Re: [EM] Sociological issues of elections
On 1.9.2013, at 16.57, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: To answer your question Juho, «When you wrote about a form of government that is elected by the people, did you mean that voters should have more say on what the government (coalition) will be like?»: My intention behind that statement was purely that the government should still be voted in by the population, not be decided by any other means, such as electing people based on skill and knowledge (i.e. technocracy). I tried to outline some scenarios where the voters could more or less directly determine the composition of the coalition. I guess this is too dynamic for you, and you actually like the current Norwegian practice where there are two rather fixed government alternatives, and voters know exactly which coalition each candidate/party belongs to? That approach is good in the sense that people know exactly what they will get. There are however also some possible problems. If there are only two possible alternatives, the dynamics of the system might approach the dynamics of a two party system. The problem is that voters may not be able to influence all the topics but only on some selected or most popular topics. I mean that if grouping A says yes to X and Y (two continuously popular questions), and grouping B says no to X and Y, then there may be third questions that will never be solved. Maybe both groupings say yes to Z (e.g. yes to money coming to the parties from some dubious sources) although voters do not like Z. The voters can not vote no to Z. A multiparty system is however better than a two-party system in this respect since it is possible that grouping A has party A1 that actually would not like to promote Z, but uít has to since other parties in grouping A do. In this case voters may one day influence on Z by first giving party A1 sufficient support so that A1 gains majority within grouping A. The point thus is that voters may have more influence on what direction the country will take if there are more than 2 main groupings, and voters can decide which ones will be in power next time. If all parties that do not like Z (and who will sincerely announce their preferences before the election) will get more votes, those parties are likely to be in the government, and the country is likely to oppose Z (those parties may come from left, right and elsewhere). Of course this approach has the problem that the exact policy and parties that will be included in the government are not known before the election (unlike in the fixed groupings approach). The formation of the government and its policy may can however be guessed quite well, if large_and_rising_parties will form the govrnment, and all parties have clearly stated their opinion on X, Y, Z etc. More votes to no Z parties is likely to lead to a no Z government in these or next elections. Different approaches have different benefits. One just needs to estimate how well these properties meet the needs of the country in question. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Sociological issues of elections
On 1.9.2013, at 22.02, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: On Sun, Sep 01, 2013 at 07:05:12PM +0300, Juho Laatu wrote: I tried to outline some scenarios where the voters could more or less directly determine the composition of the coalition. I guess this is too dynamic for you, and you actually like the current Norwegian practice where there are two rather fixed government alternatives, and voters know exactly which coalition each candidate/party belongs to? I apologize for answering so briefly on your message. I find the idea that letting the voters vote for their preferred coalition quite interesting I agee with interesting. But probably they are not very pracical, and probably will not be used. I just wanted to analyze the prospects a bit further on the path taht you seemed to point out. :-) And I can't fully visualize how such an election would work, and it seems to me that this may quickly become a fairly complex system? Yes. Even the simplest approaches could get quite complex since one can not allow a mechanical algorithm to determine the coalition anyway. Maybe the parties will not agree, and it is not easy to agree what coalition size is optimal etc. So, maybe voter opinions would be used olny as one input in the negotiations. We can see the sizes of the parties after the election anyway, and we can see which parties lost votes and which ones gained new votes. Based on this we can quite well already see which coalitions are the favourite ones. Explicit voter given information on different coalitions could be just additional opinion poll style information. Maybe a Condorcet poll where different coalition core partner combinatons are listed as candidates. Maybe a poll on one's favourite party and one's favourite second party for the coalition. The latter example is easier since it is easier to agree what the candidates are. But the additional information that these polls would offer is not very essential anyway. I don't know how common this is, but before elections in Norway most media create tests where the user is presented with several questions they answer with how much they agree with, and at the end they're presented with which party they agree the most with. This kind of web services are popular in Finland too. If this was how people voted for parties then you would effectively eliminate much fearmongering and charisma-votes, but you'll also introduce several other issues (the ideology of the party is lost, and you'll greatly simplify problems that may be very complex in nature). The key problem that I see in the question based polls is that it is very difficult to formulate neutral questions, to find a well balanced set of questions, and also to evaluate the level of agreement and weight of each question. I typically also miss some key questions that I would have liked to answer and hear candidate opinions. Such questionnaires can offer useful additional information to the voters, but I would not pick any single one of them as an election method that does good enough job in analyzing which candidates the voters want to elect. This kind of questionnaires can also be (at least in principle) used to mislead the voters by focusing on certain matters, and making biased questions and answer options (like giving a sunny picture and forcing candidates and voters to agree with topic X, and reverse treatment for topic Y). I know the questions is vague and broad, but I hope the issues I'm trying to point out is something the readers of this list can relate to. Questions like how to arrange an election so that voters will get best possible information and where parties can not present too biased views to the voters are very relevant at least to me. One topic that I have sometimes played with, and that has something to do with this discussion is how to complement the quick and vague TV debates with some more concrete questions and answers. One approach is to allow each party to present some written questions to other parties and force the other parties to answer these questions. That alone would give the voters some idea on what the current key differences between different parties are. Just a scratch, but the point is that we could force the discussions to be more exact, not only marketing stuff, and not only kind of enetertaining first shooter games on TV. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Sociological issues of elections
On 31.8.2013, at 15.24, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: This may be a bit outside what is usually discussed here, but I'll give it a shot and if someone know of some resources I should check up on then please let me know. I've not followed this list for a long time, but my impression is that the main focus is on the technical or mathematical properties, and less on the sociological issues. For instance, when voting for persons then candidates with high popularity and charisma are likely to win more votes than less charismatic candidates, despite the less charismatic candidates being far more suited for the task (more knowledge, experience, talent, etc.). In the Norwegian system where we got multiple parties, but two blocks (left and right), we also see that some people vote for their second preference rather than the first, because the first is in the wrong block or intend to cooperate with another party which the voter dislike the most. If it is within the scope of this list, what are your thoughts on the subject? In my opinion this is very much in scope. And from technical or mathematical properties point of view, these considerations may well have an impact on what kind of techniques one should use. I'd try to solve the problem of charismatic candidates by offering more information about the candidates to the voters, and allowing all candidates equal amount of publicity (visual, non-visual, real time, offline, net). What more could we do? Voters must anyway find out themselves which candidates are really good despite of not so good charisma, and which ones have nice charisma but nothing behind the charisma. The system can not make these evaluations for them, so we just need to increase the openness and informativeness of the system. Then the problem of people not voting for otherwise good candidates that have bad ideas like cooperation with unwanted parties, or who are from the wrong bock. I think also here voters should decide how much weight they put on different topics. If cooperation and correct wing are important, then that candidate really is bad and the voter should not vote for him. I guess here we come also close to the problem of voters being unable (e.g. in traditional list based systems) to give support to some selected set of candidates that come from multiple parties, but not to the other candidates of those parties. Typically voters can also give their vote to one candidate only, and that vote might end up supporting wrong candidates (if the favourite candidate will not be elected). Alternatively: Assuming the perfect election system where voting any different than your real preference would only hurt your preference, how would you design a form of government that is elected by the people, but is resistant to sociological issues that can't be prevented by the election method (such as the examples mentioned above)? I think we would first have to agree what kind of a government is a good government. There can be many opinions, and for different kind of political systems the choice may be different. From a traditional multiparty perspective a good government might be one that represents majority of the voters but not if we want to have an opposiition too. (this is just one option) Traditionally we want there to be static parties (other options possible too). The government would typically consist of multiple parties. A typical approach is that voters must choose their party and some preferred candidate(s) within that party. (Alternatively voters could indicate support also to good candidates from multiple parties.) Traditionally governments are formed only after the election, which means that the voter will not vote for a government coalition but that parties will build the coalition by themselves. It is however also quite common that possible government coalitions are quite well known and fixed already before the election (I guess Norway is closer to this). (It would be possible to have also elections where voters will decide what kind of government to form, but I guess this approach is not in use anywhere.) When you wrote about a form of government that is elected by the people, did you mean that voters should have more say on what the government (coalition) will be like? I.e. do you dislike both the approach of two fixed alternatives and the approach of parties negotiating the coalition structure after the election? Anyway, whether decided by the voters or by the parties (/ elected representatives) after the election, a good government coalition might be one that has proportional representation of all those parties that will form the government. Within those parties one has different options on how to pick the ministers. The ministers could be representatives that got a lots of support from the voters. Or alternatively the ministers could be ones that have support from the representatives (this approach alloas also
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 22.7.2013, at 16.43, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: On Sun, Jul 21, 2013 at 04:04:03PM +0300, Juho Laatu wrote: Yes, it is possible and even typical that many small parties get their best results in the same district. One simple fix (and one step more complex algorithm) is to allocate full quota seats first and fractional seats only after them. This means that the results can be off only by less than one quota for each party in each region. (Also other more ideal methods can be developed.) I wonder if accuracy of one quota would be sufficient. I may misunderstand you here, but I'm confused as of what would be the fractional seats. Using Sainte-Laguë there's no quota and thus no fraction. The simplest quota is Hare quota (= allVotes / allSeats). If a party gets 3.4 quotas of votes in some district, then it has three full quotas and one fractional quota of votes. In the algorithm above that would mean three certain full quota seats and one uncertain fractional seat. That approach is closer to quota style thinking than to divisor (e.g. Sainte-Laguë) style thinking, but it can be used in in divisor based methods too. The fractional seats will just be allocated using either a largest remainder method or a divisor method. With Sainte-Laguë one could use also Droop quota instead of Hare quota if one finds that more appropriate, or whatever quota is considered best (and is not too generous in the sense that it would grant too many seats). Is your idea to apportion seats by first using a quota (quota = votes / seats), then apportion the remaining seats (sequentially giving out seats to party A, party B, party C, ...) as described earlier in this thread? Yes, in the description above the intention was to allocate the remaining seats first to the smallest party, then to the next smallest etc. That might produce a sensible result, I'll see if I can modify the code to do something like this. I think that approach is at least quite easy to explain and justify to the voters. A full quota is something that looks pretty much like a certain seat, and quota fractions look like possible seats. Juho Let me know if this is not what you meant. -- Regards, Vidar Wahlberg 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] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 22.7.2013, at 23.50, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 07/22/2013 05:37 PM, Juho Laatu wrote: On 22.7.2013, at 16.43, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: That might produce a sensible result, I'll see if I can modify the code to do something like this. I think that approach is at least quite easy to explain and justify to the voters. A full quota is something that looks pretty much like a certain seat, and quota fractions look like possible seats. Yes, a quota is easier to explain. Just consider my attempts at divisor-based STV analogs vs STV itself: the latter is far easier to understand. On the other hand, quota-based systems have some peculiar properties. In party list, if you're using a quota method, it might happen that party X gains support while party Y loses support, yet Y gains more seats than X. Yes, the paradoxes may complicate things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apportionment_paradox). Some of the peculiarities can however be quite acceptable and even wanted. We discussed earlier for example the possibility that some seats would go to Condorcet style centrists. Let's say we have three parties, large Left, large Right and small Centre. If there is only one seat, we might give that to the centrist party (since it may be a clear Condorcet winner). But if there are two seats we might give them to Left and Right. And we get Alabama paradox style behaviour (where the centrist party loses a seat when the number of seats grows). The benefit of divisor methods is that they give a clear order of allocation. The quota methods rather focus on minimizing the lost votes. Both have their benefits, and their problems, both from the point of view of who should actually be elected, and from the point of view how to explain the behaviour of the methods to the audience. I guess that for party list, you could explain a divisor method pretty easily as well -- or rather, the Webster variant (multiply and round) would be fairly easy to explain: We would like each party to get a proportional share. So we divide each party's number of votes by some constant to get the sum to equal the number of seats in parliament. But this will give fractional results, so we have to round the results since there's no such thing as a tenth of an MP. But now the sum of seats may not add up to the number of seats in parliament. So we adjust the divisor. In other words, it's the least possible change from the ideal situation, given that we can't have fractional MPs. I'd like to test and try fractional MPs too :-). I note that generally voters need a simple and credible explanation. Very few voters actally understand how the most common divisor methods lead to proportional representation. Some of them may know how to use the algorithm, but I guess most are just happy to have a vague understanding that the used algorithm is most likely ok since people say it is proportional and experts, media and one's own party do not complain about it. The algorithm may thus be complex and it may contain paradoxes as long as there is a consensus that it works well enough. Or the algorithm may simple to help calculations and understanding. Nowadays simple calculations are no more a requirement, but computerized counting may sometimes be presented as a potential source of fraud (not often in real life though, if the calculations can be independently checked). I note that it is quite common that claimed problems emerge when some interest group wants to attack a method that is for some reason not beneficial to the interest group. Often the identified flaws are just clever propaganda, not so much about actual meaningful flaws of the system. It is also possible that flaws are real in a situation where someone proposes a biased system that would serve the interest of some interest group (e.g. to keep the current strong parties in power). After saying all this, I note that the most common divisor and largest remainder methods tend to give very proportional results when compared to what kind of systems are on average used globally. I think they are also all simple enough and easy enough to justify (not to all voters but to many enough experts and politicians to get the consensus that they work fine). Often the vulnerabilities are vulnerabilities to negative marketing, not really vulnerabilities in the actual use of the system. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 20.7.2013, at 13.07, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 07/19/2013 11:50 PM, Juho Laatu wrote: On 19.7.2013, at 10.18, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: In such cases, I would also suggest a few of the seats of the parliament be given by a centrist- or minmax-based method (e.g. Condorcet, CPO-SL with few seats, or possibly even minmax approval or something like it). The idea would be that there shouldn't be any kingmakers, but if there's a near-tie, that tie is broken by a moderate group. In proportional systems one should distribute most of the seats directly to different parties without seeking for compromise candidates. I mean that also extreme parties should get their proportional share of the seats. Only in the allocaton of the very last seats (=last seats at national level) one can take the second preferences of the voters into account. The second preferences often point to compromise oriented candidates (by definition). The idea of favouring compromise candidates thus means taking the second preferences of the voters into account when allocating the very last seats. Sometimes the voters may prefer giving the last seat to a compromise party (with only a small fraction of quota of first preference votes supporting this decision) to giving it to one of the main parties (that might have close to 0.5 quota of first preference votes left supporting their candidate). The CPO approach is a good way to estimate which allocation of seats would get wide support among the electorate. I was more thinking of doing so as a way of heading off the kingmaker objection. The objection goes something like: we need to have a threshold, because otherwise a very small party might be in position to make or break a coalition and so would get undue power. A threshold is an absolute way of avoiding this unless the party is at least to some extent large enough, but one could also avoid it by giving the tiebreaker spot to a centrist or broad appeal group. If complexity is not an issue, having a centrist tiebreaker group might even be preferable, since a threshold is indiscriminate about where it gives that tiebreaker power: a medium sized party could still become kingmaker were it lucky enough, given a threshold. If new mechanisms are needed in order to avoid using some more problematic mechanisms (like a high threshold), then such mechanisms are needed. But if not absolutely needed, my preference is to go for full proportionality, allowing compromise candidates instead of ones with most unused support (fractional quota) left only when allocating the very last seats. Also in those cases allocation of last seats to compromise candidates would be based on vote transfers (of still unused fractional votes) that give the compromise candidate more support than all extreme candidates have. One reason for this approach is that voter opinions and majortity are such a strong concepts that one should avoid breaking such majorities. Let's say we have four parties, big left, big right, small extreme left, and small modeate right. L + EL have 51% majority. EL is now a kingmaker in the sense that its support gives majority strength to L. MR is a compromise party in this scenario (preferred over the other big party by many voters). If we give more power to MR (since it is a compromise party, or since it is more moderate than the other small party) would change the left wing majority to a right wing majority. I'm sure this would also not look good in the eyes of the voters and media. Parties of different size may have disproportional voting power with certain distribution of strength among the parties. But I rather see that as a mathematical phenomenon that is natural in the sense that if majorities are that way, then they are that way. It would be difficult to say that some majority grouping does not deserve its majortity status. I already noted few mails back that at least in Finland I don't see the kingmaker effect giving too much power to the small parties. Typically government coalitions have more than one small party, if one small party would be in a kingmaker position. And generally small parties rather respect the opinions of the big parties. This is because they want to continue co-operation with other parties also in the next governments, and because they probably made some agreements (you get this, I get that, other topics will be decided by majority within the government) when the government was formed. I thus believe that in many (maybe most) countries the kingmaker position would not be a major problem. But if it causes problems in the discussion, then some modifications may be needed to defend agaist the threat, or the threat of not making any progress otherwise. Now that I think about it, that might be a way to improve the inequality between proportional representation and coalition voting power. This could be done in one of two ways
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
Some random notes. Please treat them as such. Just trying to point out what PAL representation looks like from different angles. I guess the key feature of PAL representation is the dynamic size of the districts. In this thread one central theme has been practical reforms in the Norwegian (or similar) system. Therefore of course one starts from districts that are similar to the current ones. But I think it could be possible that also a working and very accurately proportional multiparty system would use PAL representation like dynamic districts one day. (For current single member district based systems the promise of PAL representation is of course quite different, and the reasons to support or oppose it are quite different.) I note that the linked PAL representation article recommends use of super-districts. This means that voters would be (almost) forced to vote for the candidates of their own region (as in typical multiwinner systems force voters to do today). There was also the write-in option (to support the traditions of the USA I guess). If such write-in votes are rare, then they have also only small impact on the results. If they are common, then candidates of large centres would probably get more votes, and that would reduce regional proportionality somewhat. If some party gets only one seat (nationally), then I wonder if that seat would go to the biggest super-district. Is that how the system works? I guess the candidates of the biggest super-district typically delegate votes to each others. I wonder if they are allowed to delegate to others too (which might mean delegation to some central places, central figures, and that migh distort regional proportionality to some extent). I also note that the negotiation process of candidate vote delegation might be a complex one, possibly even involving money and party coercion. In large parties that will get several seats in each super-district this system could lead to more accurate regional representation than in traditional multimember district based systems. The problem of voters voting for the most central candidates of their (super-)district however remains (= makes the regional representation less proportional). Same with candidate delegation. One alternative to this kind of dynamic district oriented approach to providing good regional proportionality are e.g. ranked votes that allow voters to support all the candidates of their own sub-district (if they so wish), but just let the representatives represent whatever they do represent (region or ideology). I note that one key idea behind the PAL representation approach to districts is to follow the traditional single member district idea as closely as possible (maybe partly for marketability reasons, partly to guarantee good regional proportionality). This may be important in current single member district countries. When one looks at the system from current multmember district country point of view, the super-districts seem to correspond to the current districts. Then the question is, how much more will the dynamic districts offer when compared to traditional bullet votes to a party or to a candidate withins a (super-)district, or to a ranked vote based system (that allows voters to vote in terms of smaller sub-districts, but does not force them to do so (like super-districts do not force voters to vote locally)). One more topic in my mind is the distribution of candidates to the atomic districts. I guess in PAL representation it is possible that representatives of all (dynamic) districts that cover one particular atomic district may come from that single atomic district. Each atomic district thus gets its own nominated representative (for each party) but it is possible that the geographical distribution of the candidates is not very balanced. I guess that's enough (maybe even too much :) for now. Juho On 20.7.2013, at 17.40, Jameson Quinn wrote: I have kept up with this thread only intermittently. It seems to have strayed significantly far away from its subject line, and while I've been interested in some of the points that have been made, it's hard to summarize the thread as a whole. There is one point I've wanted to make, which seems a bit off-topic, but no more so than the rest of the thread. That is that a least remainders approach is not the only way to get something biproportional. You can also approach that ideal through delegation. Asset, for instance, is arguably perfectly proportional in all salient dimensions. And PAL representation is a biproportional system that works with a simple vote-for-one ballot. I encourage the people to follow that link because I think that the ideas in that system might enrich the conversation in this thread. Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 21.7.2013, at 14.42, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 08:23:04AM +0300, Juho Laatu wrote: I do feel that distributing first seats to small parties first makes more sense, especially considering that certain small parties (such as Rødt) got a lot of support in districts with large cities, but nearly no support in other districts. They should be guaranteed to receive their won seats in the districts where they got most support. I think it is ok to simply distribute first all seats of the smallest party, then all seats of the next smallest party etc. This is to avoid any weird results where some parties got seats in districts where they had relatively small support. Large parties do have strong candidates in every district, so leaving the rounding errors to them causes least harm. I actually tried something not too far from this, I distributed one and one seat to each party, i.e. in a election where 3 parties won seats: party A gets a seat party B gets a seat Party C gets a seat Party A gets a seat ... When a party had no more seats they were of course skipped. What happened was that certain districts got very peculiar results for the large parties. For example in Oslo all the small parties got one or more seats, leaving few seats left for the largest party, who got half the amount of seats you'd expect compared to their vote percentage in that district. Yes, it is possible and even typical that many small parties get their best results in the same district. One simple fix (and one step more complex algorithm) is to allocate full quota seats first and fractional seats only after them. This means that the results can be off only by less than one quota for each party in each region. (Also other more ideal methods can be developed.) I wonder if accuracy of one quota would be sufficient. This is why I went for the slightly more complex way of distributing seats in the reversed order the seats were won. It does mean that both small and large parties suffer rounding errors, but it's more evenly spread, and with a slight advantage to smaller parties. The biproportional apportionment system Kristoffer linked to is very interesting. It is slightly more complex and I fear it may be too complex for common people to understand (which will make it difficult to gain support for it), and I wonder if it may end up with exceptionally long calculation time when there are many districts and many parties. Yes, it has some complexity problems. Of course the benefit is that the results will follow some ideal definition. I guess the society and politicians have a lot to say on what approach is best. Especially in Norway where amount of seats in a district may be radically different from the amount of votes cast in that district. Finnmark is a such example, which got a low population and few voters, but a large area, giving them relatively many seats (calculated by population and area) compared to amount of votes. As I've understood the algorithm so far it'll calculate how many seats each party wins in a district purely based on percentage of the votes cast there, then later adjusted up or down to match the real amount of seats that should be won in the district. Due to the low amount of votes in this district it's likely that only about 1-2 seats will initially be won there, meaning you'll have to weight up the votes in Finnmark and weight the votes down in another district. I'd like to try implementing it, but I don't fully grasp all of it yet and most of my spare time ran out, so it might take a while. It would be good if there was an EM algorithm library somewhere. This has been discussed also before. I guess the rich environment of languages and platforms is one key reason why such nice library culture does not exist (not in EM, not much elsewhere either). Hoping for a better future with ability to communicate also easily implementable algorithms. Juho -- Regards, Vidar Wahlberg 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] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 19.7.2013, at 10.18, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: In short, multiple constraints might mean that the results over here depends on what happens over there in a way that's not easy to understand. And the more constraints you add, the harder it could get. One could estimate the level of confusion caused by those properties of the method that are not very easy to explain by studying the complex properties of the current system. In Norway the leveling seats are one potential topic. Could a discussion on the leveling seats go like this? Why do we have leveling seats? To make the results more balanced. Ok. If this is plausible, and if people thus accept the current level of complexity in the rules, then people could accept same level of complex rules also in the new system. The acceptable explanation could refer to the algorithm itself or to the design principles behind the algorithm. In such cases, I would also suggest a few of the seats of the parliament be given by a centrist- or minmax-based method (e.g. Condorcet, CPO-SL with few seats, or possibly even minmax approval or something like it). The idea would be that there shouldn't be any kingmakers, but if there's a near-tie, that tie is broken by a moderate group. In proportional systems one should distribute most of the seats directly to different parties without seeking for compromise candidates. I mean that also extreme parties should get their proportional share of the seats. Only in the allocaton of the very last seats (=last seats at national level) one can take the second preferences of the voters into account. The second preferences often point to compromise oriented candidates (by definition). The idea of favouring compromise candidates thus means taking the second preferences of the voters into account when allocating the very last seats. Sometimes the voters may prefer giving the last seat to a compromise party (with only a small fraction of quota of first preference votes supporting this decision) to giving it to one of the main parties (that might have close to 0.5 quota of first preference votes left supporting their candidate). The CPO approach is a good way to estimate which allocation of seats would get wide support among the electorate. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 18.7.2013, at 14.15, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: the percentage of the votes the party received in the district that plays a role This expression is actually ambigious. It could mean percentage of the votes of the district votes or percentage of the votes of the party votes. It could be an idea to implement an algorithm that tries to minimize partySeatsInDistrict / seatsInDistrict - partyPercentageInDistrict for all parties in all districts, but I believe this is a fairly difficult problem to solve, and the algorithm would likely be complex. Algorithms that aim at ideal results may be complex. Simpler approximate algorithms may give almost identical results. Ideal algorithms have the benefit of being provably ideal in some sense. Simple algorithms have the benefit of being understandable to the voters (and of course also easy to use and verify). I do feel that distributing first seats to small parties first makes more sense, especially considering that certain small parties (such as Rødt) got a lot of support in districts with large cities, but nearly no support in other districts. They should be guaranteed to receive their won seats in the districts where they got most support. I think it is ok to simply distribute first all seats of the smallest party, then all seats of the next smallest party etc. This is to avoid any weird results where some parties got seats in districts where they had relatively small support. Large parties do have strong candidates in every district, so leaving the rounding errors to them causes least harm. and I believe it's important that the method is so simple that most people can easily grasp it. Yes, this is quite important. Although I note that also the philosophy of a complex algorithm that aims at ideal results (in some mathematical sense) may sometimes be easy to explain to the voters, although the actual algorithm might be very complex. Most voters will not learn how to count the results anyway, but most of them like the system more if they at some level can trust that it is fair. This could mean exparts saying that it is good, media and friends saying that it is good, or simply nobody complaining that it has some bad features (like paradoxical results or a complex algorithm that may hide something). I think you may have misread the line you quoted. Yes, that was just confusion and being too quick to push the send button. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 18.7.2013, at 21.13, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: For each district and each party, calculate the quotient. Quotient = partyDistrictVotes / (2 * partyDistrictSeats + 1) In the category of simple and straight forward algorithms, here is one approach. - first use SL to determine at national level the number of seats that each party gets - then allocate all seats of the smallest party so that it gets it seats in districts where it has full nationalQuota of votes, or largest fractional nationalQuota of votes - continue with the next smallest party etc. - nationalQuota = nationalVotes / nationalSeats - after all seats of some district have been allocated, that district will be ignored when counting the rest of the results - if some party doesn't have sufficient number of candidates in some district, restart the algorithm but reduce the number of seats of this party by one I think the last row where a party loses a seat if it doesn't have sufficient number of candidates in all districts is fair since it is usually a mistake of the party if it does not nominate many enough candidates. (In the recent proposal in Finland they did some backtracking in such cases, but to me that seemed like adding unnecessary complexity to the method without getting any real benefits.) (One could also adjust the use of nationalQuota in the districts so that the impact of different voting activity in each district is cancelled = districtQuota = districtVotes / districtSeats, or maybe even something more complex (and possibly more fair).) it's possible to keep the modified Sainte-Laguë (first divisor is 1.4 instead of 1) if one so desires I note that in addition to being a threshold to small parties, divisor 1.4 can be also used to avoid strategic splitting of a small party to two even smaller parties to get two seats instead of only one. Generally I don't like thresholds at all since they make the results less proportional, but I can accept this one if the risk of startegies is real. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 18.7.2013, at 23.36, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: (And now that I think about it: if it's desired, it should be possible to make n-proportional apportionment methods for n2 -- e.g. a method that tries to balance regional representation, national representation, and representation of minorities according to their share of the population. The greater n is, though, the less intuitive the results will be.) I think any number of such (voted or static) proportionalities could be used. To me the biggest problem is that the rounding errors will increase, and as a result we will get also some strange results. That means some less intuitive results as you say, but maybe also more intuitive/fair in the sense that all groups will be fairly represented. With voted and static proportionalities I refer to e.g. percentage of votes to women vs. percentage of women in the society. In real life having political and regional proportionality may be enough for most countries, but I can see that in countries where the balance betheen different groups of the society is critical, also other proportionalities can be useful. This would allow e.g. different ethnic groups to work within one (ideological) party instead of being split in separate ethnic parties. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 18.7.2013, at 3.11, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: so the party gets the seat in the district with the highest: partyVotePercent / (2 * partyDistrictSeats + 1) Will the size of the district impact the results? (i.e. 20% of the votes in a district that has 6 seats altogether should always give that party at least one seat, but if that district has only 3 seats, getting a seat would not be certain) Once a district received all its seats, it's of course excluded from receiving any more seats. I guess the same applies to districts. Once all the seats of a district are gone, the remaining (party) seats will be allocated in other districts. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this method. I like the simplicity of the method. And despite of its simplicity I expect the results to be pretty accurate. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] EM list problems?
