Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Andrew Myers, this method looks interesting, as it is proportional, Condorcet and non STV-like. You write on your web-page, that: the correctness of the algorithm depends on a currently unproved conjecture: that if improvement of a committee is possible, it can be done by replacing one member at a time. It would be very difficult to gain support for a method, which relies on an unproven conjecture. I see this as the biggest problem in your proposed method. I guess that from the presentation every voter votes for M candidates, where M is the number of seats, and that the voter uses range-like voting for each of the candidates voted for on the ballot. I don't understand the two modes - combined weights and best candidate and why two modes are needed. You write on your web page, that: The factor (*k*+1) may be surprising in the condition for proportional validity, but it actually agrees with proportional representation election methods developed elsewhere; it is analogous to the Droop quotahttp://www.encyclopedia4u.com/d/droop-quota.html used by many STV election methods It could be nice, if you could show a proof on how the method achieves proportionality, what advantages it has to standard STV and how it tackles strategic-voting/vote management (for instance - give zero weight to the strongest competitors). I assume it is not used for elections anywhere, so some alpha testing could be appropriate. Best regards Peter Zborník 2010/5/4 Andrew Myers an...@cs.cornell.edu If you are looking for a proportional Condorcet method, I will also recommend the proportional election method that I developed. It is not STV-like, but it achieves proportionality when there are blocs of voters. It has the added advantage that it is already built into a running Internet voting system, CIVS. This algorithm has been used for many online polls and has been a success. The code of CIVS is publicly available. For more information about the method, see: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/proportional.html By the way, CIVS has recently acquired support for internationalization. It would be easy to construct a Czech instance if someone were willing to translate approximately 250 sentences from English to Czech. There is, for example, a Hungarian version (see http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs-test/index.html.hu, translated by Árpád Magosányi). I am in the market for help translating to other languages. Cheers, -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear all, A mathematically more sound notation of the importance of the functions of the council members would be the following: M1M2=M3M4=M5=M6=M7, where Mn is a member of the set of all council members. instead of P[VPa, VPb][Ma, Mb, Mc, Md]. The unified method is called Schulze generalized proportional ranking. This method would repeatedly apply the fill the not yet elected (vacant) seats of councils, that are elected by STV method (FVSSTV). Schulze describes his method in chapter 7 of http://m-schulze.webhop.net/schulze2.pdf http://m-schulze.webhop.net/schulze2.pdf Best regards Peter Zborník On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 10:11 PM, Raph Frank raph...@gmail.com wrote: On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com wrote: The proportional ranking needed is not PVPaVPbMaMbMcMd, but P[VPa, VPb][Ma, Mb, Mc, Md]. Let us call this required ranking for boundary conditions. Schulze's method can do that too. Step 1: Elect the Schulze single seat method winner as President Step 2: Elect a 3 person council using Schulze-STV, but the President must be a member Step 3: Elect a 7 person council using Schulze-STV, but the President + VPs must be members. I think this is what you meant by your unified method? Schulze rankings is just Schulze-STV, except you elect councils that increase in size by one each iteration, and members elected in previous iterations must be members of subsequent councils. Example (from an email by Schulze): 40 ABC 25 BAC 35 CBA The Schulze proportional ranking is BAC. However, for two seats, Droop proportionality, requires that A and C are elected. The unified method for two seats without boundary conditions would select BA (i.e.Schulze STV) Schulze-STV meets the Droop criterion, so would elect A and C in a 2 seat race. Schulze-rankings elects B and then A as you say. There are 2 steps: *** Work out A's score vs C: *** We split the voters in 2 groups Voters who prefer B to A: 60 Voters who prefer C to A: 35 There are no options in which group each voter can be placed, as no voter is eligible for both groups. The smallest group has 35 voters so, A better than than C gets 35 votes *** Work out C's score vs A *** Again we split into 2 groups Voters who prefer only B to C: 0 Voters who prefer only A to C: 0 Voters who prefer both to C: 65 Thus we split the third group into 2 parts, as they can be placed in either group. Voters who prefer B to C: 32.5 Voters who prefer A to C: 32.5 The smallest group has 32.5 voters so, C better than A gets 32.5 votes Thus the result is A gets 35 votes and C get 32.5 votes, so A wins the 2nd seat. Anyway, I think the rankings method can be generalised to allow groups of candidates to be elected at once, rather than electing them one at a time. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Peter, Thanks for your comments. I'll address them inline. On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: Dear Andrew Myers, this method looks interesting, as it is proportional, Condorcet and non STV-like. You write on your web-page, that: the correctness of the algorithm depends on a currently unproved conjecture: that if improvement of a committee is possible, it can be done by replacing one member at a time. It would be very difficult to gain support for a method, which relies on an unproven conjecture. I see this as the biggest problem in your proposed method. We should probably distinguish between the method and the currently implemented algorithm. The question is whether the algorithm correctly implements the method -- this is what the conjecture rests on. The current implementation gives the ability to compare any pair of committees directly, so it is possible to sanity-check the algorithmic result. I guess that from the presentation every voter votes for M candidates, where M is the number of seats, and that the voter uses range-like voting for each of the candidates voted for on the ballot. I don't understand the two modes - combined weights and best candidate and why two modes are needed. In practice, best candidate seems to be the mode most people want. It supports only ordinal ranking of the choices. The combined-weights mode is more range-like, but -- crucially, from my perspective -- the ratings/weights assigned by one voter are NEVER compared to the ratings f another voter. That, to me, makes range voting a nonstarter. You write on your web page, that: The factor (/k/+1) may be surprising in the condition for proportional validity, but it actually agrees with proportional representation election methods developed elsewhere; it is analogous to the Droop quota http://www.encyclopedia4u.com/d/droop-quota.html used by many STV election methods It could be nice, if you could show a proof on how the method achieves proportionality, what advantages it has to standard STV and how it tackles strategic-voting/vote management (for instance - give zero weight to the strongest competitors). I assume it is not used for elections anywhere, so some alpha testing could be appropriate. I agree that more results about this method would be helpful. I haven't had time to push much on that. But actually, proportional mode has been used quite a few times for elections in CIVS. At last count, there have been 292 proportional-mode elections, and none of them have to my knowledge yielded the wrong result. As one example, there is a gardening group that runs monthly proportional polls to pick which plants should be considered plants of the month. My impression is that the use of proportional mode is periodically important for this kind of poll, to prevent, say, the orchid fanatics from taking over. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Peter Zbornik, you wrote (9 May 2010): In your paper schulze3.pdf, there are some instances, where the Schulze proportional ranking fails to produce an unambiguous ordering (see for instance the result for data set A10). Why do there ambiguities occur and how would you recommend them to be resolved in a deterministic manner without resorting to random number generation etc? In 5 instances (A10, A12, A23, A33, A67), the Schulze proportional ranking is not unique. This is caused by the small numbers of voters and the large numbers of candidates. For example, in instance A10 (83 voters, 19 candidates), there are two possible Schulze proportional rankings: NAPMQFGRSLIBDJKEHOC and NMPQAFGRSLIBDJKEHOC. You wrote (9 May 2010): Does Schulze-STV allow for truncated ballots? I.e. when there are 5 candidates, does Schulze-STV allow me to only rank two of them on my ballot? I recommend proportional completion. This is explained in section 5.3 of http://m-schulze.webhop.net/schulze2.pdf and in the file calcul01.pdf of http://m-schulze.webhop.net/schulze3.zip You wrote (9 May 2010): I am also curious to know, if you think it would be difficult for you to implement a program, which would handle the green council elections in an optimal proportional manner, i.e. methods, which would only impose the required ranking. It would be simple to incorporate all the requested specifications. Send me an input file with explanations. Markus Schulze Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Markus Schulze,
You wrote On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 6:59 PM:
I recommend that you should solve indecisive situations by using the
numbers of the member ID cards of the candidates.
we have member ID cards, and each of them has a number.
I guess we could give the oldest member of the party the place in case of a
tie, i.e. the person with the lowest number on the ID card.
Is this solution in line with what you recommend?
You wrote On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 6:59 PM:
Yes, the Schulze STV method and the Schulze proportional ranking method can
handle situations with incomplete individual rankings without sacrificing
any of the good properties.
This would be great. Just to avoid any potential misunderstandings: can
Schulze-STV and Schulze proportional ranking handle ballots on the form M1
Operator M2 Operator ... Operator Mn, where Operator is in {, =} and
M1,..., Mn are elements in the set of hopefuls?
That would indeed be a great bonus.
Best regards
Peter Zborník
On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 6:59 PM, Markus Schulze
markus.schu...@alumni.tu-berlin.de wrote:
Dear Peter Zbornik,
you wrote (9 May 2010):
Basically, I have to come up with some method or way
to select one of the two rankings you gave for A10,
A12, A23, A33, A67. That is a real problem.
I recommend that you should solve indecisive situations
by using the numbers of the member ID cards of the
candidates.
By the way, out of pure curiosity, could a hybrid
ranked ballot, i.e. a ballot on the form A=BC=DE,
be used in Schulze-STV in theory, without sacrificing
any of the good properties of the method?
Yes, the Schulze STV method and the Schulze proportional
ranking method can handle situations with incomplete
individual rankings without sacrificing any of the good
properties.
Markus Schulze
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
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Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Markus Schulze,
I think got the idea of the Schulze proportional method after your
definition and Raph Frank's explanation and example.
I am however not sure that the Schulze proportional method satisfies the
proportionality criterion for the top-down approach to create party lists.
You wrote (6.5.2010):
a. Suppose x and y are the only hopeful candidates.
Suppose N is the number of voters.
Suppose Droop proportionality for n seats requires
that x must be elected and that y must not be
elected, then we get H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] N/(n+1)
and H[A(1),...,A(n-1),y,x] N/(n+1), and, therefore,
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] H[A(1),...,A(n-1),y,x].
This guarantees that the Schulze proportional
ranking method satisfies the proportionality
criterion for the top-down approach to create
party lists.
If I have understood you correctly, you only show that the Schulze
proportional ranking method satisfies the proportionality criterion for the
top-down approach to create party lists for the special case where there
are only two hopefuls x and y.
If I am correct, then it would be helpful if you could provide a full proof,
or further explanation, which shows that the proportionality criterion for
the top-down approach to create party lists is satisfied for any number of
hopefuls.
Best regards
Peter Zborník
On Thu, May 6, 2010 at 1:51 PM, Markus Schulze
markus.schu...@alumni.tu-berlin.de wrote:
Dear Peter Zbornik,
in the scientific literature, candidates, who
have not yet been elected, are sometimes called
hopeful.
***
The Schulze proportional ranking method can be
described as follows:
Suppose place 1 to (n-1) have already been
filled. Suppose A(i) (with i = 1,...,(n-1))
is the candidate of place i.
Suppose we want to fill the n-th place.
Suppose x,y are two hopeful candidates. Then
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] is the largest possible
value such that the electorate can be divided
into n+1 disjoint parts T(1),...,T(n+1) such that
1. For all i := 1,...,n: |T(i)| = H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
2. For all i := 1,...,(n-1): Every voter in T(i)
prefers candidate A(i) to candidate y.
3. Every voter in T(n) prefers candidate x
to candidate y.
Apply the Schulze single-winner election method
to the matrix d[x,y] := H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
The winner gets the n-th place.
***
The best way to understand the Schulze proportional
ranking method is to investigate the properties of
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]. For example:
a. Suppose x and y are the only hopeful candidates.
Suppose N is the number of voters.
Suppose Droop proportionality for n seats requires
that x must be elected and that y must not be
elected, then we get H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] N/(n+1)
and H[A(1),...,A(n-1),y,x] N/(n+1), and, therefore,
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] H[A(1),...,A(n-1),y,x].
This guarantees that the Schulze proportional
ranking method satisfies the proportionality
criterion for the top-down approach to create
party lists.
b. Adding or removing another hopeful candidate z
does not change H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
c. H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] is monotonic. That means:
Ranking candidate x higher cannot decrease
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]. Ranking candidate x
lower cannot increase H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
Ranking candidate y higher cannot increase
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]. Ranking candidate y
lower cannot decrease H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
d. H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] depends only on which
candidates of {A(1),...,A(n-1),x} the individual
voter prefers to candidate y, but it does not
depend on the order in which this voter prefers
these candidates to candidate y.
This guarantees that my method is not needlessly
vulnerable to Hylland free riding. In my paper
(http://m-schulze.webhop.net/schulze2.pdf), I argue
that other STV methods are needlessly vulnerable to
Hylland free riding, because the result depends on
the order in which the individual voter prefers
strong winners. In my paper, I argue that voters,
who understand STV well, know that it is a useful
strategy to give candidates, who are certain of
election, an insincerely low ranking. I argue
that, therefore, the order in which the individual
voter prefers strong winners doesn't contain any
information about the opinion of this voter, but
only information about how clever this voter is in
identifying strong winners. Therefore, the result
should not depend on the order in which the
individual voter prefers strong winners.
Markus Schulze
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
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Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Peter Zbornik,
the fact, that the Schulze single-winner election method
satisfies the majority criterion, is a direct consequence
of the fact that every pairwise victory is stronger than
every pairwise defeat.
Similarly, the fact, that the Schulze proportional ranking
method satisfies the proportionality criterion for the
top-down approach, is a direct consequence of the fact
that every link H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] from an outcome
{A(1),...,A(n-1),x} in agreement with the proportionality
criterion to an outcome {A(1),...,A(n-1),y} in disagreement
with the proportionality criterion has a strength of more
than N/(n+1) and that every link H[A(1),...,A(n-1),y,x]
from an outcome {A(1),...,A(n-1),y} in disagreement
with the proportionality criterion to an outcome
{A(1),...,A(n-1),x} in agreement with the proportionality
criterion has a strength of less than N/(n+1). This means
that every path from an outcome in agreement with the
proportionality criterion to an outcome in disagreement
with the proportionality criterion has a strength of
more than N/(n+1) and that every path from an outcome
in disagreement with the proportionality criterion to an
outcome in agreement with the proportionality criterion
has a strength of less than N/(n+1). This means that every
outcome in agreement with the proportionality criterion
disqualifies every outcome in disagreement with the
proportionality criterion.
