open issue about Range is, of course, how many rating levels should be used. A natural choice is 10, but anything from about 5 to 10 or so seems reasonable to me. As I said before, I am very concerned about the large number of candidates in the Republican presidential primary. I would love to see Range Voting used there. That won't happen, of course, but if Republicans end up largely unhappy with their candidate (as they were with McCain), the silver lining to that could will be an opportunity to promote Range Voting to Republicans. To me, Range remains a non-starter for political settings, though I can see some valid uses. I have implicitly argued that the real barrier to adoption of other voting method is simply the complexity of constructing one's ballot. Range voting is more complex than producing an ordering on candidates. For me the problem of determining my own utility for various candidates is quite perplexing; I can't imagine the ordinary voter finding it more pleasant. Range also exposes the possibility of strategic voting very explicitly to the voters. Only a chump casts a vote other than 0 or 10 on a 10-point scale. Range creates an incentive for dishonesty. So if the lazy voters are voting approval style because they don't want to sort out their utilities, and the motivated voters are voting approval style because that's the right strategy, who's left? It seems to me that we might as well have Approval and keep the ballots simple rather than use Range. -- Andrew attachment: andru.vcf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Has this idea been considered?
On 7/7/11 3:54 PM, Russ Paielli wrote: Let me just elaborate on my concerns about complexity. Most of you probably know most of this already, but let me just try to summ it up and put things in perspective. Some of the participants on this list are advanced mathematicians, and they have been discussing these matters for years. As you all know, the topic of election methods and voting systems can get very complicated. As far as I know, there is still no consensus even on this list on what is the best system. If there is no consensus here, how can you expect to get a consensus among the general public? ... So let's say we somehow manage to get widespread public awareness of the deficiencies of the current plurality system. Then what? Eventually, and actual change has to go through Congress. Try to imagine Senator Blowhard grilling the experts on the proposed rules of their favorite system. It would certainly be good for one thing: fodder for Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert! ... I wish there were a good, viable solution, but I just don't see it happening in the foreseeable future. --Russ P. Russ, I think you might be too focused on US presidential elections. Changing that will take a long time and it is not the place to start. There are lots of other kinds of elections that are also important and where it will be easier to make a change -- will not require a constitutional amendment, for starters. Party primaries seem like one possibility. I think that the way to make the change at the top level is first to get voters aware of and used to ranked-choice voting. That is why I implemented CIVS, for use by organizations at all scales. The specific details of what Condorcet completion method is used are not that important, I think. Many voters don't know or care how the electoral college works, despite 200+ years of its use. And the reasonable Condorcet variations are not more broken than the electoral college! Voters just need time to become comfortable with ranking choices instead of picking one. If you want to try CIVS out, by the way, I happen to be looking for feedback on a good book to use for a college freshman reading project, at: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/vote.pl?id=E_6d3db58589520629akey=77b16251195da930 Cheers, -- Andrew attachment: andru.vcf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Has this idea been considered?
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Russ Paielli wrote: ...I eventually realized I was kidding myself to think that those schemes will ever see the light of day in major public elections. What is the limit of complexity that the general public will accept on a large scale? I don't know, but I have my doubts that anything beyond simple Approval will ever pass muster -- and even that will be a hard sell. My experience with CIVS suggests that ranking choices is perfectly comprehensible to ordinary people. There have been more than 3,000 elections run using CIVS, and more than 60,000 votes cast. These are not technically savvy voters for the most part. To pick a few groups rather arbitrarily, CIVS is being used daily by plant fanciers, sports teams, book clubs, music lovers, prom organizers, beer drinkers, fraternities, church groups, PBeM gamers, and families naming pets and (!) children. If anything, to me ranking choices seems easier than Approval, because the voter doesn't have to think about where to draw the approve/disapprove cutoff, which I fear also encourages voters to think strategically. -- Andrew attachment: andru.vcf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] remember Toby Nixon?