This message (that was sent by me) was not properly delivered to me. Did someone else have similar probelms or was it only me? http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2013-July/032170.html Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 7.7.2013, at 23.49, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: But this raises the question of where the regional MPs should reside. Two approaches (just thinking out loud). 1) One could have multiple layers from single member districts to counties etc. I recommend natural historical borderlines, not newly generated random borderlines, since it is important that people see the regions and their representatives as their own, representing some identifiable group with similar needs and targets. 2) Each party could have their own districting that spreads their representatives over all districts (smallest parties with one representative would have one district that covers the whole country). I note that in order to keep good geographical balance, one would have to take into account where each representative comes from, and not let their distribution become too unbalanced (e.g. one bottom level district gets representatives at all levels and another one only at the bottom level). This seems to get quite complex. And yes, when one adjusts local outcomes to get greater national proportionality, that means that someone who shouldn't have won on the local level nevertheless does win. Hopefully the difference won't be as great as to make the voters complain! Perhaps this is part of the point of leveling seats: they start off not being owned by anyone, so giving them out to party members may not seem as much a way of overruling the local result as if one started with all seats filled and *then* adjusted. Yes, it is important to give also a good impression of how the system works. I think people are quite ok with the idea that there will be some randomness in the allocation of the last seats, since that is the case anyway in most methods, and since those candidates are anyway close to having vs. not having sufficient support. Better luck next time for those candidates that didn't make it this time. I note also that one easy trick to get accureate proportionalities (national political, regional political and geographic) is to have representatives with different weight (different voting weight while in the parliament). But usually people do not fancy this kind of solutions. I'll outline also one sketch of a simple non-backtracking algorithm, just for reference. 1) Allocate (number of) seats to parties at country level, 2) in each district, allocate those seats that are supported by full quota of party votes, 3) allocate the remaining seats to parties, starting from the smallest party, so that each party gets its seats in regions that still have unallocated seats left and where the party has highest support, 4) allocate the seats of each party in each district to their candidates. Point 3 is the critical one. The idea is simply that small parties better be handled first since large parties have probably good candidates with reasonable amout of support in each district, and they can therefore be allocated last (without causing strange results). The result may not be ideal, but probably good enough, and acceptable since the algorithm is simple and straight forward. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 7.7.2013, at 16.16, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: On Fri, Jul 05, 2013 at 11:37:55PM +0200, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: The argument then is that if you add in lots of very small parties, any of them might become a kingmaker and so get extremely disproportional amounts of power. While I see the point, I think this may be a bit too simplified. Where as small parties in Norway possibly do have more influence than their size dictates, they arguably do not have the same power as the larger parties. Let's say we have two left wing parties and one right wing party. 46% L1 5% L2 49% R Should we redulce the number of seats of L2 so that it would not get too much power. By doing so we would change the left wing majority to a right wing majority. Small parties can be needed to build up majorty coalition governments. I think it is fair to give them their proportional number of seats. At least in Finland small parties have much smaller role in the coalition governments than the largest parties have. It is also typical that large parties collect so many small parties in the govenment that even if one of them would leave the government, the government would still have majority. This guarantees that no single small party can blackmail the government. The small parties need to consider also what would happen at the next time if they try to play bigger role in the government that their size is. Alternatively, instead of running Sainte-Laguë in each county, you could run SL on the national result (distributing all 169 seats), something which would produce a representation percentage very close to the actual result, and then distribute the seats to the parties in the different counties (keeping the same amount of seats in each county). I think this makes sense if you do not like the leveling seat style of building proportionality at national level. The last seats will be distributed pretty much in the same way anyway, but in this approach all seats are in principle seen as equal. The algorithm may either aim at some ideal allocation, or be a practical algorithm that just finds a good enough result. If we want full proportinality, then proportionality should thus be counted at national level. Another reason why national level votes should be used to count the number of seats for each party is that one should guarantee that it makes sense to vote for the small paries also in the smallest counties. If there is no such prcedure or leveling seats or some other national level leveling algorithms in place, it would not make sense to vote for small parties in the small counties. this would reduce the support of the smallest parties already before the votes are counted. This kind of balancing mechanisms will lead to electing a representative of the small party at least in some county, or maybe in this voter's own county, even if the number of votes would not be sufficient to win any of the seats, if seats would be allocated independently in each county. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 4.7.2013, at 21.39, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: that we're using 1.4 as the first divisor in Sainte-Laguë is what's making it difficult for smaller parties to get a foothold I can see the followig factors that influence the ability of the smallest parties to get seats: - constituencies / counties with small number of seats (problematic to parties below 4% national support) - thresholds are bad to the small parties - Sainte-Laguë is very fair to the small parties - 1.4 vs. 1 as the first divisor (divisor 1 for the leveling seats helps small parties above 4%) - vote to a party can be lost if the vote can not be inherited by the second best party (hurts large parties as well, but may be psychologically more difficult to the small party voters) I favour systems that are so simple that regular voters can easily understand how they work. Even though I'm a fan of Ranked Pairs Condorcet methods, I too share this sentiment. One can see also ranked methods also as simple methods in the sense that voters can easily understand what ranking means. And if there is also no need to consider and plan strategies but to just rank some candidates sincerely, then we could say that voting is easy for the voters. We would thus not require them to be able to tell how the algorithm works internally, but just to have a good understanding on how to vote, and that the method seems to be a fair. Another argument could be that voters probably would be wary of drastically changing the existing voting system. In the Norwegian voting system, changing it by removing election threshold, increase seats in each county by 1 and remove leveling seats, and possibly reduce the first Sainte-Laguë divisor slightly, say 1.3, while making it possible for voters to rank parties, could greatly help prevent the fear of wasting ones vote. Using the counting method mentioned earlier (exclude party with fewest votes, rerun Sainte-Laguë until all remaining parties got at least 1 seat), it's arguably easier to explain than the current one with the leveling seat algorithm. Just be careful that, when getting rid of the leveling seats, you don't end up in a situation where all the counties would elect their representatives independently of each others. Because of the small number of seats per county, that would effectively limit the chances of small parties to get seats in the small counties. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
Some late comments follow. Vidar Wahlberg wrote: The short answer to why not vote directly for persons? would be that in Norway there's more focus on the goals of a party rather than the goal of its politicians, and some may argue that the extra abstraction layer is a good thing, as well as I'd like an alternative that won't be completely alien to the common people. I'm hoping that any discussion that may arise won't focus on this aspect, though. Open lists would be one easy modification, but I note that you prefer ranked ballots, so let's skip open lists. Ranked ballots can also provide better party internal proportionality (between different sections of the party or between different parts of the districts) than basic open lists. I don't have any proof that it will degenerate into a populist competition, but I do see the potential that it will, when you vote directly for a person rather than a party. In principle ability to vote for persons helps populist candidates. My best understanding is that in Finland, that uses open lists, well known candidates (from sports, TV etc.) probably have slightly better chances to win a seat when compared to countries using closed lists, but that difference is not big. Also closed lists can be populated with well known figures to get populist votes (in addition to nominating experienced politicians). Also campaining could in principle be more populist in open lists, but I don't see big difference here either. In FInland the level of populism differs more between parties than between the candidates of a single party. All in all, I believe the risk of excessive populism is not big in ranked methods either. The leveling seat algorithm is... peculiar. You said that you don't like methods that lead towards a two/three party system. In other words the method should allow also small parties to survive. I note that typically small districts are one key reason why small parties do not get any seats. If you e.g. have a district with 3 seats, it is obvious that only two/three largest parties can win there. The leveling seats (that are allocated based on support at national level) could fix that problem, but I understood that n Norway they don't apply to the smallest parties. Therefore the 5% threshold probably effectively reduces the chances of the smallest parties to get their proportional share (at national level) of the seats. It does not make sense to the voters to vote for parties that most likely will not get any seats in their district anyway. I don't know what the situation in Norway actually is today. My comments here are thus just general comments on how multi-winner election methods usually work. I'd like to get rid of both leveling seats and election threshold. If you want to achieve exact proportionality (also for small parties) I think it is important that proportionality will be counted at national level. Also in ranked methods it is not enough if each district does its best alone since the small number of seats per district will distort proportionality at national level. From this point of view the leveing seats (or any construction that aims at providing proportionality at national level) is good, and thresholds are bad. - - - I note that you can achieve national level proportionality in list based methods also without leveling seats. In Finland there was a proposal that was alrady once accepted by the parliament but then cancelled by the current government. This proposal counted the proportionality first at national level, and then allocated a predetermined number of seats to each district so that at the same time also the calculated national proportionality numbers were met. This means that the last seats in some districts were slightly forced to correct parties, to meeth the national proportionality target. All methods that try to reach multiple targets, like political proportionality and geographic proportionality at the same time will have some rounding errors. In the Finnish proposal those rounding errors were thus solved by slight distortion in who and which party wins the last seat in each district, instead of using e.g. leveling seats to capture the rounding errors. - - - You had interest in guaranteeing that the lost votes of small parties will go to parties that are similar-minded. If one counts exact proportionality at national level the number of lost votes will be quite small. That alone might be enough for some needs. The traditional way of voting for one party or one candidate only could thus be enough, and there would not be need to have ranked votes for this reason. (Ranked votes could be there for other reasons, like to support party internal proportionality.) Ranked methods may also be quite heavy for the voter if there anre tens of candidates to rank. For the needs of Finland I have been interested in methods that would combine lists and ranked votes in another way.
Re: [EM] Quotaless STV-PR suggestion
On 4.7.2013, at 6.57, Chris Benham wrote: STV meets Later-no-Harm because lower preferences only count after the the fate (elected or definitely eliminated) of more preferred candidates has been set. My suggestion doesn't because by not truncating a voter could have their ballot count towards the election of a non-favourite in an early round (and a candidate that might have won anyway), and so be reduced in weight and then not be heavy enough to elect the voter's favourite in a later round (when it would have been if the voter had truncated). It seems that your suggestion reduces the weight of a vote when it contributes to electing someone at the first time. Another approach would be to try to reduce the weight of a vote based on the most preferred candidate that is about to be elected. Can you elaborate why you prefer to do it this way (to help me to understand why your suggestion is what it is). Another question. How about using Condorcet to elect the winner at each round instead of doing it in IRV style (top-ranked on the highest number of ballots)? Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats
On 4.7.2013, at 13.55, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 07/04/2013 08:55 AM, Juho Laatu wrote: In principle ability to vote for persons helps populist candidates. My best understanding is that in Finland, that uses open lists, well known candidates (from sports, TV etc.) probably have slightly better chances to win a seat when compared to countries using closed lists, but that difference is not big. Also closed lists can be populated with well known figures to get populist votes (in addition to nominating experienced politicians). Also campaining could in principle be more populist in open lists, but I don't see big difference here either. In FInland the level of populism differs more between parties than between the candidates of a single party. All in all, I believe the risk of excessive populism is not big in ranked methods either. Both closed list and open (and ranked) methods have their failure modes. Closed list fails when the party leadership becomes unaccountable and insulates itself, and then the voter is forced to either vote my way or the highway - i.e. to accept the leadership's ranking or to not vote for the party. Person-based methods fail when it produces an incentive to be excessively populist. In a way, that's a mirror of the general balancing act of democracy. If it is too representative as opposed to direct, then the powerholders might just run away with the power and mockingly say to the voters that they have no choice but to vote for one of the powerholders. If it's too direct, then it can amplify too much and oscillate around various policies if not degenerating entirely to populism. I suspect that the solution to this particular problem lies not in getting the balance right, but somehow setting up the right feedback system so that public discussion and opinion convergence can move beyond populism. That said, I think I favor ranked multiwinner methods if I have to choose: the populist objection seems to be employed to exaggerate the negative results of giving the people more choice. Your expression representative vs. direct captures the small difference between multi-winner methods that allow parties vs. voters to decide which candidates of each party will be elected. Most democracies are representative democracies, so there will be some level of representative isolation between voters and decision making. One just has to decide how much direct power to give to the voters, and how much one expects them to be capable of making decisions themselves. In closed lists it is also important that the party structure can change. If the system is parameterized so that the old parties will stay in power forever, we may be in trouble. But if the system allows parties to grow, emerge and diminish depending on what kind of candidates each party puts on the list, then we are ok. The leveling seat algorithm is... peculiar. You said that you don't like methods that lead towards a two/three party system. In other words the method should allow also small parties to survive. I note that typically small districts are one key reason why small parties do not get any seats. If you e.g. have a district with 3 seats, it is obvious that only two/three largest parties can win there. The leveling seats (that are allocated based on support at national level) could fix that problem, but I understood that n Norway they don't apply to the smallest parties. Therefore the 5% threshold probably effectively reduces the chances of the smallest parties to get their proportional share (at national level) of the seats. It does not make sense to the voters to vote for parties that most likely will not get any seats in their district anyway. I don't know what the situation in Norway actually is today. My comments here are thus just general comments on how multi-winner election methods usually work. The Norwegian threshold is at 4%. If parties get sufficient local support, they still get seats; the 4% only regards leveling seats. As a concrete example, in the 2009 parliamentary election, the Liberal Party (Venstre) achieved a support result of 3.9%, just below the threshold of 4%. In the previous election, their support reached 5.9%. As a consequence of going below the threshold, the party lost 8 of its 10 MPs. The Norwegian system has thus two levels that determine how many seats the smallest parties will get. Here is a list of constituencies of the parliamentary election (taken from Wikipedia). County Seats Østfold 9 Akershus 16 Oslo 17 Hedmark 8 Oppland 7 Buskerud 9 Vestfold 7 Telemark 6 Aust-Agder 4 Vest-Agder 6 Rogaland 13 Hordaland 15 Sogn og Fjordane 5 Møre og Romsdal 9 Sør-Trøndelag 10 Nord-Trøndelag 6 Nordland 10 Troms 7 Finnmark 5 Total 169 If a voter expects some party not to reach the 4% threshold, then voting for such party makes sense only in the largest districts, e.g. in Oslo that has 17 seats
Re: [EM] Before Voting Methods and Criteria: Outcome Design Goals (long)
On 30.6.2013, at 23.19, Benjamin Grant wrote: I’ve been coming at understanding better the options and choices, merits and flaws of various approaches to holding votes – mostly with the kind (and sometimes not-so-kind) help of the people on this list. However, a (I assume) basic thought occurred to me, which may be so obvious no one need ever discuss it, but I want to double check my thinking on some of this. The rest of this post will NOT be concerned with any one particular voting method or criteria. Instead I will be comparing different scenarios of voter preference with thoughts about who “should” win. If I am not making sense quite yet, come along and hopefully it will make more sense in practice. If not, you can ask me questions or delete the post. Let’s assume that we have a magical gift – a super power, if you will. We can know exactly what each voter thinks about each candidate. Now, because this comes from magic, it cannot unfortunately be used as a part of the election process, but it will be useful for our examination of attitudes of the voters. So as we turn our power on a random voter, we can pick (on a scale of 0 to 100) how they feel about each candidate. A 0, in this case, indicates that the voter is absolutely against the candidate winning the election, and will vote however he must to stop that from happening, whereas a 100 indicates the reverse: that the voter is absolutely for this candidate’s victory, and will give it everything he can at the ballot box. 50 indicates a sort of “meh” reaction – doesn’t hate them, doesn’t love them – or possibly the voter has some aspects of the candidate he really likes, but some other aspects that he is less than thrilled with. So, using this power, we can know absolutely on a scale of 0 to 100 what each voter thinks of each candidate. Using that knowledge, we ought to be able to say who “should” win – which I will return to in just a moment. First, each candidate’s support by the voters can be noted on a graph, with the X axis denoting the scale of 0-100 Favorability, and the Y axis denoting the percentage of voters who hold that exact opinion. So, for example, on a graph like this, you might find that 12% rate a certain candidate at 0F – they *hate* this guy. Another 14% may rate this candidate at 100F – these are his loyal base. Most people fall somewhere in between. To keep things simple, I’m going to talk about candidates as if their voters clump at certain points, instead of spreading more fuzzily. I think the core questions become no less valid and no less worth thought. I am going to posit a series of two candidate comparisons, and ask who “should” win. The point here is to ignore the methods for a bit, and just see what our gut says, given the absolutely magically accurate information we have about the voter’s preferences. An exact definition of which candidate is best can be used also as a definition of the method (assuming that the preferences can be expressed on the ballot and the expressed opinions are sincere enough). I mean that you can also proceed by defining the ideal outcome first and then declaring that exact definition to be the algorithm, instead of defining an algorithm first and then checking what kind of candidates that algorithm will elect. To start with, let’s imagine one candidate with 51% of the voters giving him an 80F, and 49% giving him a 0F. Another candidate has a 63% of the voters giving an 80F (with the remaining 37% giving 0F.) Which candidate ought to win? Unless I miss something, this one is an easy one. Both candidates have the same level of favorability but one has greater breadth than the other. It seems self-evident to say that when the favorability is identical, but the breadth is not, greater breadth should win. Likewise, if instead our election has one fellow with 51% @ 80F and another at 51% @ 100F, the second ought to win, since he has the same breadth, but higher favorability, right? (Note, if I say that a candidate has 51% @ 80F, not only does that mean 51% of the voters find him at an 80 Favorability, but that all other voters omitted (the 49%) find him at 0F. Additionally please note that these are NOT elections or election methods, just questions about who we feel “should” win given different circumstances of voter sentiment.) So, when one candidate has equal or better breadth and/or favorability, it makes sense to our sense of fairness that they ought to win. Now let’s examine the more complex and fun situation of unequal aspects – with one candidate with a better breadth, but his competitor with a better favorability. This time, we have a candidate named Wilson who manages to get 51% @ 100F. His competitor Franklin gets 80% @ 90F. In this circumstance, I think a lot of us would prefer that Franklin win. Sure, 51% of the
Re: [EM] Discourse
On 1.7.2013, at 23.12, Benjamin Grant wrote: Thanks for everyone's candor and feedback. I can certainly appreciate how annoying it is to deal with someone like myself that 1) is often asking questions that everyone else had heard many times before and knows the answer by heart, and 2) someone who may not be able to understand the explanations when they are given. I am running into #2 a lot, so much that I am wondering if this list is really mostly for people who are already trained, steeped, and comfortable with concepts like utlity and Batesian regret, with high level math and set theory, and so on. Some people are very kowledgeable here, some less. That's no problem as long as the discussions are good. There are many kind of people on the EM list. Some have academic interests in this area, some are active on practical reforms, some promote their own favourite methods and criteria, some are just interested in following the discussions. The language on this list is sometimes polite, sometimes not. Your mails have certainly been better than many others. Welcome to the list. It is no problem if you don't know all the used terminology yet. Because of the multitude of topics and writers of this list, people are already used to reading and answering those mails that they are interested of and skip the rest. Despite of all the quarreling and messy posts, I think the EM list is a well working mailing list that has also lots of good content for various needs. Hopefully for you too. Juho It may simply require more time and effort than I have to give to understand the answers to these questions, I certainly do not have the option presently to take courses in these advanced subjects. I was hoping there would be a more down-to-earth way to get this stuff, but whether there's no way to dumb this stuff down, or whether it's just not something that people here are interested in, either way I can appreciate it. Finally, while I was surprised that erudition didn't eliminate the churlishness, my best approach to that fact is probably to get a thicker skin. I'm not promising to be a punching bag, mind you, but I can probably be a little less sensitive and just assume that these groups are more pugnacious than I had imagined. Thanks everyone. I'm going to keep my subscription to these groups for now (if I may), and I will try to be mindful of all of the above if and when I continue interacting with them. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 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] irv and the politics of electoral reform.
On 26.6.2013, at 22.48, David L Wetzell wrote: This is in response to an earlier post by Juho where he speculates that IRV is the preferred reform by politicians in the two major parties who want to accommodate change that does the least harm to the status quo. I think it's useful to consider the ideas of the politics of electoral reform by Alan Renwick, as reviewed by Patrick Dunleavy. Renwick breaks electoral reforms into two categories, ‘majority elite imposition and elite-mass interactions. The first is a faux reform pushed by the elites to increase their control. The latter is a reform pushed by the masses on the elites whereby both sides accommodate each other some to give way to a new political equilibrium with a different system for the circulation of the elites. This sounds like a tug of war between elite and masses. Makes sense. (Maybe the elite wins the tug of war when it gets rid of democracy, and the masses win when they get rid of the elite. The democratic ideal seems to be to seek a balance where the rope is loose and the power is as close to the masses as they can steer the system.) I think the reform in the US that wins the majority elite imposition prize is top two primary. It certainly improves on fptp the least of all possible reforms and removes a lot of important voices in the final round. Yes, top two primary would be a simpler modification. Its dynamics differ somewhat from the dynamics of IRV. I'm not sure which one would defend status quo better in a typical two-party environment. I see IRV as an elite mass interaction. It doesn't end the tendency to a two-party dominated system, but it does change the nature of that two-party dominated system so that both must hew more to the center and new ideas or frames for wedge-issues can be brought up by outsiders. In traditional two-party countries this kind of electoral reforms may have far reaching influences. One should be ready to discuss also possible changes in other areas of the political system that is typically built around the basic idea of having two alternating parties in power, or alternating presidents / governments from one of the two leading parties. Or maybe the target is just to open up the possibility of electing sometimes independents or representatives of small parties, just to remind the big parties that they must listen to the voters and not just keep running their own (maybe hidden) agenda and rely on winning 50% of the elections forever anyway. That would be a two-party system with reminders. I guess this is close to what you meant. Transition from FPTP towards IRV looks like a typical elite mass interaction since that modification increases the power of the masses, and works against the status quo that the elite is expected to maintain. I also see that FairVote's proposed upgrade of top two primary to that a top four primary is essentially trying to coopt the momentum such a false reform has gotten for disingenuous reasons so that it'd actually be useful. It also solves some of the problems with IRV by limiting the number of candidates in the final election to four. There are only 41 ways to rank up to 3 of four candidates and so it'd be feasible to sort ballots into these forty-one categories at the precinct level. This fits with my proposal to rally around IRV and then if or when IRV proves dysfunctional, using IRV to proffer alts to IRV. If we make IRV+ American forms of PR in more local elections the progressive-centrist consensus for reform then it'll pave the way for further experiements down the road that'll give some of the ideas this list focuses a lot on more opportunities. In politics one must be prepared to make lots of compromises. That means that if a reform will be made, it will probably be very different from the first (mathematically clean) proposals, and therefore maybe not very pretty. This means that one should have a clear understanding on what direction one wants to take, and accept all reasonable steps in that direction. Juho dlw dlw 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] Is it professional?