Markus Schulze
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Juho, I attach a post scriptum to my email below (7.5.2010). I wrote: The unified method for two seats without boundary conditions would select BA (i.e.Schulze STV) Under the boundary condition AB (A is elected before B) the same unified method would select AC otherwise (i.e. Schulze proportional ranking). A less ambiguous formulation is (changes in bold): The unified method for two seats without boundary conditions would select BA (i.e.Schulze STV)*.* Under the boundary condition *PVP (the P is elected before the VP)* the same unified method would select AC (i.e. Schulze proportional ranking). Best regards Peter Zborník On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 5:27 PM, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com wrote: Dear Juho, thanks for taking the time to formalize the requirements and the discussion so far. I would like to put some ideas into the ether, which extend the approach of Schulze in some directions. It is worth emphasizing that I presently do not in any way recommend any of the approaches below before Shulze's proportional ranking, and that they are just some ideas, which I would like to get out of my head. Thus in this email I deliberately leave the procurement process for a proportional election system for the Czech green party in order to indulge in some academic speculation. --- Extension suggestion: The Schulze proportional rankig method is good, but has one weakness, which I will try to examplify below. Our main problem with the proposal of Schulze, is that it gives us more hierarchy than we usually need, and that it drops proportionality unnecessarily much. Let's for the sake of the argument say, that we want to select the Green regional party council in Prague, which (as an exception) has two vice presidents, without internal ordering and seven members. Thus this council looks like the following: P, VPa, VPb, Ma, Mb, Mc, Md (Ma means Member a). The proportional ranking needed is not PVPaVPbMaMbMcMd, but P[VPa, VPb][Ma, Mb, Mc, Md]. Let us call this required ranking for boundary conditions. I will discuss some ideas to address this issue by with a little inspiration from the world of statistics. --- In statistics, the top-down and bottom-up approach correspond to two heuristics often used to select variables to a regression model from a large number of candidate variables, specifically to forward and backward selection, see (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepwise_regression): In statistics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistics, *stepwise regression* includes regression models in which the choice of predictive variables is carried out by an automatic procedure.[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepwise_regression#cite_note-0 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepwise_regression#cite_note-1[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stepwise_regression#cite_note-2Usually, this takes the form of a sequence of F-tests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-test, but other techniques are possible, such as t-tests http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-test, adjusted R-square http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-square, Akaike information criterion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akaike_information_criterion, Bayesian information criterionhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_information_criterion, Mallows' Cp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mallows%27_Cp, or false discovery rate http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_discovery_rate. The main approaches are: - Forward selection, which involves starting with no variables in the model, trying out the variables one by one and including them if they are 'statistically significant'. - Backward elimination, which involves starting with all candidate variables and testing them one by one for statistical significance, deleting any that are not significant. An other method (the exhaustive search), which can be used for a moderate number of candidate variables and variables in the model, is to evaluate all possible variable combinations. I.e. in the case where we are looking for a model with two variables, and we have four candidate variables (a,b,c,d), then we evaluate the model for the variables (a,b), (a,c), (a,d), (b,c), (b,d), (c,d). A combination of the forward selection approach and the exhaustive search would take as imput information on how many candidate variables to evaluate in each step, for instance, Step 1: one variable, step 2: two variables, step 3: four variables (the Green regional party council in Prague) --- The underlying idea from the combine statistical approach in the previous paragraph, could be used combine top-down and bottom-up ranking, by modifying or generalize the Schulze proportional ranking (which I understand a little) and Schulze STV (which I haven't studied) to one universal top-down method. The unified method would have the Schulze proportional ranking as a special case, when the bondary conditions would be a...n and speculatively Schulze STV as a special case,
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com wrote: The proportional ranking needed is not PVPaVPbMaMbMcMd, but P[VPa, VPb][Ma, Mb, Mc, Md]. Let us call this required ranking for boundary conditions. Schulze's method can do that too. Step 1: Elect the Schulze single seat method winner as President Step 2: Elect a 3 person council using Schulze-STV, but the President must be a member Step 3: Elect a 7 person council using Schulze-STV, but the President + VPs must be members. I think this is what you meant by your unified method? Schulze rankings is just Schulze-STV, except you elect councils that increase in size by one each iteration, and members elected in previous iterations must be members of subsequent councils. Example (from an email by Schulze): 40 ABC 25 BAC 35 CBA The Schulze proportional ranking is BAC. However, for two seats, Droop proportionality, requires that A and C are elected. The unified method for two seats without boundary conditions would select BA (i.e.Schulze STV) Schulze-STV meets the Droop criterion, so would elect A and C in a 2 seat race. Schulze-rankings elects B and then A as you say. There are 2 steps: *** Work out A's score vs C: *** We split the voters in 2 groups Voters who prefer B to A: 60 Voters who prefer C to A: 35 There are no options in which group each voter can be placed, as no voter is eligible for both groups. The smallest group has 35 voters so, A better than than C gets 35 votes *** Work out C's score vs A *** Again we split into 2 groups Voters who prefer only B to C: 0 Voters who prefer only A to C: 0 Voters who prefer both to C: 65 Thus we split the third group into 2 parts, as they can be placed in either group. Voters who prefer B to C: 32.5 Voters who prefer A to C: 32.5 The smallest group has 32.5 voters so, C better than A gets 32.5 votes Thus the result is A gets 35 votes and C get 32.5 votes, so A wins the 2nd seat. Anyway, I think the rankings method can be generalised to allow groups of candidates to be elected at once, rather than electing them one at a time. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Raph Frank, Thanks, for sorting things out and for the example. Based on your comments, I'll try to explain what I meant by the unified method, even though you basically said it all in your previous email. Thus, as you pointed out, the unified Schulze method is equivalent to Schulze STV, if it is modified to always include already elected members. You mention, that the Schulze proportional ranking thus is a special case of this method which always elects only one member. The unified Schulze method is also equivalent to Schulze's proportional ranking, if it is modified to elect groups of hopefuls. A special case of this method is Schulze STV - where the group size is the same as the number of seats. I guess, that we can say, that Schulze proportional ranking and Schulze STV are special cases of an underlying Schulze method. Thanks for pointing these things out. I really have to take a closer look at the paper, and at Schulze STV. Best regards Peter Zborník 2010/5/7, Raph Frank raph...@gmail.com: On Fri, May 7, 2010 at 4:27 PM, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com wrote: The proportional ranking needed is not PVPaVPbMaMbMcMd, but P[VPa, VPb][Ma, Mb, Mc, Md]. Let us call this required ranking for boundary conditions. Schulze's method can do that too. Step 1: Elect the Schulze single seat method winner as President Step 2: Elect a 3 person council using Schulze-STV, but the President must be a member Step 3: Elect a 7 person council using Schulze-STV, but the President + VPs must be members. I think this is what you meant by your unified method? Schulze rankings is just Schulze-STV, except you elect councils that increase in size by one each iteration, and members elected in previous iterations must be members of subsequent councils. Example (from an email by Schulze): 40 ABC 25 BAC 35 CBA The Schulze proportional ranking is BAC. However, for two seats, Droop proportionality, requires that A and C are elected. The unified method for two seats without boundary conditions would select BA (i.e.Schulze STV) Schulze-STV meets the Droop criterion, so would elect A and C in a 2 seat race. Schulze-rankings elects B and then A as you say. There are 2 steps: *** Work out A's score vs C: *** We split the voters in 2 groups Voters who prefer B to A: 60 Voters who prefer C to A: 35 There are no options in which group each voter can be placed, as no voter is eligible for both groups. The smallest group has 35 voters so, A better than than C gets 35 votes *** Work out C's score vs A *** Again we split into 2 groups Voters who prefer only B to C: 0 Voters who prefer only A to C: 0 Voters who prefer both to C: 65 Thus we split the third group into 2 parts, as they can be placed in either group. Voters who prefer B to C: 32.5 Voters who prefer A to C: 32.5 The smallest group has 32.5 voters so, C better than A gets 32.5 votes Thus the result is A gets 35 votes and C get 32.5 votes, so A wins the 2nd seat. Anyway, I think the rankings method can be generalised to allow groups of candidates to be elected at once, rather than electing them one at a time. -- Odesláno z mobilního zařízení Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On May 7, 2010, at 6:27 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: Our main problem with the proposal of Schulze, is that it gives us more hierarchy than we usually need, and that it drops proportionality unnecessarily much. Let's for the sake of the argument say, that we want to select the Green regional party council in Prague, which (as an exception) has two vice presidents, without internal ordering and seven members. Thus this council looks like the following: P, VPa, VPb, Ma, Mb, Mc, Md (Ma means Member a). The proportional ranking needed is not PVPaVPbMaMbMcMd, but P[VPa, VPb][Ma, Mb, Mc, Md]. In my definition I missed this variant. In this case 3) and 4) should be replaced with 3) Elect the vice presidents (all at one round) so that set of P +VP1+...+VPn is as proportional as possible based on V1 An other example where this ranking would be needed could for instance be the national council with two presidents (party leaders), whch is a common leaderhip structure in the green parties in some countries. Thus, let us for instance assume the following structure: [Pa, Pb]VPaVPb[Ma, Mb, Mc] In the case of two presidents, Shulze's proportional ranking fails to elect the most proportional Condorcet presidential pair (I have no clue of how to be able to find the most proportional Condorcet presidential pair), since it imposes an unnecessary condition that one president should be ranked ahead the secon. Maybe the presidential pair or Prague regional council of the Greens could be good examples to focus on. Let's make a generic model. Your notation is a good start. I see proportional ranking and proportional election as two alternative schemes that differ so that - proportional election elects the best proportional set of n candidates - proportional ranking does the same but in a serial way so that it first elects one representative, then two representatives with the restriction that the first representative has already been fixed, and so on until all representatives have been elected There could be also intermediate forms where the serial process e.g. uses some forward looking techniques to balance the bias caused by the decisions that can not be fixed later. Some proportional election techniques are also computationally complex and therefore proportional ranking or some intermediate approaches may help (e.g. elect representatives in smaller groups, or even so that the decisions can be partially reversed later, there are many alternative ways). Your notation could in this light be read as follows. [Pa, Pb]VPaVPb[Ma, Mb, Mc] says: use PE to elect Pa and Pb; continue with PR to elect VPa; continue with PR to elect VPb; continue with PE to elect Ma, Mb and Mc (with the limitation that the already elected representatives must be kept). This is based on the assumption that same votes are used in all phases. The PR steps are actually just PE steps that elect only one additional representative. We can thus in principle use the same PE method all the time. Relation refers to a serial process and [ , ] refers to electing multiple representatives at one round. Juho P.S. I note that you already covered this approach in your later mail. This approach applies to all proportional methods that can add members to some already fixed set of representatives (not only to the one that Markus Schulze proposed). Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Peter Zbornik,
in the scientific literature, candidates, who
have not yet been elected, are sometimes called
hopeful.
***
The Schulze proportional ranking method can be
described as follows:
Suppose place 1 to (n-1) have already been
filled. Suppose A(i) (with i = 1,...,(n-1))
is the candidate of place i.
Suppose we want to fill the n-th place.
Suppose x,y are two hopeful candidates. Then
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] is the largest possible
value such that the electorate can be divided
into n+1 disjoint parts T(1),...,T(n+1) such that
1. For all i := 1,...,n: |T(i)| = H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
2. For all i := 1,...,(n-1): Every voter in T(i)
prefers candidate A(i) to candidate y.
3. Every voter in T(n) prefers candidate x
to candidate y.
Apply the Schulze single-winner election method
to the matrix d[x,y] := H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
The winner gets the n-th place.
***
The best way to understand the Schulze proportional
ranking method is to investigate the properties of
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]. For example:
a. Suppose x and y are the only hopeful candidates.
Suppose N is the number of voters.
Suppose Droop proportionality for n seats requires
that x must be elected and that y must not be
elected, then we get H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] N/(n+1)
and H[A(1),...,A(n-1),y,x] N/(n+1), and, therefore,
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] H[A(1),...,A(n-1),y,x].
This guarantees that the Schulze proportional
ranking method satisfies the proportionality
criterion for the top-down approach to create
party lists.
b. Adding or removing another hopeful candidate z
does not change H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
c. H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] is monotonic. That means:
Ranking candidate x higher cannot decrease
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]. Ranking candidate x
lower cannot increase H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
Ranking candidate y higher cannot increase
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]. Ranking candidate y
lower cannot decrease H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
d. H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] depends only on which
candidates of {A(1),...,A(n-1),x} the individual
voter prefers to candidate y, but it does not
depend on the order in which this voter prefers
these candidates to candidate y.
This guarantees that my method is not needlessly
vulnerable to Hylland free riding. In my paper
(http://m-schulze.webhop.net/schulze2.pdf), I argue
that other STV methods are needlessly vulnerable to
Hylland free riding, because the result depends on
the order in which the individual voter prefers
strong winners. In my paper, I argue that voters,
who understand STV well, know that it is a useful
strategy to give candidates, who are certain of
election, an insincerely low ranking. I argue
that, therefore, the order in which the individual
voter prefers strong winners doesn't contain any
information about the opinion of this voter, but
only information about how clever this voter is in
identifying strong winners. Therefore, the result
should not depend on the order in which the
individual voter prefers strong winners.
Markus Schulze
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Markus Schulze, dear readers,
The example below is intriguing. But I am afraid I fail to understand
this formulation of Schulze's proportional ranking.
I would be grateful if M. Schulze or someone else, could give an
example, which could help me get it.
Specifically, I didn't understand what H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] is. Is
it a function, H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]=min(cardinality of T(i),
0=i=n+1 plus other criteria)?, I didn't get the properties of
T(n+1). Why are there n+1 partitions of the electorate and not only n?