On 7/22/64 11:59 AM, Dave Ketchum wrote: On May 24, 2011, at 6:42 PM, fsimm...@pcc.edu wrote: About six years ago Toby Nixon asked the members of this EM list for a advice on what election method to try propose in the Washington State Legislature. He finally settled on CSSD beatpath. As near as I know nothing came of it. What would we propose if we had another opportunity like that? It seems to me that people have rejected IRV, Bucklin, and other methods based on ranked ballots because they don’t want to rank the candidates. I would propose Condorcet, with just a few clarifications: Leave CSSD beatpath as a detail method decision to resolve later. Reject IRV for known problems. Those unranked are simply counted as having the bottom rank. Write-ins permitted and counted as if actually nominated. This is a bit of extra pain, but I like it better than demanding extra nominations that enemies could make unacceptably difficult. Equal ranking permitted. Those who like Approval should understand that using a single rank lets them express their desire without considering ranking in detail. No restrictions as to how rank numbers compare - when considering which of a pair has higher rank, ONLY their ranks compare as HL, LH, or E=- what ranks are assigned to other candidates have no effect on this. No restriction as to how many rank numbers a voter may use, beyond fact that a chosen ballot design may impose a limit as to how many can be expressed. DYN is a simple addition for those who see value in that method. Having conducted in the CIVS system an experiment over the past several years as to whether people are able to deal with ranked ballots, I have to say that voters seem to be able to deal with ranking choices. In fact they will even rank dozens of choices. As long as the user interface is not painful, it's not a big deal for most people. So I would choose Condorcet in a second. Like Dave, I don't think the completion method matters a great deal. However, write-ins are a more complicated issue and it is still not clear to me how to handle them fairly. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] eliminate the plurality loser until there is a Condorcet winner
James Green-Armytage asked Quick question for everyone: Do you happen to know when the method described in the subject line (eliminate the plurality loser until there is a Condorcet winner) was first proposed? This idea is implemented as part of the CIVS voting service, where it is called Condorcet-IRV. When I looked into the origins of the idea a while back, I discovered that it had been proposed originally by Thomas Hill of England's Electoral Reform Society. Hope that helps. Best, -- Andrew attachment: andru.vcf Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] An interesting real election
On 1/30/11 2:39 PM, Paul Kislanko wrote: Strike my previous reply... Didn't notice that #6 pairwise beat #1, but pairwise lost to #2-#5. Here's a case where I'd actually like to see instead of the pairwise matrix the matrix that shows counts of votes for #1, #2, ... #5. In particular, which is the Bucklin winner? #6 loses or ties with every alternative except #1. I've attached the ballots. Note that there were actually 15 candidates in this election; I just showed the action for the top 6 in my earlier mail. Each ballot is one row, and position x shows the ranking that the voter assigned to candidate x. The listing uses the unranked numbers for the candidates, so the top 6 candidates are not candidates 1-6. There is also one more ballot in the listing below than for the matrix I sent earlier, but the same relatively interesting situation still pertains. -- Andrew 8,6,5,3,15,7,13,12,1,2,12,12,12,4,14 15,10,7,4,9,3,14,13,1,8,5,12,2,11,6 15,6,4,3,12,2,6,11,11,11,1,13,7,11,14 3,4,13,9,2,1,15,10,9,9,14,12,9,11,11 15,12,2,7,14,8,13,6,3,1,12,12,6,4,5 4,14,5,15,6,7,14,14,14,14,14,2,1,14,3 4,6,8,2,14,9,15,13,12,12,7,3,5,12,1 4,15,3,8,15,7,15,15,2,1,5,15,15,15,6 15,15,15,15,15,15,15,15,1,1,15,15,2,15,2 15,5,6,2,15,14,14,14,14,3,1,14,4,14,14 15,15,15,2,15,15,15,5,4,15,15,15,1,15,3 15,12,4,11,11,2,14,13,11,11,11,1,11,11,3 7,11,4,3,10,6,12,15,5,2,13,9,1,14,8 2,5,6,7,15,8,14,12,3,1,10,11,4,13,9 15,14,14,14,2,14,1,14,14,14,14,14,14,14,14 7,12,12,4,14,2,15,1,6,3,12,13,12,5,12 9,11,2,1,8,4,10,5,3,6,12,13,14,7,15 15,5,12,4,12,12,13,12,2,12,3,12,1,12,14 1,15,15,15,15,15,15,15,15,1,15,15,15,15,15 1,8,3,7,4,7,15,15,2,15,15,15,5,15,15 4,15,15,1,15,15,15,15,3,2,15,15,15,15,15 15,8,10,10,6,1,14,14,4,2,5,11,3,14,7 13,4,2,6,14,5,15,10,9,1,11,8,7,12,3 3,4,14,2,14,6,14,14,7,15,1,14,5,14,8 15,10,10,2,14,10,14,10,2,1,10,10,2,10,10 15,15,15,15,3,15,15,15,15,15,15,15,1,2,15 6,6,8,6,3,7,15,1,3,11,9,15,12,15,7 15,15,14,3,2,10,15,4,13,1,15,15,11,15,12 10,3,4,15,14,5,8,13,1,9,6,11,2,12,7 14,15,15,15,10,8,15,15,3,2,1,15,15,15,15 9,11,2,3,12,4,15,1,5,6,13,14,8,7,10 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] An interesting real election
It's a little tough to spot without the coloring that CIVS does, but #1 loses pairwise to #6. This makes #2 win according to Schulze. As Markus points out, #2 is the candidate with the weakest pairwise defeat (13-9 vs the 14-13 defeat of #1 by #6). -- Andrew On 1/30/11 2:33 PM, Paul Kislanko wrote: How is #1 not a Condorcet Winner, since #1 pairwise-beats every other alternative? *From:* election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com [mailto:election-methods-boun...@lists.electorama.com] *On Behalf Of *Andrew Myers *Sent:* Saturday, January 29, 2011 4:41 PM *To:* Election Methods Mailing List *Subject:* [EM] An interesting real election Here is an unusual case from a real poll run recently by a group using CIVS. Usually there is a Condorcet winner, but not this time. Who should win? Ranked pairs says #1, and ranks the six choices as shown. It only has to reverse one preference. Schulze says #2, because it beats #6 by 15-11, and #6 beats #1 by 14-13. So #2 has a 14-13 beatpath vs. #1. Hill's method (Condorcet-IRV) picks #6 as the winner. -- Andrew 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 1. - 13 15 17 16 13 2. 9 - 13 14 17 15 3. 11 11 - 13 15 14 4. 9 10 10 - 14 13 5. 11 10 9 10 - 13 6. 14 11 11 13 10 - Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] An interesting real election