On 25.6.2013, at 12.13, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 06/25/2013 09:17 AM, Juho Laatu wrote: On 25.6.2013, at 1.25, Benjamin Grant wrote: On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 6:19 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_el...@lavabit.com mailto:km_el...@lavabit.com wrote: Scenario 1: Voters don't rank now, but will rank when they see it's worth it. Here IRV will eventually crash but BTR-IRV is, well, better. Scenario 2: Voters rank, contrary to your assumptions (but suggested by international evidence). Again, BTR-IRV does better. Scenario 3: Voters don't rank and never will. BTR-IRV is here no worse than IRV. Under what scenario does BTR-IRV *lose* against ordinary IRV? I am quite interested in the answer to this as well, as I imagine that whatever the answer is is a defining advantage, should any exist. One can see this problem from two quite different points of view. One approach is that BTR-IRV is simply an improved version of IRV that it avoids some of the key problems of IRV. Therefore it could be straight forward to get also BTR-IRV accepted if the society accepts IRV. Another approach is to have a more political power oriented viewpoint. IRV tends to favour major parties. If the incumbent strong parties (that do have a lot to say on what route the politics take) may well count their chances in each proposed method. This might lead to favouring methods like IRV that still allow the largest parties to take a lion's share of the victories. Right. I've heard this argument from others: that IRV, favoring the large parties, will get greater support from them. But the problem with that argument is that on the face of it, it seems to apply just as well to Plurality. The rule may apply to all political parties with ability and interest to plot and plan and be power hungry or be afraid that other parties are power hungry. That is thus a considerable temptation to all parties in all competitive political systems. Some political forces might think that if reform is imminent, then one should pick a method that causes least harm. Adoption of IRV (replacing plurality) might lead to further reforms and therefore this path is risky to the incumbent major parties, but other methods might be even more dangerous to them. In that situation IRV may be the least threatening one of the proposed changes. From this point of view a good reform might be one that will cause so many problems that it wll be soon cancelled. I note that in Burlington the reform was cancelled. The reasons behind the cancellation are probably quite complex, but in real life political situations also fake reforms and watered down reforms are quite common. My theory thus is that in all organizations (not just in politics) people tend to maintain and increase their own power and position. In this situation, and if someone understands the dynamics of the election methods well enough, also reforms may proceed on such paths that are most useful and least harmful to the ones that are in power right now. For example in the USA Plurality (and the whole political system around it) may thus be the most popular approach to the incumbents. IRV might be one of the least harmful reforms, and at least less harmful than e.g. Condorcet. The ones who already have power, have power to some degree because of the imbalances in the power allocation system. Yes. I think in most systems also the initiatives and alternative proposals come from the ones that already have power. Therefore already the concrete proposals are usually filtered by them in some suitable way. Therefore, they'll be disinclined to switch the power allocation system or parts of it, for something that will distribute power away from them. Or to be more direct: the people who are in power because of Plurality would see no need to advocate IRV unless they would also be in power under IRV -- and if they already have power, why take the chance? Yes. In all political systems those who were elected in the previous election tend to dislike electon method reforms since it was the old method that elected them. In this situation any changes in the method carry a risk of not electing the same candidates next time. On the other hand it is the job of the politicians to make changes in the society and thereby market themselves as active politicians. Sometimes the discussion goes also on the (unwanted) election method reform track, and sometimes that even leads to something. In that situation some watered down reform (or a reform that improves the chances of the politician / party in power) is the favourite one. I think the argument would be better if adapted to a sort of internal discontent scenario. For simplicity's sake, say you have a 1984-like structure with three classes: - The upper class wants to stay in power, - The middle class wants to switch places with the upper class, - The lower class
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On 25.6.2013, at 11.57, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 06/25/2013 09:00 AM, Juho Laatu wrote: On 25.6.2013, at 1.06, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: Remember that criterion compliances are absolute. So a method may fail a criterion yet be perfectly acceptable in real elections. I just want to support this viewpoint. It is not essential how many criteria a mehod violates. It is more important how bad those violations are, i.e. if the method likely have serious problems or not. The best method might well be a method that violates multiple criteria, but manages to spread the (unavoidable) problems evenly so that all of them stay insignificant. In a sense, it's like certain kinds of mathematical tests. There are primality tests that return either this number is definitely a prime or this number might be prime or might be composite. If you get the former result, you know you're dealing with a prime, but if you get the second, you don't know whether you're dealing with a prime or a composite number. Criterion compliances are similar. If something passes IIA, you don't have to worry about candidates being added or removed as long as the voters don't alter their votes when the candidates are being added/removed. Whatever the dynamics might be on the nomination side, IIA secures the method. On the other hand, if something fails IIA, then you have the might be scenario. The method might fail IIA in blatant ways, or it might fail it where it doesn't really matter. You don't know. Yes. Often you also know that although some method violates some criterion in practice it will (almost or completely certailnly) not cause any problems. We may also have a balance of benefits and problems where the benefits the problems so that e.g. trying some theoretically possible stratgy simply does not makes sense (= is more likely to cause damage than benefits). In this case there is no compliance but there is a strong understanding that there will be no problems. In the EM list discussions people often do not keep the difference of theoretical vulnerabilities and practical vulnerabilitis (in real life elections, maybe in some given political environment) clear enough. In my case, I do like the certainty that criterion compliance provides, but sometimes, it just isn't available. There is, though, one situation where criterion compliances go both ways. The method might produce a result that goes so completely against common sense that opponents can use it to argue against the method, even if that result itself only would appear very rarely. Perception does matter; and it's reasonable that it does, because sometimes the bizarre failure is symptomatic of a method that behaves strangely under pressure in general. That is not true all the time, though. It is good to handle both concerns. I like to discuss first about the properties of each method at abstract / technical / theoretical level, and then give also some consideration to how such methods would fit and could be marketed in some given political environments. What I don't like is method and criteria names that have been chosen to be as good for positive or negative marketing as possible. In the theoretical discussions the ugly and pretty names should have no meaning (except to idetify a criterion or method). Condorcet methods are an interesting example since in many cases their violations deal with situations where opinions are cyclical. In real elections sincere top level cycles are not very common, and artificially generated cycles (as a result of successfully implemented strategies) may also be difficult to generate and may easily lead to unwanted results from the strategists' point of view. The problem thus is that marginal violations (that voters actually need not worry about at all) will be marketed as major flaws that make it impossible to use the method in all real elections. Failing to meet FBC does not mean that voters are expected to betray or should always seriously consider betraying their favourite. Strategy never betray your favourite or always vote sincerely may lead to better results and may well be the best strategy for the voters (of all opinion groups) to follow. One can compare the vulnerabilities of the election methods also to security systems. In that area one often says that a system is as strong as its weakest link. Also in election methods one could optimize the system based on how strong the weakest link is. That means (roughly) that we need not worry how many flaws the stronger links have as long as those links are still stronger than the weakest link (and if weakening a strong link allows us to make a weak link stronger). In summary, I want to clearly separate discussion on the theoretical properties of the methods, on the practical properties of the methods (in real life elections), and on the marketability of the methods (to the politicians, media
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On 25.6.2013, at 18.00, Benjamin Grant wrote: On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 2:53 AM, Juho Laatu juho.la...@gmail.com wrote: On 24.6.2013, at 16.06, Benjamin Grant wrote: So, as far as *I* can see, this converts Score Voting into Approval voting. The only people who would bother to vote sincerely are: 1) Those who truly prefer Gore highest and Bush lowest (or vice versa), because there’s no strategic downside. You seem to assume that voters with opinion 'Gore:75, Nader: 90, Bush: 10’ are not strategic when they vote 'Gore:75, Nader: 100, Bush: 0’. There are thus two possible levels of sincereness, either people who think that all candidates are about equally good should vote that way, or if they should exaggerate and tell that the worst one of them is worth 0 points and the best one is worth 100 points. But in the instance where someone's highest priority is to stop Bush, and a distant second level priority is to see Nader elected over Gore, it seems unavoidable to admit that if they vote 'Gore:75, Nader: 100, Bush: 0’ they will be harming their first priority by withholding support from Gore. Isn't this correct? Yes. Those voters already have some strategic thoughts like I must maximize the power of my vote. If they sincerely feel strongly that way (Bush is worth 0 points etc.), this can be classified as sincere voting. But if they think that all politicians are actually quite equal, maybe they should vote sincerely 'Gore:75, Nader: 80, Bush: 70’. So then that is a non-strategic vote in comparison to 100/whatever/0, yes? I guess whether we call some vote strategic or not depends also on what the voters were requested to do. If they were requested to evaluate candidates so that 0 points means worst imaginable and 100 points means perfect, then 0 points should be reserved for Hitler and Stalin and similar. Bush is certainly above that level for most voters. But if they were asked to spred the candidates on a scale from 0 to 100, then voters should use also numbers 0 and 100. (The latter approach of course has problems like someone nominating a Republican candidate that is much worse than Bush and thereby lifts Bush to at least 25 points in all ballots.) That's what makes strategic voting different from sincere voting, isn't it: that strategic voting has a greater chance of creating a more preferred outcome? The voters can either try to influence the outcome of the election as much in their own favour as possible, or they can simply indicate their opininion sincerely, as requested by the election organizers. In competitive elections (e.g. political elections) voters tend to adopt the first approach. I some more peaceful elections and polls they may adopt the second approach. So long as the strategic vote and the sincere vote are not the same, a sincere vote is a vote against your preferences. If the election is not competitive, then your sincere votes is also ideal for you, even if you caould change the result to better from your point of view by falsifying your preferences. A typical example situation could be e.g. a vote within a family on what food to make today. In such environments the voters typically want to seek a balanced result rather than get their own preferences implemented every day by using some strategic tricks. Political elections are of course usually more competitive. That is why it seems so important to me to favor system where those two kinds of voting coincide as often as possible, right? Yes. It is one of the key targets to find an election method that would sufficiently discourage strategic voting. In some methods like Approval people (on the EM list) usually expect voters not to vote sincerely (= approve those that you approve) but to cast their best strategic vote, which typically includes approving some of the frontrunners and not approving some of the frontrunners. From this point of view there are at least two categories of practical methods 1) methods where people are expected to express their sincere opinions on the ballot and 2) methods where all voters are expected to follow some strategy that is available to all and that least to balanced results despite of all being strategic. In both cases we want to avoid situations where some voters can cast a stronger strategic vote than others, and where strategic voting would somehow make the end result bad, or make the election more random, or allow the plotters to win, or make it difficult for the regular voters to vote. It’s days like these that I feel that there *is* no way to elect people that is fair and right. L All methods have some problems. But the problems are not always so bad that they would invalidate the method. I'd propose to study also the Condorcet compliant methods. I note that they already popped up in the later discussions and you more or less already promised to study them. When compared to Range style
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On 26.6.2013, at 13.31, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 06/26/2013 11:24 AM, Juho Laatu wrote: On 25.6.2013, at 18.07, Benjamin Grant wrote: Now there are some criteria that aren't important to me at all, that I do not value what the try to protect - and those I factor out. I think I don't have any criteria that I'd absolutely require. How about unanimity? :-) Ok, that comes close. However, an otherwise excellent method with 1/100 random probability of not meeting unaminity, giving victory to some almost equally good candidate, would maybe be a stupid method, but still maybe acceptable. I.e. I could accept it if other alternatives are worse. :-) Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On 24.6.2013, at 16.06, Benjamin Grant wrote: So, as far as *I* can see, this converts Score Voting into Approval voting. The only people who would bother to vote sincerely are: 1) Those who truly prefer Gore highest and Bush lowest (or vice versa), because there’s no strategic downside. You seem to assume that voters with opinion 'Gore:75, Nader: 90, Bush: 10’ are not strategic when they vote 'Gore:75, Nader: 100, Bush: 0’. There are thus two possible levels of sincereness, either people who think that all candidates are about equally good should vote that way, or if they should exaggerate and tell that the worst one of them is worth 0 points and the best one is worth 100 points. Am I substantially wrong about any of this? I think you are generally very right about this. It’s days like these that I feel that there *is* no way to elect people that is fair and right. L All methods have some problems. But the problems are not always so bad that they would invalidate the method. I'd propose to study also the Condorcet compliant methods. I note that they already popped up in the later discussions and you more or less already promised to study them. When compared to Range style utility measuring style Condorcet methods take another approach by allowing majorities to decide. With sincere (Range) preferences 55: A=100 B=90, 45: B=100 A=0 majority based methods allow A to win. Althoug B has clearly higher sum of utiliy, it is also a fact that if one would elect B, B would be opposed by 55% majority. A would be supported by 55% majority. Not a pretty sight to watch, but that's how majority oriented systems are suposed to work. Maybe the majority philosophy is that you will get a ruler that can rule (and there is no mutiny), instead of getting a ruler whose proposals would be voted against every time by 55% majority in the parliament or in public elections. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On 25.6.2013, at 1.06, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: Remember that criterion compliances are absolute. So a method may fail a criterion yet be perfectly acceptable in real elections. I just want to support this viewpoint. It is not essential how many criteria a mehod violates. It is more important how bad those violations are, i.e. if the method likely have serious problems or not. The best method might well be a method that violates multiple criteria, but manages to spread the (unavoidable) problems evenly so that all of them stay insignificant. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Is it professional?
On 25.6.2013, at 1.25, Benjamin Grant wrote: On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 6:19 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_el...@lavabit.com wrote: Scenario 1: Voters don't rank now, but will rank when they see it's worth it. Here IRV will eventually crash but BTR-IRV is, well, better. Scenario 2: Voters rank, contrary to your assumptions (but suggested by international evidence). Again, BTR-IRV does better. Scenario 3: Voters don't rank and never will. BTR-IRV is here no worse than IRV. Under what scenario does BTR-IRV *lose* against ordinary IRV? I am quite interested in the answer to this as well, as I imagine that whatever the answer is is a defining advantage, should any exist. One can see this problem from two quite different points of view. One approach is that BTR-IRV is simply an improved version of IRV that it avoids some of the key problems of IRV. Therefore it could be straight forward to get also BTR-IRV accepted if the society accepts IRV. Another approach is to have a more political power oriented viewpoint. IRV tends to favour major parties. If the incumbent strong parties (that do have a lot to say on what route the politics take) may well count their chances in each proposed method. This might lead to favouring methods like IRV that still allow the largest parties to take a lion's share of the victories. A classical example is one where there are two major parties and a smaller compromise party candidate between the lajor party candidates. Should the mathod allow that compromise candidate win? Condorcet compliant methods seem to think that the compromise candidate should win. (I also note that different political systems may have different needs. In some systems the strongest are expected to rule whil in others compromises are the default mode of operation.) Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
On 25.6.2013, at 1.06, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: So there are really three stages to a prospective new party or candidate (like the Greens or Nader): 1. the candidate is not competitive (e.g. fringe candidate). 2. the candidate is competitive but either not strong enough to win, or there's been a miscalculation by the voters. 3. the candidate has taken over the position that would belong to a competitor (e.g. Nader becomes the new Gore). I think Approval advocates argue that the relative share of approvals will inform the voters of where they are. So the progression goes something like: In stage one, everybody who approves of Nader also approves of Gore. In stage three, the tables are turned: everybody who approves of Gore also approves of Nader, but Nader still wins. Stage two and the transition to three is the tricky part. ... ... ... One more approach to the problems of Approval is that it works fine as long as there are two potential winners. Then it is easy to approve the better one of those, and any additional candidates that one wants to promote. It is much more difficult for individual voters to find a working voting strategy when there are three or more possible winners. One classical example is the one where one wing has two candidates that have about equal chances to win, and the other wing has just one candidate. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all?
On 18.6.2013, at 4.24, Benjamin Grant wrote: From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, June 17, 2013 3:14 PM Subject: Re: Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all? Unfortunately, Bucklin systems fail that one too. Hold on a sec. Let me think this through. If we are using a Bucklin system, perhaps a strictly ranked one, and X is currently winning. Adding a single ballot that has X ranked as the highest does two things: it changes the threshold, and it awards one more vote to X. The only way it can hurt X – ie, cause X not to win, is if the harm in changing the threshold is greater than the benefit of getting another first place vote. That’s the key to why Buckley keep failing Participation!! I think I finally grasped the essential Participation flaw with Buckley!! Each added ballot changes the threshold. Changing the threshold will either have NO effect, or it will change how “deep” we have to go to find a winner. In this case, even if we know ALL the ballot we are adding have X at the top, adding even a single on if it changes the threshold enough will suddenly bring into your totals all the next place rankings for the existing ballots. In other words, Buckley fails Participation because it is not a “smooth” curve, it is a fragile one that can leap and lurch, if you see what I am saying. In its own way, Buckley is as unpredictable as IRV. Both have fractal moments where a very small change can completely swamp the system and produce a very different result. Any system as – what’s the right word, jagged? sensitive? fragile? is going to have one or more issues with appealing to our common sense, because each has a point in which a tiny change can cause a system wide shift. Am I right? Yes. This is a good approach to describing the problem. I tend to categorize different methods also as heuristic and more mathmatically exact methods that try to describe the outcome or wanted features of the winner more directly. IRV is a good example of a method that is based on an algorithms that makes pretty much sense to us, but that is anyway just an approximation of what we want. Also Bucklin is based on a similar kind of algorithm that does pretty good job, but still is just a serial stepwise approximation based on guesses on what direction we want to take (and which candidates might be bad enough so that we can eliminate them already at this step). I don’t know what this kind of trait is called, this oversensitivity, this ability to suddenly shift from condition One to Condition Two with no smooth transition points in between – but I think these kinds of systems will suffer from problems like these. Now, for all I know ALL voting systems have this kind of issue – we’ll see. I think out of the discussed methods at least Range does not really have this kind of randomness / fractal behaviour / oversensitivity / stepwise guesses based problems. It simply measures the quality of the candidates (=sum of utilities) and picks the best candidate as the winner. Range has other strategic problems in competitive environments, but that is due to strategic voting, not due to an oversensitive algorithm. Also FPTP is quite ok, if one assumes that all voters vote sincerely and we are supposed to elect the candidate that has highest first preference support. According to my experience the most typical way to get an oversensitive method is to use some serial elimination based algorithm that makes serial (heuristic) guesses on which candidates are potential winners and which ones are not. Those methods can be good methods though, if the randomness caused by the algorithm causes less harm than the other properties of the method give us benefits. If we want to avoid this kind of oversensitivity / randomness, one good approach is to simply define a (candidate quality) criterion that points out which one of the candiates is the best for our needs. Juho -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 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] List issues?
That has sometimes happened to me too. Juho On 18.6.2013, at 15.49, Benjamin Grant wrote: Well, I did put my computer consultant hat on (my day job) and this is what I found: With regard to the 2 or 3 emails that showed up on the list archive page but not in my inbox, 1) They did not show up in my inbox in Outlook 2) Nor did they show up in my webmail, since Outlook is configured to leave a copy on the server 3) Nor are they in the Bulk Mail folder of my Webmail I am at a loss to come up with a plausible explanation of the above apart from the idea that those emails were either never sent (list-serv issue) of somehow were sent but didn’t make it to my mail server @ godaddy (no idea how that might happen, I include it for the sake of completeness.) Anyways, just wanted the list-serv admins to know about this, will let you guys know if I see any other strange behavior. -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 From: Jameson Quinn [mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, June 18, 2013 5:45 AM To: Benjamin Grant Subject: Re: [EM] List issues? I don't think it's a general problem. Perhaps it's something about your spam filter or your mail client's threading algorithm. 2013/6/17 Benjamin Grant b...@4efix.com I have noticed a few times, now, over the last several days where I have sent something to the list, and I don’t receive a copy of my own email back from the list. Most of the time, I do – but on at least 2 or 3 occasions I have written something to the list – and I can see it at least made it to the archive here: http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2013-June/thread.html BUT I never get a copy of it in my inbox as I am supposed to. Is this a known issue with this list, that sometimes you don’t get copies of the stuff you send? Is it worse than that, do you sometimes not get copies of the stuff *other* people send too? -Benn Grant eFix Computer Consulting b...@4efix.com 603.283.6601 Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info 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] MAV on electowiki
I quickly read the article. Here are some observations. - Term Bucklin system has not been defined. I can guess that it probably refers to Bucklin style stepwise addition of new approvals, but that may not be as obvious to all readers. If there is no definition of Bucklin system, maybe one could say As in Bucklin instead of As with any Bucklin system. - Sentence if there are more than one with a majority, the B votes are removed and the highest sub-majority wins is ambigious in the sense that it is not clear if highest sub-majority refers to all candidates or to candidates that had majority after adding the B votes. - It is not quite clear what happens and if it is possible that there is no majority after the F votes have been counted. - The grades could be letters or numbers, but they could also be e.g. columns without any letter or number. This part of text discusses what the ballots might look like. I'm not sure if ballot different ballot formats should be seen as an essential part of the method definition, or if the method should be defined abstractly without referring to what the actual ballots might look like. I tend to define the methods abstractly without assuming anything on the ballots, and then discuss possible ballot formats as a separate topic, but I'm not saying that's the only and best approach. The current text is thus ok. I just first read the grades of the definition as abstract grades, not as definitions on what would be written in the ballots. - The linked definition of evaluatve says that ranked systems can not give same ratings to two candidates. I think that's confusing and wrong. Juho On 18.6.2013, at 23.44, Jameson Quinn wrote: http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Majority_Approval_Voting Please help build up the article and work on the clearest consensus wording. This article is all my own voice so far; my goal is for it not to be. Jameson 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] Deconstructing the Majority Criterion
On 17.6.2013, at 18.26, Benjamin Grant wrote: Majority Criterion My definition of Majority Criterion is simply something like if more than 50% of the voters prefer candidate A to all other candidates, then A shall win. There are methods that aim at respecting the wishes of the majority (majority oriented). Range/Score is not one of them. It rather aims at electing the candidate that has the highest sum of utility among the voters. This is a different need than the idea of letting the majority decide. Majority oriented methods can give poor results from the range point of view. For example sincere votes 51: A=10, B=9, C=9 ; 26: B=10, C=9, A=0 ; 25 C=10, B=9, A=0 tell us that B and C have clearly higher average utility among the voters than A, although majority of the voters consider A to be the best candidate. A would not be a good winner according to the Range philosophy. One could say that majority oriented methods are typically used in competitive environments since majority rule seems to make sense in environments where we expect voters to take position strictly in favour of their own candidate and against the other candidates and vote accordingly. In Range such thinking may lead to exaggeration. Maybe we will get votes like 51: A=10, B=0, C=0 ; 26: B=10, C=0, A=0 ; 25 C=10, B=0, A=0 although the sincere preferences are as above, With this kind of maximally exaggerated votes Range will also respect the majority rule (but it loses its expressiveness and its ability to elect the candidate that has highest sum of utility among the voters). In summary, Range is not a majority oriented method, and not really a method for competitive environments (since it may become just approval with fractional votes). It should not follow the majority rule since that would ruin its intended other good properties. Majority oriented methods are often good for competitive environments. Range is good when the election organizer and the voters sincerely want to elect the candidate with highest sum of utility. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] proportional constraints - help needed
On 12.2.2013, at 0.33, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: I think it could be useful to quantify exactly what is meant by quoted-in proportionality in the sense that the Czech Green Party desires it. Then one may make a quota proportionality criterion and design methods from the ground up that pass it. My best understanding of the quoted-in related requirements is now as follows. The key idea is that if a seat is about to go to a candidate that is of wrong gender, then the fact that this seat must be given to some less liked candidate makes the seat in some sense less valuable to the grouping that supports these candidates. The rule is not exactly about one of the sexes since one (quoted-in) seat may be forced to go to a male candidate and another seat (of the same grouping) to a female candiate. The rule is not really about avoinding allocating more than one quoted-in seat to one grouping since sometimes the value of two (less valuable) quoted-in seats is the ideal way to balance the seats between the groupings (best proportionality). To my understanding there is also no requirement to have equal number of male and female representatives in each grouping (only a requirement to do so at top level, i.e. to make the proportinally ordered list balanced with respect to gender s). Since there is also a general proportionality requirement in the traditional sense (each grouping to get a proportional number of representatives), there are two conflicting requirements, and therefore also a need to agree the correct balance between these two requirements (traditional proportionality and need to balance the allocated less valuable (quoted-in) seats). I mean that if the elected quoted-in candidate is 10 points worse than the candidate that would have been elected without the quoted-in rule, then that can be compensated by giving that grouping some fraction of a seat more seats (worth 10 points). All groupings will thus not get all those representatives that they wanted (quoted-in rule), and they will also not get the proportionally correct number of representatives. There is thus a need to agree what the value of one seat is, and what the negative value of getting a quoted-in seat is. These weights must be determined by a political agreement. Once the weights of these benefits have been determined, it should be a more exact task to determine what algorithm finds the best allocation of the seats. It is however quite difficult to estimate if some candidate that was elected as a quoted-in candidate would or would not have been elected also otherwise. And if not elected without the quoted-in rule, how much the opinions were violated in this particular change of representative. Some agreement is needed also here on how to measure these values. One may also follow some theoretical model that gives exact values to the quoted-in representatives (based on the preferences on the ballots). Or maybe there is just one constatnt value for all quoted-in seats. What would the quota proportionality criterion be then? Based on this discussion one should first make some agreements on what the weights of different (conflicting) needs are. Once this has been agreed, and assuming that we have also a rule for determining the lost value of each quoted-in candidate, then the algorithm just needs to find the ideal allocation of the weighted seats (different representative sets may have different weights). And the criterion is just a mathematical proportionality criterion, based on the agreed (and/or calculated) weights. Is this close to what you want the criterion to be? Juho P.S. Personally I think this algorithm gets already quite complex, and there are also some arguments why there would be no need or why it would be harmful to compensate the quoted-in seats. So also a simpler proportional approach could do. But if the Czech Green Party says that the quoted-in seats shall be compensated, then let's try to find a good algorithm that will do the job (and the correct criterion). Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] proportional constraints - help needed
On 12.2.2013, at 1.24, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2013/2/11 Kristofer Munsterhjelm km_el...@lavabit.com (Also, speaking of criteria: if I had enough time, I would try to find a monotone variant of Schulze STV. I think one can make monotone Droop-proportional multiwinner methods, since I made a Bucklin hack that seemed to be both monotone and Droop-proportional. However, I have no mathematical proof that the method obeys both criteria.) What does monotone even mean for PR? You can make something that's sequentially monotone, but it's (I think) impossible to avoid situations where AB were winning but changing CAB to ABC causes B to lose (or variants of this kind of problem). That's still technically monotone, but from a voters perspective, it's not usefully so. I think monotonicity is sometimes an obvious requirement but not always. A ranked ordering (= monotonicity with respect to adding seats) may give different results than a proportional algorithm that just picks the agreed number of representatives (with no order). Sometimes a ranked ordering is needed (like in the Czech Green Party canddidate list), sometimes not. The need to establish a ranked order may make the proportionality of the results slightly worse. I also like the Alabama paradox in the sense that one can as well consider such results the correct and exact outcome, not a negative paradox. All in all, both appraches are needed, for different needs. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] proportional constraints - help needed
On 7.2.2013, at 20.43, Peter Zbornik wrote: At second sight, I think that giving different quota weights (V) to quoted-in candidates would lead to strategic voting leading to the weaker-gender candidates being placed at the end in order to be quoted-in, as you mention yourself. Coming shortly back to this strategy. Let's assume first that the genders are about equally strong across all groupings. One grouping recommends its supporters to rank all female candidates before the male candidates in this election. In the next election the order of the genders will be reversed. The grouping also recommends all its supporters to rank all the candidates of this grouping. The probablity of getting mostly female representatives increases, but in the next election the roles will be reversed. On average this strategy gives more representatives (if other groupings are sincere). If one gender is known to be weaker, then that gender would be ranked last, as you said. If that gender is constantly weaker, this strategy will lead to a constant bias within this grouping to get candidates of the stronger gender. But average number of representetives would grow also in this case (if other groupings are sincere). Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] proportional constraints - help needed
On 5.2.2013, at 19.50, Peter Zbornik wrote: i] that the seats are quoted-in fairly proportionally between the voters (i.e. the same voters do not get both quoted-in seats) and at the same time 50: w1 w2 m1 m2 50: w3 w4 m3 m4 The first seat goes to w1 (lottery). The second seat goes to m3 (male representative needed). I read the rule above so that the third seat should go to w3 (not to w2). The rule talks about getting both quoted-in seats, but I guess the intention is that already the first quoted-in seat is considered to be a slight disadvantage that shall be balanced by ranking w3 third. Is this the correct way to read the rule? The fourth seat goest to w2. 1) If we read the rule above literally so, that one grouping should not get both quoted-in seats, the fifth seat goes to m1. 2) If we read the rule so that the quoted-in seats are considered slightly less valuable than the normal seats, then the fifth seat goes to m4. Which one of the interpretations is the correct one? My understanding is now that there is no requirement concerning the balance of genders between the groupings, so allocating both male seats to the second grouping should be no problem. But is it a problem to allocate both quoted-in seats to it? Is the second proportional ordering ( w1, m3, w3, w2, m4 ) above more balanced / proportional in the light of the planned targets than the first one ( w1, m3, w3, w2, m1 )? (The algorithm could in principle also backtrack and reallocate the first seats to make it possible to allocate the last seats in a better way, but that doesn't seem to add anything useful in this example.) Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] proportional constraints - help needed
-in candidate a value of 1/2 or 2/3 of a seat for the quoted-in candidate could maybe be used. Maybe someone will propose a better formula to value the quoted-in candidate, which might (or might not) depend on the number of the seat being elected (i.e. it is worse to get seat no. 2 quoted-in, than seat no. 5). P. 2013/2/7 Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com: 2013/2/7 Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk: On 5.2.2013, at 19.50, Peter Zbornik wrote: i] that the seats are quoted-in fairly proportionally between the voters (i.e. the same voters do not get both quoted-in seats) and at the same time 50: w1 w2 m1 m2 50: w3 w4 m3 m4 The first seat goes to w1 (lottery). The second seat goes to m3 (male representative needed). I read the rule above so that the third seat should go to w3 (not to w2). The rule talks about getting both quoted-in seats, but I guess the intention is that already the first quoted-in seat is considered to be a slight disadvantage that shall be balanced by ranking w3 third. Is this the correct way to read the rule? In a sense yes, but I haven't thought about the problem that way. The question is how to quantify the disadvantage, for instance if we had the votes 55 w1 w2 m1 m2 and 45 w3 w4 m3 m4, should we still rank w3 third, instead of w2? The fourth seat goest to w2. 1) If we read the rule above literally so, that one grouping should not get both quoted-in seats, the fifth seat goes to m1. 2) If we read the rule so that the quoted-in seats are considered slightly less valuable than the normal seats, then the fifth seat goes to m4. That is an interesting point. I guess both interpretations are valid. Personally, at first sight, I like the second interpretation. I have to think about that a little. Which one of the interpretations is the correct one? My understanding is now that there is no requirement concerning the balance of genders between the groupings, so allocating both male seats to the second grouping should be no problem. But is it a problem to allocate both quoted-in seats to it? Is the second proportional ordering ( w1, m3, w3, w2, m4 ) above more balanced / proportional in the light of the planned targets than the first one ( w1, m3, w3, w2, m1 )? (The algorithm could in principle also backtrack and reallocate the first seats to make it possible to allocate the last seats in a better way, but that doesn't seem to add anything useful in this example.) Juho 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] proportional constraints - help needed
On 7.2.2013, at 19.11, Jameson Quinn wrote: I think V should be 3/4 (if quoted-in) or 1 (if would have won that same seat anyway). Do yu mean that also the weight of a quoted-in seat should grow dynamically to 1 if the algorithm finds out later that the quoted-in candidate would have been elected also at a later round without the quoted-in rules? That may add some complexity and inaccuracy to a sequential algorithm (but may still yield fairer results). That leads to anouther topic. James Gilmour referred to one algorithm that fills the seats starting from the last seat. If one wants the proportionality to be ideal (but still use a sequential algorithm, not an exhaustive evaluation of all combinations), and one can estimate what the expected number elected representatives is, one could first find the ideal proportional set of that size, and then proceed from that point to larger sets by adding candidates (in the proportional order), and to smaller sets by dropping the candidates out one by one. This may be already too much fine-tuning and therefore not worth the trouble (even if the expected outcomes would be slightly more proportional). Juho (P.S. My wording on the mail below should be softened a bit = w3 could be automatically ranked third. That depends on the used algorithm.) Thus, the quota would be 2/11, and the leftover (unrepresented) quota at the end would be between 1/11 (Hare-like) and 2/11 (Droop-like). Jameson 2013/2/7 Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk I try to address the targets one more round without taking position on how the actual algorithm will work. From this point of view I start from the question, what is the value of a quoted-in seat. Maybe we can use a constant value (V) that is smaller that the value of a normal seat (1). One problem that we have is that although the value of a quoted-in seat is smaller than 1, the final value of that representative may be equal to 1. I mean that if we are electing members of a parliament, all elected candiates will have one vote each in the parliament. Therefore, from political balance point of view, every representative is equally valuable. The lesser value of the quoted-in candidate refers only to the fact that some grouping did not get their most favoured candidate throuh. If one tries to meet e.g. regional proportionality and political proportionality requirements at one go simultaneously, the only erros are rounding errors in the allocation of the last seats. The quoted-in requirements and political proportionality requrements are however in conflict with each others. One has to decide how much weight to put to the need to elect the most liked candidate of a grouping vs. to give all groupings equal weight in the parliament. In the example below, if we assume that five candidates (w1, m3, w3, w2, m4) will be elected, and V = 0.5, the liked candidate points of the two groups will be 2, 2 but the voting weights in the parliament will be 2, 3 . What is the ideal outcome of the algoritms then? Should the algorithm make the liked candidate points as equal as possible for all groupings, or should the algorithm lead to a compromise result that puts some weight also on the voting strengths in the parliament? I guess you can do this quite well also by adjusting the value of V, e.g. from 0.5 to 0.75. So far my conclusion is that one could get a quite reasonable algorithm by just picking a good value for V and then using some algorithm that optimizes proportionality using these agreed weights (and the gender balance requirements). - - - Personally I'm still wondering if the less liked candidate reweighting rules are a good thing to have. One reason is the equal voting weight of the elected representatives in the parliament. Sometimes the quoted-in candidates could be elected also without the quoted-in rules (e.g. if the second set of opinions was 50: w3 m3 w4 m4). The algorithm could thus not be accurate anyway (could give false rewards). One could also say that if some of the groupings doesn't have any good (= value very close to 1) candidates of the underrepresented gender, it is its own fault, and that shoudl not be rewarded by giving it more seats. One more point is that the algorithm might favour the quoted-in grouping also for other reasons. I'll modify the example a bit. 45: w1 w2 m1 m2 05: w1 w2 45: w3 w4 m3 m4 05: w3 w4 Here I assume that those candidates that are ranked lower in the votes will typically get also less votes in general. Here all male candidates have only 45 supporters, while all female candidates have 50 supporters each. Here I assume that voters do not generally rank all candiates or all candidates of their own grouping (this may not be the case in all elections). Anyway, the impact of this possible phenomenon is that at least w3 will be automatically ranked third, also
Re: [EM] proportional constraints - help needed
On 7.2.2013, at 22.24, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hi Juho, returning to your original example, again, with slightly modified number of votes to avoid tie-breaking: Coalition 1 (C1) - 51: w1 w2 m1 m2 Coalition 2 (C2) - 49: w3 w4 m3 m4 Results: Seat number, candidate, coalition, quoted in 1. w1, C1, no 2. m3, C2, yes 3. w2, C1, no 4, w3, C2, no 5. m1, C1, no There is no problem here, as C1 got the majority of candidates, and kept the constraints, so there was never any issue with proportionality of quoted-in candidaes. Here is an example to illustrate the problem: Coalition 1: 32: w1w4w3m3 Coalition 2: 33: w1w3w4m4 Coalition 3: 35: w2w5m1m2 Apply top-down proportional ordering (Otten) for normal STV: Elect 1st seat - w1 (quota 50) Elect 2nd seat - m1 (quoted in instead of w2) (quota 33.4) 3rd seat - w3 (quota 25) 4th seat - w4 (quota 20) 5th seat - m4 (quoted in instead of w5) (quota 16.7) This leads to the quoted-in candidates being disproportionally distributed in coalition 3. Thus, the right distribution, intuitively is: 4th seat - m3 5th seat - w5 The approach of giving less weight to the quoted-in candidates (= reduce less weight from the votes that supported the election of m1) could lead to the intended outcome here. Sorry to have bothered you with this, but on the other hand, I feel this is an important problem. No problem. Actually I have personal interest in proportional methods with mutiple allocation criteria. So, thanks for taking this topic up and promoting this kind of advanced methods also in real life. Juho Best regards Peter Zborník 2013/2/7 Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com: Hi Juho, I have to think this through a bit. Thanks for the examples. At second sight, I think that giving different quota weights (V) to quoted-in candidates would lead to strategic voting leading to the weaker-gender candidates being placed at the end in order to be quoted-in, as you mention yourself. Best regards Peter Zborník 2013/2/7 Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk: I try to address the targets one more round without taking position on how the actual algorithm will work. From this point of view I start from the question, what is the value of a quoted-in seat. Maybe we can use a constant value (V) that is smaller that the value of a normal seat (1). One problem that we have is that although the value of a quoted-in seat is smaller than 1, the final value of that representative may be equal to 1. I mean that if we are electing members of a parliament, all elected candiates will have one vote each in the parliament. Therefore, from political balance point of view, every representative is equally valuable. The lesser value of the quoted-in candidate refers only to the fact that some grouping did not get their most favoured candidate throuh. If one tries to meet e.g. regional proportionality and political proportionality requirements at one go simultaneously, the only erros are rounding errors in the allocation of the last seats. The quoted-in requirements and political proportionality requrements are however in conflict with each others. One has to decide how much weight to put to the need to elect the most liked candidate of a grouping vs. to give all groupings equal weight in the parliament. In the example below, if we assume that five candidates (w1, m3, w3, w2, m4) will be elected, and V = 0.5, the liked candidate points of the two groups will be 2, 2 but the voting weights in the parliament will be 2, 3 . What is the ideal outcome of the algoritms then? Should the algorithm make the liked candidate points as equal as possible for all groupings, or should the algorithm lead to a compromise result that puts some weight also on the voting strengths in the parliament? I guess you can do this quite well also by adjusting the value of V, e.g. from 0.5 to 0.75. So far my conclusion is that one could get a quite reasonable algorithm by just picking a good value for V and then using some algorithm that optimizes proportionality using these agreed weights (and the gender balance requirements). - - - Personally I'm still wondering if the less liked candidate reweighting rules are a good thing to have. One reason is the equal voting weight of the elected representatives in the parliament. Sometimes the quoted-in candidates could be elected also without the quoted-in rules (e.g. if the second set of opinions was 50: w3 m3 w4 m4). The algorithm could thus not be accurate anyway (could give false rewards). One could also say that if some of the groupings doesn't have any good (= value very close to 1) candidates of the underrepresented gender, it is its own fault, and that shoudl not be rewarded by giving it more seats. One more point is that the algorithm might favour the quoted-in grouping also for other reasons. I'll modify the example a bit
Re: [EM] proportional constraints - help needed
Is there a quota or gender requirement or both requirements? - If we assume that the quota rules are not needed since both genders will get seats also otherwise, is it ok if one grouping gets 3 women and the other one 2 men? - Is it ok if the second seat goes to a male candidate of some grouping and the fifth seat goes to a female candidate of the same grouping? Juho On 6.2.2013, at 11.47, Peter Zbornik wrote: James, Jonathan, I need that the quoted-in people are quoted-in in such a way, that the proportionality of the election is not significantly disturbed. I think Rosenthiel's approach has the following insufficiencies: If I elect five women, and then increase the number of elected seats until two more men have been elected, then we might end up with a situation, where a] one coalition of voters get all the seats (the easiest example is when we elect two ordered seats, one man and one woman) - i.e. the resulting list is not a proportionaly ordered list b] one coalition of voters get all the qouted-in men - i.e. the resulting list has no proportionality between gender. Best regards Peter Zborník 2013/2/6 James Gilmour jgilm...@globalnet.co.uk: Jonathan Lundell Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2013 6:40 PM There is, I think, an underlying misconception here, namely that STV order of election can be interpreted as a ranking of level of support. It's not, in the general case. Jonathan is absolutely right. If you want lists ordered by relative support, you need to adopt a procedure like that recommended by Colin Rosenstiel and used by some UK political parties when they have to select ordered lists for closed-list party-PR elections. First you use ordinary STV-PR to elect the required total number of candidates. Then you conduct a series of STV-PR elections, each for one vacancy less than the preceding election. The unsuccessful candidate takes the lowest vacant place on the ordered list. Continue until you run-off between the top-two for the second-last place. For full details, see: http://www.crosenstiel.webspace.virginmedia.com/stv/orderstv.htm and http://www.crosenstiel.webspace.virginmedia.com/stv/ordstvdt.htm The second one includes a constraint for candidate's sex. James Gilmour --- avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean. Virus Database (VPS): 130205-0, 05/02/2013 Tested on: 05/02/2013 23:49:22 avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2013 AVAST Software. http://www.avast.com Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] proportional constraints - help needed
On 6.2.2013, at 12.29, Juho Laatu wrote: - Is it ok if the second seat goes to a male candidate of some grouping and the fifth seat goes to a female candidate of the same grouping? Clarification: In the second and fifth seats the quota rule forced the sex to be changed. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] The Green scenario, and IRV in the Green scenario, is a new topic here. Hence these additional comments. Clarification of position and why.