Are hopefuls x. y two members of the set of all hopefuls? I guess yes.
Some reference to the definitions in the paper could be useful.
Thank you for you kind help.
Best regards
Peter Zbornik
2010/5/6, Markus Schulze markus.schu...@alumni.tu-berlin.de:
Dear Peter Zbornik,
in the scientific literature, candidates, who
have not yet been elected, are sometimes called
hopeful.
***
The Schulze proportional ranking method can be
described as follows:
Suppose place 1 to (n-1) have already been
filled. Suppose A(i) (with i = 1,...,(n-1))
is the candidate of place i.
Suppose we want to fill the n-th place.
Suppose x,y are two hopeful candidates. Then
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] is the largest possible
value such that the electorate can be divided
into n+1 disjoint parts T(1),...,T(n+1) such that
1. For all i := 1,...,n: |T(i)| = H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
2. For all i := 1,...,(n-1): Every voter in T(i)
prefers candidate A(i) to candidate y.
3. Every voter in T(n) prefers candidate x
to candidate y.
Apply the Schulze single-winner election method
to the matrix d[x,y] := H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
The winner gets the n-th place.
***
The best way to understand the Schulze proportional
ranking method is to investigate the properties of
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]. For example:
a. Suppose x and y are the only hopeful candidates.
Suppose N is the number of voters.
Suppose Droop proportionality for n seats requires
that x must be elected and that y must not be
elected, then we get H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] N/(n+1)
and H[A(1),...,A(n-1),y,x] N/(n+1), and, therefore,
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] H[A(1),...,A(n-1),y,x].
This guarantees that the Schulze proportional
ranking method satisfies the proportionality
criterion for the top-down approach to create
party lists.
b. Adding or removing another hopeful candidate z
does not change H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
c. H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] is monotonic. That means:
Ranking candidate x higher cannot decrease
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]. Ranking candidate x
lower cannot increase H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
Ranking candidate y higher cannot increase
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]. Ranking candidate y
lower cannot decrease H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
d. H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] depends only on which
candidates of {A(1),...,A(n-1),x} the individual
voter prefers to candidate y, but it does not
depend on the order in which this voter prefers
these candidates to candidate y.
This guarantees that my method is not needlessly
vulnerable to Hylland free riding. In my paper
(http://m-schulze.webhop.net/schulze2.pdf), I argue
that other STV methods are needlessly vulnerable to
Hylland free riding, because the result depends on
the order in which the individual voter prefers
strong winners. In my paper, I argue that voters,
who understand STV well, know that it is a useful
strategy to give candidates, who are certain of
election, an insincerely low ranking. I argue
that, therefore, the order in which the individual
voter prefers strong winners doesn't contain any
information about the opinion of this voter, but
only information about how clever this voter is in
identifying strong winners. Therefore, the result
should not depend on the order in which the
individual voter prefers strong winners.
Markus Schulze
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
--
Odesláno z mobilního zařízení
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Peter Zbornik,
I wrote (6 May 2010):
The Schulze proportional ranking method can be
described as follows:
Suppose place 1 to (n-1) have already been
filled. Suppose A(i) (with i = 1,...,(n-1))
is the candidate of place i.
Suppose we want to fill the n-th place.
Suppose x,y are two hopeful candidates. Then
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] is the largest possible
value such that the electorate can be divided
into n+1 disjoint parts T(1),...,T(n+1) such that
1. For all i := 1,...,n: |T(i)| = H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
2. For all i := 1,...,(n-1): Every voter in T(i)
prefers candidate A(i) to candidate y.
3. Every voter in T(n) prefers candidate x
to candidate y.
Apply the Schulze single-winner election method
to the matrix d[x,y] := H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
The winner gets the n-th place.
You wrote (6 May 2010):
The example below is intriguing. But I am afraid I fail
to understand this formulation of Schulze's proportional
ranking. I would be grateful if M. Schulze or someone
else, could give an example, which could help me get it.
Specifically, I didn't understand what H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]
is. Is it a function, H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]=
min(cardinality of T(i), 0=i=n+1 plus other criteria)?,
I didn't get the properties of T(n+1). Why are there n+1
partitions of the electorate and not only n?
H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] is a real number. My mail above is
supposed to be a definition for H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y].
There are n+1 partitions because there can also be
some voters who prefer candidate y to every candidate
in {A(1),...,A(n-1),x}. The voters in T(n+1) are those
who prefer candidate y to every candidate in
{A(1),...,A(n-1),x}.
Markus Schulze
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
2010/5/6 Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com: Dear Markus Schulze, dear readers, The example below is intriguing. But I am afraid I fail to understand this formulation of Schulze's proportional ranking. I would be grateful if M. Schulze or someone else, could give an example, which could help me get it. Specifically, I didn't understand what H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y] is. Is it a function, H[A(1),...,A(n-1),x,y]=min(cardinality of T(i), 0=i=n+1 plus other criteria)?, I didn't get the properties of T(n+1). Why are there n+1 partitions of the electorate and not only n? Are hopefuls x. y two members of the set of all hopefuls? I guess yes. Some reference to the definitions in the paper could be useful. Thank you for you kind help. H is the number of members in the smallest partition. When comparing candidate x to candidate y, there are n-1 candidates who have already been elected. candidate 1: called A(1) candidate 2: called A(2) ... candidate n-1: called A(n-1) You must then split the voters up into n groups. The voters in group 1 must prefer candidate 1 to candidate y The voters in group 2 must prefer candidate 2 to candidate y (and so on) The voters in group n-1 must prefer candidate (n-1) to candidate y Finally, the voters in group n must prefer candidate x to candidate y Voters who prefer candidate y to all others cannot be placed in any group. You then arrange the voters so that the smallest group has as many members as possible. There is no point in putting all the voters in one group, as then the other groups will be smaller and it is only the smallest group size that matters. When you have done that, you look at size of the smallest group. The number of members in that group is taken as the votes for x is preferred to y. Assume that is 600 votes. You then repeat the process but with x and y swapped. The number of members in the smallest group is taken as the votes for y is preferred to x. Assume that is 700 votes. Under those assumptions, y beats x by 700 votes to 600. You then repeat for every possible pair and elect the Schulze winner. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Raph Frank wrote: On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 12:08 AM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: (I note that Raph Frank proposed also an approach where the election of the last representative would be free of these sex related requirements. That is one way of relieving the proportionality related problems since at least the last choice that often distorts proportionality the most can be done quite freely. I'm not sure how big the improvement would be. There may be also other more sophisticated approaches as noted above.) The approach is to add 1 to the requirements, so the freedom can be given in the last step. I was thinking of quotas and ensuring that it is actually worth voting for candidates. If a candidate gets in with 60% of a quota due to gender restrictions, then the principle of PR-STV would seem to require an adjustment to the quota. The quota would in effect be to low for all the other candidates. Maybe there should be a different quota for men and women. You could initially set it to the same for each. If there ends up being more men than women, then the quota for women could be decreased, and the one for men increased (or vice versa). This could be done iteratively (maybe like Meek's method) until the balance requirement is just barely met. This makes me think of my own M-Set Webster (monotone divisor-based) method. In it, at least as by my reference implementation, it would be easy to set that kind of constraint. The method ordinarily starts with the set of all councils and goes through at least this many of that coalition for different solid coalitions to get a certain number of candidate councils, which are then winnowed down to a single one in the margins phase. One might add the additional constraints in two ways. The first would be to add new coalitions of all-women and all-men, having a fixed (not divisor-dependent) criterion of at least this many for each. The second would be to start with only the permitted councils (i.e. those that satisfy the constraints) instead of all possible ones. The outcome would be the same. I am not sure if that method would be monotone, however, as the margins phase might consider jumps to inadmissible councils. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On May 5, 2010, at 1:36 PM, Markus Schulze wrote: Dear Juho, I wrote (4 May 2010): This is my proposal: --Use the Schulze proportional ranking method. --The top-ranked candidate becomes the president. --The second-ranked candidate becomes the vice president. --If the first two candidates happen to be male, then, when you calculate the third-ranked candidate, restrict your considerations to female candidates. If the first two candidates happen to be female, then, when you calculate the third-ranked candidate, restrict your considerations to male candidates. The third-ranked candidate becomes the 2nd vice president. --The fourth-ranked candidate becomes the 3rd vice president. --The fifth-ranked candidate becomes the 4th vice president. --If 4 of the already elected candidates happen to be male, then, when you calculate the sixth-ranked candidate, restrict your considerations to female candidates. If 4 of the already elected candidates happen to be female, then, when you calculate the sixth-ranked candidate, restrict your considerations to male candidates. The sixth-ranked candidate becomes the 5th vice president. --The seventh-ranked candidate becomes the 6th vice president. You wrote (5 May 2010): In the description of Markus Schulze there were two steps where the male/female proportionality was handled. That approach works if there are separate requirements for the set of three first (vice)presidents and the rest of the council members. My understanding is that in the Czech Green Party there are no such requirements on the presidents. In that situation it may be better to push the forced male/female election to the end of the list. I prefer my proposal because of two reasons. First: In my proposal, the fourth and the fifth candidate reduce the distortion of proportionality that might be caused by the specific choice of the third candidate. The seventh candidate reduces the distortion of proportionality that might be caused by the specific choice of the sixth candidate. In your proposal, there are no candidates who reduce the distortion of proportionality that might be caused by the gender requirements. In all the proposed serial election based methods the later representatives do balance the imbalances caused by the earlier choices. The most crucial balancing move is the last seat since that reslt will not be fixed any more (Raph Frank addressed this problem in his proposal). The last seat (or two if a bigger fix is needed) can fix more or less well all the earlier imbalanced decisions. If we assume that there are many enough male and female candidates left at the end of the race then the need to balance both political proportionality and male/female proportionality at the last step is not much more difficult that balancing the political proportionality only. Another reason why I wanted to avoid making the male/female balancing decisions at the beginning of the process is that the first elected seats are more critical/important than the others. I understood that Peter Zbornik wanted to guarantee that the president will be elected from clean table with no additional restrictions like limiting the choice to the already elected council members. For this reason probably we should also avoid distorting the election of the president with the male/female rules. For similar but milder reasons also the second vice president could be elected so that the most preferred (proportional) candidate wins, and the male/female questions could be solved when electing the regular council members. Pushing the male/female decisions to the end also guarantees in general that the most liked candidates will be elected. It is possible for example that the third representative is clearly the most liked candidate of the third largest grouping (or the third most liked candidate in general). The male/female rule at the third position could force this candidate (X) to be replaced with a much less liked candidate (Y) of opposite sex. And if Y is ideologically close to X then that choice could reduce the support of X in the counting process so much that X will not be elected in the council at all. Use of the male/female rules at fixed positions in the list may thus be harmful in the sense that best candidates will not be elected. Also the political proportionality may suffer if some obvious candidates (maybe from some well defined quota size separate grouping) are not elected. If we want to move the male/female decisions up from the last seats then for example the Meek and two quotas based solution (that Raph Frank proposed) would give better (less violent) results than using fixed positions on the list to fix the male/female proportionality. When we compare that Meek based approach to the end of list approach, the Meek approach is less violent in its choices (if the change occurs at the third position, then the male and female
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Markus Schulze, thank you for your proposal. It seems that your method is the one, which fulfills the requirements I set up for the Green party council elections the closest at the moment. Its drawbacks is however, that it is a new, complex method with only limited testing on data an no usage in real life. I would indeed like to include the top-down proportional ranking approach as a requirement for council elections. The bottom-up approach has never been used for single-winner elections as far as I know, and I don't like that the top-most winner may not be the president fulfilling the majority rule. Due to the complexity of the method and the minimum of descriptions for the lay-man, I am not sure that Schulze proprtional ranking necessarily is the best top-down method to propose to the green party, even though I like it. A simpler top-down STV approach is discussed in: http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE9/P5.HTM and in http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE12/P1.HTM (references by Schulze in http://m-schulze.webhop.net/schulze2.pdf). What is the advantages of Schulze proportional ranking to the simpler top down STV modified method described in http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE9/P5.HTM? Otten ends his second article by stating: I do not at this point advocate that a generalised Condorcet method is adopted. However, I think the idea has its merits, and I do believe the question of ordering demands further consideration. While a single rule may not be appropriate for all circumstances, it should be possible to narrow the field somewhat from that in section 5. How would you respond to Ottens remark above, which stems from the fact (?) that Condorcet methods (and thus Schulze proportional ranking) violate of the principle, that that later preferences should not be allowed to count against earlier ones? QUOTAS: Quota rules are always intrusive on representative democracy, and their application is in the end a political question. The gender-quota feature you propose is the most natural, as it gives women representation in the top three places in the council and as it is similar to the party list ordering requirement. However this representation is not required in our statutes, thus it is strictly not needed. I will probably recommend your approach to the gender quota, if I will recommend using Schulze proportional orderings. However, I may face the opinion that we need to require only two women in the council, without any specific ordering and with a minimum impact on the proportionality of the top P and VP positions and on the council proportionality in general. In this situation, what 2nd best solution would you propose and why? PROPORTIONAL ORDERINGS: I have some questions about the Schulze proportional ordering ( http://m-schulze.webhop.net/schulze2.pdf). I would like to read your full paper (maybe I find time in the weekend), but a more detailed overview of the method would be a nice start. Maybe some reading instructions could help me and other readers. In your comparison with Schulze STV, did your method ever differ by more than one council member? Schulze proportional ranking for dummies - first try by a dummy: If I understood it correctly, it finds the Condorcet extention (for instance ax) from the condorcet winner (for instance a) by selecting the candidate x which in the committee ax will have the strongest path. I.e. the committee ax is the committee, which has the highest preferences among the voters and simultaneously includes the president a. Please correct me if this is not a correct description of the method. Properties of the proportional ranking: We thus have a promising, alfa-tested method with a natural appeal (vote management, condorcet winner, proportional orderings), which builds upon a good, tried and tested single-winner method in a natural way. Now we need to understand it and sell it to the masses or at least to the green party. What properties does this method fulfil (by properties I mean for instance something like WIHFR, Schwartz or Smith criterions)? How is proportionality measured in the Schulze proportional ranking method? By proportional completion? In other words how do we know that the method doesn't behave chaotically or unpredictive? How does Schulze proportional ranking protect against vote management? What is the connection to Schulze STV, if any? Schulze proportional ranking - a brief introduction: So far I have understood that the section 6 of your paper is not sufficient for a full understanding the method and that your paper is really deep. Some reading instructions could help. What other sections in the paper do you recommend to read for a good understanding of the Schulze proportional ranking method (for instance some parts of section 5 about Schulze STV)? A wikipedia article on Schulze proportional ranking for dummies might also be of use (I guess anyone with a good understanding of the method could do the dummies explanation). OK, so I