Here is an unusual case from a real poll run recently by a group using CIVS. Usually there is a Condorcet winner, but not this time. Who should win? Ranked pairs says #1, and ranks the six choices as shown. It only has to reverse one preference. Schulze says #2, because it beats #6 by 15-11, and #6 beats #1 by 14-13. So #2 has a 14-13 beatpath vs. #1. Hill's method (Condorcet-IRV) picks #6 as the winner. -- Andrew 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 1. - 13 15 17 16 13 2. 9 - 13 14 17 15 3. 11 11 - 13 15 14 4. 9 10 10 - 14 13 5. 11 10 9 10 - 13 6. 14 11 11 13 10 - Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] An assortment of recently online Condorcet elections, some with ballot data
I thought people might find these useful/fun to look at. Click on show details to get access to the ballots where available. 12 Modern Philosophers: Which Ones Are Likely to be Read in 100 Years? (13 choices, 413+ voters, ballots available) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/results.pl?id=E_520bd5632b7ff3cb Who are the most important philosophers of all time? (48 choices, 948 voters, ballots available) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/results.pl?id=E_5f1c74bf01172b2a What is the best measure of faculty quality? (4 choices, 256+ voters, ballots available) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/results.pl?id=E_a90355821e6c7fc3 Favorite programming language (40 choices, 134 voters) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/results.pl?id=E_540fe382529392ba GNU Mailman Logo Contest 2010 (5 choices, 391 voters) http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/results.pl?id=E_17290602feb24023 Cheers, -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Peter, Thanks for your comments. I'll address them inline. On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: Dear Andrew Myers, this method looks interesting, as it is proportional, Condorcet and non STV-like. You write on your web-page, that: the correctness of the algorithm depends on a currently unproved conjecture: that if improvement of a committee is possible, it can be done by replacing one member at a time. It would be very difficult to gain support for a method, which relies on an unproven conjecture. I see this as the biggest problem in your proposed method. We should probably distinguish between the method and the currently implemented algorithm. The question is whether the algorithm correctly implements the method -- this is what the conjecture rests on. The current implementation gives the ability to compare any pair of committees directly, so it is possible to sanity-check the algorithmic result. I guess that from the presentation every voter votes for M candidates, where M is the number of seats, and that the voter uses range-like voting for each of the candidates voted for on the ballot. I don't understand the two modes - combined weights and best candidate and why two modes are needed. In practice, best candidate seems to be the mode most people want. It supports only ordinal ranking of the choices. The combined-weights mode is more range-like, but -- crucially, from my perspective -- the ratings/weights assigned by one voter are NEVER compared to the ratings f another voter. That, to me, makes range voting a nonstarter. You write on your web page, that: The factor (/k/+1) may be surprising in the condition for proportional validity, but it actually agrees with proportional representation election methods developed elsewhere; it is analogous to the Droop quota http://www.encyclopedia4u.com/d/droop-quota.html used by many STV election methods It could be nice, if you could show a proof on how the method achieves proportionality, what advantages it has to standard STV and how it tackles strategic-voting/vote management (for instance - give zero weight to the strongest competitors). I assume it is not used for elections anywhere, so some alpha testing could be appropriate. I agree that more results about this method would be helpful. I haven't had time to push much on that. But actually, proportional mode has been used quite a few times for elections in CIVS. At last count, there have been 292 proportional-mode elections, and none of them have to my knowledge yielded the wrong result. As one example, there is a gardening group that runs monthly proportional polls to pick which plants should be considered plants of the month. My impression is that the use of proportional mode is periodically important for this kind of poll, to prevent, say, the orchid fanatics from taking over. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