On 4.2.2013, at 15.40, Peter Zbornik wrote: Being a green party member (although a Czech one and not US), I would advocate only the top-two-run-off variant of IRV, i.e. elimination of the candidates and transfer of votes until two remain, no quota for election (or quota=100%) except for the case where one candidate has more than 50% of first preferences. The top two candidates would meet in a second round in IRV. A candidate would be elected if he/she would get more than 50% of the votes. Empty votes would count as valid votes in both first and second round. If no candidate would be elected in second round new elections would take place. The advantages of the proposed election system are 1) the voters are given a chance to concentrate only on two candidates in the second round, and are thus allowed to change their preferences. 2) blank votes together with IRV might make the candidates less polarized, as, given a large number of blank votes, the candidate with the highest number of votes in the second round would have to rely on the second preferences of the voters for the opposing candidate in order to get 50%+ votes. PZ If one wants to guarentee sufficient support of the winner (50% in the description above), then one nice approach is to have an explicit approval cutoff in the ballots. By comparing each candidate to that cutoff one can count how wide support each candidate has. You can use that information also to determine if someone should win already based on the first round, or which candidates shoud go to the later rounds. For example, if the winner of the first round (maybe using a Condorcet method) has 50% approval, elect him. Otherwise arrange a second round with the same rules, except that you may drop some of the candidates out (maybe all but two). My point is just that this aproach is formally nice and it collects useful additional information that can be used in many ways, like making the decision already after the first round. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proposed bullet-voting prohibition criterion
On 3.2.2013, at 13.13, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 01/30/2013 05:30 PM, Peter Gustafsson wrote: Kristoffer: Thanks for pointing out those possibilities for how a big party can instruct its voters on how to thwart the intent of this proposed criterion. Obviously, BVP is not sufficient to ensure the transition from a two-party environment to a multiparty environment. What are your ideas on how make a stronger set of criteria to that end? ... One approach to this problem is that Proportional Representation is actually the criteron that defines multiparty systems (or at least the typical ones). This criterion may however not be a practical requirement in a two-party country since a jump to a PR system would be a very long jump. However, also two-party systems approximate PR roughly. One could therefore start from small steps like requiring more accurate PR for the leading two parties in those bodies where both parties are represented. After that a natural step might be to allow also some major third party to get some seats in areas where it is strong. And eventually one might in theory end up having PR for all opinion groups (or at least all those that have at least one quota of supporters). In some sense plurality allows those parties that have 50% support to have seats while a good PR system allows all parties with at least one quota of support to have one seat. Single member districts are maybe the key problem and strong legacy that makes and keeps two-party systems two-party systems. It may be that a multiparty system that is based on single member districts is not viable (or does not properly meet the multiparty environment requirement). So, maybe one would have to break the single seat district tradition at some point in time. That's not an easy thing to do. One more important trick might be to start the changes from smaller units like towns. I'm sure there must be one or two towns that would be interested in giving the multiparty approach try. If such trials are suucessful, that wolud surely influence thinking and decisions also at the higher levels. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Request re. Acronym Use on this list
EM's own web site is also a good source of definitions for abbreviations that are often used in the EM discussions. (http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Special:AllPages) But in general I too recommend writers to open all abbreviations that are not obvious to all. There is no point in making the messages more cryptic than they could be. Juho On 21.1.2013, at 19.54, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On 1/21/13 9:31 AM, Kathy Dopp wrote: I do not spend enough time following this subject to memorize all the acronyms. Could posters to this list please make your emails comprehensible to someone like myself by spelling out the words comprising the acronym when it is first used in each and every email to the list? Kathy, i feel the same way. sometimes Wikipedia (Voting systems) is helpful. but it doesn't keep up. and i just confirmed, evidently a while ago i disabled the filter on my email client regarding your posts to EM. i forgot i did that. hence i see the post. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. 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] Majority-Judgement using adjectives versus alphabetical scales versus numerical ranges.
On 6.12.2012, at 23.54, ⸘Ŭalabio‽ wrote: ¡Hello! ¿How fare you? Yesterday, I noted that Majority-Judgements does not work if we have too many adjectives because we have only so many adjectives and voters might confuse adjectives too close in meaning.. ¿Would an alphabetical scale be acceptable?: In the United States of America, we grade students using letters: A+ A A- B+ B B- C+ C C- D+ D D- F+ F F- I have 2 questions grading candidates on this scale. 1 question is for people not in the United States of America. The other question is for everyone: People outside the United States of America: ¿Do you Understand this Scale? Very understandable. If some values should be considered unacceptable, then that category should be pointed out. For everyone: ¿Is this scale acceptable to you? Followup question: If this scale is not acceptable to you, ¿why is it not acceptable to you? With 15 grades, this scale is not very different from the numerical ranges of 0 to 9 or negative -9 to positive +9. This raises the question: ¿Why not just use the ranges 0 to 9 or negative -9 to positive +9 instead? Each country could use those values (letters or numbers) that people are most familiar with. If you want to have universal coverage, then numbers are good since they heve the same meaning and people are familiar with them everyehere. It depends on the type of election if -n to +n is better than 0 to n or 1 to n. If there is an approval cutoff or unacceptable values, then the scale can be from a to b to c (b can be 0 or a positive number). Since most number systems are based on 10, ranges that are in one way or another based on that number are good. I guess low values are usually worse than high values, but one could also use ranking style values where 1 is the best value. Juho ¡Peace! -- “⸘Ŭalabio‽” wala...@macosx.com Skype: Walabio An IntactWiki: http://circleaks.org/ “You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.” —— Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan 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] Possibly more stable consensus government
On 26.11.2012, at 0.03, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: You have a parliamentary system. Forming a government requires a supermajority (say 60%). That says to me that the policy of the governmnet will be on average more centrist (averaged) than e.g. with 51% governmnets. Since the governments will be a combination of multiple interest groups, each party probably has to commit to supporting few topics that they actually don't like. And this means that the parties should have strict party discipline. I'll use FInland as an example. In the recent years there have been three major parties. Any two of them can form the core of the government. In order to make the government stronger they invite also some smaller parties in the government. Those governments have been very stable (regularly from one election to the next election). It is normal that all parties in the government at least stay silent and vote as agreed when the government was formed, even if they disagree on the content in some questions. One reason is that the politicians love being ministers. Also the small parties tend to be loyal. One reason is that they want to be included in the next governments too (as loyal members of the government, with one or two own requirements that they want the government to support). The Finnish system does not require 60% support, but in practice the three party system has thus led to a quite similar situation. However, all motions of no confidence have to be constructive, i.e. they have to propose a new government and thus be subject to the supermajority rule. In FInland the government usually has no problem making (practically) all their MPs support the government when the parliament votes on confidence in the government (and in other questions too). What kind of behavior would you see under such a system? One would ordinarily consider parliamentary systems that require a supermajority for forming a government to be very unstable, because it may take forever to get the required majority, and in the meantime, a simple majority can tear down the government that already exists. In Finland the policy does not change very much between governments. It may be even so that the policy (or rhetorics) of that major party that move from government to opposition (or in the other direction) is the part that changes. There is thus no alternating government policy style behavour e.g. between the left and right wings. Nowadays there are also other factors in the political fiels than the traditional left vs. right battle. Also coopertion of the leftmost and rightmost large parties is no problem. They have other things in common (e.g. som more salary worker, industry and city orientation than the centre party has). But by insisting that all votes of no confidence are constructive, a simple majority can't remove the government. Only a supermajority can, and then only when it has a proposal for another government. So what we would expect to happen is that the government can stay in office for a much longer time than would otherwise be the case. This, in turn, is offset by the supermajority requirement for getting your particular government proposal into the executive in the first place. In Finland the political system has resembled this approach in the recent years although there are no specific supermajority requirements to form or to break governmnets. Having such rules could strengthen similar behaviour even more. Looking at the rules from a Finnish perspective, the supermajority rule to replace the current government could be too strong since it could make the maybe too stable system even more stable. Would that configuration weaken the consensus aspect of the system? That doesn't seem to be the case in Finland. One problem that I see is that the consensus may not be a true consensus of the voters. Sometimes it appears to be more a consensus of the professional politicians themselves, including their interest to stay in the government (higher salary, more power, more visibility). Sometimes it appears that the politicians agree what to do between themselves an tell to the media and voters only the official planned story (as agreed by the government parties). Perhaps a government that happened to have a supermajority at one point outstays their welcome and gets increasingly unpopular until there's a sufficient supermajority in the other direction, then that government gets replaced by its opposite pole, and rinse and repeat. Maybe in some other countries, but in Finland the party discipline or governmnet discipline tends to be quite strong. On the other hand, the opposition might try to appeal more broadly so that, as the government gets less popular and the centrists previously aligned with the government starts abandoning it, the opposition almost immediately has a variant of the centrist policy ready to catch them so their
Re: [EM] Possibly more stable consensus government
On 4.12.2012, at 15.35, Raph Frank wrote: On Tue, Dec 4, 2012 at 10:21 AM, Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: In Finland the political system has resembled this approach in the recent years although there are no specific supermajority requirements to form or to break governmnets. Having such rules could strengthen similar behaviour even more. Looking at the rules from a Finnish perspective, the supermajority rule to replace the current government could be too strong since it could make the maybe too stable system even more stable. Fundamentally, consensus by rules is different than consensus voluntarily. Yes, e.g. in a country with two alternating 51% government alternatives these rules would make a dramatical difference. In the case you have, the lager parties benefit from having the smaller parties involved, but it isn't mandatory. Making the smaller parties required would boost their negotiating power. In Finland the governments typically have more than one small party. That means that no single small party is critical when forming the new government, nor after the government has been formed. If there is a supermajority requirement for breaking the government, that could reduce the power of the small parties (inside the already formed government). This may lead to fragmentation of the larger parties. I'm not sure since a large party would still have more power than its fragments. At least in Finland I'd expect large parties to agree and form the core of the government also if the supermajority rules would be in place. Maybe in some other countries, but in Finland the party discipline or governmnet discipline tends to be quite strong. I think the parliamentary system, where being a minister requires loyalty to the party, discipline is easier. If you changed it so that members of the legislature couldn't be appointed to cabinet (or better couldn't stand for election to the legislature for the next election), then discipline would probably fall. Such rules would seem to expand Montesquieu's separation of powers rules to new areas. In the current political system in Finland (and probably also in most other places) the politicians are very interested in becoming and staying as ministers. In the politics of the EU countries politics also ablity to influence in the EU machinery is a possible career target for the politicians. If those interests are too high, the political targets may become secondary targets. Even before proposing separation of the parliament and the government I might propose separation of political roles and business roles, separation from administration (e.g. reward jobs for the politicians), and setting stricter rules on how the political parties re funded. I believe most political systems would probably benefit of various additional separations of power. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho: Social Optimizations. The Sincere Ideal.
On 15.11.2012, at 18.00, Michael Ossipoff wrote: If I ranked all of the candidates sincerely, the Democrat and the Republican would be at the bottom of that ranking. Even if they're winnable. So you can't say that not ranking unwinnable candidates allows you to vote a short ranking. I said that not ranking unwinnable candidates does not cause very much harm. In your case I assume that your most preferred candiates can not win. Based on that you could leave them unranked, but you should rank at least one of the two winnable candidates. That apprach will not change the result of the election (with high probability). This (focus on who wins) is the way we usually measure the performance of election methods and study the recommended voting practices for the voters. There could however be other resons why it would make sense to rank your favourite candidates. You could rank them at top to help them (or their party) to win at the next election. Or you could give them this way some encouragement and thumbs up, and you could increase their chances of becoming elected in some other important position. In order to get good information on the true preferences of the electorate (for statistics and studies) it would make sense for all voters to always rank as many candidates as possible. You may also have your personal reasons, like the feeling of ranking one of the frontrunners one but last (not first). Sure, there's a case for saying that people would enjoy indicating who is worst. I just don't think that the Democrats and Republicans deserve to be ranked at all. Not ranking them at all is better than dignifying them with rank positions--even last and 2nd-to-last. That sounds like you are talking about implicit approval of all the ranked candidates. I prefer to see rankings as rankings, i.e. truncated vote AB means ABC=D=E, not ABC=D=E, if we talk about traditional Condorcet methods that usually treat truncations that way. But I guess you are talking about methods that intentionally want to use implicit approval. I believe many people would be happy to tell who is worst. But it is not a good idea to allow them to vote ABall_othersYZ since that could lead to unexpected and bad results. Allowing them to rank ABCDYZ(all_others) is better since then they have to explicitly indicate that C and D are better than Y and Z. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
On 14.11.2012, at 2.59, Kevin Venzke wrote: Hi Juho, - Mail original - De : Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk I don't believe the public needs to understand the terms plurality criterion or implicit approval or even strategy to find the scenario problematic. I guess people need to understand what ranking candidates in general or ranking them above the last place means, and that such an act is supposed to mean something when they vote, if they have an opinion on the Plurality criterion (or on examples that demonstrate the impact of the Plurality criterion). Or do you mean that the Plurality criterion example would be presented and explained to the public, but assuming that they don't understand what ranking or not ranking some candidate means? Plurality is just a description that is convenient for discussion on the EM list. Ranking above last place isn't a concept that exists (until someone feels it would aid their position to bring it up). It just takes someone (could be an IRV advocate) to say this many voters ranked this candidate first and this candidate second, and didn't rank anyone else, etc. If this, without bringing up any criteria, doesn't raise an awful lot of eyebrows, then I'm wrong about Plurality. But if it does raise eyebrows, then it is up to the pro-margins crowd to explain to the public that their mistake is that they believe in implicit approval (without having ever heard of it) and that they should stop, because it (you will say) encourages harmful strategy. Ok, it seems that we are moving in the direction of marketability of the methods. All methods can be attacked based on some of their properties. And in most cases voters are quite unaware of any of those properties, until someone builds such (usually negative) marketing messages and starts using them. Sometimes the marketing messages might be based on what actually happened in the election. In Burlington 2009 mayoral elections people were told that IRV failed to elect the Condorcet winner. But it seems that people didn't pay much attention to that failure. Sometimes the marketing stories are based just on what might happen in theory. It may be that we are talking more about the psychology of the politicians and lobbyists here, and less about the psychology of the actual voters, or the concerns of the election method experts. And I want note again that virtually every proposed method satisfies Plurality aside from margins and MMPO. So if Plurality is the cause of some harmful strategy, your offered alternative must be something really fantastic. I guess Condorcet methods can't ever be successful since they fail such terrible criteria as favourite betrayal and burial. ;-) I mean that whatever method you want to promote, there are some nasty negative marketing pitches that you must be ready to answer. I'm not sure if Plurality is the most difficult one. One reason is that even experts need to read the definition twice before they properly understand what the idea is and what the implications of the criterion might be. That's why I see it as such a show-stopper. I wonder if the voters should be told about the Plurality criterion or if that should be hidden from them (to avoid them rankig only those candidates that they approve / want to promote). In some startegies that information may be useful to them. But losing information because of truncation (in an election that has no meaningful strategy problems) is harmful. Do you think that if you permit IRV voters to know that IRV satisfies Plurality, they will truncate more often (assuming the rules allow them to)? Depends on how different properties are presented and advertised. If Plurality would be presented as an important feature of Condorcet methods, some people might take that seriously and vote accordingly (e.g. rank only those candidates that they approve). That could be relevant in IRV too, if someone would start merketing IRV using the Plurality criterion. I can't imagine that anyone would use Plurality to promote a method, since even FPP satisfies it. I can only see using it to oppose a method, and even then it seems unnecessary to put a name to the problem. But in general I lean in the direction that in most cases (e.g. in Burlington) people will use ranked methods in some quite sincere way and they do not worry about the details, like IRV strategies or Plurality criterion. Ok. In the context of margins' proposability and Plurality I don't actually think it matters how people would vote under it. (Though I'm sure it would come up. Ahaha.) However, even without stategy and property discussions, some voters may be tempted to truncate just because they get the idea (maybe from their traditional voting methods) that marking some candidate on the ballot will give him some points. But that would be based on lack
Re: [EM] 3 or more choices-Condorcet
On 14.11.2012, at 15.21, Michael Ossipoff wrote: There's no best winner. We've been over that. But, if you really want a best winner, then look at the significant social optimizations of Approval and Score. There may be different elections with different needs. The society is free to decide what criterion to use for each need. If you want to elect a candidate that gets a high sum of ratings, why not use Score. If you want to elect the most approved candidate, use Approval. If you want to elect a candidate that is preferred over all others, use Condorcet. (Take also the nature of the society into account since the votes may not be sincre enough.) Maybe, then, people should reluctantly give up the elusive goal of electing the CW. That's my take. Just work on reducing strategy needs, eliminating the worst strategy needs. I'm more optimistic. My guess is that in most societies voters are sincere enough. But, what if there are 20 or 30 candidates? Wouldn't you prefer a method that doesn't make you need to rank the unacceptables? In methods with 20 or 30 candidates many of the candidates may be irrelevant either in the sense that they will certainly not win, or in the sense that the voter doesn't care which one of the remaining candiates wins. In those cases truncation is quite ok. No information lost. It would however be good if the voters would rank all but one of those unacceptables that are potential winners (if the voter has such preferences). if ranking unacceptables is distasteful to you (as it is to me) You should think that you are telling that the worst candidate is even worse than the second worst. That's what Condorcet methods anyway typically do, i.e. focus on pairwise losses rather than wins. That could make ranking of the worst candidates a pleasant experience. :-) Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
On 12.11.2012, at 17.59, Kevin Venzke wrote: Hi Juho, Kevin Venzke wrote: Margins, it seems to me, is DOA as a proposal due to the Plurality criterion. That 35 AB, 25 B, 40 C would elect A is too counter-intuitive. I agree. For those who don't know, the Plurality criterion says that if X is ranked strictly above all other candidates on more ballots than Y is ranked above any candidates, then Y must not win. Plurality criterion assumes implicit approval (given any preference) of ranked candidates (definitions above have some differences). In that sense it adds something extra to pure ranking. I don't believe the public needs to understand the terms plurality criterion or implicit approval or even strategy to find the scenario problematic. I guess people need to understand what ranking candidates in general or ranking them above the last place means, and that such an act is supposed to mean something when they vote, if they have an opinion on the Plurality criterion (or on examples that demonstrate the impact of the Plurality criterion). Or do you mean that the Plurality criterion example would be presented and explained to the public, but assuming that they don't understand what ranking or not ranking some candidate means? That's why I see it as such a show-stopper. I wonder if the voters should be told about the Plurality criterion or if that should be hidden from them (to avoid them rankig only those candidates that they approve / want to promote). In some startegies that information may be useful to them. But losing information because of truncation (in an election that has no meaningful strategy problems) is harmful. Do you think that if you permit IRV voters to know that IRV satisfies Plurality, they will truncate more often (assuming the rules allow them to)? Depends on how different properties are presented and advertised. If Plurality would be presented as an important feature of Condorcet methods, some people might take that seriously and vote accordingly (e.g. rank only those candidates that they approve). That could be relevant in IRV too, if someone would start merketing IRV using the Plurality criterion. But in general I lean in the direction that in most cases (e.g. in Burlington) people will use ranked methods in some quite sincere way and they do not worry about the details, like IRV strategies or Plurality criterion. However, even without stategy and property discussions, some voters may be tempted to truncate just because they get the idea (maybe from their traditional voting methods) that marking some candidate on the ballot will give him some points. But that would be based on lack of understanding and not on the properties on the method in question. I think the correct message to voters in most ranked method based elections is to encourage them not to truncate but rank all ralevant (good and less good) candidates sincerely. The thought that Plurality itself (satisfaction of it, or failures of it) can be exploited by voters is strange to me. Pluraity criterion can at least play a role in some strategies. Sincere rankings are 49:A, 48:BC, 3:CB. If the three C supporters truncate, Plurality criterion says that (former Condorcet winner) B can not win any more. Plurality criterion does not say that C must win, but if it does (as in some Condorcet methods), then those three CB voters have a working strategy. Also the wording and intent of Plurality criterion may lead people to think that by not ranking some candidates at all, they can decrease the chancs of those candidates to win (never mind if the voters are rational or not). Juho Kevin 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] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
On 11.11.2012, at 18.16, Chris Benham wrote: [robert bristow-johnson wrote:] the most realistic path to accomplishing that is *not* to advocate a method that cannot be explained to citizen-legislators. Yes, but it also helps to advocate a method that opponents can't easily ridicule with bad examples. Which methods don't have any such bad examples that can be used for negative marketing? ;-) Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
On 11.11.2012, at 18.33, Chris Benham wrote: Kevin Venzke wrote: Margins, it seems to me, is DOA as a proposal due to the Plurality criterion. That 35 AB, 25 B, 40 C would elect A is too counter-intuitive. I agree. For those who don't know, the Plurality criterion says that if X is ranked strictly above all other candidates on more ballots than Y is ranked above any candidates, then Y must not win. Woodall says: (in http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE6/P4.HTM) If some candidate x has strictly fewer votes in total than some other candidate y has first-preference votes, then x should not have greater probability than y of being elected. Wikipedia says: If the number of ballots ranking A as the first preference is greater than the number of ballots on which another candidate B is given any preference, then A's probability of winning must be no less than B's. Plurality criterion assumes implicit approval (given any preference) of ranked candidates (definitions above have some differences). In that sense it adds something extra to pure ranking. If one wants to have an approval cutoff in the ballot, an alternative approach is to have an explicit approval cutoff. Explicit cutoff allows voters to rank also candidates that they do not approve. Those explicit approvals would be taken into account when counting the results (maybe in the spirit of the Plurality criterion). Implicit cutoff (if voters know of its existence) may encourage truncation, which means losing some preference information. Typically the definitions of winning votes based Condorcet methods do not contain any reference to implicit approval, and usually they don't have any specific emphasis on the last and one but last position. But of course, if they meet Plurality criterion, then they will respect rankings or rankings above the last position as described in the Plurality criterion. In the given example there was an assumption (in the spirit of the Plurality criterion) that all voters who voted KL, did not approve M and N, and they all approved L. That may not be the case if voters are not aware that this is how their vote will be interpreted, or they may not follow this rule even if they knew it. I wonder if the voters should be told about the Plurality criterion or if that should be hidden from them (to avoid them rankig only those candidates that they approve / want to promote). In some startegies that information may be useful to them. But losing information because of truncation (in an election that has no meaningful strategy problems) is harmful. Juho http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Plurality_criterion I like a more general standard that says that if X both pairwise beats Y and positionally dominates Y, then Y mustn't win. Chris Benham Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Fwd: 3 or more choices - Condorcet