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 9:19 PM, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com wrote: What is the advantages of Schulze proportional ranking to the simpler top down STV modified method described in http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE9/P5.HTM? The first problem with this one is that it will elect the President is the IRV winner. This gets you a non-centerist President. Even if you use this proposal, I would strongly recommend electing the President with a condorcet compliant method for the first ranking position and the proceed to the next steps. The general problem is that protecting a candidate from exclusion can break the proportionality process. In fact, a candidate who reaches the quota could be defeated by a candidate on a fraction of the quota. From the link: In exceptional circumstances it is possible that two candidates, not previously elected may exceed the quota in the same stage. For example: 16: LCR 17: YLCR 30: CLR 37: RLC Rank Number 1 (IRV count): Round 1: L: 16 Y: 17 C: 30 R: 37 L is eliminated, all votes go to C Round 2 L: 0 Y: 17 C: 46 (+16) R: 37 Y is eliminated and all voted go to C C wins. Rank Number 2 Round 1: L: 16 Y: 17 C: 30 R: 37 Quota is 34 R is elected with a surplus of 3, goes to L Round 2: L: 19 (+3) Y: 17 C: 30 R: 34* Y is eliminated, 17 goes to L Round 3: L: 36* (+17) Y: 0 C: 30 R: 34* Now both L and R have quotas, so they are entitled to the 2 seats. However, C won in the first round, so C must be one of the 2 elected. The rules would say that as soon as R was declared elected in round 1, no further rounds would be attempted. However, the same problem presumably applies to more complex methods. Otten ends his second article by stating: I do not at this point advocate that a generalised Condorcet method is adopted. However, I think the idea has its merits, and I do believe the question of ordering demands further consideration. While a single rule may not be appropriate for all circumstances, it should be possible to narrow the field somewhat from that in section 5. I think his second proposal is similar to Schule's ranking method. It also naturally elects the condorcet winner in the first round. However, it represents more counting. How would you respond to Ottens remark above, which stems from the fact (?) that Condorcet methods (and thus Schulze proportional ranking) violate of the principle, that that later preferences should not be allowed to count against earlier ones? This is a basic criterion that IRV and PR-STV meet. It is normally called Later No Harm. It says that if you vote ABCD. the method will not even look at your lower preferences unless you higher preferences have been elected or eliminated. So, while A still has a chance of winning, your full vote strength goes to A. This might get A elected, but also, by the time your vote gets to B, it might be to late. This is like digging your heels in. One side says that they want their candidate and will accept no other, and the other says the same. They then vote, and the side which ends up slight bigger is happy, as they get their candidate, but the other side is disappointed. However, if they compromised and accepted a candidate that both sides agree is good, rather than refusing to negotiate, then the winner would have been acceptable to both sides, even if not their first choice. I think Later No Harm is actually a sign of potential problems with a methods rather than a positive thing. A wikipedia article on Schulze proportional ranking for dummies might also be of use (I guess anyone with a good understanding of the method could do the dummies explanation). There is one on the standard Schulze-STV method. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulze_STV This explains how to compare 2 councils. I think it is easier to understand than the paper. However, it potentially is not as accurate. Maybe Markus Schulze can comment on its accuracy or otherwise. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
a Condorcet winner can be a candidate that has the fewest first preferences. True in Condorcet, though not expected to happen often. Compared with each other candidate, the CW must win in each such pair. Each such can have first preference over the CW as seen by SOME voters. IRV, looking only at first preferences while deciding which to discard, will discard such a CW. It is IRV's discarding without looking at all that the voters vote that makes many of us desire to discard IRV. Dave Ketchum On May 5, 2010, at 8:09 PM, Terry Bouricius wrote: Peter Z., Ralph wrote snip The first problem with this one is that it will elect the President is the IRV winner. This gets you a non-centerist President. Even if you use this proposal, I would strongly recommend electing the President with a condorcet compliant method for the first ranking position and the proceed to the next steps. snip Clarification...IRV does not get you a non-centrist winner. IRV elects the centrist Condorcet winner in most scenarios, though it does not assure it in certain scenarios. A weak Condorcet winner (a candidate with relatively few first preferences) can lose under IRV...But that may or may not be considered desirable by the Czech Green Party, depending partly on the function of President. It is important to understand that a Condorcet winner can be a candidate that has the fewest first preferences...A weak Condorcet winner may be a centrist or merely a pleasant person who nobody knows much about and has avoided making any enemies. If the President is primarily a meeting facilitator, this may be fine. If the President is the public face of the party, a more charismatic leader (who may have made some enemies within the party) might (or might not) be preferable. This list has a lot of people who are sold on the priority of the Condorcet criterion, but there are other perspectives to consider. Terry Bouricius Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 10:16 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm km-el...@broadpark.no wrote: Peter Zbornik wrote: Dear all, I am sending a post scriptum to the email below. 1. The conservative method is only interesting if, the unambiguously pre-elected president and vice president(s) are not in the set of proportionally (for instance STV) elected council members. 2. If the unambiguously elected president and vice president(s) is in the set of proportionally (for instance STV) elected council members, then I guess the conservative method would include the optimal method as a special case (the optimal method was where the president and vice presidents are elected from the proportionally elected council members). 3. The number of pre-elected vice presidents in point 1 above can be zero. The president is always unambiguously pre-elected. 4. For completeness, I would like to add one additional requirement, which I think can be resolved after the seletion of a good voting procedure. Requirement: The selected council must contain at least X members of each sex (gender-equality rule). X is specified before each election. This gender rule is used in our organization today. A simple way of doing this, if the council size (after president and VPs have been elected) is even, is to have two elections, each of a council size equal to half the assembly. Then, for the first, only elect women, and for the second, only elect men. Use the same ballots, but remove candidates of the sex you don't want. I am affraid that this is not possible. First we have mostly odd-numbered council sizes, and secondly the gender rule does not require that half of the men should be men and the other half women. Our current gender rule goes as following: for every three members of the body, there has to be one person of each sex. A five member council thus has to have one woman and one man. For seven members it is two men and two women. Methods like Schulze STV work by comparing possible councils to determine which are best. Thus, it may be possible to limit them to only consider balanced councils. I'm not sure how to do this in ordinary STV, however, since it doesn't work that way, and in any case, this would be untested. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
This is a good approach in the category of simple (only one method used) proportional ranking based methods. Use of proportional ranking reduces the proportionality of the council and the set of n presidents a bit but not much. The election of the president can be seen to happen before the election of the council. Same ballots are used for all elections. = Good for simplicity. Some small restrictions if the election criteria for P are different from the criteria of VPs and those of the council members. The last vice president positions are probably not needed. Their order will probably become public but should maybe not be emphasized. Markus Schulze of course recommends a Schulze method based approach but also any other good Condorcet method could be used as the basis. The Schulze family of methods has the benefit that it is quite well documented and the basic single winner Schulze method is also already used in some organizations. Probably Markus Schulze will also provide assistance in the promotion of the methods and related software. All these variants are however very similar so the argumentation and software is pretty similar in all cases. I support this approach as one proposal in the category of simple proportional ranking based methods. No need to limit to the Schulze method based approach only but to allow also other base methods to be used (e.g. Ranked Pairs, minmax(margins)). Also other categories or maybe variants of this one should/could be discussed and proposed as alternative approaches. Juho On May 4, 2010, at 3:42 PM, Markus Schulze wrote: Dear Peter Zbornik, this is my proposal: --Use the Schulze proportional ranking method. --The top-ranked candidate becomes the president. --The second-ranked candidate becomes the vice president. --If the first two candidates happen to be male, then, when you calculate the third-ranked candidate, restrict your considerations to female candidates. If the first two candidates happen to be female, then, when you calculate the third-ranked candidate, restrict your considerations to male candidates. The third-ranked candidate becomes the 2nd vice president. --The fourth-ranked candidate becomes the 3rd vice president. --The fifth-ranked candidate becomes the 4th vice president. --If 4 of the already elected candidates happen to be male, then, when you calculate the sixth-ranked candidate, restrict your considerations to female candidates. If 4 of the already elected candidates happen to be female, then, when you calculate the sixth-ranked candidate, restrict your considerations to male candidates. The sixth-ranked candidate becomes the 5th vice president. --The seventh-ranked candidate becomes the 6th vice president. Markus Schulze Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
If you are looking for a proportional Condorcet method, I will also recommend the proportional election method that I developed. It is not STV-like, but it achieves proportionality when there are blocs of voters. It has the added advantage that it is already built into a running Internet voting system, CIVS. This algorithm has been used for many online polls and has been a success. The code of CIVS is publicly available. For more information about the method, see: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs/proportional.html By the way, CIVS has recently acquired support for internationalization. It would be easy to construct a Czech instance if someone were willing to translate approximately 250 sentences from English to Czech. There is, for example, a Hungarian version (see http://www.cs.cornell.edu/w8/~andru/civs-test/index.html.hu, translated by Árpád Magosányi). I am in the market for help translating to other languages. Cheers, -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Tue, May 4, 2010 at 8:12 AM, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com wrote: I am affraid that this is not possible. First we have mostly odd-numbered council sizes, and secondly the gender rule does not require that half of the men should be men and the other half women. Our current gender rule goes as following: for every three members of the body, there has to be one person of each sex. A five member council thus has to have one woman and one man. For seven members it is two men and two women. For elimination based PR-STV, I think my suggestion would be the most reasonable. - Set the threshold at one larger than the required number - protect from elimination members of a gender if elimination would reduce their number below the threshold - prohibit from election members of a gender if that election would leave less than a threshold for the other gender - on the last round, remove remove the restrictions In a 5 person council, that means that there must be at least 1 man and 1 woman. If the candidates were Men: M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 and Women W1 W2 W3 then an election might go something like Round 1 M1: 20 M2: 15 M3: 15 M4: 10 M5: 10 W1: 10 W2: 8 W3: 12 Total: 100 Quota: 17 M1 gets elected + 3 are distributed Round 2 M1: 17* M2: 16 (+1) M3: 15 M4: 10 M5: 11 (+1) W1: 11 (+1) W2: 8 W3: 12 W2 is lowest, so is eliminated, +8 are distributed Round 3 M1: 17* M2: 16 M3: 15 M4: 13 (+3) M5: 14 (+3) W1: 13 (+2) W2: 0 W3: 12 W3 is lowest. However, eliminating W3 would reduce the number of women below 2, so the lowest man is eliminated. M4 is eliminated + 13 are distributed Round 4 M1: 17* M2: 17 (+1) M3: 17 (+2) M4: 0 M5: 16 (+2) W1: 17 (+4) W2: 0 W3: 16 (+4) M2, M3 and W1 all meet the quota, so all are elected, but no surplus is distributed. Round 5 M1: 17* M2: 17* M3: 17* M4: 0 M5: 16 W1: 17* W2: 0 W3: 16 If this had been a previous round, W3 would be protected from elimination, as there are only 2 women left. However, since this is the last round, (only 1 seat left to fill and 2 candidates for the seat), the restriction is lifted. Both W3 and M5 have 16 votes, so a tie break rule (say coin toss), would decide which one is eliminated. If M5 is eliminated, then the results are: M1+M2+M3+W1+W3 if W3 is eliminated, then the results are M1+M2+M3+M5+W1 In both cases, the requirement for at least 1 man and 1 woman is met. Methods like Schulze STV work by comparing possible councils to determine which are best. Thus, it may be possible to limit them to only consider balanced councils. I'm not sure how to do this in ordinary STV, however, since it doesn't work that way, and in any case, this would be untested. Yes, you can. The software would just need to be updated. A council with 5 men and 0 women would be considered to lose to a council of 4 men and 1 woman. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Some more comments on how the male/female requirements could be handled. In the description of Markus Schulze (see below) there were two steps where the male/female proportionality was handled. That approach works if there are separate requirements for the set of three first (vice)presidents and the rest of the council members. My understanding is that in the Czech Green Party there are no such requirements on the presidents. In that situation it may be better to push the forced male/ female election to the end of the list. It may be better to allocate the resulting problems in the last seats and elect the first seats in a more optimal way. It could also be a problem if we for example know what the three largest groupings that are likely to get the three first seats are. In that situation the idea of forcing the third grouping to always be the one that will be forced (if needed) not to elect their best candidate doesn't sound fair. Towards the end of the list the level of randomness is higher and the groupings that get those last seats may be happier to get them and never mind if the representative is male or female. This style of ensuring that appropriate number of male/female candidates will be elected is not optimal. It is for example possible that the fourth elected representative has an alternative of other sex that is about as popular as the elected president. In that case it could make sense to elect that alternative and in that way avoid the need to do some more violent changes later on the list. This approach of pushing the forced decisions towards the end of the list is however a working although somewhat ad hoc solution. More accurate solutions may be much more complex, e.g. ones that compare all possible sets of representatives and then pick the one that distorts proportionality with respect to voter preferences and sex related proportionality as little as possible. What would be a better but still simple approach? If one pushes the forced elections towards the end of the list the method could look as follows. --Use a Condorcet based proportional ranking method. --The top-ranked candidate becomes the president. --The second-ranked candidate becomes the first vice president. (optional step) --The third-ranked candidate becomes the second vice president. (optional step) --Also the following n candidates will become members of the council. --If at some point in the process all the remaining representatives must be male or female to make sure that the number of male/female candidates will meet the requirements, then restrict the consideration to male or female candidates only. This approach is thus not an optimal way to handle the sex requirements but maybe good enough and at least a simple one. (I note that Raph Frank proposed also an approach where the election of the last representative would be free of these sex related requirements. That is one way of relieving the proportionality related problems since at least the last choice that often distorts proportionality the most can be done quite freely. I'm not sure how big the improvement would be. There may be also other more sophisticated approaches as noted above.) Juho On May 4, 2010, at 5:03 PM, Juho wrote: This is a good approach in the category of simple (only one method used) proportional ranking based methods. Use of proportional ranking reduces the proportionality of the council and the set of n presidents a bit but not much. The election of the president can be seen to happen before the election of the council. Same ballots are used for all elections. = Good for simplicity. Some small restrictions if the election criteria for P are different from the criteria of VPs and those of the council members. The last vice president positions are probably not needed. Their order will probably become public but should maybe not be emphasized. Markus Schulze of course recommends a Schulze method based approach but also any other good Condorcet method could be used as the basis. The Schulze family of methods has the benefit that it is quite well documented and the basic single winner Schulze method is also already used in some organizations. Probably Markus Schulze will also provide assistance in the promotion of the methods and related software. All these variants are however very similar so the argumentation and software is pretty similar in all cases. I support this approach as one proposal in the category of simple proportional ranking based methods. No need to limit to the Schulze method based approach only but to allow also other base methods to be used (e.g. Ranked Pairs, minmax(margins)). Also other categories or maybe variants of this one should/could be discussed and proposed as alternative approaches. Juho On May 4, 2010, at 3:42 PM, Markus Schulze wrote: Dear Peter Zbornik,