If you are looking for a proportional Condorcet method, I will also recommend the proportional election method that I developed. It is not STV-like, but it achieves proportionality when there are blocs of voters. It has the added advantage that it is already built into a running Internet voting system, CIVS. This algorithm has been used for many online polls and has been a success. The code of CIVS is publicly available. For more information about the method, see: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/proportional.html By the way, CIVS has recently acquired support for internationalization. It would be easy to construct a Czech instance if someone were willing to translate approximately 250 sentences from English to Czech. There is, for example, a Hungarian version (see http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs-test/index.html.hu, translated by Árpád Magosányi). I am in the market for help translating to other languages. Cheers, -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: At 04:24 PM 4/25/2010, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hi, I am a member of the Czech Green party, and we are giving our statutes an overhaul. We are a small parliamentary party with only some 2000 members. Lately we have had quite some problems infighting due to the winner-takes-it-all election methods used within the party. ... The best way to handle council officer electinos is within the council itself, and repeated ballot is the standard way to do it; these officers should serve at the pleasure of the council, they are servants of the council. Thus ordinarily majority vote is adequate, and simple. I'll be surprised if a version of asset voting is appealing to these folks. To me, asset voting has always sounded very similar to Soviet democracy. A multistage process with a hierarchy of voters creates rich opportunities for various forms of coercion, and distances voters from the choice of leaders even more than they are now. That's the way it worked in the Soviet Union, and I'm sure the Czechs are familiar with the history. -- Andrew - Andrew Myers Associate Professor Department of Computer Science Cornell University Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Asset doesn't resemble what the Soviets had in the least There is no party control, parties become unnecessary with Asset. Abd, The phrase parties become unnecessary is redolent of utopian idealism. Parties will exist. Or do you think somehow asset voting is going to prevent concentrations of power, despite the iron law of oligarchy you are fond of quoting? Or there will be concentrations of power, but they virtuously will not engage in the give-and-take on the issues that at least some asset voting proponents have argued is a positive feature? No, of course there are and will be concentrations of power. The Soviet system had layers of electors. This allowed voting power to become more and more concentrated toward the top of the hierarchy until the top levels were pure Communist apparatchiks chosen for their unblinking loyalty to the system. It's also not necessarily multistage. If voters fear coercion of small-scale electors, they can decide, in advance, to give large numbers of votes to single candidates whom they trust. The ability to vote for the single candidate you think will win does help with the problem. But then what's the point of the asset mechanism? And if voters fear coercion of small-scale electors, they will vote the way those electors tell them to. That's the nature of coercion. Giving their vote away to someone else could open them up to reprisal. Maybe you think the vote will be anonymous? Then you need to design the protocols that protect anonymity. Not so easy. We should assume that the voting system is run by the parties and they will cheat if they can. The more layers your vote filters through, the more opportunities to cheat. Also, we must remember that coercion comes in both negative and positive forms -- the latter is called vote buying. Asset voting seems to me to offer great possibilities for efficient distributed vote buying. Peer-to-peer vote buying, if you will. If you propose something new that appears to have some of the features of a system known to be horrible, the onus is on you to convince others that these features are not a problem. You say asset voting isn't like Soviet democracy because it doesn't have party control. But how do you think that party control was established in the first place? Many totalitarian regimes (Soviet, even Nazi) start with a base comprising mostly idealists who sincerely want to make things better. The idealists are purged in the first few years via the governance mechanisms they have naively established. We will organize anyway, whether Mr. Myers likes it or not. He can join us, or not. We are not going to coerce him. Classic. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Idea Proposal: Listening Democracy
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: However, I strongly urge people who attempt to analyze the situation and to propose reforms to: 1. Keep it simple. An extraordinarily powerful system for fully proportional representation consisting of a seemingly-simple tweak on Single Transferable Vote was proposed in 1883 or so by Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll). If a simple system that is*obviously* far more democratic doesn't attract notice for more than a hundred years, what chance does something more complicated and dodgier (i.e., involving lots of unknowns) have? This description is misleading. It omits that there are no known good algorithms for implementing this method: the computational complexity of Dodgson's voting method is prohibitive. In fact, it was not even known until a few years ago, when the problem was shown to be complete for parallel access to an NP oracle (class Theta_2^p). http://www.springerlink.com/content/wg040716q8261222/ This result means it is extremely far from being usable in practice. Unless P=NP, there are no polynomial-time algorithms for deciding elections with Dodgson's method. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] strategy-free Condorcet method after all!
Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: Warren Smith has a copy of Tideman's election archive, as well as some other data, here: http://rangevoting.org/TidemanData.html I haven't run the data through my simulator yet, but it seems cycles are rare. There's also a database of STV elections at http://www.openstv.org/stvdb . While they could be processed by my program (if I write the correct converters), they are multiwinner elections and so the frequency of cycles might not be relevant to what would be the case for when voters are told the election is single-winner. Does anybody know of any data sources apart from the above? I have ballot data from about 1500 elections run using CIVS. But I haven't had the time to write software to package it up nicely. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] What does proportional representation MEAN? And list of known PR methods (know any more?)
Warren Smith wrote: Kristofer Munsterhjelm asked me what proportional representation (PR) means. At this time it is probably unwise to make a too-precise definition since every PR voting method seems to obey a different proportionality theorem. I say you should just assess each theorem on a case by case basis to see if you like it. But a somewhat imprecise definition is: ... HERE'S MY LIST OF KNOWN PR VOTING METHODS: ... That's my list. Is anybody aware of any other PR methods? Yes, the CIVS voting system implements a Condorcet PR method that I came up with. It seems to work well in practice, having been used for dozens if not hundreds of elections/polls. In the k=1 case it devolves to regular Condorcet. There is a description of it on the CIVS web site: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/proportional.html -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Anyone got a good analysis on limitations of approval andrange voting?
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Notice that the requirement of Arrow that social preferences be insensitive to variations in the intensity of preferences was preposterous. Arrow apparently insisted on this because he believed that it was impossible to come up with any objective measure of preference intensity; however, that was simply his opinion and certainly isn't true where there is a cost to voting. Arrow doesn't impose that requirement; that's not what IIA says. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Anyone got a good analysis on limitations of approval andrange voting?
Jonathan Lundell wrote: This is in part Arrow's justification for dealing only with ordinal (vs cardinal) preferences in the Possibility Theorem. Add may label it preposterous, but it's the widely accepted view. Mine as well. Arrow's Theorem seems like a red herring in the context of the cardinal vs. ordinal debate. IIA makes just as much sense when applied to range voting as it does to ranked voting. Arrow was just making a simplifying assumption and I don't see that it makes his results lose generality. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Anyone got a good analysis on limitations of approval andrange voting?
Jonathan Lundell wrote: I don't have his proof in front of me (I'm on the road), but I'm pretty sure that it assumes ordinal ranking. It seems fairly obvious that the theorem also holds for ratings, because ratings can be projected onto rankings without affecting any of Arrow's criteria. To put it another way, the proofs I have seen all apply to range-based methods in a straightforward way--there needs to be some fiddling with the proof to deal with ties, but that issue is not essential. Letting voters give ratings doesn't mean you escape Arrow's Theorem. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] A big Condorcet election
I thought people might enjoy seeing what happens when you have roughly a thousand people rank-order 48 candidates, and combine the results with various Condorcet methods. In this case, it's an attempt to determine the 20 most influential philosophers of all time. http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/cgi-perl/civs/results.pl?id=E_5f1c74bf01172b2a Cheers, -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [Election-Methods] Ballots with cycles
Juho wrote: Use of arbitrary preferences is interesting but rather theoretical, and the changes in the outcome might be marginal (at least in typical public elections). Any more reasons why it should be allowed? (In regular public elections also the complexity of the ballots might be a show stopper.) (If different ballots have different complexity that might be a risk to voter privacy (you would cast a complex vote while most other votes would be simpler).) Juho, Thanks for your thoughts on this. The reason to have it is that you can take a ballot that is expressed as ordinary rankings and decompose it into a set of individual preference relationships, each of which does not reveal much information about the voter. The various preferences are still summable, but preferences coming from different voters can be mixed together, preserving their privacy. This addresses a vulnerability sometimes called the Italian attack or Sicilian attack, legendarily associated with some elections in that region (I have no actual evidence that this really happened!), in which voters could be identified by the precise rankings used in their ballots, dictated by party bosses. With N alternatives, the N! possible orderings can uniquely identify many voters. The concern is that a voter might be able to inject a set of preferences into the system that do not correspond to any numeric ranking, if they control the software is that generates the preference relationships. So the question is whether there is a scenario in which a voter doing this is able to swing an election that cannot be swung by a voter who only generates transitive orderings. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