Resent. Also I seem to have some problems getting my mails through on the list. Juho Begin forwarded message: From: Juho Laatu Date: 8. 11 2012 20.32.01 UTC+2.00 To: EM list Subject: Re: [EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet On 8.11.2012, at 18.55, Chris Benham wrote: Robert Bristow-Johnson wrote (1 Oct 2012): my spin is similar. Ranked Pairs simply says that some elections (or runoffs) speak more loudly than others. those with higher margins are more definitive in expressing the will of the electorate than elections with small margins. of course, a margin of zero is a tie and this says *nothing* regarding the will of the electorate, since it can go either way. the reason i like margins over winning votes is that the margin, in vote count, is the product of the margin as a percent (that would be a measure of the decisiveness of the electorate) times the total number of votes (which is a measure of how important the election is). so the margin in votes is the product of salience of the race times how decisive the decision is. Say there are 3 candidates and the voters have the option to fully rank them, but instead they all just choose to vote FPP-style thus: 49: A 48: B 03: C Of course the only possible winner is A. Now say the election is held again (with the same voters and candidates), and the B voters change to BC giving: 49: A 48: BC 03: C Now to my mind this change adds strength to no candidate other than C, so the winner should either stay the same or change to C. Does anyone disagree? The change of 48 vote fragments from C=A to CA adds strength to C and adds weakness to A. Condorcet methods often concentrate on the strength of losses to other candidates. So how do you (Robert or whoever the cap fits) justify to the A voters (and any fair-minded person not infatuated with the Margins pairwise algorithm) that the new Margins winner is B?? Candidate A now loses to one candidate in a pairwise comparison instead of winning all others, so A might not win this time. The pairwise comparisons: BC 48-3, CA 51-49, AB 49-48. Ranked Pairs(Margins) gives the order BCA. I am happy with either A or C winning, but a win for C might look odd to people accustomed to FPP and/or IRV. *If* we insist on a Condorcet method that uses only information contained in the pairwise matrix (and so ignoring all positional or approval information) then *maybe* Losing Votes is the best way to weigh the pairwise results. (So the strongest pairwise results are those where the loser has the fewest votes and, put the other way, the weakest results are those where the loser gets the most votes). With sincre votes the implications of the result in real life after the election (strongest defeat / strength of opposition against the winner in this case) is one good approach to determining which method is the most sensible one. In the example all candidates lose to one other candidate (= the candidate that is the strongest opponent in opposition). - Margins measure the strength of opposition as how many more supporters does the opposition have (when compared to the number of supporters of the winner) - Proportions measure the strength of opposition as how many times more supporters does the opposition have (when compared to the number of supporters of the winner) - Losing Votes measure the strength of opposition as how many people would defend the winner (assuming that opposition has more supporters, but not putting any weight on how many) - Winning Votes measure the strength of opposition as how many people would oppose the winner (assuming that oppostion has more supporters, but not putting any weight on how many defenders there are) All these make at least some sense in real life. But losing and winning votes are somewhat limited in the sense that the number of (respectively) winning or losing votes has no impact on the strength/weakness of the winner. My first concern with the nature of sincere margins as a way to measure the quality of the winner as ability to defend against oppostion is if proportions make more sense than margins or not. Margins are simpler. Proportions say that 49-48 defeat is weaker than 48-47 defeat. (One additional interesting question is what all the ties mean. If we use the pairwise matrix only and assume sincerity, maybe the default interpretation is that all the ties are intentional (not e.g. a result of voters being too tired to mark all their sincere opinions in the ballot).) Juho In the example Losing Votes elects A. Winning Votes elects C which I'm fine with, but I don't like Winning Votes for other reasons. Chris Benham 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] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
On 6.10.2012, at 0.03, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 10/05/2012 12:12 AM, Juho Laatu wrote: And even in the three-categories classification, it's hard to find any objectively best method. The third category was quality of the outcome under honesty. For this category only, finding the best method is straight forward in the sense that one can freely decide what the criterion of the best candidate is in each election. The third category is both easy and hard. It's easy in that if you know what society wants, the answer presents itself readily (unless the desideratum is very indirect or statistical). It's hard in that you have to know what's best. Is an utilitarian approach best? Sum-of-utilities? Mean-utilities? Is equality and fairness valued in itself, thus possibly leading to a preference for candidates everybody thinks is good enough in favor of those some love and some hate? Or is utility hidden or incommensurable to begin with? Perhaps the best one can do is make a hindsight prediction based on foresight data, like in the OD_Ranking link I gave. In any event, there's no out of nothing way to find the correct metric, I think. Yes, one always has to understand the needs and make the decision based on those needs. There are for example the two classical categories, ranked/majority and rated/utility based categories. And then, wide support vs. first preference support etc. Maybe third category definitions may include already some well established strategic concerns in the sense that even though one would think that some utility/ratings based function would be ideal, one uses a majority based function because one thinks that majority is the way to rule competitive societies anyway (since opposition that has majority would be too difficult or too unfair to suppress). But I guess this is still a sincere definition of who should win with sincere votes. The second category was resistance to noise and strategy. It is difficult to estimate how much protection there should be against each threat scenario. It is easier to find the correct answers after the method has been in use for a while (in the given environment). If you (the election method implementer) only get one shot, that makes it more difficult still, because it would generally be advantageous to err on the side of caution so that arguments similar to those against IRV don't get used against your method, or so that the method doesn't perpetuate two-party rule (which you won't know until the method is actually used); but assuming you're on the Pareto front, each hardening within this category will lead to a weakening of the other two. The first ctegory was consistency with itself. Maybe this can be measured somehow, although opinions on what is good may be subjective. Yes. Say you have to decide between margins and wv for the Ranked Pairs rule. Let's disregard strategy susceptibility for now for the sake of illustrating the point. Then the wv version passes Plurality while the margins version passes symmetric completion. Which do you want? I can't see pure reasoning finding the answer to that. Rather, it would appear to be a matter of societal preference. (IMHO, Plurality seems to be more serious than symmetric completion, but then I do prefer wv.) In this category we are really talking about personal preferences. There are many criteria that can be used to point out paradoxes (that may also violate the chosen third category rule). All methods have some paradoxes and therefore it may be just a question of good positive and negative marketing which method gets the most negative points from the audience in the first category. Both plurality and symmetric completion could be used. I guess one could also reject all Condorcet methods since the possibility of cyclic opinions in the results is unpleasant to many. (Woodall says that all methods should meet Plurality but I don't see Plurality as a requirement, not even for majority methods.) If we first decide what third category rule to use and what second category adjustments are needed to make the method work well, then what do the remaining first category decisions look like? Do they work against the chosen third and second category approaches? Do they make the method better? Or do they make the method better in the eyes of the audience? Maybe we could choose which one of the otherwise equally good methods we would use. Or maybe first category would tell us which methods are politically possible (not too much confusion or opposition). Summing up all three properties to determine which system is best could be done in theory, but is of course quite complex. Hence my reference to Pareto fronts. It's conservative - retaining lots of methods that could be excluded if we knew how to compare the category elements - but seems to be the best we can do without actually knowing how to compare. I
Re: [EM] Let's clear up some confusion
On 5.10.2012, at 6.45, Michael Ossipoff wrote: On Thu, Oct 4, 2012 at 6:51 PM, Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: On 4.10.2012, at 23.53, Michael Ossipoff wrote: I think you recommended Symmetrical ICT for informational polling. I guess you like and trust it within that framework. I like and trust Symmetrical ICT within every framework. In official public elections, I like and trust Symmetrical ICT. What I don't trust, in official public elections is the people who own and operate the machines that do the machine balloting, and the computerized counting. That's the trust reason why I don't propose any rank-balloting method for official public elections. We went through this already once. Yes. My opinion was that machine balloting can be avoided if needed. Computerized counting is not a problem if the (securely recorded) ballots are public, or if many parties can double-check the results. As you said, we've already covered that topic. I refer you to my postings in the earlier discussion. So you want 150 million ballots to be public. Yes, or alternatively available to few neutral parties. In many Condorcet methods this could also mean availability of the pairwise preference matrices of each polling station / vote recording station. What, you mean copies of the electronic recording are made public? Yes, electronic versions. You have great faith in the honesty of the recording. Not necessarily (you tell me, since I guess you assume your home country here), but I think that recording of rankings or ratings is not much more dishonest than recording bullet votes or approvals. ...the process between the voting and this 150 million-ballot record. As I said before, an Approval count can be publicly watched. Not just the making of an allegedly-honest electronic recording of rankings, but the actual final approval tallies in an Approval election, with marking-pen on paper. When the actual result can be arrived at, via simple tallying, in public, in the open, in front of observers from the various parties, and recorded and televised by cameras belonging to each party, Approval is incomparably, qualitatively, more fraud-secure than any Condorcet method could be. I wonder where the difference is. Simple bullet votes are easy in the sense that one could collect them into piles for each candidate and then count the number of ballots in each pile. In Approval the process could be to tick the marked candidates of each ballot on a computer screen. In Condorcet the process could be to tick the marked candidates of each ballot on a computer screen, in the given order. The results could be double-checked by another counter and continuously monitored by others, physically and electronically. Juho Mike Ossipoff 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] Let's clear up some confusion
On 4.10.2012, at 7.49, Michael Ossipoff wrote: You said: , maybe the question if you recommend the voters to rank sincerely or if you recommend them to sometimes use the top ties (although the candidates are not equally good). [endquote] Good question. In a public election, I'd emphasize that their best strategy in a u/a election is to equal top rank all of the acceptables, and to not rank any accceptables. Ok, this is maybe where our thouhts differ. My target level with ranked methods is to be able to tell the voters that there indeed are some strategic possibilities, at least theoretical ones, but for them it is safe enough and their best general strategy to rank the candidates sincerely. I don't like the idea of recommending voters not to give their opinion about the candidates. Not giving one's sincere opinions may infroduce more problems than it solves. And it certainly makes the outcome of the election worse in the case that there was after all no need to vote strategically. Maybe you don't worry about recommending voters to turn strategic in Condorcet elections since you dont like (or trust) Condorcet methods very much anyway. I think that a considerable part of the benefits of ranked methods would be lost if people would have to resort to strategic voting, and not indicate sincerely which candidates are good. Maybe your answer is that Condorcet methods are so vulnerable to strategies that the voters must either vote strategically or fall prey to the strategists. I guess we'll just have to wait and see. There are many TTR and IRV elections where people generally vote sincerely, but one never knows. Of course this depends to some extent also on the society in question. in the unimproved Condorcet versions, you'd never really know what to do. You'd have to try to judge whether some acceptables are much more winnable than others, so that refusing to top-rank Y (an acceptable) is justified because Y isnt likely to win anyway, and top-ranking hir could make X (another acceptable) lose. That's a problem that you'd never have to worry about in Symmetrical ICT. It's the old lesser-evil dilemma of FBC-failing methods. As I said, to me the most interesting strategic thinking related question in Condorcet is if one can honestly recommend sincere voting as the best general strategy to the voters. In Symmetrical ICT, with your advice to the voters, voters would have to worry whether to tell that their favourite is better than the compromise or if they should vote for a tie (and not support their favourite over the compromise). You might say that Symmetrical ICT's u/a strategy sounds a lot like Approval. Yes, and the fact that the best that you can get, in u/a strategy, in rank methods, is simply Approval strategy is another good reason to propose Approval (or maybe Score) instead of any rank method. Maybe you promote Symmetrical ICT because that helps you promoting Approval over the Condorcet methods, i.e. that there is a need to flatten your preferences to the level of Approval anyway. :-) More seriously, my point is still that the best promise of Condorcet methods is that people might be able to give full sincere rankings in competitive elections. And that (e.g.) FBC properties of some traditional Condorcet methods may be good enough to allow voters to vote sincerely. Maybe you think the same way, except that for you the line of defence is at the level of Approval. You asked me how I'd instruct a voter. But you know that I don't propose any rank method for official public elecions. Yes, I already commented that above. :-) Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Let's clear up some confusion
On 4.10.2012, at 16.18, Michael Ossipoff wrote: You said: Maybe you don't worry about recommending voters to turn strategic in Condorcet elections since you don't like (or trust) Condorcet methods very much anyway. [endquote] That isn't true. Symmetrical iCT is a Condorcet method, and I like and trust Symmetrical ICT. I think you recommended Symmetrical ICT for informational polling. I guess you like and trust it within that framework. You said: I think that a considerable part of the benefits of ranked methods would be lost if people would have to resort to strategic voting, and not indicate sincerely which candidates are good. [endquote] Good point. So then, you're therefore changing your proposal from margins to Approval, right? Probably not, unless you manage to arrange some Condorcet elections and spread the message of strategic voting well enough. Hopefuly also Approval elections and good propaganda in the reverse direction. :-) You said: I guess we'll just have to wait and see. There are many TTR and IRV elections where people generally vote sincerely, but one never knows. [endquote] One can listen to what voters say. Where IRV is used for official public elections, voters say that they favorite-bury, so as to not waste their vote. References? We've already made a pact: I won't tell you the strategy-inclinations of voters where you reside, and you won't tell me the strategy-inclinations in the U.S. What was that? More seriously, my point is still that the best promise of Condorcet methods is that people might be able to give full sincere rankings in competitive elections. Yes, the promise of Symmetrical ICT is that it encourages sincere ranking, unlike unimproved Condorcet. I believe you recommended voters to be sincere in one (not so competitive) election. In the previous mail you said I'd emphasize that their best strategy in a u/a election is to equal top rank all of the acceptables, and to not rank any accceptables. Maybe you think that this is the best level of sincerity that Condorcet methods can achieve. We've agreed to disagree about which one of us has more familiarity with and contact with American voters. I disagree. :-) Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
And even in the three-categories classification, it's hard to find any objectively best method. The third category was quality of the outcome under honesty. For this category only, finding the best method is straight forward in the sense that one can freely decide what the criterion of the best candidate is in each election. The second category was resistance to noise and strategy. It is difficult to estimate how much protection there should be against each threat scenario. It is easier to find the correct answers after the method has been in use for a while (in the given environment). The first ctegory was consistency with itself. Maybe this can be measured somehow, although opinions on what is good may be subjective. Summing up all three properties to determine which system is best could be done in theory, but is of course quite complex. Condorcet comparison methods are relevant in all three categories. Maybe the ability to separate comparison methods from the rest of the method makes discussion one step easeir / more structured. I guess the most discussed topic around comparison methods has been strategy resistance (category two). Many of the comparison methods are so simple that category one doesn't cause major problems. In category three there might be something more to discuss. Also soft / heuristic approaches could be valid (in addition to the traditional simple and hard ones (that may be easier to define and agree)). Juho On 4.10.2012, at 22.44, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 10/02/2012 12:50 AM, Juho Laatu wrote: I just note that there are many approaches to making the pairwise comparisons. - One could use proportions instead of margins = A/B isntead of A-B. - If one measures the number of poeple who took position, one would have to know which ones voted for a tie intentionally, and which ones voted for a tie because they thought those candidates were already irrelevat, or because they didn't know the candidates, or were just too lazy to mark all the details in the ballot. An wlternative would be to assume that any tie is interpreted as an intentionally marked tie. A candidate taht is not known by many voters probably will not be ranked high anyway, so there may be no need for adjustments. - Winning votes counts the amount of opposition, but doesn't care about the amount of support. - Also other more fine-tuned approaches to making the pairwise comparisons could be developed. Or maybe rough and simple rules are easier to justify. - Truncation as a way to make the results of the truncated candidates worse is not a nice option because it may lead to people not ranking the candidates, which is contrary to the targets of ranked voting (= collect all preference opinions). The worst case would be bullet voting. My earlier voting software has a number of ways of doing Condorcet comparisons, although most are pretty obscure. These are: - wv: winning votes, number of voters on the victorious side, 0 if losing - lv: losing votes, number of voters in total minus number of voters on the losing side, or 0 if this is the losing side - margins: maximum of AB - BA and 0. - lmargins: AB - BA, so negative numbers are permitted. - pairwise opposition: number of voters on this side (even if this is the losing side). - wtv: same as wv, but ties also count (on both sides). - tourn_wv: 1 if this is the winning side, otherwise 0. - tourn_sym: 1 if this is the winning side, 0 for a tie, otherwise -1. - fractional_wv: (AB) / (AB + BA) if on the winning side, otherwise 0. - relative_margins: (AB - BA) / (AB + B/A) - keener_margins: h((AB + 1) / (AB + BA + 2)) where h(x) = 0.5 + 0.5 sign(x - 0.5) * sqrt(|2x - 1), as per meyer.math.ncsu.edu/Meyer/Talks/OD_RankingCharleston.pdf . It's not that hard to find different ways to compare Condorcet. I think someone on the list had an idea of using a statistical comparison, i.e. to say AB if A beats B with a certain level of confidence (as one would reason with polls), BA if B beats a within the same level, and unknown otherwise. Perhaps the important part is not really what kind of interpretation one uses as how well it goes with the three categories I have talked about earlier. Well, both might be important. Say you had an interpretation that gave second place votes much more weight (e.g. AB plus two times A votes in second place) than others. Even if this interpretation had some criterion-failure avoiding properties, it could easily lead to people doubting the legitimacy of the method with such a seemingly arbitrary component to it. And even in the three-categories classification, it's hard to find any objectively best method. You can find Pareto-dominating and Pareto-dominated methods. For instance, unless the societal value under sincerity of Black (Condorcet/Borda) is better than, say, Ranked Pairs, Ranked Pairs would Pareto-dominate Black and so we
Re: [EM] Let's clear up some confusion
On 4.10.2012, at 23.53, Michael Ossipoff wrote: I think you recommended Symmetrical ICT for informational polling. I guess you like and trust it within that framework. I like and trust Symmetrical ICT within every framework. In official public elections, I like and trust Symmetrical ICT. What I don't trust, in official public elections is the people who own and operate the machines that do the machine balloting, and the computerized counting. That's the trust reason why I don't propose any rank-balloting method for official public elections. We went through this already once. My opinion was that machine balloting can be avoided if needed. Computerized counting is not a problem if the (securely recorded) ballots are public, or if many parties can double-check the results. We've agreed to disagree about which one of us has more familiarity with and contact with American voters. I disagree. :-) Do you mean that you disagree, in keeping with our agreement to disagree, or do you mean that you don't agree that you agreed to disagree. Wasn't it an agreement that we disagree? If it wasn't then I must disagree now. :-) If it is the latter, then do you disagree that you agree to disagree because you agree? You are deviating to the actual content. I'm certain I'd disagree also without this disagreement. :-) If so, then you agree with me about which one of us has more familiarity and contact with American voters. I think we already quite certainly agree to disagree. And that's an agreement that we can agree. :-) Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
On 3.10.2012, at 3.35, Michael Ossipoff wrote: On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 12:55 AM, Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: On 2.10.2012, at 4.37, Michael Ossipoff wrote: A) What is it that is gained by using traditional (unimproved) Condorcet instead of Symmetrical Improved Condorcet? The downsides of unimproved are: .1. FBC failure (though unimproved-Condorcet advocates speculate that people won't mind) The traditional interpretation of ranked votes may well support FBC well enough in the classical Condorcet methods. Yes, that's what I meant by speculation. It is well known that it is impossible to meet all ciriteria at the same time. Typical election methods can't be made fully strategy free. Therefore the best approach must be to meet some criteria not 100% but well enough. And note that that speculation is coming from someone who likewise accepts Margins' failure of the Plurality Criterion. How often Margins fails Plurality isn't the issue. The examples in which it does will be widely shared with the public, by the opponents of any enactment proposal for any method that violates that criterion (or any other embarrassment-criterion). Speculation that voters won't be affected by a strategy-incentive is one form that unimproved Condorcet rationalization and self-deception can take. But my purpose, at this stage of the procedure isn't to argue about the criteria and properties, so much as to establish what unimproved Condorcet advocates think make unimproved Condorcet so good as to outweigh the disadvantages that I listed. By the way, of course it's better to call a method by the name used by its advocates. We have a term for the more EM-popular (unimproved) Condorcet versions: Strong Condorcet. That's the term that I'll start using. It refers to Beatpath, Ranked-Pairs, River, Goldfish, Kemeny, and VoteFair. Maybe other similar methods too. Sometimes I'll abbreviate Strong Condorcet to Strong. I'd recommend to make the separation by using your new term improved Condorcet (or maybe some more descriptive name) and leave the traditional Condorcet approach as it is and how people usually refer to it, i.e. without any additional name when one refers to the basic rankings. Or maybe use generic words like traditional or regular when needed. I think you may be about to break your own good rule of using names that the advocates of the named object use. .2. Interpretation of equal-top and equal-bottom ranking is contrary to the voter's preferences, intent and wishes. I guess by default the meaning of equal-top and equal-bottom ranking is to rank the candidates equal. Wrong. Ranking X and Y in 1st place, or ranking W and Z in last place additionally means that that voter prefers that the winner be X or Y, or that the voter would rather that the winner be someone else other than W or Z. That's true already without any additions. Juho And, you see, that's where unimproved Condorcet --excuse me, I meant Strong Condorcet--parts ways with what the voter prefers. I've explained this before, here at EM. I'll explain it again if requested. The voter may have interest to cast a stronger vote where the equal-top and equal-bottom rankings have some additional strength ...such as being interpreted and counted in keeping with that voter's preferences, intent and wishes? Yes. , but that's another story Indeed, in Strong, that is indeed another story. Strong has its own story, and it isn't about what the voter actually prefers. , and not the default interpretation of ranked votes. You mean _your_ default interpretation of ranked votes. From what you said, your default interpretation of equal top ranking disregards the voter's preference for the top-ranked candidates over the other candidates. Indeed, that is a different story. Mike Ossipoff 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] Let's clear up some confusion
You explanation sounds like a pretty regular ranked ballot approach. If I rank U and V second, I want them to lose to the firsts and win the rest. Juho On 3.10.2012, at 6.06, Michael Ossipoff wrote: Juho: In improved Condorcet, the voter who equal top ranks X and Y, or who equal bottom ranks W and Z, doesn't have any more power to vote one over the other, or to not do so, than any otther voter has to vote one candidate over the other or no do so. Nor does a vote for X over Y, or for Y over X, counted for the ballot of a voter top ranking X and Y, have any more power or effect as a pairwise vote cast by any voter between any two candidates. Likewise for the equal bottom ranking voter who ranks W and Z at bottom. (at bottom means not voted over anyone). So then, what makes Improved Condorcet different from unimproved Condorcet? How is it more favorable to the equal top or equal bottom ranking voter, without giving undue power to that voter?: With respect to X and Y, hir ballot is counted in hir beat interest, in keeping with hir preferences, intent and wishes. As for what that means, I'll say it again: If you rank X and Y both in 1st place, that means that you'd rather elect one of them (either one of them) than anyone whom you don't rank in 1st place. If you rank W and Z at bottom, that means that you'd rather elect anyone whom you rank above bottom, instead of W or Z. Mike Ossipoff 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] Let's clear up some confusion
Yes, it seems that the interpretation of the ballots and sincere wishes of the
voters are the same in both traditional ranked ballots and your improved
approach. And the interpretation is the same for all ranks, except that the
first and last ranks do not have any candidates above or below.
Juho
On 3.10.2012, at 13.53, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 3:25 AM, Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
You explanation sounds like a pretty regular ranked ballot approach. If I
rank U and V second, I want them to lose to the firsts and win the rest.
Quite so.
And (regarding your 2nd-ranked candidates), it's because you want
someone else (your 1st ranked) to win more than you want your 2nd
ranked to win, and because you also want your 2nd ranked to win more
than you want your 3rd ranked to win--That's what makes the top and
bottom rank positions different from all of the other rank positions.
Your top-ranked candidates: You'd prefer that they win instead of anyone else.
Your bottom-ranked candidates. You'd prefer that anyone but them wins.
Neither of those things can be said for any other rank position, other
than top or bottom rank position. For the reason that you stated in
your above-quoted text.
That's why, in keeping with what the voter would prefer and wishes
with hir equal top and equal bottom rankings, Symmetrical ICT
interprets equal top and bottom ranking as it does. That's why no
other rank positions are treated in that way--because the voter intent
and preference that I refer to at top and bottom rank position doesn't
apply at any other rank position.
Because, when ranking X and Y in 1st place, you'd prefer that the
winner be from {X,Y}, then you don't want either to pairwise-beat the
other, which could change the winner from someone in {X,Y} to someone
else, like your last choice. So Symmetrical ICT lets you have your
ballot counted as automatically voting between X and Y in such a way
as to keep either from beating the other.
It's your vote. It's your ballot, and it's your pairwise vote between
X and Y. It should be counted in your best interest, in keeping with
what you prefer and intend, when ranking X and Y equal top, or when
ranking W and Z equal bottom.
Mike Ossipoff
Juho
On 3.10.2012, at 6.06, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
Juho:
In improved Condorcet, the voter who equal top ranks X and Y, or who
equal bottom ranks W and Z, doesn't have any more power to vote one
over the other, or to not do so, than any otther voter has to vote one
candidate over the other or no do so.
Nor does a vote for X over Y, or for Y over X, counted for the ballot
of a voter top ranking X and Y, have any more power or effect as a
pairwise vote cast by any voter between any two candidates.
Likewise for the equal bottom ranking voter who ranks W and Z at
bottom. (at bottom means not voted over anyone).
So then, what makes Improved Condorcet different from unimproved
Condorcet? How is it more favorable to the equal top or equal bottom
ranking voter, without giving undue power to that voter?:
With respect to X and Y, hir ballot is counted in hir beat interest,
in keeping with hir preferences, intent and wishes.
As for what that means, I'll say it again:
If you rank X and Y both in 1st place, that means that you'd rather
elect one of them (either one of them) than anyone whom you don't rank
in 1st place.
If you rank W and Z at bottom, that means that you'd rather elect
anyone whom you rank above bottom, instead of W or Z.
Mike Ossipoff
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
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Re: [EM] Let's clear up some confusion
Do you assume that the voters will know that the method will treat tied first
and tied last in a different way than tied middle? If they know, then you could
say that the interpretation and sincere wishes of the voters are different for
the middle preferences. (In that case, probably you should include that
difference also in the definition of what the ballots mean.)
Juho
On 3.10.2012, at 14.56, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 7:24 AM, Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Yes, it seems that the interpretation of the ballots and sincere wishes of
the voters are the same in both traditional ranked ballots and your improved
approach.