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear all, I am sending a post scriptum to the email below. 1. The conservative method is only interesting if, the unambiguously pre-elected president and vice president(s) are not in the set of proportionally (for instance STV) elected council members. 2. If the unambiguously elected president and vice president(s) is in the set of proportionally (for instance STV) elected council members, then I guess the conservative method would include the optimal method as a special case (the optimal method was where the president and vice presidents are elected from the proportionally elected council members). 3. The number of pre-elected vice presidents in point 1 above can be zero. The president is always unambiguously pre-elected. 4. For completeness, I would like to add one additional requirement, which I think can be resolved after the seletion of a good voting procedure. Requirement: The selected council must contain at least X members of each sex (gender-equality rule). X is specified before each election. This gender rule is used in our organization today. Best regards Peter Zborník 2010/5/3 Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com Dear all, if the single-winner president or the proportionally elected VPs sometimes are not a member of the set of proportionally elected council members (which is likely), then I would also like to ask you for a proposal on the last conservative method, thus it would not be optional, as I wrote below. Thus, in all I ask you for three proposals. Motivation: I can imagine that there could be a method, which elected the rest of the council members after the the president and some or all vice presidents have been elected using proportional ranking (see the proposal of Markus Schulze for an example). Such an election method would sacrifice a proportionality in the council in order to elect the president unambigously and to achieve proportionality between the president and some of the vice presidents (at least the 1st VP). The election of the rest of the council members would be done to maximize the proportionality of the elected council, maybe by using a modified version of STV, where the pre-elected president and vice presidents would be considered elected to the council at the start of the STV election, using the same ballots as for the proportional ranking election. Less important VPs (like for instance a fourth VP), would be elected from the council. Thus, the rest of the council members would be elected in such a way, that the council would be as much proportional as possible given the pre-elected P and VPs. The advantage of this method is, that there would be no ambiguity relating to the legitimacy of the elected president and the most important VPs. What methods would you recommend for this scenario? Would there be a software that could be able to handle this problem (possibly after some slight modification)? I think the scenario above (i.e.first proportional ordering of P and some VPs, then balancing election of the rest of the council to achieve proportionality in the council and finally possibly electing some less important VPs from the elected council) is the variant which would come closest to the way the elections are done in our party today, while attaining proportionality. Right now the scenario above seems to be the optimal solution, which I would like propose to the party. It wasn't easy to arrive to the model above, but now I think the problem is well-defined. Best regards Peter Zbornik 2010/4/29, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com: On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 2:45 AM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: On Apr 28, 2010, at 9:19 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hello, I have some catching up to do here. I need to think more about some of the different methods and the proposals I have gotten. Some of the methods are new to me. As I am a layman it takes time to understand them. Condorcet methods have not been used in politics yet, I think. Are there by any chance other methods to elect centrist presidents? The most common single-winner methods (plurality, top-two runoff, IRV) are known not to be centrist oriented. For example in the quite common set-up where we have two extremists and one centrist with slightly less support they all elect one of the extremists. Approval and Condorcet are more centrist oriented. They are both also old and well tested methods although they have not been widely used in public political elections. One problem with Approval (that was not mentioned yet) is the limited expressive power of the Approval vote and resulting problems in choosing the right strategy, e.g. when there are three leading candidates and one should approve either one or two of them. That is problematic e.g when left wing has 2 candidates and is is bigger than right wing that has 1 candidate. (In Approval voters are generally assumed to vote
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On May 3, 2010, at 3:51 AM, Peter Zbornik wrote: Dear all, if the single-winner president or the proportionally elected VPs sometimes are not a member of the set of proportionally elected council members (which is likely), Possible but maybe not very common. then I would also like to ask you for a proposal on the last conservative method, thus it would not be optional, as I wrote below. Thus, in all I ask you for three proposals. Motivation: I can imagine that there could be a method, which elected the rest of the council members after the the president and some or all vice presidents have been elected using proportional ranking (see the proposal of Markus Schulze for an example). Word after sounds a bit dangerous because of strategic voting. Voters that have gotten their representatives as president and vice president may get a second set of representatives if the election of the rest of the council is independent of the election of the presidents. In order to maintain good proportionality in the full council one could reverse the order of the elections (council first) and limit the choice of the presidents to the council members, or use the same ballots to elect both presidents and the council. (I note that later on you seem to propose using the same ballots in both elections.) If term conservative means already widely used and tested in politics then maybe proportional ranking based methods fall outside of this category. But if you allow some fresh winds then such locking methods could be used. Since the first vice president seems to be a more important position than the second and later vice presidents similar locking could be used throughout the hierarchical chain of presidents. In my first proposal I locked only the president and let the vice presidents be equal. Proportional ranking (in methods that aim at electing good compromise candidates first) would do the same trick to all vice president positions. The other council seats are equal, so proportional ranking is not useful there. But since the distorting effect of such compromise oriented proportional ranking may be considered just noise in the last seats it is not impossible to use proportional ranking to elect all the presidents and council members at one go. (What I mean by distorting effect is that if you have left, centre and right, and centre has less first place support than the other two, then a good approach may be to elect C if one elects only one representative. But if one elects two then one could pick L and R (to be proportional). This means that the proportional ranking (or locking) approach always makes a mistake, either in the case of one or two representatives. But in the case of electing the presidents it may be well justified to elect C as president (the most important job, expected to represent all sections of the party) and then elect either L or R as the first vice president. And the other one as third. Fair enough although the team of two is not proportional.) Such an election method would sacrifice a proportionality in the council in order to elect the president unambigously and to achieve proportionality between the president and some of the vice presidents (at least the 1st VP). The election of the rest of the council members would be done to maximize the proportionality of the elected council, maybe by using a modified version of STV, where the pre-elected president and vice presidents would be considered elected to the council at the start of the STV election, using the same ballots as for the proportional ranking election. Less important VPs (like for instance a fourth VP), would be elected from the council. As noted above, and if you want to emphasize simplicity, using the serial / proportional ranking approach to elect also the council members would not be a big distortion in the proportionality of the whole council. Note also that already electing the president outside of the (otherwise to be) council would mean a minor (and not probable) distortion to the proportionality of the full council. My thinking is thus that if we want to serialize the election of all the P +VPs anyway, then one alternative is to use that same basic method all the way (since the resulting additional distortion will be smaller towards the end of the chain). This kind of a method provides a complete proportional ranking of the elected council members. This is quite unnecessary towards the end of the list, but what is interesting at the beginning of the list is that there is no need to define the exact number of vice presidents since one can just pick as many of them from the chain as needed. Thus, the rest of the council members would be elected in such a way, that the council would be as much proportional as possible given the pre-elected P and VPs. The advantage of this method is, that there would be no ambiguity
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear Raph Frank, you wrote (3 May 2010): For the rest of the council, I think electing them using Schulze-STV with the restriction that only results where the President and VP are members are allowed would give better proportionality. If I understand Peter Zbornik correctly, then he wants a ranking of the members of the council, so that it is clear who the 2nd vice president, the 3rd vice president, the 4th vice president, etc., is. Therefore, I recommend a proportional ranking method for the election of the council. Markus Schulze Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Markus Schulze markus.schu...@alumni.tu-berlin.de wrote: Dear Raph Frank, you wrote (3 May 2010): For the rest of the council, I think electing them using Schulze-STV with the restriction that only results where the President and VP are members are allowed would give better proportionality. If I understand Peter Zbornik correctly, then he wants a ranking of the members of the council, so that it is clear who the 2nd vice president, the 3rd vice president, the 4th vice president, etc., is. Markus Schulze understands me correctly. Therefore, I recommend a proportional ranking method for the election of the council. Markus Schulze Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
2010/5/3 Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk: (What I mean by distorting effect is that if you have left, centre and right, and centre has less first place support than the other two, then a good approach may be to elect C if one elects only one representative. But if one elects two then one could pick L and R (to be proportional). This means that the proportional ranking (or locking) approach always makes a mistake, either in the case of one or two representatives. But in the case of electing the presidents it may be well justified to elect C as president (the most important job, expected to represent all sections of the party) and then elect either L or R as the first vice president. And the other one as third. Fair enough although the team of two is not proportional.) Looking it purely on the number line is like trying to slot in new candidates at each step. For example, assuming that each voter/candidate is scored from 0 to 100 and new candidates are added one at a time. Round 1: The most representative candidate would be placed at 50. Winners: 50 Ideal result: 50 Round 2 The ideal result would be one candidate at 33 and one at 67. However, the winner from round 1must be included. I am going to assume 33 wins the tie-break with 67. Winners: 50, 33 Ideal: 67, 33 Round 3 The ideal would be 25, 50, 75 Since 33 was elected, 75 wins against 25. Winners: 33, 50, 75 Ideal: 25, 50, 75 As you add more members, the differences between ideal and actual is reduced, but it is never eliminated. Also, if there is no need for rankings, then it is better to just elect the remaining candidates proportionally. This kind of a method provides a complete proportional ranking of the elected council members. This is quite unnecessary towards the end of the list, but what is interesting at the beginning of the list is that there is no need to define the exact number of vice presidents since one can just pick as many of them from the chain as needed. Right, if there is a desire for an ordered list and proportionality, then proportional ordering methods are a good idea. However, they do sacrifice some proportionality for being able to rank the candidates. If the requirement of conservative / already used methods (like STV) is not strict, then one could well use some Condorcet method as a basis in the serialization. This might be the simplest. Just elect the council using PR-STV and then rank them in condorcet order. However, that does mean that the condorcet winner isn't guaranteed to be the President. You mentioned also the possibility of additional requirements (in the P.S. mail). It is possible e.g. to elect certain minimum number of males and females. In the serial approach that was discussed above one simple approach would be to just eliminate all remaining male or female candidates at some appropriate in the serial process when all the remaining representatives must be of same sex. So assume that the rules were 8 member council and at least 3 men and at least 3 women. If a 5th man is elected, then all further men are eliminated before the next round. Similarly, if a 5th woman is elected, all remaining women are eliminated. You also need a rule which says that members of a particular gender would be automatically elected. For example, if there is 1 man elected and 2 unelected men remaining, then those 2 men are automatically elected. This could cause strategic effects and problems with quota. It might be better to say that men are protected from elimination if there are only 4 remaining men and likewise only 4 remaining women, except in the last round (when there are 9 remaining candidates). Also, all men or eliminated if 5 of their gender are elected. This guarantees at least 3 of each are elected, which still having the same effective quota for each (except if the 5 elected rule kicks in). Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On May 3, 2010, at 2:07 PM, Raph Frank wrote:
2010/5/3 Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk:
(What I mean by distorting effect is that if you have left,
centre and
right, and centre has less first place support than the other two,
then a
good approach may be to elect C if one elects only one
representative. But
if one elects two then one could pick L and R (to be proportional).
This
means that the proportional ranking (or locking) approach always
makes a
mistake, either in the case of one or two representatives. But in
the case
of electing the presidents it may be well justified to elect C as
president
(the most important job, expected to represent all sections of the
party)
and then elect either L or R as the first vice president. And the
other one
as third. Fair enough although the team of two is not
proportional.)
Looking it purely on the number line is like trying to slot in new
candidates at each step.
For example, assuming that each voter/candidate is scored from 0 to
100 and new candidates are added one at a time.
Round 1:
The most representative candidate would be placed at 50.
Winners: 50
Ideal result: 50
Round 2
The ideal result would be one candidate at 33 and one at 67. However,
the winner from round 1must be included.
I am going to assume 33 wins the tie-break with 67.
Winners: 50, 33
Ideal: 67, 33
Round 3
The ideal would be 25, 50, 75
Since 33 was elected, 75 wins against 25.
Winners: 33, 50, 75
Ideal: 25, 50, 75
(An alternative approach to defining the ideal winner sets would be
{50}, {25, 75}, {17, 50, 83} etc., but this is not important in this
example.)
As you add more members, the differences between ideal and actual is
reduced, but it is never eliminated.
Also, if there is no need for rankings, then it is better to just
elect the remaining candidates proportionally.
This kind of a method provides a complete proportional ranking of the
elected council members. This is quite unnecessary towards the end
of the
list, but what is interesting at the beginning of the list is that
there is
no need to define the exact number of vice presidents since one can
just
pick as many of them from the chain as needed.
Right, if there is a desire for an ordered list and proportionality,
then proportional ordering methods are a good idea.
However, they do sacrifice some proportionality for being able to rank
the candidates.
If the requirement of conservative / already used methods (like
STV) is not
strict, then one could well use some Condorcet method as a basis in
the
serialization.
This might be the simplest. Just elect the council using PR-STV and
then rank them in condorcet order.
Yes, using a non-serial proportional method to get the ideally
proportional council and then serialize its members using a serial
proportional method would give ideal proportionality for the council.
(PR-STV is however not ideally proportional but a practical method
that has its own distortions, just like the serial ones have.) This
approach has some other distortions. It may not elect the ideal
president (or vice presidents) since one can only pick one among the
council members. The sets of n first presidents could also be less
proportional than in the case where one can elect the presidents from
the full set of candidates.
We are thus talking about how to best allocate the inevitable small
distortions that we must live with in any case.
The serial approach has the benefit of simplicity if the presidents
will be elected in some serial style anyway. One should also note that
the set of candidates is never ideal, and the border line between last
elected and first not elected candidate may always be a bit violent
with respect to proportionality. This means that to some extent the
additional noise caused by the serial election style (of the full
council) to some extent gets lost in the noise caused by other factors
among the last elected / not elected candidates. We need to estimate
the benefits and problems.
However, that does mean that the condorcet winner isn't guaranteed to
be the President.
You mentioned also the possibility of additional requirements (in
the P.S.
mail). It is possible e.g. to elect certain minimum number of males
and
females. In the serial approach that was discussed above one simple
approach
would be to just eliminate all remaining male or female candidates
at some
appropriate in the serial process when all the remaining
representatives
must be of same sex.
So assume that the rules were 8 member council and at least 3 men and
at least 3 women.
If a 5th man is elected, then all further men are eliminated before
the next round. Similarly, if a 5th woman is elected, all remaining
women are eliminated.
You also need a rule which says that members of a particular gender
would be automatically elected. For example, if there is 1 man
elected and 2 unelected men remaining, then those 2 men are
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On May 3, 2010, at 2:07 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: On Mon, May 3, 2010 at 1:00 PM, Markus Schulze markus.schu...@alumni.tu-berlin.de wrote: Dear Raph Frank, you wrote (3 May 2010): For the rest of the council, I think electing them using Schulze-STV with the restriction that only results where the President and VP are members are allowed would give better proportionality. If I understand Peter Zbornik correctly, then he wants a ranking of the members of the council, so that it is clear who the 2nd vice president, the 3rd vice president, the 4th vice president, etc., is. Markus Schulze understands me correctly. I understood that the VPs should be ranked but that there is no such requirement for the rest of the council. Or are all members of the council considered to be numbered VPs? The use of some proportional ranking method indeed distorts proportionality a bit. But I proposed to study also this one method only approach (as an alternative to best possible optimization of the proportionality of the council) since the resulting method would be simple and the distortion that it causes could be smaller than its benefits. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Peter Zbornik wrote: Dear all, I am sending a post scriptum to the email below. 1. The conservative method is only interesting if, the unambiguously pre-elected president and vice president(s) are not in the set of proportionally (for instance STV) elected council members. 2. If the unambiguously elected president and vice president(s) is in the set of proportionally (for instance STV) elected council members, then I guess the conservative method would include the optimal method as a special case (the optimal method was where the president and vice presidents are elected from the proportionally elected council members). 3. The number of pre-elected vice presidents in point 1 above can be zero. The president is always unambiguously pre-elected. 4. For completeness, I would like to add one additional requirement, which I think can be resolved after the seletion of a good voting procedure. Requirement: The selected council must contain at least X members of each sex (gender-equality rule). X is specified before each election. This gender rule is used in our organization today. A simple way of doing this, if the council size (after president and VPs have been elected) is even, is to have two elections, each of a council size equal to half the assembly. Then, for the first, only elect women, and for the second, only elect men. Use the same ballots, but remove candidates of the sex you don't want. Methods like Schulze STV work by comparing possible councils to determine which are best. Thus, it may be possible to limit them to only consider balanced councils. I'm not sure how to do this in ordinary STV, however, since it doesn't work that way, and in any case, this would be untested. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Dear all, if the single-winner president or the proportionally elected VPs sometimes are not a member of the set of proportionally elected council members (which is likely), then I would also like to ask you for a proposal on the last conservative method, thus it would not be optional, as I wrote below. Thus, in all I ask you for three proposals. Motivation: I can imagine that there could be a method, which elected the rest of the council members after the the president and some or all vice presidents have been elected using proportional ranking (see the proposal of Markus Schulze for an example). Such an election method would sacrifice a proportionality in the council in order to elect the president unambigously and to achieve proportionality between the president and some of the vice presidents (at least the 1st VP). The election of the rest of the council members would be done to maximize the proportionality of the elected council, maybe by using a modified version of STV, where the pre-elected president and vice presidents would be considered elected to the council at the start of the STV election, using the same ballots as for the proportional ranking election. Less important VPs (like for instance a fourth VP), would be elected from the council. Thus, the rest of the council members would be elected in such a way, that the council would be as much proportional as possible given the pre-elected P and VPs. The advantage of this method is, that there would be no ambiguity relating to the legitimacy of the elected president and the most important VPs. What methods would you recommend for this scenario? Would there be a software that could be able to handle this problem (possibly after some slight modification)? I think the scenario above (i.e.first proportional ordering of P and some VPs, then balancing election of the rest of the council to achieve proportionality in the council and finally possibly electing some less important VPs from the elected council) is the variant which would come closest to the way the elections are done in our party today, while attaining proportionality. Right now the scenario above seems to be the optimal solution, which I would like propose to the party. It wasn't easy to arrive to the model above, but now I think the problem is well-defined. Best regards Peter Zbornik 2010/4/29, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com: On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 2:45 AM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: On Apr 28, 2010, at 9:19 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hello, I have some catching up to do here. I need to think more about some of the different methods and the proposals I have gotten. Some of the methods are new to me. As I am a layman it takes time to understand them. Condorcet methods have not been used in politics yet, I think. Are there by any chance other methods to elect centrist presidents? The most common single-winner methods (plurality, top-two runoff, IRV) are known not to be centrist oriented. For example in the quite common set-up where we have two extremists and one centrist with slightly less support they all elect one of the extremists. Approval and Condorcet are more centrist oriented. They are both also old and well tested methods although they have not been widely used in public political elections. One problem with Approval (that was not mentioned yet) is the limited expressive power of the Approval vote and resulting problems in choosing the right strategy, e.g. when there are three leading candidates and one should approve either one or two of them. That is problematic e.g when left wing has 2 candidates and is is bigger than right wing that has 1 candidate. (In Approval voters are generally assumed to vote strategically and not just sincerely list candidates that they consider approvable.) If I have understood the discussion correctly, you are still in draft phase. Many of the presented drafts can be quickly made into concrete and exact proposals. Some of the used components are more mature / well tested than others. There are some details left to decide, e.g. which STV variant (/ which proportional method) or which Condorcet variant (/ which single-winner method) to use. When some of you feel you have a good proposal at hand in this discussion, feel free to summarize and put forward a draft. I'm trying t listen to you to understand which one of the proposals would be the best for your needs :-). Now my understanding is that you still want all the listed requirements to be met and you want to use as well tested (and simple/explainable) methods as possible. Yes, the requirements are set. People have to understand what they are voting about, if they are to support the method. The people who like the majoritarian system can be expected to spread FUD (fear uncertainty doubt). It has at least to be a method in use in some organizations. Maybe I shouldn't have excluded Schulze STV right away,
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Ok, thanks. Yes, my misstake. Peter On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 11:26 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: 2010/4/28 Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com OK, thanks. Please go on to propose the condorcet, if you think it is the best. Approval voting was used in the French presidential election, first round, where far-right nationalist Le Pen got to the second round. Le Pen was hardly a centrist. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Effect_on_elections Quote:one study [16] showed that approval voting would not have chosen the same two winners as plurality voting (Chirac and Le Pen) in France's presidential election of 2002 (first round) - it instead would have chosen Chirac and Jospin. To some, this seemed a more reasonable result[citation needed] since Le Pen was a radical who lost to Chirac by an enormous margin in the second round. Peter I think you're misreading Wikipedia there. Approval was not used; the passage simply says that some suggest that if it HAD been used, the results would have been better. JQ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Thu, Apr 29, 2010 at 2:45 AM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: On Apr 28, 2010, at 9:19 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hello, I have some catching up to do here. I need to think more about some of the different methods and the proposals I have gotten. Some of the methods are new to me. As I am a layman it takes time to understand them. Condorcet methods have not been used in politics yet, I think. Are there by any chance other methods to elect centrist presidents? The most common single-winner methods (plurality, top-two runoff, IRV) are known not to be centrist oriented. For example in the quite common set-up where we have two extremists and one centrist with slightly less support they all elect one of the extremists. Approval and Condorcet are more centrist oriented. They are both also old and well tested methods although they have not been widely used in public political elections. One problem with Approval (that was not mentioned yet) is the limited expressive power of the Approval vote and resulting problems in choosing the right strategy, e.g. when there are three leading candidates and one should approve either one or two of them. That is problematic e.g when left wing has 2 candidates and is is bigger than right wing that has 1 candidate. (In Approval voters are generally assumed to vote strategically and not just sincerely list candidates that they consider approvable.) If I have understood the discussion correctly, you are still in draft phase. Many of the presented drafts can be quickly made into concrete and exact proposals. Some of the used components are more mature / well tested than others. There are some details left to decide, e.g. which STV variant (/ which proportional method) or which Condorcet variant (/ which single-winner method) to use. When some of you feel you have a good proposal at hand in this discussion, feel free to summarize and put forward a draft. I'm trying t listen to you to understand which one of the proposals would be the best for your needs :-). Now my understanding is that you still want all the listed requirements to be met and you want to use as well tested (and simple/explainable) methods as possible. Yes, the requirements are set. People have to understand what they are voting about, if they are to support the method. The people who like the majoritarian system can be expected to spread FUD (fear uncertainty doubt). It has at least to be a method in use in some organizations. Maybe I shouldn't have excluded Schulze STV right away, since it is in use at some places. Are you btw ok with the idea of limiting the choice of P+VPs to the (already elected of simultaneously elected) council members? Yes as one variant Using the same ballots with different vote counting techniques seems like quite an elegant and interesting solution. I never thought of that possibility. If more than one ballot is to be used, then I prefer to having the P and VP elected before the councilmembers. There is a small problem here. If one elects the P and VPs first, then the voters may not give the already elected P+VPs any votes in the second (council) round for strategic reasons (or maybe they are not even candidates there any more but considered already elected), and as a result the groupings of P and VPs would be over-represented in the council. This is not ok if you want the council (that includes P+VPs) to be proportional. (For this reason my first draft used the same ballots for all elections and the second draft elected the council first and P+VPs among the council members only after that.) Just to avoid misunderstandings: The president is the party leader as in most political parties around the world. He is the main guy simply, the person appearing on television etc., the one people know best in the streets. The president also chairs the meetings of the national council (sometimes I have used the term board, the meaning is the same in this context). Think Gordon Brown or Angela Merkel, small scale :o) We have discussed splitting the external and internal funcions of the president, but it is not politically feasible to do. Two separate jobs then, and someone might be competent for one job and someone else for the other. This would make the election process more complex. The simplest approach would be to elect these two persons among the council members in two separate elections and forget proportionality with respect to these two jobs. VPs could still be elected proportionally (but they could be close to the two Ps = the set of Ps+VPs is not fully proportional). It is neither feasible to change the role of the president to be a stricly internal guy or to have him elected by the council. The president has to be elected by the delegates as is the case today, if the proposal should have a chance to pass. This should be ok. (No limitations on who can vote although in some
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