First of all, it isn't _my_ improved approach. It's Kevin Venzke's
improved approach.
(My innovation was to do it at bottom as well as at top. In fact, I'd
proposed it at bottom long ago. At that time I called it power
truncation).
Yes, the wishes of the voters don't change, just because one count
rule respects their wishes and another doesn't. You're right about
that.
But no, the interpretation of ballots is not the same in Improved
Condorcet and unimproved Condorcet. Improved Condorcet respects the
preferences, intent and wishes of equal top and equal bottom ranking
voters. Unimproved Condorcet doesn't respect their intent and wishes.
Let me again state the definition of Symmetrical ICT, to show how it
differs from the versions of unimproved Condorcet:
Symmetrical ICT:
(XY) means the number of people ranking X over Y.
(YX) means the number of peoiple ranking Y over X.
(X=Y)T means the number of people ranking X and Y at top.
(X=Y)B means the number of people ranking X and Y at bottom.
X beats Y iff (XY) + (X=Y)B (YX) + (X=Y)T.
[end of Symmetrical ICT definition]
So no, Improved Condorcet and unimproved Condorcet do not interpret
ballots in the same way.
And the interpretation is the same for all ranks, except that the first and
last ranks do not have any candidates above or below.
Yes, and that's why Symmetrical ICT treats equal top and equal bottom
ranking differently, in keeping with (as I said) the preferences,
intent and wishes of the equal top and equal bottom ranking voters.
Some here don't like to hear this: The emperor (unimproved Condorcet)
doesn't have any clothes.
Mike Ossipoff
Juho
On 3.10.2012, at 13.53, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 3:25 AM, Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
You explanation sounds like a pretty regular ranked ballot approach. If I
rank U and V second, I want them to lose to the firsts and win the rest.
Quite so.
And (regarding your 2nd-ranked candidates), it's because you want
someone else (your 1st ranked) to win more than you want your 2nd
ranked to win, and because you also want your 2nd ranked to win more
than you want your 3rd ranked to win--That's what makes the top and
bottom rank positions different from all of the other rank positions.
Your top-ranked candidates: You'd prefer that they win instead of anyone
else.
Your bottom-ranked candidates. You'd prefer that anyone but them wins.
Neither of those things can be said for any other rank position, other
than top or bottom rank position. For the reason that you stated in
your above-quoted text.
That's why, in keeping with what the voter would prefer and wishes
with hir equal top and equal bottom rankings, Symmetrical ICT
interprets equal top and bottom ranking as it does. That's why no
other rank positions are treated in that way--because the voter intent
and preference that I refer to at top and bottom rank position doesn't
apply at any other rank position.
Because, when ranking X and Y in 1st place, you'd prefer that the
winner be from {X,Y}, then you don't want either to pairwise-beat the
other, which could change the winner from someone in {X,Y} to someone
else, like your last choice. So Symmetrical ICT lets you have your
ballot counted as automatically voting between X and Y in such a way
as to keep either from beating the other.
It's your vote. It's your ballot, and it's your pairwise vote between
X and Y. It should be counted in your best interest, in keeping with
what you prefer and intend, when ranking X and Y equal top, or when
ranking W and Z equal bottom.
Mike Ossipoff
Juho
On 3.10.2012, at 6.06, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
Juho:
In improved Condorcet, the voter who equal top ranks X and Y, or who
equal bottom ranks W and Z, doesn't have any more power to vote one
over the other, or to not do so, than any otther voter has to vote one
candidate over the other or no do so.
Nor does a vote for X over Y, or for Y over X, counted for the ballot
of a voter top ranking X and Y, have any more power or effect as a
pairwise vote cast by any voter between any two candidates.
Likewise for the equal bottom ranking voter who ranks W and Z at
bottom. (at bottom means not voted over
Re: [EM] Let's clear up some confusion
On 3.10.2012, at 20.37, Michael Ossipoff wrote: (In that case, probably you should include that difference also in the definition of what the ballots mean.) Wrong. My definition of Symmetrical ICT fully specifies the method and its count rule. No doubt about that. I was interested in if you expect regular voters to know that there are special rules on how the top and bottom ties are handled. If there is anything interesting left, maybe the question if you recommend the voters to rank sincerely or if you recommend them to sometimes use the top ties (although the candidates are not equally good). Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
On 1.10.2012, at 17.31, Michael Ossipoff wrote: Everyone here agrees that natural (sincere) circular ties would be rare. Quite rare in typical political elections. Also, the choice is a lot less clear when there isn't a circular tie. More difficult to think, but can be as clear. For those reasons, it matters much less what a rank method does when there isn't a CW. Only because cycles are rare. But if we exclude that viewpoint, then quite as important. I read that Condorcet(margins) fails the Plurality Criterion. Did you know that, Juho? Not one of my favourite criteria (if any are as on/off criteria, since I like many criteria but do not require them to be met 100% if there are also other important targets to meet). The Plurality Criterion is one of those embarrassment criteria. It could be important because it could be used to easily defeat an enactment proposal. I don't know how well that idea could be sold as negative marketing. There are many criteria that sound (or whose name sounds ;-) ) intuitive but that deserve a second look. That was why I ceased advocating MMPO. ...along with burial strategy. That's another thing about Margins: It has much more problem with burial and truncation to defeat a sincere CW, as compared with wv. Margins are more vulnerable to some strategies than winning votes, but in some other strategies the balance is the other way around. What counts is vulnerability in real elections. Margins are quite good. And wv has a burial problem that its advocates are in denial about too. By the way, speaking of denial, people at EM are in denial about the feasibility problems of rank-methods in general. I've discussed them enough that it isn't necessary to explain what I mean about that. The best test would be to arrange competitive real life Condorcet elections. IRV seems to work fine, at least if we ignore the complaints about the sensibility of the elimination process. I think I may be in denial although I don't know yet what the key problem is that I deny :-). Juho Mike Ossipoff 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] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
On 1.10.2012, at 19.16, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 10/01/2012 12:13 AM, Juho Laatu wrote: On 30.9.2012, at 15.41, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: As far as intrinsically Condorcet methods go, Ranked Pairs feels simple to me. The only tricky part is the indirect nature of the unless it contradicts what you already affirmed step. To me the biggest problem of path based methods is that there is no very good real life explanation to why chains of pairwise victories are so important. In real life the idea of not electiong a candidate that would lose to someone who would lose to someone etc. doesn't sound like an important criterion (since it doesn't talk about what the candidate is like or how strong the opposition would be, but about what the set of candidates and its network of relations looks like). Probably there will never be a long chain of changes from one winner to another in real life. I don't think you need to go into path logic for Ranked Pairs. Rather, how about this? Ranked Pairs is based on setting up a complete ranking where the result of one candidate may depend on pairwise comparisons of some distant candidates. If therere is a large top loop, changes in opinions between A and B may change the winner from C to D. In this sense some distant opinons along the paths somewhere may influence the goodness of a candidate. Because of the existence of cycles, it's obvious we need to discard some of the data. So, what data do we discard? I wouldn't say that we have to discard some data but that we may violate some pairwise preference opinions in the sense that the winner may lose some pairwise comparisons. The reason why I don't like word discard is actually related to the fact that this makes us too easily think of the end result as a complete ordeing of the candidates, where some facts had to be discarded because they did not fit in the picture. And here the problem is that group opinions may indeed be cyclic, and there is no need to correct them to a transitive order. The used words are not that important. But whatever the words, I do stick to the claim that group opinions are graphs, not linear orders, and we must decide who the winner is, in the presence of cyclic opinions (not by eliminating them, at least not in all methods). (Same comments about terms like breaking cycles.) If we have to discard a one-on-one victory, lets discard those that are as narrow, or involve as few voters, as possible. Yes, it is in most cases better to violate some narrow victories rather than strong ones. (We can assume full rankings and skip the few voters criterion since it is not essential here and it would introduce new open questions.) Hence, we should go down the list of one-on-one contests and add the data they give to our order unless it would produce a cycle. That way, all the decisive contests get counted first and if we have to throw some away, it's the weaker ones. I can see two approaches here. One is to measure the preference relations of each candidate seprately, e.g. how much and to which other candidates someone loses and how this influences this candidate's goodness. The other approach is that also the pairwise preferences of other unrelated candidates may influence the goodness of this candidate. One special case of this second approach is to say that the best winner should be picked so that the group oinion is first forced into a linear opinion using some criteria, and then the first candidate of that order is the winner. Minmax is an example in the first category where only the personal properties of each candidate do count. It's a little IRVish (justifying the method by the way it works rather than the outcome), but still... I think the part that was method oriented was the formation of the linear ordering. The way Ranked Pairs arranges the candidates is however quite intuitive and natural (not as heuristic and procedural as IRV). But as already said, the intermediate result of a linear order of the candidates is not necessary, but just a method specfic trick. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
I just note that there are many approaches to making the pairwise comparisons. - One could use proportions instead of margins = A/B isntead of A-B. - If one measures the number of poeple who took position, one would have to know which ones voted for a tie intentionally, and which ones voted for a tie because they thought those candidates were already irrelevat, or because they didn't know the candidates, or were just too lazy to mark all the details in the ballot. An wlternative would be to assume that any tie is interpreted as an intentionally marked tie. A candidate taht is not known by many voters probably will not be ranked high anyway, so there may be no need for adjustments. - Winning votes counts the amount of opposition, but doesn't care about the amount of support. - Also other more fine-tuned approaches to making the pairwise comparisons could be developed. Or maybe rough and simple rules are easier to justify. - Truncation as a way to make the results of the truncated candidates worse is not a nice option because it may lead to people not ranking the candidates, which is contrary to the targets of ranked voting (= collect all preference opinions). The worst case would be bullet voting. Juho On 1.10.2012, at 23.52, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 10/01/2012 08:50 PM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: the reason i like margins over winning votes is that the margin, in vote count, is the product of the margin as a percent (that would be a measure of the decisiveness of the electorate) times the total number of votes (which is a measure of how important the election is). so the margin in votes is the product of salience of the race times how decisive the decision is. Similarly, one might say that wv is more about the degree of contention about something than the margin of victory. If most people have no opinion about A vs B, but 10 people vote A ahead of B, then that, according to wv, is less important than if, out of a million, ten more people vote A ahead of B than B ahead of A. In the latter case, the contest draws significant attention; in the former, it doesn't. It's a bit like polling. Say you poll a thousand voters and 990 of them decline to answer. Then that ten answer in favor of A isn't going to carry much weight in favor of A; but if all thousand answer and 510 are in favor of A, that's quite a bit more important. 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] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
On 2.10.2012, at 4.37, Michael Ossipoff wrote: A) What is it that is gained by using traditional (unimproved) Condorcet instead of Symmetrical Improved Condorcet? The downsides of unimproved are: .1. FBC failure (though unimproved-Condorcet advocates speculate that people won't mind) The traditional interpretation of ranked votes may well support FBC well enough in the classical Condorcet methods. .2. Interpretation of equal-top and equal-bottom ranking is contrary to the voter's preferences, intent and wishes. I guess by default the meaning of equal-top and equal-bottom ranking is to rank the candidates equal. The voter may have interest to cast a stronger vote where the equal-top and equal-bottom rankings have some additional strength, but that's another story, and not the default interpretation of ranked votes. Those are two drawbacks. If you advocate unimproved Condorcet, then it must offer some advantages--important enough advantages to outweigh the two disadvantages listed above. Simplicity. Lack of interest to truncate one's vote (and lose preference information) at the top and at the bottom. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Strong methods (was Re: 3 or more choices - Condorcet)
On 30.9.2012, at 11.56, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 09/29/2012 10:49 PM, Juho Laatu wrote: What is a strong Condorcet method? Basically, one that gives good results while being resistant to tinkering by the parties (who have greater capacity to coordinate strategy than do the voters, and more to lose under the new regime), and not giving weird results or having weird result dynamics that could be used to discredit the method. That's a prestty good definition of good. I'd say good results (there may be different definitions) with sincere votes, and (if needed) good behaviour in the presence of strategists too. In practice, that means: is cloneproof, passes independence of as much as possible (independence of Smith-dominated alternatives, say), and is monotone. These criteria could be one set of definitions of a good (sincere) winner. I usually do not assume the first two ones since there may be good (sincere) winners also outside those criteria. Monotonicity is maybe more natural in the Condorcet category. River would be even better than Ranked Pairs, since River passes independence of Pareto-dominated alternatives and RP doesn't, but River is even less known than Ranked Pairs. I've put strong in quote marks because I know others may disagree with my priorities. FairVote obviously doesn't consider the having weird result dynamics part important as long as the strangeness can't be exploited by deliberate strategy. If one looks positively at their criteria, maybe they put strong emphasis on the marketability of the method. That marketability may include some tendency to favour the large parties. To digress a bit, I think you could say strong methods go further in satisfying three categories than do not-as-strong methods. The first is consistency with itself. Nonmonotone methods do badly here. The intuitive idea is that if a method is not monotone (say), then that means that its concept of what is better is lacking - it's like someone who says I'm closer to the city after traveling in the wrong direction. It's important to make clear that whether or not these inconsistencies can be exploited through strategy is not really important. The danger is that a perfectly innocent election will find itself on the wrong side of an inconsistency and so the result will be either inferior (as a result) or less legitimate (because people will say WTF is going on here?). Of course, there are some such inconsistencies we have to accept if we want Condorcet. Yes, it is good if the winner is someone who can be said to be the best according to some definitions, and people agree with the sensibility of those definitions. This means picking the best winner (with sincere votes), not a random winner. The second is resistance to noise and strategy. Independence of clones fit here, as well as independence of X (Smith-dominated alternatives, Pareto-dominated alternatives, weak IIA). The resistance may protect against strategy - cloneproof methods keep parties from running an army of identical candidates - or improve the outcome when there is no strategy - e.g. by not being affected by the liberal parties' vote-splitting in a replay of the 1988 South Korean presidential election. (I just note that independence of clones can be an interesting topic both when discussing behaviour with sincere votes and strategies.) The third is quality of the outcome under honesty, according to some metric or desired logic. It's hard to say which metric one should pick, unfortunately, and for Ranked Pairs (and Schulze), there's probably no simple metric that the method optimizes. Furthermore, the logic one uses for rated methods probably wouldn't directly fit onto rank methods (because utilities are either unknown or not applicable). It seems that I assumed above that this category and the first category are related. Maybe this category implies also the first category. I.e. there is no such good logic of what we desire that would break against the first caregory. (Or maybe, if we step outside the Condorcet domain and think about IRV, then maybe the idea of kicking the weakest candidate out at every round makes sense in some setup??) I'm not sure where Condorcet compliance fits into the categories above, either. Perhaps it's the third, in a sort of deontological logic that says do whatever you want, but if there's a candidate that would win every runoff, elect him. Perhaps it's a consistency criterion, where the people expect X to win outright if he can win every runoff. Or maybe it's doing without strategy what the voters could do with enough coordination in other methods, easing the burden on those voters - or a way to have the method resist single-group repeal efforts, where electing the CW ensures that if the supporters of a loser tries to repeal or complain, there will always be a greater group of supporters
Re: [EM] Strong methods (was Re: 3 or more choices - Condorcet)
On 30.9.2012, at 16.06, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 09/30/2012 11:47 AM, Juho Laatu wrote: On 30.9.2012, at 11.56, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: In practice, that means: is cloneproof, passes independence of as much as possible (independence of Smith-dominated alternatives, say), and is monotone. These criteria could be one set of definitions of a good (sincere) winner. I usually do not assume the first two ones since there may be good (sincere) winners also outside those criteria. Monotonicity is maybe more natural in the Condorcet category. There might be, but then again, there may also be better outcomes when the method does not get confused by vote-splitting problems (e.g. the Korean election). Bad clone related problems must be corrected, but different criteria may conflict, and one may get similar votes and matrices with or without real clones (= politically similar candidates). Therefore one may also meet the clone related criteria well enough in order to respect better some other requirements. In my opinion, even if that works, it won't have the desired effect. Australia shows this. Maybe Austratlia shows that things could fail. But one could be also lucky, and Australia is a quite specific case. One must try and hope that things will work out. I believe most countries have some problems in their voting system, and usually they could be corrected, but they are not since there is not enough political will. So the difference between the third and first category is, I think, that the third is about what's good for society in general, while the first is about what makes the voters (and candidates) accept the outcome. The more democracy is about having the losers accept that they've lost, the more important the first category becomes with respect to the third, for instance. Maybe one more first category related explanation behind promoting IRV is that the serial elimination rule looks like a fair fight (where the weakest fighters are fairly kicked out of the fight) to many voters :-). Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
On 30.9.2012, at 15.41, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 09/30/2012 12:51 AM, robert bristow-johnson wrote: i still think that a cycle with a Smith set bigger than 3 is s unlikely since i still believe that cycles themselves will be rare in practice. ... Currently, single-winner elections very rarely have cycles and large Smith sets are even more rare. In typical political environments where people know the candidates or at least the parties well, and where there often are also strong established orders like teh left-right axis, cycles are indeed quite rare, and cycles bigger than 3 are even more rare. There can be however environments where cycles are somewhat more common. I mean environments where all the candidates look quite similar, there are many of them, and where there is no strong eastablished political structure that would help voters in making decisions. In such an environment there could be random loops among the very similar candidates. For example in the 2008 Wikimedia borad elections there was a large loop, but not at the top (http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Board_elections/2008/Results/en). But in typical political elections top cycles of 4 should be very rare. As far as intrinsically Condorcet methods go, Ranked Pairs feels simple to me. The only tricky part is the indirect nature of the unless it contradicts what you already affirmed step. To me the biggest problem of path based methods is that there is no very good real life explanation to why chains of pairwise victories are so important. In real life the idea of not electiong a candidate that would lose to someone who would lose to someone etc. doesn't sound like an important criterion (since it doesn't talk about what the candidate is like or how strong the opposition would be, but about what the set of candidates and its network of relations looks like). Probably there will never be a long chain of changes from one winner to another in real life. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
On 1.10.2012, at 5.05, robert bristow-johnson wrote: But in typical political elections top cycles of 4 should be very rare. and my understanding is that Schulze, RP, and Minmax all elect the same candidate for case of a simple 3-choice cycle and, of course, they all elect the same candidate when there is no cycle. Yes, with three candidates the choice depends only on the used comparison method, i.e. margins, winning votes etc. If there is a fourth candidate outside the 3-choice top cycle, Minmax can elect also the fourth candidate if the worst losses of all the cycled candidates are worse than that of the fourth candidate. This is also a very rare case. The justification behind that choice is that the level of opposition against the chosen winner (in favour of any single one of the competitiors) will be lowest this way. In Minmax(margins) the fourth candidate would also need the least amount of additional votes to become a Condorcet winner. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] 3 or more choices - Condorcet
What is a strong Condorcet method? Juho On 29.9.2012, at 23.11, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 09/28/2012 10:11 PM, dn...@aol.com wrote: A B Choice C comes along. C may - head to head --- 1. Beat both C A C B 2. Lose to both A C B C 3. Beat A BUT lose to B C A B C Thus, obviously, a tiebreaker is needed in case 3. Obviously perhaps Approval. i.e. BOTH number votes and YES/NO Approval votes. Obviously much more complex with 4 or more choices. --- ANY election reform method in the U.S.A. has to get past the math challeged appointed folks in SCOTUS. i.e. ANY reform must be REALLY SIMPLE. Condorcet applies for legislative bodies and single or multiple executive/judicial offices. I think Ranked Pairs is the simplest strong Condorcet method. You sort the pairwise victories so that the strongest comes first, then you go down the list, adding that victory to the final order unless it would contradict something you added earlier. So say you have 100 voters prefer A to B 80 voters prefer B to C 85 voters prefer C to A which would give you: First the result must place A higher than B. (Okay.) Second, the result must place C higher than A. (Okay.) Third, the result must place B higher than C... but that's impossible because C is higher than A is higher than B. So skip it. And the winner is thus C. A comes second, and B third. - On the other hand, Schulze is being used more widely, so it's a question of what will be more persuasive: saying this thing is simple, or this thing is used lots of places. 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] Juho: I agree to disagree
Ok, thanks for the effort, trying to convince me. Juho On 28.9.2012, at 4.47, Michael Ossipoff wrote: It's time to agree to disagree. But thank you for demonstrating (as if it needed more demonstrating on EM) the impossibility of ever adopting or enacting a rank-method, due to the innumerable different methods advocated by rank-method advocates, who will never be able to agree on one; and due to the innumerable criteria by which they justify their favorite methods. Mike Ossipoff 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] MJ for use on wikipedia?
Since Wikipedia says in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VOTE that voting is used maily to help in building consesus. The polls are thus not expected to be competitive. The final decisions are not made based on the poll results but in a discussion that the polls should help. Because of this approach to voting and Wikipedia work in general, the main target of the polling seems to be to provide good information on the opinions and thereby help the process. It seems to me that one shold focus more on the results with sincere votes than on trying to make it impossible for the voters to use strategies to falsify the results. If someone will falsify the results and people will note that, it is not a problem since the outcome of the poll is not a binding one. The srategists would be told that the basic idea of Wikipedia is to co-operate, and they are supposed to give sincere answers in the polls. People who try to cheat and mislead others probably will not stay in the Wikipedia community for very long. Since the method should be informative and not make strict decisions, there is no need to even declare the winner. One could just collect rankings from the voters and then collect and publish various informative results based on those polls. If there is a Condorcet winner opinion, that would of course be mentioned. But one could have multiple criteria on which candidate is best, and the result could well say that according to criterion 1 candidate 1 is best, but according to criteron 2 candidate 2 is best. The discussion would continue from these facts, and could eventually lead to deciding which one of the candidates is best and which criteria are most valid in this case. One could collect also ratings in addition to rankings, if that adds some useful information. Often also ratings might add something interesting. One could also include additional pesudo-candidates in the candidate list, or other additional information in the ballot. For example if one wants to decide which elements should be included in some article, one could have a pseudo-candidate acceptability limit. It would be useful to know not only which candidates are better than others but also which candidates are generally considered acceptable. My point here is thus that for the purposes of Wikipedia consensus building, the polling system could simply collect as much useful information from the voters/workers as it can. People are not supposed to fight on which candidate wins but to discuss on the properties of all the candidates. There may be also need for more competitive polls, e.g. when the community wants to decide what tool to use for some purpose. Then there is a need to choose one single solution on the spot. But when following the discussion based consensus approach, the main target could be to just collect information. Taking into account the non-competitive nature of the Wikipedia community, also the strict (competitive, not discussion and consensus based) elections probably need not be very strategy resistance oriented. In summary, the non-competitive, discussion and consensus oriented nature of Wikipedia may have impact on how and what polling / voting methods are used. Juho On 28.9.2012, at 15.59, Jameson Quinn wrote: I've written a wikipedia essay on how Majority Judgment would be a good option for resolving certain disputes, in the extremely rare (but real) case when it does come down to a vote. This essay has garnered a positive mention in a pending Wikipedia RFC (Request For Comment). Jameson ps. This should go without saying, but please don't use my real name if you respond to this essay on Wikipedia itself or repost anything about this elsewhere. 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] MJ for use on wikipedia?
On 28.9.2012, at 22.33, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2012/9/28 Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk Since Wikipedia says in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VOTE that voting is used maily to help in building consesus. The polls are thus not expected to be competitive. The final decisions are not made based on the poll results but in a discussion that the polls should help. Please actually read the essay I linked earlier. It begins by acknowledging that consensus discussion is the norm on wikipedia, as you say. MJ is proposed specifically for those rare cases when that does not work and some decision is necessary (such as the choice of software tool example you give). I read it and I tried to cover both competitive and non-competitive approaches, but I admit that I got too much lost on the non-competitive side while your text focused on the competitive part. I understood that as long as we are talking about the !voting system we are talking about the discussion and consensus driven approach. I didn't study the history of the Ireland and abortion activism cases. I wonder if they were cases where people decided to vote on the Wikipedia content, or maybe on something else like used tools. ...Taking into account the non-competitive nature of the Wikipedia community, also the strict (competitive, not discussion and consensus based) elections probably need not be very strategy resistance oriented. I disagree. The cases when consensus discussion fails to resolve the issue are precisely those cases when strategy is salient. I can see at least three levels. The first one is the discussion and consensus based track where we probably need not make any voting decisions, but polling style information is enough (to be used for making decisions). Then there is voting in a friendly environment. There I assume that the Wikipedia community is a characteristically non-competitive society where one can expect all (or almost all) voters to be sincere (that could mean e.g. use of Range to decide which tool is best, without strategy concerns). The third level could be used when there obviously is a fight going on, and people think that the correct way to solve the problem is by voting, and voters indeed want to beat each others and do not trust the sincerity of each others when they vote. I guess there are also fights that are this strong in the Wikipedia community. Sometimes they could be solved by voting, but hopefully more often by letting the fighters cool down and find a solution that can be accepted by all. Maybe one typical (Wikipedia content related) situation could be to decide if some part of a controversial Wikipedia article is acceptable or not. But also in that case, maybe the controversial nature and fights on some parts of the text would be a sufficient reason to not include those parts in the Wikipedia article. (I'm not fully familiar with the current Wikipedia working practices, but I'd expect something like that.) My point is that since Wikipedia aims at discussion and consensus on its work (probably also on other matters than Wikipedia content), the used methods could reflect this principle (first level: polling, second level non-competitive methods, third level: competitive strategy resistant methods). Probably competitive voting should never be the recommended way of working, but only the last resort. A voting procedure that can be used in competitive conflicts could be agreed, but if possible, never or seldom used. When used, that means giving temporarily up the principle of polling is not a substitute for discussion. Maybe a decision on whether some part of text is acceptable or not could be made by elders using the second level voting, or better yet, using the first level process. Often also a timeout (and temporary removal of possible controversial content) may be a better approach (and the default approcah) than deciding something in a competitive election. Same with technical decisions on tools. I don't believe there would ve very often cases where the decision has to be made right away, bypassing the consensus approach. I wonder if this makes sense to you. My text above may still not be a very good match with your article, but maybe you can tell how you see the need of those three levels of polling/voting based decision making in the Wikipedia community. Juho Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] MJ for use on wikipedia?
Article titles can indeed be problematic since every article must have some title. There is no way of having articles without a title in the case that there is no consensus. Old titles can however be used for some time (maybe with a note pointing out the ongoing debate) while seeking consensus. Wikipedia should of course have very clear policies on what kind of titles to use when there are different opinions. In the case of Ireland it seems to me that use of the formally correct names must be the correct answer. If the formal name of the country is Republic of Ireland, then let's use that. The (island) addition would depend on if Wikipedia recommends clarifications in this format or clarifications in the text right after the title (as it is now). I read some of the Wikipedia naming policies, and they already seem to cover typical problem cases quite extensively. I hope they will be kept up to date so that next time when a similar problem emerges, the solution will be obvious and there is no need to vote. I think also levels one and two could be used in this kind of naming conflicts. I'm not sure if the voters want to use strategies, although the discussion is heated. Also I don't know how quickly the issue must be solved, and if the title shall be decided as the voting result says or just based on the voting/polling results. But I wasn't there so I cant tell if discussion and consensus simply could not be used any more. In any case it is good that Wikipedia aims at making the working practices as discussion and consensus and agreed policy oriented as possible. Juho On 29.9.2012, at 1.16, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2012/9/28 Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk On 28.9.2012, at 22.33, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2012/9/28 Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk Since Wikipedia says in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VOTE that voting is used maily to help in building consesus. The polls are thus not expected to be competitive. The final decisions are not made based on the poll results but in a discussion that the polls should help. Please actually read the essay I linked earlier. It begins by acknowledging that consensus discussion is the norm on wikipedia, as you say. MJ is proposed specifically for those rare cases when that does not work and some decision is necessary (such as the choice of software tool example you give). I read it and I tried to cover both competitive and non-competitive approaches, but I admit that I got too much lost on the non-competitive side while your text focused on the competitive part. I understood that as long as we are talking about the !voting system we are talking about the discussion and consensus driven approach. I didn't study the history of the Ireland and abortion activism cases. I wonder if they were cases where people decided to vote on the Wikipedia content, or maybe on something else like used tools. Both of them are debates centering on article titles. An article can have only one title, and a title can refer to only one article. Redirects and disambiguation pages can help reduce the tensions this creates, but there are cases where the dispute goes too deep, and eventually a vote is called. So these would fit in the third level of your classification, and the technical issues around titles keep some of the normal mechanisms of compromise (ie, do both) from working. Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho: Different answers to your questions. You're right...