2010/4/28 Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk On Apr 28, 2010, at 9:19 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hello, I have some catching up to do here. I need to think more about some of the different methods and the proposals I have gotten. Some of the methods are new to me. As I am a layman it takes time to understand them. Condorcet methods have not been used in politics yet, I think. Are there by any chance other methods to elect centrist presidents? The most common single-winner methods (plurality, top-two runoff, IRV) are known not to be centrist oriented. For example in the quite common set-up where we have two extremists and one centrist with slightly less support they all elect one of the extremists. That's with honest votes. Of course, voters can strategize to counteract the system's tendency. In the US-2000 election, some Gore (center-left) voters had a slogan that a vote for Nader (left) is a vote for Bush (we all know how he turned out). This slogan encapsulates the perverse strategy incentives of an extremist oriented system like Plurality, or, to a slightly lesser extent, IRV. Approval and Condorcet are more centrist oriented. They are both also old and well tested methods although they have not been widely used in public political elections. One problem with Approval (that was not mentioned yet) is the limited expressive power of the Approval vote and resulting problems in choosing the right strategy, e.g. when there are three leading candidates and one should approve either one or two of them. That is problematic e.g when left wing has 2 candidates and is is bigger than right wing that has 1 candidate. (In Approval voters are generally assumed to vote strategically and not just sincerely list candidates that they consider approvable.) This is exactly the problem that Bucklin is intended to solve. Bucklin is essentially multi-round approval using one ballot. It's not as theoretically clean as many methods, so there are some desirable criteria that it doesn't strictly satisfy; but it's a simple, practical method, both for voting and for counting. (Of course, as always, I'm referring to the equal-rankings-allowed versions of Bucklin.) Of course, the issue with Bucklin is that it uses a different (simpler) balloting style than STV or Condorcet. So if you used Bucklin for the single-winner method, you'd either need to take two ballots, take a combined ballot (with some ficticious cutoff candidates - possibly hard to understand), or use a proportional method like RBV which is based on Bucklin ballots. JQ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 08:59 AM 4/29/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote: [quoting Juho] One problem with Approval (that was not mentioned yet) is the limited expressive power of the Approval vote and resulting problems in choosing the right strategy, e.g. when there are three leading candidates and one should approve either one or two of them. That is problematic e.g when left wing has 2 candidates and is is bigger than right wing that has 1 candidate. (In Approval voters are generally assumed to vote strategically and not just sincerely list candidates that they consider approvable.) This is exactly the problem that Bucklin is intended to solve. Bucklin is essentially multi-round approval using one ballot. It's not as theoretically clean as many methods, so there are some desirable criteria that it doesn't strictly satisfy; but it's a simple, practical method, both for voting and for counting. (Of course, as always, I'm referring to the equal-rankings-allowed versions of Bucklin.) All the known implementations of Bucklin (all in the United States, eighty to ninety years ago) did not allow equal ranking in the top two ranks. I'm not sure of all the variations that were used. However, the versions I'm familiar with did allow equal ranking in the third rank. With what we know now, there is no harm in allowing equal ranking in all ranks. The reason that would be advanced to prohibit it is to disallow the Majority Criterion failure that can happen when voters vote for more than one in first rank. Because there is very little strategic reason for them to do that, if any, unless they really do have only a negligible preference -- in their judgment! -- this MC failure is technical, not substantive. It's also not very likely to happen unless the jurisdiction is blessed with more than one widely pleasing candidate. (If the conditions of the majority criterion are set up, the majority preference must be elected in the first round, unless some of the majority also votes for another candidate. The Condorcet Criterion, which Bucklin also technically fails, for the same reasons, occurs if the ranking is limited. That is not intrinsic to Bucklin; a Bucklin ballot could allow full ranking and could consider it if deterministic.) It's important to separate ballot design from counting method. Just as IRV can be run as 3-rank or with full ranking (and some implementations that FairVote touts as IRV only allow two explicit ranks), so too Bucklin could be run with as little as two approved ranks or with a full Range ballot that has, effectively, say, 100 ratings. As long as there are as many ratings as ranks, the voters can decide to fully rank the candidates, but the key difference with equal-ranking methods is that they have the *option* of equal ranking. If there are not enough ranks to fully rank the candidates, we must notice, all methods require equal ranking, but usually just at the bottom! Mr. Quinn has correctly described Bucklin as multi-round approval. That is, if we imagine that a series of approval elections are held, with a majority being required for election. At the beginning, voters vote conservatively, i.e., the easiest way for them to vote, particularly if they don't yet know the preferences of the other voters, is simply to vote for their own preferred candidate. They will only equal-rank if they have no strong preference; allowing equal ranking makes the voters' decision easier. If it's hard to decide, you really don't have a strong preference! But if you have some nagging doubt when you decide to equal rank, which one do you prefer? In the end, the decision that most matters, in Bucklin, is whether or not you'd be pleased to see the outcome be a particular candidate, or at least not displeased. If so, then probably you should vote for the candidate, and then the voting problem reduces to ranking these candidates. Which can be done as pure ranks or as ratings. One device that is used by Borda Count, which is a related method, is to have as many ranks as candidates. While I generally favor this (it allows voters to use their ability to compare preferences to generate a rank order), it may be collecting noise, if there are a lot of candidates. My sense is that 3-rank Bucklin (which means 3 approved ranks), with an added rank within the disapproved set, is enough for most purposes, but some studies should be done with simulations to determine how much results are improved with additional ranks. Bucklin addresses the major concern of most voters when they hear about Approval: why can't I vote for my favorite, to give my favorite a chance to win, before my additional approvals are considered? It should also be understood that, like any good method, Bucklin doesn't force voters to approve any additional candidates at all. If Bucklin is used in a runoff system, this is a perfectly sane vote under some circumstances. It all depends on how strong the
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
One device that is used by Borda Count, which is a related method, is to have as many ranks as candidates. While I generally favor this (it allows voters to use their ability to compare preferences to generate a rank order), it may be collecting noise, if there are a lot of candidates. My sense is that 3-rank Bucklin (which means 3 approved ranks), with an added rank within the disapproved set, is enough for most purposes, but some studies should be done with simulations to determine how much results are improved with additional ranks. 1. I don't see how Borda is related to Bucklin. 2. As I've said before, I favor only 2 ranks for Bucklin. This keeps strategic opportunities to an absolute minimum, and allows simple one-word labels for each rank (preferred, approved, unapproved). Bucklin is very easy to understand and vote. Natural voting tendencies are sound strategy! Agreed. Of course, the issue with Bucklin is that it uses a different (simpler) balloting style than STV or Condorcet. It can use the same ballot, the same set of preferences. A Range ballot can be used for STV or Condorcet analysis. That the ballot is simpler is not exactly correct. A three-rank ballot looks the same as a three-rank STV (IRV) ballot. It's counted differently in Bucklin. While you can modify STV to allow equality, the well-known versions do not. Thus, the ballot is not the same. The Bucklin ballot is more permissive and thus simpler. Also, for a council, 3 rankings is not nearly enough for STV. You should really require nearly-full ranking. With Bucklin, as few as 2 rankings is enough (and, in my opinion, optimal). JQ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 01:07 PM 4/29/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote: One device that is used by Borda Count, which is a related method, is to have as many ranks as candidates. While I generally favor this (it allows voters to use their ability to compare preferences to generate a rank order), it may be collecting noise, if there are a lot of candidates. My sense is that 3-rank Bucklin (which means 3 approved ranks), with an added rank within the disapproved set, is enough for most purposes, but some studies should be done with simulations to determine how much results are improved with additional ranks. 1. I don't see how Borda is related to Bucklin. Borda is Range Voting with a special restriction: equal ranking is not allowed, and the number of ranks is equal to the number of candidates. Strictly, real Borda rules do allow equal ranking, but only at the bottom, and the voter is essentially penalized with a weak vote. Another way to put it is that Borda with equal ranking allowed and therefore empty ranks is Range. Thus we can recognize that the Borda count that is promoted by Saari is simply Range with the hands of the voters tied. And the ballot that feeds Bucklin is strategically optimal if it is a Range ballot covering the approved set. That's the connection. 2. As I've said before, I favor only 2 ranks for Bucklin. This keeps strategic opportunities to an absolute minimum, and allows simple one-word labels for each rank (preferred, approved, unapproved). Sure, but there is more flexibility for handling large candidate sets. Strategic opportunities are ways in which voters can more accurately express their preferences. It's a good thing, not a bad one, and Bucklin handles these well. Key to Bucklin: the ranking, at least the ranking that can elect a candidate, is of approved candidates only. Not willing to cause the election of a candidate, don't vote for the candidate in an approved rank. The unapproved rank that Mr. Quinn mentions is the default rank of no-vote. Bucklin is very easy to understand and vote. Natural voting tendencies are sound strategy! Agreed. Cool. I hope it's correct! Of course, the issue with Bucklin is that it uses a different (simpler) balloting style than STV or Condorcet. It can use the same ballot, the same set of preferences. A Range ballot can be used for STV or Condorcet analysis. That the ballot is simpler is not exactly correct. A three-rank ballot looks the same as a three-rank STV (IRV) ballot. It's counted differently in Bucklin. While you can modify STV to allow equality, the well-known versions do not. Thus, the ballot is not the same. The Bucklin ballot is more permissive and thus simpler. Bucklin can be no-equal-ranking allowed, and was, unfortunately, simulated that way by Warren, accounting for its less than optimal performance, I suspect. Bucklin can use exactly the same ballot as STV or Condorcet. (either one can allow or not allow equal ranking.) The only critical difference is analysis. Bucklin uses the ballot to control a series of approval elections with declining approval cutoff. STV has complicated rules that I won't describe. Condorcet only considers the pairwise data, which can neglect preference strength, but some Condorcet methods do use preference strength information estimated from rank distance or vote counts. Also, for a council, 3 rankings is not nearly enough for STV. You should really require nearly-full ranking. With Bucklin, as few as 2 rankings is enough (and, in my opinion, optimal). Remember, 3-rank Bucklin, standard ER, allows complete ranking of candidates into four groups, and this is adequate for good analysis. With the overvoting scheme I've mentiond, the same ballot would allow ranking into six groups. With the disapproved rank used, (which would only be used for the proportional representation part of an election as is being considered, or possibly to determine preference in a runoff, or just for information so that voters can make good choices in a runoff, knowing a truer picture of overall preferences), which turns Bucklin into 4-rank, in a way, there are eight possible rankings. Add an explicit zero, and it's nine rankings. Don't you think that's enough for STV? Given that one can equal rank? With 2-rank Bucklin, you have three ranks. You can't use the ballot for serious Condorcet analysis, probably, particularly if we consider write-ins allowed. There are reasons why they used three ranks, usually, a century ago. They were actually able to handle an election with over ninety candidates, and the result seems to have been popular. I should find that, as I recall, they did find a majority, which is quite a trick with that many candidates! With 2-rank Bucklin, the election can handle full ranking of only three candidates, which, with a write-in, means two on the ballot. That's pretty primitive, given how easy it is and how harmless it is to add a third
[EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Three slot Bucklin is also known as MCA (Majority Choice Approval): if no alternative is preferred on more than fifty percent of the ballots, then the approval cutoff is lowered to include the middle slot. Compare this with three slot WMA (Weighted Median Approval) based on the same ballots: (1) The random ballot probabilities are computed from the submitted ballots. (2) For each ballot b, if the total probability of the preferred candidates on ballot b is no more than fifty percent, then the approval cutoff is lowered to include the middle slot on ballot b. In the three candidate case WMA and MCA give identical approvals. But when there are four or more alternatives, WMA is less of a blunt instrument compared to MCA. When there is no majority preferred alternative, under WMA the approval cutoff is only lowered on the ballots where there is not a good chance that the winner will come from among the preferred alternatives on those ballots. As Chris Benham pointed out, this version of WMA satisfies the Participation Criterion, whereas MCA does not. On the other hand, MCA is efficiently summable by precinct, whereas WMA is not. Both methods satisfy Monotonicity, and both methods are as clone free as three slot Range is, based on the idea that the truer the clones, the more likely they will be rated the same, and when not rated the same they will be rated adjacently. Both methods satisfy Independence from Pareto Dominated Alternatives, provided that ties are broken by random ballot or by random ballot probabilities conditioned on the tied alternatives. MCA satisfies the FBC (Favorite Betrayal Criterion). I'm not sure if WMA satisfies the FBC. In other words, could raising one's true favorite from the middle slot to preferred status change the winner from someone else (compromise) with preferred status to a third alternative besides the recently raised favorite? Thanks, Forest Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
2010/4/29 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com At 01:07 PM 4/29/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote: One device that is used by Borda Count, which is a related method, is to have as many ranks as candidates. While I generally favor this (it allows voters to use their ability to compare preferences to generate a rank order), it may be collecting noise, if there are a lot of candidates. My sense is that 3-rank Bucklin (which means 3 approved ranks), with an added rank within the disapproved set, is enough for most purposes, but some studies should be done with simulations to determine how much results are improved with additional ranks. 1. I don't see how Borda is related to Bucklin. Borda is Range Voting with a special restriction: equal ranking is not allowed, and the number of ranks is equal to the number of candidates. Strictly, real Borda rules do allow equal ranking, but only at the bottom, and the voter is essentially penalized with a weak vote. Another way to put it is that Borda with equal ranking allowed and therefore empty ranks is Range. Thus we can recognize that the Borda count that is promoted by Saari is simply Range with the hands of the voters tied. And the ballot that feeds Bucklin is strategically optimal if it is a Range ballot covering the approved set. That's the connection. One could probably construct such a connection for any two systems. I know that you feel in your heart that this connection has a deep truth, whereas some concoction of why Schulze and Plurality are deeply connected would be bullshit, but it's hard to see that you could convince a mathematically openminded person who disagreed with you. Mr. Quinn seems to have a common response: that strategic voting is Bad. He doesn't say what he means by it, but Bucklin voters were allowed to leave a rank empty. So if they had a strong preference for their favorite, but were still willing to accept, in the end, the election of another candidate, they could rank their favorite in first rank and the other in third rank, which represents a sincere -- but smart -- vote. It reduces the chance, which does exist with Bucklin, that a multiple majority would be found in the second round, and that thus they'd be possibly abstaining from that election, having voted for both of these candidates. Note that this outcome isn't a bad one if it were actually bad, the voters wouldn't have added the additional approval, I assume. In a two-round system, they gain additional flexibility, they can postpone the hold my nose vote till the end, when it is far more obvious that it's a necessity. They will have some pretty good information from the primary. I don't think that strategic voting itself is Bad. I think that an opportunity for strategy is an opportunity for regret, and regret (and recrimination) is something that makes you want to change voting systems so they don't give the unfair result you regret helping to cause. (Of course, I don't mean a result you regret; any system has losers. I mean, actions you regret; a result that you realize you could easily have changed.) This is why semi-honest (Range-type) strategy is in some ways more pernicious than dishonest strategy. Any time a semi-honest strategy could have changed the result, people will probably feel more regret than if the same change had been possible with an honest strategy. I could write pages about other things I think about strategy, but that's enough for now. Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: You assume that there is only one VP. Well, if more than 1 VP is possible, then the election could be - Elect council with PR-STV - The condorcet winner (only including the councillors) is President - Elect 2 of the councilors as VPs using PR-STV However, there is still the question of what exactly the VPs and President is supposed to do. If they are to chair council meetings, then it is better to just elect them. We could have also two and keep track of which members are elected first, second and third. I still disagree with using order of election in a PR-STV election. It provides an additional incentive for dishonest rankings. It would have most of the same problems that plurality has where you need to vote for one of the top-2. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 28, 2010, at 7:34 AM, Raph Frank wrote: On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: You assume that there is only one VP. Well, if more than 1 VP is possible, then the election could be - Elect council with PR-STV - The condorcet winner (only including the councillors) is President - Elect 2 of the councilors as VPs using PR-STV However, there is still the question of what exactly the VPs and President is supposed to do. If they are to chair council meetings, then it is better to just elect them. We could have also two and keep track of which members are elected first, second and third. I still disagree with using order of election in a PR-STV election. It provides an additional incentive for dishonest rankings. It also encourages strategic nominations. The whole idea of using order-of-election in STV for *anything* should be drowned in a bathtub ASAP. It would have most of the same problems that plurality has where you need to vote for one of the top-2. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 28, 2010, at 5:34 PM, Raph Frank wrote: On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: You assume that there is only one VP. Well, if more than 1 VP is possible, then the election could be - Elect council with PR-STV - The condorcet winner (only including the councillors) is President - Elect 2 of the councilors as VPs using PR-STV In this case the VPs are elected in a proportional way but one of them could be from the same grouping as the P (not in line with the requirements that I assumed). However, there is still the question of what exactly the VPs and President is supposed to do. I understood that the P and VPs could be the leader of the party and her deputies. I understood that the same method could be used also at lower layers. If they are to chair council meetings, then it is better to just elect them. We could have also two and keep track of which members are elected first, second and third. I still disagree with using order of election in a PR-STV election. It provides an additional incentive for dishonest rankings. If I understood you correctly, I agree that use of the election order of the council members is not a good criterion when electing the VPs and/or P. Number of votes of each elected candidate at the end of the election would be one step better. There was also the problem of the distorting effect of the different quota in the P+VPs election and the council election. Note btw that also use of CPO-STV may be possible in this kind of small elections. It would have most of the same problems that plurality has where you need to vote for one of the top-2. Do you mean that voters would concentrate on the first rankings and strongest candidates? The used method should be such that this kind of behaviour will not be rational. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: Do you mean that voters would concentrate on the first rankings and strongest candidates? The used method should be such that this kind of behaviour will not be rational. Yes. If the order of election matters, then your first rank is effectively for the president's position .. and it is a plurality election. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