On 27.9.2012, at 9.21, Michael Ossipoff wrote: ...about some things. But first, regarding some of the other things: 1. You seem to imply that you think that there is a single, objective, right ideal sincere winner. Of course you'll deny that, but you've repeatedly fallaciously based on argument on that assumption. I deny that I'd think that there is one definition of right ideal sincere winner (since I think different elections, societies and individuals are free to define themselves who is the best, and different elections may well have different requirements). But in each election, with a set of votes (that do not contain exactly similarly or exactly equally well ranked candidates), one (each opinion holder separately) should at least in theory be able to tell which one of the candidates is the best and should be elected if the votes are sincere. There is thus always some understanding of what kind of candidate should be elected, and this philosophy could in principle be defined and presented as a best sincere winner definition / criterion. Sometimes something is a matter of subjective, individual choice, without a single objective right answer. Yes. How do you think that you might go about proving that one particular winner is the ideal right sincere winner? Proofs and conclusions have to be based on some objective premise. Free choice. You're giving us an unsupported assumption. 2. You seem to assume that, if there is a single, objective, right ideal sincere winner, then it must be found from rank-balloting. I assumed that the best sincere winner definition will be given together with some assumption of the type of ballots. It would be ok to define the best sincere winner in terms of ratings, although one would choose a ranking based method for use in the elections. There might be various reasons for not using ratings directly in the actual method. Obviously one would pick such a rankings based method that elects as good winners as possible (according to the best sincere winner criterion), and has other good properties like sufficient strategy resistance. The resulting method would not always elect the best winner even if the votes were fully sincere, but it is now a good compromise between different needs (election of good winners, startegy resistance, simplicity etc.). Again, that's just your unsupported assumption. 3. You seem to think that, for any two desirable method-attributes, one of them can only be achieved by something that spoils the other. In other words, you think that any pair of desirable method-attributes must be mutually incompatible. In some sense yes. I have mentioned the assumption that methods that have modified to be strategy resistant, usually do not implement any sincere best winner definition that has been determined for sincere votes. ...a pair of desirable attributes such as freedom from the worst strategy needs, and choice of the unique, objective, right ideal sincere winner...or maybe any desirable sincere winner. Yes. In fact, it doesn't occur to you that free-ness from the worst strategy needs can result from a result that would be desirable as the sincere winner...or the best ideal sincere winner, if there is such a thing. Different needs could sometimes lead to the same answer. It is possible that the sincere winner definition naturally points in a direction that also is strategy resistant (maybe to some extent even typical). I only believe that if the method is tweaked or modified just to be strategy resistant, then one would with high probability deviate from the path of electing the best winner with sincere votes. Tweaking means here making decisions that aim at defending against some identified weaknesses of the method (strategic vulnerabilities or other other problems that are not related to pickng the best sincere winner). My point thus is that if you first think about sincere votes and who should be elected, and then find a method that implements exactly that definition, and then you abserve some stratgy problems and modify the method so that it can better answer those chanllenges, then the method (by definition) is not any more the method that elected the best winners with sincere votes. I've told you why that, in fact is so (but without the assumption about there being a single best ideal sincere winner). Now: Something that you're right about: It made sense to ask me if I prefer any sincere winners or ways of choosing them. Yes I do. For Official Public Elections: Approval. (maybe Score too). I guess Approval means the candidate that is most approved among the voters (not necessarily the one that gets the highest number of approvals from voters that give approvals to candidates using their best strategy to optimize the result from their point of view). That is, sincre Approval. Same with points in Score. I've discussed Approval's unique
Re: [EM] SITC vs [what?]
On 25.9.2012, at 7.56, Michael Ossipoff wrote: You said: Minmax(margins) can elect outside the top cycle if such a candidate is closest to being a CW (measured in number of required additional votes) [endquote] Now, you see, that's exactly what I was talking about. Now you're back to Dodgson again, aren't you. I think I'm still at Minmax(margins). But you are right that the difference is not important. ..quite aside from the fact that I've told you why SITC does well when people rank sincerely. I still have not heard you claim that SITC could be used as a definition of the best sincere winner. Is it an ideal definition of an ideal winner, or is it a practical method that performs almost ideally also when voters use strategies? With Approval, Score, or SITC, the voters will decide that for themselves. Note that in multi-party countries representative bodies are typically elected using a multi-winner proportional method, not using a single-winner method in singe-member districts. The latter approach tends to maintain a strong role of the largest parties. When I talked about the possiility of keeping a two-party system, I thought that the latter approach would mean 50% interest to maintain a two-party (or few-party) system. In typical multi-party systems presidential and parliamentary election methods are normally very different (single-winner vs. multi-winner). I see the sincere winner criterion and strategic concerns as two separate topics. What is the sincere winner criterion? The methods that I advocate are the most likely to encourage sincere voting, or relatively sincere voting, in comparison with other methods. Throughout this mail stream I have tried to talk about two separate topics: who would be the ideal sincere winner and what method to use in practice. Strategic concerns may infuence the selection of the latter, but not the definition of the former. If your methods define sincere voting then they are sincere winner criteria themselves. If they encourage sincere voting by some additional tricks like properties that disourage strategic voting, then those modifications/tricks probably cause a deviation that means that the ideal winner will not be always elected with sincere votes (since the method differs from the ideal sincere winner definition). And that _is_ a strategic topic. That's because certain strategy-needs are what can and does distort sincere voting--the only thing that can distort and prevent sincere voting. This sounds like certain strategy defence means are in place, and the method has therefore not been designed based on the ideal sincere winner criterion only, and therefore it does not always elect the ideal winner with sincere votes. The alternative explanation would be that the actual method and the ideal sincere winner criterion happen to coincide (which sounds unlikely). It may well be that the method elects more often or more ideal winners than a method that would implement exactly the ideal sincere winner definition (because of the strategic votes or increased number of sincere votes). You think that strategy-freeness and good sincere results are mutually incompatible. No, I say that a method whose behaviour has been tweaked so that it performs well in strategic environments, normally does not always elect the ideal winner (in whatever way one defines that) with sincere votes. If there will be defection in situations like the chicken dilemma examples, then can you still advocate Beatpath, MinMax(margins) or Dodgson over SITC, by saying they will get sincere rankings? You have to pick the method so that strategic concerns will be properly addressed. I don't want to take position if one of those is absolutely better than others (since that is not relevant to my claim). I don't know what that means. Nothing important, just restating the oblious fact that practical methods must be selected based on practical requirements, and that my intention was not to estimate the level of chicken dilemma problems in various methods but just to discuss the relation and differences between ideal sincere winner definitions and practical methods. 1. What makes you think that MinMax(margins), Dodgson, or Beatpath won't have a chicken dilemma? I already said that I do believe that basic Condorcet methods are not very prone to this problem. I know that you disagree. Maybe you'll find one day a proof that will convince me. I'm going to repeat this all over again for you: I'll comment this winning votes example together with the margins bease example in the other chicken dilemma mail. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
On 25.9.2012, at 9.31, Michael Ossipoff wrote: Juho: Here's the MinMax(margins) chicken dilemma example that I promised, in which defection by B voters is successful and rewarded:: Sincere preferences: 75: ABC 51: BAC 100: C(A=B) Voted rankings: 75: AB 51: B 100: C Try MinMax(margins) with that example. Note that it's a Dodgson example too. Note also that the B faction is small in comparison to the other factions. Condorcet(wv) reliably rewards defection. SITC reliably thwarts and penalizes defection. Though MinMax(margins) and Dodgson don't reward defection quite as reliably as does wv, (though the example shows that they easily do so), they certainly don't reliably thwart and penalize it either. I think I'll skip the Dodgson part since I have not claimed anything about that method (and that's quite irrelevant too in this context). You may forget Dodgson. I'll comment mainly margins since I prefer margins versions of Condorcet methods to winning votes versions. But I'll address also the winning votes related problems shortly. An additional problem of MinMax(margins) and Dodgson: It is well established and well-discussed on EM that MinMax(margins) has particularly great problem with strategic truncation and offensive burial. And you probably already guessed that I would say that those theoretical vulnerabilities may not be that bad in real elections. Those things, even offensive burial, aren't a problem with SITC, because the only candidate who can benefit from it is the most top-ranked candidate among the unbeaten candidates--or just the most top-ranked candidate if there are no unbeaten candidates. I'm not sure if it is wise to expand this discussion also to SITC. It might however be of interest to me (based of what I have written) to point out that sometimes SITC and electing the ideal sincere winner (your definition) do not coincide. Offensive burial can't make anyone else win. Now to Minmax(margins). I assume that this is a regular public election. Some reasons why the chicken dilemma might not be a major problem in the given example: - With these numbers all B supporters will have to implement the strategy to guarantee that B wins. This is very unlikely in real life. - It is very unlikely that all B supporters use the strategy but none of the A supporters do. A is more popular than B, and therefore A supporters might truncate B with higher probability (due to thinking that B is a weak candidate). If two of the A supporters bullet vote (when all B voters are strategic), C is already tied with B, and according to the given preferences, B supporters would be very unhappy with that. For this reason B supporters should concentrate on making C not win instead of trying to beat A with this very risky strategy. - The anticipated opinions are likely to change before the election day. If one of the B supporters becomes an A supporter, all candidates are tied. Maybe that single voter didn't like the idea that B supporters would try to steal the victory. This is again one reason why B should try to be friends with A and not try to cheat and steal the victory. - Opinions are not usually as clean as in this example. There are often also other parties and always some voters whose preferences differ from those three main categories (e.g. ACB). This means that it is more difficult to guess how people will vote, to take into account the strategic interests of all voter groups, and to estimate the outcome. There is also always a group of voters who want to vote sincerely. If we assume e.g. +/-5% change of all preference orders, strategic voting gets much more difficult than it is on paper. On paper we can define ourselves how each voter will vote and allow certain interest group to stratgeize with 100% control of the similar minded voters. In real life, if there is one strategy, there may be also other strategies. Already based on the first bullet point, this strategy seems to be a highly irrational strategy in Minmax(margins). And the other bullet points do not make the life of the strategists any easier. I'd say that you can sleep peacefully and not worry abut the chicken dilemma, at least with this threat scenario. Do you agree? The winning votes variants are however much more vulnerable to this strategy. There are also strategies where margins are more vulnerble. But I prefer margins based versions of the Codorcet methods, because I find their sincere winner philosophy and also strategic properties better. But I'll try to say some words in favour of the wv versions too in your chicken dilemma scenario. In your wv example (27: ABC, 24: BAC, 49: C) three strategically truncating B supporters can change the result. That is already a low number that could be well achieved. But there are still many problems on the way of the strategists. - Also in this scenario it is not probable that only B supporters
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
I will not comment the Dodgson and changing vs. adding votes related misunderstandings. I hope that misunderstanding is now solved. My example best sincere winner criterion was meant to refer to the Minmax(margins) philosophy. On 24.9.2012, at 16.33, Michael Ossipoff wrote: If you think that MinMax(margins) or Dodgson is better than Symmetrical ICT, under sincere voting, you have yet to tell why. My comments applied to any definition of best sincere winner. I didn't comment on which one is best. (Instead I said that different elections and different people may have different targets.) I noted at some point that SITC has some strategy defence related properties that may make it an unlikely choice as a best sincere winner criterion. Do you really think that would help hir status against opposition in office better than being the most favorite candidate in the top cycle? I don't know what most favorite means here. Minmax(margins) can elect outside the top cycle if such a candidate is closest to being a CW (measured in number of required additional votes). I don't claim that this criterion would be the best one for all elections, but it is one that sounds usable for some needs. So you're saying that different voting systems should be used for different elections. But, as each new election comes near, who decides which method will be used for that particular election? I'd expect one series of elections to stick to one method (and be based on one stable understanding on what kind of a candidate is the best sincere winner). Should we use different voting systems for presidential and Congressional elections? If so, then which one would be better (by ideal sincere winner) for the presidency,and which would be better for Congress? Those two elecions are very different by nature, and therefore they could well have different targets / understanding of whom to elect with sincere votes. The question on which method and which sincere winner criterion to choose is very difficlt since changes to the current system may mean changes to the very basic concepts of the system. There are multiple options. One interesting question is if the president shoud be from a large party of if he/she could be a compromise candidate that has no major party behind him/her. In the Congress one has to decide e.g. if one wants to keep the two-party approach or not. The end result might be two very different election methods. Of course, judging by how well they choose the ideal sincere winner assumes that you still think that there won't be a chicken dilemma, and can tell why. I see the sincere winner criterion and strategic concerns as two separate topics. The method that will be eventually used may deviate from what the sincere winner criterion points to if there are strategic concerns that must be addressed by selecting a method that has the required strategy related properties. If there will be defection in situations like the chicken dilemma examples, then can you still advocate Beatpath, MinMax(margins) or Dodgson over SITC, by saying they will get sincere rankings? You have to pick the method so that strategic concerns will be properly adressed. I don't want to take position if one of those is absolutely better than others (since that is not relevant to my claim). I tried to cover all the questions in your mail. You may point out the unanswered ones, so I can check what I can do with them. I don't think the following four questions that you gave as a response are ones that I left unanswered, but new questions or new formulations. I'l check them anyway. 1. What makes you think that MinMax(margins), Dodgson, or Beatpath won't have a chicken dilemma? I already said that I do believe that basic Condorcet methods are not very prone to this problem. I know that you disagree. Maybe you'll find one day a proof that will convince me. Must I do that, to show you their chicken dilemma? Request it and I will. No need since I don't expect that to change my opinions. It could be a wasted effort. I'm interested if there is something really convincing, but maybe better leave this topic this time, with the assumption that I would not believe it anyway. 2. What makes you so sure that the United States won't have a significant amount of favorite-burial, when unimproved Condorcet, such as Dodgson, MinMax(margins) or Beatpath, is used? I'm not sure but my best guess is that basic Condorcet methods would work well enough. My confidence is based on theoretical studies, experiences with Condorcet in non-political elections and experiences with IRV in political elections (also in the U.S.). Many Condorcet startegies are difficult to identify, to use, to coordinate, and often they may also backfire. The details have been debated numerous times in the history on the EM list. Sometimes you seem to say that you're just speaking in general, about most societies, or many
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
On 23.9.2012, at 8.01, Michael Ossipoff wrote: On Sat, Sep 22, 2012 at 6:11 PM, Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: On 22.9.2012, at 22.06, Michael Ossipoff wrote: 2. Your statement above implies that Symmetrical ICT doesn't choose as well as [...what?] when people rank sincerely. That statement requires specification of what method(s) choose(s) better than SITC under sincere voting, and why that is so. Give me a description of who would be the best winner with sincere votes in the election that we talk about. You're the one who wants to use the notion of the best winner with sincere votes. Odd that you need to ask me to describe your ideal sincere winner. If you want to object that ICT and SITC don't choose the ideal sincere winnner well enough, then you're the one who needs to say what you mean by the best winner with sincere votes. Note that my opinion is that different elections may have different criteria. I mentioned one possible criterion of the best winner as an example, but that need not be your target (or not in all elctions). You could also in principle declare the operative definition of ICT or SITC as the definition of an ideal winner (with sincere ballots), but I'd have some doubts on the genuity of that claim since I believe that those methods have some strategy defence flavour embedded in them, and it doesn't sound probable that the strategy defence algoritms and ideal winner definition would coincide. If you pick some other definition of ideal winner, then it is obvious that ICT and SITC sometimes deviate from that ideal. But, with all sincere ballots, many like the idea of electing the CW: The candidate who pair-beats each of the others, when such a candidate exists. When CW is legitimately defined, when equal top and equal bottom ranking are interpreted consistent with the preferences, intent and wishes of people voting in that way, then SITC elects the CW. Beatpath, VoteFair, and all unimproved Condorcet methods fail to elect the legitimately-defined CW. So, there is a popular ideal sincere winner: the CW. CW could indeed be part of the definiton. All Condorcet methods would be partially ideal (i.e. when there is a sincere CW). You said: Then one can tell what the best method with sincere votes is (or at least give some directions). I don't know what the philosophy of ICT and the other mentioned related methods is if we assume sincere votes. [endquote] A sincere-voting property of SITC is that it elects the legitimately-defined CW. It's the method that does that. You see, what you're missing is that the same disregard for voters preference, wishes and intent tha makes unimproved Condorcet fail FBC, also makes it fail the legitmately-defined Condorcet Criterion, and fail to elect the legimately-defined CW. So, meeting FBC doesn't require some sort of violation of the choice of ideal sincere winner. On the contrary, it comes with the election of the ideal sincere winner, because both gains come from respecting the voters' intent and preference. Do you mean that the voter should help e.g. by falsifying her sincere preferences by voting some candidates tied at top? :-) You said: My understanding is that they have been designed to resist certain strategies, not only to pick the best winner with sincere votes. [endquote] As explained above, Symmetrical ICT avoids favorite-burial need precisely _because_ it respects voter wishes. And if the CW and the Condorcet Criterion are defined according to voter wishes, then Symmetrical ICT is the method that elects the CW when there is one, and meets the Condorcet Criterion. You said: Therefore there must be another method that elects the best winner (based on the definition that you gave) more often than they do. [endquote] So that's your best argument: That, because SITC meets FBC, there must be a method (unspecified by you) that does better under sincere voting. The reason why you don't specify a method that does better than SITC under sincere voting is because you don't even know what a method should do under sincere voting. You ask me to describe the ideal sincere winner, because you don't have any idea what the ideal sincere winner should be. True in some sense. But if you allow me to define the sincere winner for you, and for your election, you could take my example definition and compare it to SITC. That could be valid for some needs. There is a difference between those two definitions. But I gave you a suggestion: The legimately-defined CW. Do you see the irony here? Someone who doesn't know what the ideal sincere winner is, wants say that surely there's some method that chooses it better than Symmetrical ICT. He just doesn't know what that method is, because he doesn't have a suggestion for what the ideal sincere winner would be. This means that one should deviate from the method that picks the best winner
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
if you rank hir over no one. Definition of beats that isn't consistent with preferences and intent of equal-top or equal-bottom ranking voter: X beats Y iff (XY) (YX) Definition of beats that is consistent with preferences and intent of equal-top ranking voter: X beats Y iff (XY) (YX) + (X = Y)T Definition of beats that is consistent with preferences and intent of equal-top ranking voter and equal-bottom ranking voter: X beats Y iff (XY) + (X=Y)B (YX) + (X=Y)T Of course the reason why Symmetrical ICT meets the Condorcet Criterion wherein beats is defined consistent with the preferences and intent of the equal-top ranking voter and the equal-bottom ranking voter is because Symmetrical ICT's definition uses that meaning for beats. But note that it is not a matter of re-defining CC so that SITC will pass. It's a matter of defining CC consistent with interpreting a voter's ballot consistent with hir preferences, intent and wishes. B. Later-No-Harm (LNHa): Condorcet methods, Approval, and Score fail LNHa. But ICT and Symmetrical ICT don't fail it nearly as badly as does unimproved Condorcet. In fact, I'll venture to say that ICT and SITC don't importantly fail LNHa. Note that I'm not speculating about how often they'll pass or fail. I'm saying that their failures aren't important.That's because there isn't a chicken dilemma. Chicken dilemma is the worst kind of LNHa failure. C. Later-No-Help (LNHe): Approval, Score, and Symmetrical ICT pass LNHe. Unimproved Condorcet and ICT fail LNHe. LNHe greatly simplifies u/a strategy. SITC's u/a strategy is as simple as that of Approval and Score. In unimproved Condorcet, you won't know what to do, even in a u/a election. I've recently told you why. In ICT and unimproved Condorcet, u/a strategy calls for ranking the unacceptable candidates in reverse order of winnability. That incentive or need doesn't exist in Symmetrical ICT. In SITC, the u/a strategy for unacceptables is to simply not rank them. In (so far as I'm aware of) all rank methods that allow equal top ranking, in a u/a election, there is a need to equal top rank the acceptables. So, in ICT and SITC that is the u/a strategy. That need exists in unimproved Condorcet too, but the problem is that moving some particular acceptable to top can change the winner from an acceptable to an unacceptable. That's why I say that, in unimproved Condorcet, you won't know what to do, even in a u/a election. D. FBC: Approval, Score, ICT and SITC pass. Unimproved Condorcet fails. E. Defection resistance: ...is had by ICT and Symmetrical ICT, but not by Approval, Score, or unimproved Condorcet. As I said, not a problem for Approval and Score (and probably not for unimproved Condorcet either, for the same reason--though dealing with it could be more complicated). But, as I also said, chicken dilemma is the nearest thing to a problem that Approval has, and therefore you don't significantly improve on Approval without getting rid of chicken dilemma. I'd said: The Chicken Dilemma is the nearest thing to a problem that Approval has (though it's so well dealt with in Approval that it isn't really a problem). You replied: I'm afraid it might be. [endquote] ...except for the long list of reasons why it wouldn't be a problem, the list that I've frequently posted during the past several weeks. One of the defenses on that list was something that Forest suggested, and which I call Strategic Fractional Ratings. You of course must have missed my posting of that. I've posted so much and so recently about the reasons why chicken dilemma won't be a problem in Approval, and, posted specifically, about SFR, that I don't think that I should repeat it again this soon. On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 7:43 PM, Juho Laatu juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: We are about to dive into the details of some methods. I'm not sure if there are still some unanswered questions that I should cover, or my own claims that I did not clarify yet. I'll comment some random points below. On 22.9.2012, at 1.48, Michael Ossipoff wrote: Maybe you meant to compare unimproved Condorcet to Approval (because you didn't want to compare it to ICT and Symmetrical ICT). Ok. You mentioned the Chicken Dilemma. It exists in Approval and Condorcet. Unimproved Condorcet doesn't get rid of the Chicken Dilemma. It's basically the same in both methods. Approval meets FBC. Unimproved Condorcet fails FBC. Exactly how is unimproved Condorcet better than Approval? Condorcet's Criterion? Condorcet's Criterion compliance is meaningless when people are favorite-burying. Then there's the matter of the highly computation-intensive count that every rank method has, including the Condorcet methods. Computation-intensive, labor-intensive count = big count-fraud opportunity. It should be enough if you can record (digitally) the content of the ballots
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
On 22.9.2012, at 22.06, Michael Ossipoff wrote: 2. Your statement above implies that Symmetrical ICT doesn't choose as well as [...what?] when people rank sincerely. That statement requires specification of what method(s) choose(s) better than SITC under sincere voting, and why that is so. Give me a description of who would be the best winner with sincere votes in the election that we talk about. Then one can tell what the best method with sincere votes is (or at least give some directions). I don't know what the philosophy of ICT and the other mentioned related methods is if we assume sincere votes. My understanding is that they have been designed to resist certan strategies, not only to pick the best winner with sincere votes. Therefore there must be another method that elects the best winner (based on the definition that you gave) more often than they do. Some properties of methods that I don't like very much are: 1) truncation based approval, since that encourages voters not to take position on which one of the non-approved candidates should be elected (works against the basic idea of ranked methods of collecting the sincere preferences), Sure, you're expressing the ideal goal of rank-balloting. But surely you know that that goal is unattainable. There are many ranked methods that do not have this property. (Same with point 2.) But remember that my question was: Ok, then what method chooses better than SITC under completely sincere ranking? And why do you say that it does? See above. Doctors have similar problems. Many medicines are far from harmless. Doctors have to compare the risks of the disease and risks of the medicine. If the medicine is likely to make more harm than help, it should not be used. This means that one should deviate from the method that picks the best winner with sincere votes... ...which is _what_ method? There are different best methods for different needs. (In my text above I asked you to provide a definition of the best candidate. A simple Condorcet oriented definition could be e.g. the candidate that requires least additional support/votes to beat any of the other candidates in a pairwise comparison/battle should be elected. This target could be selected because it gives one rational argument why the winner could be able to rule well (= only little bit of additional support needed (if any) to gain majority support for his proposals while in office).) ...only if one is certain that otherwise the method would give even worse results because of strategic voting. ..even worse than what?? A method that has been modified to cope with strategies does not elect the ideal sincere winner always. But the corresponding sincere method could be even worse if strategic voting is rampant. You haven't said what are the bad results of SITC and ITC that we need to avoid. See my first comments above. Their deviation from the ideal should become visible after one defines the ideal sincere winner. Obviously you believe that basic [unimproved] Condorcet methods would attract certain strategies to the extent that those methods must be fixed. And I believe that in most societies it is more likely that strategic voting will be marginal. Because I don't know what method you're referring to, of course there's no way to answer your expression of belief. I referred to basic Condorcet methods. (Ranked Pairs, MInmax,...) ...aside from the fact that I make no claim to know what's true about more than 1/2 of all societies. With most I wanted to say that I don't expect many societies to converge towards widespread strategic voting. I start from that assumption and I want evidence before deviating from that assumption. I think I already said that the computations (from digitized ballot content to results) could be checked either by anyone or by some nominated entities (if ballot content is not published to protect privacy). Sure, but how would you guarantee the accuracy and honesty of the digitization? ...The process that occurs between the time that the voter casts hir ballot, and the time when we have that digitized record of which you speak. This is a very traditional process. Nothing new in it. I'll give an approximate description of the process in Finland. In the polling station there are many representatives from many parties, monitoring the process. The votes are counted (information collected) right after the election ends, again together on one table by multiple people from multiple parties. After that the votes are sealed and sent for storage. I don't recall any serious problems or complaints. With complex votes the process would take more time, and there could be a need to double check, but the principles would probably stay the same. Did the voter hirself make out a paper ballot? Or was it made electronically by a voting machine (presumably, but not necessarily based on the voter's voting)? Use of
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
On 21.9.2012, at 4.05, Michael Ossipoff wrote: When you say can't be elected, you need to examine what you mean by that. Do you mean can't be elected under combination of a selective media blackout, and Plurality voting? Or do you mean can't be elected because the public prefer the policies of the Republocrats? Just in practice. Some more weight on Duverger's law, some less on media (would happen also without media). It is hard to find methods that have no weaknesses. Luckily we can often use methods whose weaknesses are weak enough. We can do better. We can avoid certain strategy needs. For instance there are now a wide variety of FBC-complying methods. They have absolutely no favorite-burial incentive. I think it makes often sense to trade one full compatibility to numerous well enough compatibilities. As in security, the system is as strong as its weakest link. One should thus focus on making the weakest points stronger, not on making strong points even stronger. All those three methods may meet that target in some elections. ...may...? Depends on targets and environment. There are varoius needs and various best methods. I suggest to you that maybe actual conversations with actual people, here, tells a different story than your tv network sources. I've had some. Have you ever noticed how perfectly the public psychology works with the sheep-herder's efforts? It's as if the sheep and the herders were made for eachother. It's as if those two sets of people were _born_ for their roles with regard to eachother. It's as if we have specially bred sheep, to work with the sheep-herders. We do. It's just like Huxley's _Brave New World_ ...except that, of course, it's anything but new. It's the result of long evolution, over human and pre-human history. That's where the actual situation differs from _Brave New World_. It isn't done by drugging. It's done, instead, by natural evolution. In politics, as in elsewhere, there are often multiple interest groups that try to optimize the game from their point of view. Achieved symbiotic balance states may well seem like made for each other. Humans are good at learning new methods. They have learned e.g many tricks to make people buy something that they want them to buy. Politics is not very far from that. The opinion of other people does influence on what people do. Some methods might even reinforce this behaviour. I believe, in most methods the method specific bad group behaviour reinforcing factor is not very strong. [endquote] Again, you're speculating about a country (U.S.) about which your only information comes from such as CNN and Fox tv. I try to avoid commenting on what the U.S. system is like or what the U.S. people shoud do. I may comment your comments on the U.S. system, but when I can, I prefer taking about election methods at a general level, not about the specifics of individual countries. In the sentence above I commented methods in general, not anything U.S. specific. (I also don't watch CNN nor Fox.) You continue: We also need good electorate, which could mean continuous education and encouragement (by media, country and fellow citizens). [endquote] In other words, you're saying that we need for the educational system and the media to act contrary to the best financial interest of those who have controlling interest in them. Why should they do that? Media has also some interest to serve their customers. And customers may sometimes appreciate good information. Different countries have quite different traditions here. There are also media that are not tightly controlled by those who have controlling interest. I have received a lot of useful information from the media, but I'd like to receive even more. You've just shown that you _are_ making claims about the U.S. Must I retract the apology that I've just made? Sorry, but you keep talking about the U.S. situation, so it is hard to avoid that topic totally :-). Because of the numerous misunderstandings I propose that you assume that my comments refer to election methods in general unless I mention U.S.. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
On 21.9.2012, at 22.52, Michael Ossipoff wrote: Just in practice. Some more weight on Duverger's law, some less on media (would happen also without media). So you keep repeating. But, in this country, the 1-party monopoly _wouldn't_ happen without the media fraud that I've discussed. You're quite vague and vacillatory about whether you're speaking of the U.S. or whether you're speaking in general. As already said, U.S. meant when U.S. mentioned. That should give you the correct context with about 95% probability. You can correct me if I make mistakes. You said would happen also without media. Where would it happen also without media? I meant that parties + plurality + single member distritcs + representative body has always a tendency to elect from two strong parties. (It is possible that different districts have different two parties, or the parties may change slowly in time.) It is hard to find methods that have no weaknesses. Luckily we can often use methods whose weaknesses are weak enough. We can do better. We can avoid certain strategy needs. For instance there are now a wide variety of FBC-complying methods. They have absolutely no favorite-burial incentive. I think it makes often sense to trade one full compatibility to numerous well enough compatibilities. As in security, the system is as strong as its weakest link. One should thus focus on making the weakest points stronger, not on making strong points even stronger. Your fallacy is your implication that there are other necessary properties, lacking in Approval , Score, and Symmetrical ICT, but possessed by unimproved Condorcet ...if unimproved Condorcet is what you're suggesting. And if unimproved Condorcet isn't what you're suggesting,then what is it that you're suggesting? I was talking about general rules concerning all methods. No intention to refer to any particular methods. If you want my opinion on Condorcet methods in general, I think they are remarkably well balanced methods, for compromise seeking, competitive, majority style elections. They thus have quite well balanced well enoughs / vulnerabilities. If there's something that they don't do well enough, and that unimproved Condorcet does well enough then you forgot to tell what it is. What kind of comparisons would you like me to make? If we are talking about the well enougs of other than Condorcet methods, then we should focus on the most probable vulnerabilities of each one of them (in the given environment). You already addressed the chicken dilemma in Approval. I think we agree that in real life that may well be the most problematic one. Same with Score. You keep making authoritatively-worded statements to the effect that unimproved Condorcet would work fine in the U.S. Sometimes you insist that you're only speaking in general, but then you go back to specifically making that statement about the U.S. I'm trying to avoid anything U.S. specific, except when answering to U.S. specific points that you want to present to me. Concerning Condorcet in the U.S., I believe the strong two-party and plurality tradition would cause some problems in transition, but I do believe that eventually people would vote pretty much the same way as in other countries (no panic burials etc.). The only U.S. specific proof I have is that in the Burlington IRV elections I didn't notice any burial like or other strategic activity that could be harmful in Condorcet. The votes seemed in general quite sincere to me, and I don't recall any reports on strategic voting. I made some ballot content analysis myself, but I couldn't find any meaningful traces of strategies. I'd expect voters to behave pretty much the same way also with other ranking based methods. I don't expect e.g. Australian style party guided voting to appear in the U.S. since people have a strong tendency to make their own independent decisions my way (probably not in Australia either unless their strangest IRV rules would be copied to Condorcet too). You said: I may comment your comments on the U.S. system, but when I can, I prefer taking about election methods at a general level, not about the specifics of individual countries. [endquote] ...then you often violate your own preference :-) The alternative would be to leave your questions / comments unanswered :-). I'm merely pointing out that your claims about how Americans would vote are lacking in authority. None of my comments are based on complete understanding of what I'm talking about :-). Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
On 22.9.2012, at 1.17, Michael Ossipoff wrote: Do you claim that unimproved Condorcet can be defended in a comparison with Symmetrical ICT, or ordinary ICT? I don't know if I have anything important to say. You are probably a better expert on the properties of those methods. Also definitions of the methods needed in addition to their technical properties. I don't exacly know what you mean with unimproved Condorcet. The Chicken Dilemma is the nearest thing to a problem that Approval has (though it's so well dealt with in Approval that it isn't really a problem). I'm afraid it might be. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
We are about to dive into the details of some methods. I'm not sure if there are still some unanswered questions that I should cover, or my own claims that I did not clarify yet. I'll comment some random points below. On 22.9.2012, at 1.48, Michael Ossipoff wrote: Maybe you meant to compare unimproved Condorcet to Approval (because you didn't want to compare it to ICT and Symmetrical ICT). Ok. You mentioned the Chicken Dilemma. It exists in Approval and Condorcet. Unimproved Condorcet doesn't get rid of the Chicken Dilemma. It's basically the same in both methods. Approval meets FBC. Unimproved Condorcet fails FBC. Exactly how is unimproved Condorcet better than Approval? Condorcet's Criterion? Condorcet's Critrerion compliance is meaningless when people are favorite-burying. Then there's the matter of the highly computation-intensive count that every rank method has, including the Condorcet methods. Computation-intensive, labor-intensive count = big count-fraud opportunity. It should be enough if you can record (digitally) the content of the ballots in a reliable way. Computations should not lead to fraud since they can be easily double checked. If the content of the ballots is mabe public, checking is really easy. If the content of the ballots is secret for privacy reasons, then we need to agree who can check the calculations. ...and it also means machine balloting and computerized count. That means an even more greatly-enhanced count-fraud opportunity. Machine balloting is a risk in all methods (if votes are only bits, and there is no paper copy). Also complex ballots like ranked and rated ballots can be implemented on paper quite well (= without too bad limitations). Computerized count is not a problem if reliable source data is available for checks. Even if you could find a significant advantage of unimproved Condorcet over Approval, that advantage wouldn't obtain when count-fraud is being done. If you want my opinion on Condorcet methods in general, I think they are remarkably well balanced methods, for compromise seeking, competitive, majority style elections. Unimproved Condorcet gives incentive /or need for favorite-burial, unlike Approval or ICT or Symmetrical ICT. Yes, you could find voters who wouldn't be susceptible to that incentive. I can show you millions who would be. It's better to just not cause it at all. Because that is so easily achieved, there's no need for favorite-burial incentive. When favorite-burial happens, it distorts preferences so as to make a joke of the election. Unimproved Condorcet, unlike ICT and Symmetrical ICT, has the Chicken Dilemma. Unimproved Condorcet, unlike Approval, Score, and Symmetrical ICT, fails Later-No-Help. You said: They thus have quite well balanced well enoughs / vulnerabilities. [endquote] Is that what you call the above-described attributes? I stick to my comment on Condorcet methods (see above). Maybe someone should arrange a real-life political Condorcet election so we could see how extensive favourite burial there will be and how much that will influence the results. Otherwise it seems to be just your guess against mine. I don't believe that the existence of a (theoretical) FBC vulnerability would automatically lead to widespread favourite betrayal. Again I refer to Burlington IRV elections as an argument why this probably would not happen even in the U.S. (The last sentence is about the U.S. The others are generic.) Juho Mike Ossipoff Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
On 20.9.2012, at 8.20, Michael Ossipoff wrote: You said: The idea that there are third candidates but that are never elected, and that can act as spoilers does not fly very well. [endquote] In what sense doesn't it fly well? What does that mean? I just meant that it is a waste of effort and energy to have fake candidates that appear as they could be elected, but they can't, or whose presence may make the natural winner not win. Let me try to translate what you said: The idea that there are non-Republocrat candidates that have never been elected to the presidency, and that an act as spoilers is either unsatisfactory to Juho, or disbelieved by Juho. Is that what you meant? Approximately so. 1. We don't want nonwinning candidates to be spoilers. That's why we don't want Plurality, IRV, or unimproved Condorcet. It is hard to find methods that have no weaknesses. Luckily we can often use methods whose weaknesses are weak enough. All those three methods may meet that target in some elections. 2. It's unsatisfactory (to the public) that only Democrats and Republicans ever win, because the public regard the (Democrat and Republican) politicians as sharing the same moral level as a schoolground drug-dealer. Depends on if they want that only Democrats and Republicans ever win. But I'm not sure that I've interpreted you correctly. Maybe you meant that what doesn't fly is the belief that the winner must be a Democrat or a Republican. Yes indeed, that doesn't fly. I meant that using a method that appears to elect any of the candidates but in reality can elect only certain candidates does not look natural. So, you see, we are in complete agreement. Pretty much so. But I didn't want to take position on two-party systems vs. multi-party systems. You said: If we want to have a two-party system... [endquote] Whoa. Who is this we who want to have a 2-party system. Are you saying that you want Finland to have a 2-party system? Or that you want the U.S. to have a 2-party system, and that I also do? That was passive. So we could be anybody who wants that. But it isn't for me to say how many parties we have, or how many parties should sometimes win. That's for the voters to decide. In a representative democracy perople elect representatives who will then decide. In this case the representatives of the two main parties will decide. This is a general problem of political systems (not only a problem of two-party systems) and also other organizations. Those that are in power have tendency to maintain their own strong position. To say that there should be some particular number of parties (like two) would be undemocratic. Unless the voters or their representatives say so. (Or maybe someone just uses his freedom of speech and freedom of opinion.) So I'm not denying that some _do_ want a 2-party system. For instance, I'll venture a guess that the Democrats and Republicans like there to be a two party system. That may well be true. In fact, I'll go farther than that, and suggest that maybe the wealthy types who own and bribe the Republocrat politicians also like there to be a two party system, in which the people owned by them are perceived as the two choices. Yes, there may be also such people. But maybe not very many. Maybe there are also many people that make use of the situation but that don't have any philosophical thoughts on what political system would be good. They are just opportunistic, with not much interest in politics nor in theories on two-party systems, Duverger's law etc. But seriously, the number of parties should be as many as people want. I note that also multi-party systems have similar problems. They may have e.g. cutoffs that give no seats to parties below 5% support. Or the size of districts may set some limits (from this point of view a one-member distric is an extreme case). A more general form of the question could be e.g. if in a N member representative body a party with M/N of the votes should get M seats. You said: , there are also better election methods for that purpose than plain plurality. [endquote] Apparently, then, you disagree with Riker. I'll take Riker's side on that question: Plurality is perfect for making, maintaining, preserving a two-party system. Maybe he should have said one good instead of perfect. Or maybe word perfect means that he is very happy with having fake candidates that can collect the protest votes without making any harm. What I meant with better was that some methods could allow new parties to rise and replace one of the old two parties, or that would allow those two parties to be internally more responsive to voter opinions than they (maybe) are today. Oh don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that Plurality can do it alone. No, it needs a little help. It needs the help of a mass media system that continually hammers home the message about the two
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
On 18.9.2012, at 18.03, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 09/16/2012 02:35 PM, Juho Laatu wrote: On 16.9.2012, at 9.57, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: (More precisely, the relative scores (number of plumpers required) become terms of type score_x - score_(x+1), which, along with SUM x=1..n score_x (just the number of voters), can be used to solve for the unknowns score_1...score_n. These scores are then normalized on 0..1.) It seems to work, but I'm not using it outside of the fitness function because I have no assurance that, say, even for a monotone method, raising A won't decrease A's score relative to the others. It might be the case that A's score will decrease even if A's rank doesn't change. Obviously, it won't work for methods that fail mono-add-plump. What should candidate's score indicate in single-winner methods? In single-winner methods the ranking of other candidates than the winner is voluntary. You could in principle pick any measure that you want (distance to victory or quality of the candidate or something else). But of course most methods do provide also a ranking as a byproduct (in addition to naming the winner). That ranking tends to follow the same philosophy as the philosophy in selecting the winner. As already noted, the mono-add-plump philosophy is close to the minmax(margins) philosophy, also with respect to ranking the other candidates. What should candidate's score indicate? Inasfar as the method's winner is the one the method considers best according to the input given, and the social ordering is a list of alternatives in order of suitability (according to the logic of the method), a score should be a finer graduation of the social ordering. That is, the winner tells you what candidate is the best choice, the social ordering tells you which candidates are closer to being winners, and the rating or score tells you by how much. Here suitability is close to what I called quality of the candidate. I note that we must have a suitable interpreation for social ordering because of the well known paradoxes of social ordering. Maybe we talk about scoring the candidates (transitively, numerically). That would make it social scoring or someting like that. I also note that if we talk about list of alternatives in the sense that we want to know who should be elected in case the first winner can not be elected, then there may be different interpretations. We may want to know e.g. who should be elected if the winner would not have participated in the election, or in the case that the winner participates but can not be elected (= the question is, do we measure losses to the winner). One more note. Term closer to being winners does refer to being close in quality / scores. It does not refer to being close to winning e.g. in number of voters that could change the results. (I used earlier term distance to victory.) If the method aims to satisfy certain criteria while finding good winners, it should do so with respect to finding the winner, and also with respect to the ranking and the score. A method that is monotone should have scores that respond monotonically to the raising of candidates, too. I note that some methods like Kemeny seem to produce the winner as a byproduct of finding the optimal ranking. Also expression breaking a loop refers to an interest to make the potentially cyclic socielty preferences linear by force. In principle that is of course unnecessary. The opinions are cyclic, and could be left as they are. That does not however rule out the option of giving the candidates scores that indicate some order of preference (that may not be the preference order of the society). I think most methods can be made to produce a social ranking. Some methods do this on its own, like Kemeny. For others, you just extend the logic by which the method in question determines the winner. For instance, disregarding ties, in Schulze, the winner is the candidate whom nobody indirectly beats. The second place finisher would then be the candidate only indirectly beaten by the winner, and so on. I guess in Schulze we can have the two options that I mentioned above. We can consider the ballots/matrix with or without the first winner, when determining the second winner. In real life these cases could be compared e.g. to the situation where the winnig candidate has died or has just decided to be in opposition instead of becoming elected. The ideal winner may be different depending on what kind of opposition he/she will have. This difference is obvious e.g. in the case of a loop of three vs. majority decision between two candidates. Turning rankings into ratings the proper way highly depends on the method in question, and can get very complex. Just look at this variant of Schulze: http://arxiv.org/abs/0912.2190 . They seem to aim at respecting multiple criteria. Many such criteria could maybe
Re: [EM] Scoring (was Re: OpenSTV 2.1.0 released)
On 19.9.2012, at 20.26, Michael Ossipoff wrote: Juho-- This thread is demonstrating something that I spoke of earlier: There are an unlimited number of things that different people can ask for from voting systems, just as there are infinitely-many ways to count rank ballots. It couldn't be any more obvious, could it, that there's just no way that agreement can ever be achieved, in such discussions, regarding which method to support as an actual proposal. Well, maybe the experts are unable to agree, but practical people that seek practical methods for practical problems might be more sensible :-). But that's ok. EM's discussion needn't be toward the goal of practical agreement for support of an actual proposal. EM's goal needn't have anything to do with actual social improvement. Discussion of social choice methods can be (and usually is) entirely divorced from any social practicality, use, or value. EM discussions may cover also theoretical (= not practical) topics. But I agree that discussions that try to find widely agreed conclusions on practical real-life situations are often surprisingly difficult. There's no law that says that you have to care about such things. I just want you to know that I'm not criticizing you about that. You said: For example FBC is an important criterion, but I can accept methods that do not meet it, but that are good enough in the sense that they allow voters to rank their favourite always first, as a safe enough rule of thumb. I don't like methods that fail FBC in the sense that voters often have to betray their favourite, or if voters have to decide whether to betray or not based on some complex analysis. In the same way many other criteria can be met well enough. That's what I used to say. There are a few problems with that. You can certainly be forgiven for not knowing what's important to voters in this country. No doubt each country is different in that regard. But understand that that means that what you say might not be applicable to this country. And, from what I've heard, some other Plurality countries have a very similar habit of lesser-evil voting. So, in fact, could it be that what you're saying is applicable only to countries that don't use Plurality for their main political elections? When I wrote that I was thinking about single-winner elections that genuinely elect from multiple candidates. But I think it covers also plurality and two-party systems. The idea that there are third candidates but that are never elected, and that can act as spoilers does not fly very well. If we want to have a two-party system, there are also better election methods for that purpose than plain plurality. Or one approach could be also to have only two parties and two candidates (= meets FBC). As I said, I used to say what you said above. That was before I observed a progressive lesser-evil Democrat-voter voting in a Condorcet Internet poll, for a presidential election. Yes, I've mentioned this before. She's a progressive, and preferred the policies of Nader to those of the Democrats. But she felt that Nader couldn't win, and that, because only a Democrat can beat the Republicans, the one and only goal is to maximize the probability of a Democrat winning instead of a Republican. We've been over this. So she ranked all of the Democrats over Nader. I couldn't tell her that she needn't do that, because it was optimal strategy, given her assumptions and her goal. You see, that's what you're missing. It's what you were missing before, too. But wasn't that more a problem of the voter than a problem of the method? She betrayed her favourite although there was maybe no need to do so. She just didn't believe that sincere ranking was a safe enough rule of thumb, or at least a better strategy than the one that she used. If you believe that the winner must necessarily be a Democrat or a Republican, if you believe that only a Democrat can beat the Republicans, then you also believe that maximizing your expectation and optimizing the outcome must mean maximizing the win-probability of a Democrat. In an election with a progressive (whose policies you prefer best), a Democrat, and some Republicans, your optimal strategy, in unimproved Condorcet, is to rank the Democrat _alone_ in 1st place. When we discussed this before, I told why that is. The reason hasn't changed since then. I'm not quite convinced. So it isn't a matter of How likely is it that this method will show its FBC failure?. Instead, it's a matter of Does (can) this method fail FBC? Maybe the question is if (rational) voters converge towards voting sincerely or towards (some opinion groups) burying their favourite. Maybe unimproved Condorcet won't often show its FBC failure. Irrelevant. By the beliefs, assumptions, and goal that I spoke of earlier--the beliefs, assumptions and goal of the fully-devoted
Re: [EM] OpenSTV 2.1.0 released and new OpaVote features
On 17.9.2012, at 21.08, Richard Fobes wrote: On 9/15/2012 3:02 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 09/15/2012 09:55 AM, Juho Laatu wrote: On 15.9.2012, at 6.05, Jeffrey O'Neill wrote: You can also now save Condorcet results in HTML format but still working on the best graphics to visualize Condorcet results. One solution is to support minmax(margins). With that method you can simply draw a histogram that indicates how many new (first preference) votes each candidate would need to win (or tie) with the winner / current leader. Here is the URL to a results page at VoteFair.org that shows another way to graphically display pairwise-comparison results: http://www.votefair.org/cgi-bin/votefairrank.cgi/votingid=41541-56251-09157 Some observations. The results contain two histogram style visualizations (= numeric value for each candidate), VoteFair ranking score and Traditional vote count / plurality. I discussed earlier about histograms that could show distance to victory or quality of the candidate (from the used method point of view). The presented histograms do not fall in these categories but offer additional information, I guess mainly to allow people to compare the reasults to some other ways to measure the candidates. When reading the results I noted that the top two candidates were tied but all the other results were transitive. That means that the top two candidates had 10 pairwise victories each (+ one tie). The number of victories of the ramaining candiates were 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and 0. These values would give us one additional histogram that would show the number of pairwise victories. Those values would tell quickly, at least to an experienced observer, that other than the two top canididates are ordered transitively. That piece of information would be valid information for most Condorcet methods, but only partial, since it only indicates the order of the candidates unambigiously if there are no pairwise cycles or ties. (Well, there is no requirement of single-winner methods or Condorcet methods to give a ranking, but the intended order is often obvious anyway.) That's all. Just some observations on the presented extar histogram style information. It is not very easy to generate distance to victory or quality of the candidate measures for all Condorcet methods. Juho Note that the pairwise comparisons are sorted according to popularity. The length of each bar indicates how many voters support that choice compared to the other choice in the pair. The summary section uses bar lengths that basically sum up the pairwise counts. This means that the length of a bar for a higher-ranked choice is not necessarily always longer than the length of a bar for the next-lower-ranked choice (but such cases become rare as the number of votes increases). Richard Fobes 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] OpenSTV 2.1.0 released and new OpaVote features
On 15.9.2012, at 6.05, Jeffrey O'Neill wrote: You can also now save Condorcet results in HTML format but still working on the best graphics to visualize Condorcet results. One solution is to support minmax(margins). With that method you can simply draw a histogram that indicates how many new (first preference) votes each candidate would need to win (or tie) with the winner / current leader. - This visualization method could be useful additional information also in other methods, but it would not be as accurate. - For detailed analyis the pairwise matrix will be important in any case. But for quick visualization histograms (= n numeric values) are something that people can generally understand based on a quick look. - I have seen 2D graphs that show all parwise wins, e.g. in Debian. They are however quite difficult to draw automatically, and the positioning of candidates in the drawing space (e.g. higher, lower) may not be neutral (unless they are in one row or circle). Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] OpenSTV 2.1.0 released and new OpaVote features
On 15.9.2012, at 13.02, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 09/15/2012 09:55 AM, Juho Laatu wrote: On 15.9.2012, at 6.05, Jeffrey O'Neill wrote: You can also now save Condorcet results in HTML format but still working on the best graphics to visualize Condorcet results. One solution is to support minmax(margins). With that method you can simply draw a histogram that indicates how many new (first preference) votes each candidate would need to win (or tie) with the winner / current leader. That also works with minmax(wv), and similar approaches can work for least reversal methods and those that use sums of victories rather than minimum/maximum ones. However, those visualization methods are still linked to specific voting methods, and thus don't provide a general visualization of the pairwise results. For minmax(margins) the number of required additional votes to beat (or at least tie with) all other candidates is an exact definition of the method, and gives one number per candidate that can be used in the histogram. All methods that can do the same thing, i.e. give one numeric value that both indicates the winner and indicates a natural measure of distance of each candidate to winning the election, can use histogram level visualization effectively. One would need also an easy to understand verbal description of what the histogram values mean. I wonder which other Condorcet methods have such intuitive function available. Do you have such functions for some of the methods that you proposed as candidates? The histogram results of minmax(margins) do not give all the information that is present in the pairwise comparison matrix. The histogram indicates only the distance to the worst competitor, which is always the current leader. Pairwise comparison results to all others are lost. (Information on 49-50 vs. 48-49 against the current leader could be included in the histogram if needed. Probably better to leave this to the matrix.) But on the other hand the difference of the hstogram values of any two candidates still indicates exactly how much closer to victory the better one of those candidates is. For complete analysis full matrix is needed, but for practical information to regular voters, especially during the counting process, the histogram may well be all that is needed. (All pairwise comparisons could be presented to allow speculation on what if there had been only these two candidates.) I suppose one could use something similar with Kemeny as well: use integer programming to find the pairwise sum of scores for the best transitive ordering that puts X first. That is X's score. Then do it for Y and Z. Assuming X wins, all other scores will be lower than X's. The relationship between additional votes and Kemeny scores might not be obvious to the end user, though. - I have seen 2D graphs that show all parwise wins, e.g. in Debian. They are however quite difficult to draw automatically, and the positioning of candidates in the drawing space (e.g. higher, lower) may not be neutral (unless they are in one row or circle). These can be decluttered by showing graphs where candidate X has an arrow to candidate Y iff X beats Y pairwise, otherwise there is no arrow. Then graph visualization programs can be used to arrange the candidates in a way so that candidates with more pairwise victories (or stronger ones, or whatnot) are closer to the top, or so that Smith set members always appear above non-Smith set members. Drawing Smith set members above non-Smith set members takes in a way position on if Smith set members are all better than all other candidates. That may make sense in methods that elect always from the Smith set since at least the winner will be drawn close to the top. But also in those (Smith set based) methods some members of the Smith set may be further from winning the election than some candidates outside the Smit set. I.e. the graph does not indicate how close different candidates are to winning the ongoing counting process. If one wants to visualize Ranked Pairs, it'd be easy to simply color the path throughout the graph to correspond with the pairwise relations/defeats picked by Ranked Pairs. Yes, that approach could work for path based methods. Ranked Pairs and methods that break all loops or make the opinions transitive could also show the candidaes ordered on a line. (But they would again lose the approximity to winning information.) I can't draw any clear conclusions from this on how good Condorcet methods are in visualizing the results or an ongoing counting process. The measure of number of voters to change the result seems to be quite natural measure of distance to victory. Another approach to visualizing the results could be to try to point out how good winner each candidate would be. In minmax(margins) these measures coincide (measured as additional votes). In Smith set based methods I guess
Re: [EM] Conceiving a Democratic Electoral Process
On 25.7.2012, at 19.35, Fred Gohlke wrote: Good Morning, Juho re: In the quoted text I assumed that your question What would you think of letting interest groups (or parties) select their most effective advocates to compete with other candidates for public office? referred to candidates that are not set by the electors (starting from the most local level) but by the parties. In that case I felt that there maybe was a need to allow the regular voters to decide instead of letting the party nominated candidates make the decisions. But maybe that was not your intended scenario. Thanks, Juho. I didn't realize you were speaking of nominees set by the parties. Now, after thinking about it in the way you intended, I still favor the idea of having the nominees compete with each other to decide which ones will be actual candidates for public office. Ok, two phases then. One to elect the party candidates (by voters, by party members, or by nominees?) and then the final election. The proportions may be manageable if there are e.g. 1,000,000 voters, 10 parties, 1000 nominees per party, that elect 10 candidates per party. I wonder if you want some proportionality (e.g. betwee two wings of a party) or not. That would influence also the first phase. I'm not speaking of vacuous televised debates where, in a couple of hours, fawning interrogators toss softball questions with inadequate follow-up, and where nominees try to outdo each other by making phony promises in an appeal for public favor. I'm talking about a real competition conducted in open sessions spanning several weeks, where the various party nominees can be challenged, not only by each other, but by the public and the media; where nominees are pressed when they give misleading or obfuscating responses, and where the election occurs on the day after the nominees make their final choice of candidates. In a competition like this, each nominee must try to persuade the other nominees to select him or her as the most able candidate. If they want to be chosen, 'Party nominated candidates' will have to commit themselves to put the public interest above their party's interest in instances where those interests clash, while the competing party nominees will miss no opportunity to show how their partisan bias is a disservice to the public. This is not the best solution to the political problems we face, but it would be an improvement. At the very least, it would reduce the deceit and obfuscation that characterize political campaigns. In terms of goals for a democratic electoral method, it does not address goals 4, 6 or 7. It meets goals 2, 3, 5, 8 and 9, and although it does not meet goal 1, it improves on present practice. 1) Parties must not be allowed to control the nomination of candidates for public office. 2) The electoral method must not require that candidates spend vast sums of money to achieve public office. If the second phase is a traditional election, traditional financing practices may apply. Juho 3) The electoral method must give the people a way to address and resolve contemporary issues. 4) The electoral method must allow every member of the electorate to become a candidate and participate in the electoral process to the full extent of each individual's desire and ability. 5) The electoral method must ensure that all candidates for public office are carefully examined to determine their integrity and suitability to serve as advocates for the people. 6) The electoral method must be repeated frequently (preferably annually). 7) The electoral method must include a means for the electorate to recall an elected official. 8) The electoral method must ensure that candidates for public office are examined, face-to-face, by people with a vital interest in ascertaining their character, and the examiners must have enough time to investigate their subject thoroughly. 9) The electoral method must accommodate the fact that parties, interest groups, factions and enclaves are a vital part of society. Fred 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] Conceiving a Democratic Electoral Process
On 23.7.2012, at 0.22, Fred Gohlke wrote: re: If we start from low/local level and parties set the candidates, I might try giving the decision power on who will go to the next levels to the regular voters, and not to the candidates that may already be professional politicians. That is certainly a possibility, although I think it unwise for several reasons: * as described in an earlier post, those at the lower levels can influence those at the higher levels. Each candidate achieves selection by a known list of electors, so communication between the electors and the candidate is straightforward. That capability is more important than voting; it lets the electors influence, not only the choice of candidates, but the public issues on which the candidates will be legislating. In the quoted text I assumed that your question What would you think of letting interest groups (or parties) select their most effective advocates to compete with other candidates for public office? referred to candidates that are not set by the electors (starting from the most local level) but by the parties. In that case I felt that there maybe was a need to allow the regular voters to decide instead of letting the party nominated candidates make the decisions. But maybe that was not your intended scenario. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