2010/4/28 Raph Frank raph...@gmail.com On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: Do you mean that voters would concentrate on the first rankings and strongest candidates? The used method should be such that this kind of behaviour will not be rational. Yes. If the order of election matters, then your first rank is effectively for the president's position .. and it is a plurality election. Minor note: I proposed using order-of-election for vice president, not for president. How about this: Elect the council with STV. Elect the president from the council with Condorcet. Elect a two-member subset of that council with PR-STV. Any members of that two-member council who aren't the president are vice presidents. It gives a variable number of vice presidents. However, it seems like a very fair all-around system, and needs no innovative new methods. Or, if you elected a 3-member subset, I suspect it would be very rare that the president was not in that subset. If she wasn't, and if 3 VPs were too many, you could then repeat the STV to choose two of those 3, or let the board elect 2, or let the president pick 2, or eliminate the Condorcet loser among those 3. (I still like my RBV method, and would still be willing to code it open-source if the Czech greens are interested. But I understand if they want something more proven.) Jameson Quinn Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 28, 2010, at 8:37 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2010/4/28 Raph Frank raph...@gmail.com On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: Do you mean that voters would concentrate on the first rankings and strongest candidates? The used method should be such that this kind of behaviour will not be rational. Yes. If the order of election matters, then your first rank is effectively for the president's position .. and it is a plurality election. Minor note: I proposed using order-of-election for vice president, not for president. How about this: Elect the council with STV. Elect the president from the council with Condorcet. Elect a two-member subset of that council with PR-STV. Any members of that two-member council who aren't the president are vice presidents. It gives a variable number of vice presidents. However, it seems like a very fair all-around system, and needs no innovative new methods. Or, if you elected a 3-member subset, I suspect it would be very rare that the president was not in that subset. If she wasn't, and if 3 VPs were too many, you could then repeat the STV to choose two of those 3, or let the board elect 2, or let the president pick 2, or eliminate the Condorcet loser among those 3. This is, I think, a decent general solution to ordering a set of STV winners: re-count, with only the current winners eligible, for successively smaller numbers of seats. However, as Abd points out, to the extent that the role is internal (board chairman as opposed to external spokesman), it'd be better for the board to elect their own officers. And if the role is both, perhaps it should be split. The more general point is that, whatever the role of President is, it's likely to have different voting criteria from board member, and trying to force the same election to do double duty in electing both is at best questionable policy. (I still like my RBV method, and would still be willing to code it open-source if the Czech greens are interested. But I understand if they want something more proven.) Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 11:37 AM 4/28/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2010/4/28 Raph Frank mailto:raph...@gmail.comraph...@gmail.com On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:05 PM, Juho mailto:juho4...@yahoo.co.ukjuho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: Do you mean that voters would concentrate on the first rankings and strongest candidates? The used method should be such that this kind of behaviour will not be rational. Yes. If the order of election matters, then your first rank is effectively for the president's position .. and it is a plurality election. Minor note: I proposed using order-of-election for vice president, not for president. How about this: Elect the council with STV. Elect the president from the council with Condorcet. Elect a two-member subset of that council with PR-STV. Any members of that two-member council who aren't the president are vice presidents. Actually, a council can use standard deliberative process, which is far simpler, to elect officers by majority. So the task becomes one of making sure that the council is truly representative. It's up to the council to decide which is more important: that the officers represent the mainstream thinking within the organization, or that they reflect the diversity of the organization with some kind of power-sharing. They can also use any kind of polling method they like, they can look at election results from their own election, and analyze them in whatever way they want. If a range-type ballot is used, they can look at factional strength, they can look at how important preferences are, they can do condorcet analysis, all the rest. Deliberative process is far more flexible and powerful than any single-ballot voting system, and that's why complex voting systems are *never* used for elections within deliberative bodies. Voting Yes or No on motions, repeated, can handle vast amounts of information, and can use polling, when appropriate, to develop the options more efficiently, without getting stuck in some unanticipated quirk of a voting system. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Hello, I have some catching up to do here. I need to think more about some of the different methods and the proposals I have gotten. Some of the methods are new to me. As I am a layman it takes time to understand them. Condorcet methods have not been used in politics yet, I think. Are there by any chance other methods to elect centrist presidents? If I have understood the discussion correctly, you are still in draft phase. When some of you feel you have a good proposal at hand in this discussion, feel free to summarize and put forward a draft. Using the same ballots with different vote counting techniques seems like quite an elegant and interesting solution. I never thought of that possibility. If more than one ballot is to be used, then I prefer to having the P and VP elected before the councilmembers. Just to avoid misunderstandings: The president is the party leader as in most political parties around the world. He is the main guy simply, the person appearing on television etc., the one people know best in the streets. The president also chairs the meetings of the national council (sometimes I have used the term board, the meaning is the same in this context). Think Gordon Brown or Angela Merkel, small scale :o) We have discussed splitting the external and internal funcions of the president, but it is not politically feasible to do. It is neither feasible to change the role of the president to be a stricly internal guy or to have him elected by the council. The president has to be elected by the delegates as is the case today, if the proposal should have a chance to pass. The vice president's are ordered first and second and third. The number of VP chan vary. The VP are the ones who stand in for the president or party leader (in that order). The president and the vice presidents are all member of the board, which currently has seven members. Best regards Peter Zborník On 4/28/10, Jonathan Lundell jlund...@pobox.com wrote: On Apr 28, 2010, at 7:34 AM, Raph Frank wrote: On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:47 AM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: You assume that there is only one VP. Well, if more than 1 VP is possible, then the election could be - Elect council with PR-STV - The condorcet winner (only including the councillors) is President - Elect 2 of the councilors as VPs using PR-STV However, there is still the question of what exactly the VPs and President is supposed to do. If they are to chair council meetings, then it is better to just elect them. We could have also two and keep track of which members are elected first, second and third. I still disagree with using order of election in a PR-STV election. It provides an additional incentive for dishonest rankings. It also encourages strategic nominations. The whole idea of using order-of-election in STV for *anything* should be drowned in a bathtub ASAP. It would have most of the same problems that plurality has where you need to vote for one of the top-2. 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 election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:52 PM, Jonathan Lundell jlund...@pobox.com wrote: This is, I think, a decent general solution to ordering a set of STV winners: re-count, with only the current winners eligible, for successively smaller numbers of seats. Yeah, it is reasonable. The fundamental problem is that if you use PR-STV to elect N candidates from N+1 candidates, then one of the factions that was represented ends up not represented at all. This isn't so big an issue when N is large, but it becomes a larger problem as N gets smaller. For example, if the voters were arranged as a circle, and each candidate represents a 120 degree sector, then picking any 2 of them is not ideal. Something like CPO-STV might help, but the problem seems fundamental. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 7:19 PM, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com wrote: Condorcet methods have not been used in politics yet, I think. Not sure if they have been used in politics. However, they have been used by various open source organisations. Schulze's method seems reasonably popular. Are there by any chance other methods to elect centrist presidents? I would recommend approval voting. For every candidate, the voter says approve or disapprove. The candidate with the most approvals wins. However, it would require a separate ballot for the President. The reason for picking condorcet was to allow the same ballots to be used for both counts. Approval should mostly give the same result as a condorcet method, but you just need to count how many approvals were received for each candidate. I am not sure if it is used much in politics either. A variant is used for election of the general secretary in the UN. The main single seat method is plurality, but that isn't a good method. The president has to be elected by the delegates as is the case today, if the proposal should have a chance to pass. The vice president's are ordered first and second and third. The number of VP chan vary. The VP are the ones who stand in for the president or party leader (in that order). The president and the vice presidents are all member of the board, which currently has seven members. What about Each voter submits 2 ballots -- approval ballot -- ranked ballot The most approved candidate becomes President automatically, as a separate election. The ranked ballots are used to elect 6 other councillors using PR-STV. The most approved councillor becomes 1st VP, the next 2nd VP and so on. The gives reasonable PR and has VPs as councillors. In fact, if there was 2 wing within the party with 51% and 49% of the members, then it would give them 3 seats each and the President would be elected from the 51% wing. Also, hopefully, a party wouldn't have such partisan sub-parties. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 28, 2010, at 2:19 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: Condorcet methods have not been used in politics yet, I think. Condorcet has not yet been used in a *government* general election. that does not mean it hasn't been used in politics. it has been used in organization elections for a single winner. i might consider the Czech Green Party to be an organization. you can choose to use whatever method you like without having to get a law passed as you would in a general election. Are there by any chance other methods to elect centrist presidents? Condorcet *does* tend to favor centrist candidates because Condorcet makes good use of 2nd-choice rankings and people on the two extreme wings are likely to choose the centrist for their 2nd choice over the extremist on the other side. but that is not a good reason to use Condorcet. there are many reasons to use Condorcet but the main reason is simply majority rule: If a majority of voters agree that Candidate A is a better choice than Candidate B, then Candidate B should not be elected. that's really it. that's why Condorcet is the correct method over IRV- STV, Plurality, Borda, Bucklin, Range, Approval or whatever else they come up with. it's simple, transparent, and directly compatible with the goals of majority rule. despite Kathy Dopp's knee-jerk reaction against STV, it probably remains to be the simplest fair method to get proportional representation for the multi-winner Council seats. IRV proponents like to extend STV to single-winner, but it's pretty well established that it's inferior to Condorcet. sometimes they elect the same winner and sometimes they don't. the problem is when IRV fails to elect the Condorcet winner - when that happens, a majority of voters agreed that Candidate A is a better choice than Candidate B, yet Candidate B was elected. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 28, 2010, at 11:29 AM, Raph Frank wrote: On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 4:52 PM, Jonathan Lundell jlund...@pobox.com wrote: This is, I think, a decent general solution to ordering a set of STV winners: re-count, with only the current winners eligible, for successively smaller numbers of seats. Yeah, it is reasonable. The fundamental problem is that if you use PR-STV to elect N candidates from N+1 candidates, then one of the factions that was represented ends up not represented at all. This isn't so big an issue when N is large, but it becomes a larger problem as N gets smaller. For example, if the voters were arranged as a circle, and each candidate represents a 120 degree sector, then picking any 2 of them is not ideal. Something like CPO-STV might help, but the problem seems fundamental. Whether it's a problem depends on what the ordering is intended for. There's no guarantee in any group that you'll find a majority choice. It's just that successive counting is in some sense a defensible ordering, while order of election is IMO not. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
OK, thanks. Please go on to propose the condorcet, if you think it is the best. Approval voting was used in the French presidential election, first round, where far-right nationalist Le Pen got to the second round. Le Pen was hardly a centrist. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Effect_on_elections Quote:one study [16] showed that approval voting would not have chosen the same two winners as plurality voting (Chirac and Le Pen) in France's presidential election of 2002 (first round) - it instead would have chosen Chirac and Jospin. To some, this seemed a more reasonable result[citation needed] since Le Pen was a radical who lost to Chirac by an enormous margin in the second round. Peter On 4/28/10, robert bristow-johnson r...@audioimagination.com wrote: On Apr 28, 2010, at 2:19 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: Condorcet methods have not been used in politics yet, I think. Condorcet has not yet been used in a *government* general election. that does not mean it hasn't been used in politics. it has been used in organization elections for a single winner. i might consider the Czech Green Party to be an organization. you can choose to use whatever method you like without having to get a law passed as you would in a general election. Are there by any chance other methods to elect centrist presidents? Condorcet *does* tend to favor centrist candidates because Condorcet makes good use of 2nd-choice rankings and people on the two extreme wings are likely to choose the centrist for their 2nd choice over the extremist on the other side. but that is not a good reason to use Condorcet. there are many reasons to use Condorcet but the main reason is simply majority rule: If a majority of voters agree that Candidate A is a better choice than Candidate B, then Candidate B should not be elected. that's really it. that's why Condorcet is the correct method over IRV-STV, Plurality, Borda, Bucklin, Range, Approval or whatever else they come up with. it's simple, transparent, and directly compatible with the goals of majority rule. despite Kathy Dopp's knee-jerk reaction against STV, it probably remains to be the simplest fair method to get proportional representation for the multi-winner Council seats. IRV proponents like to extend STV to single-winner, but it's pretty well established that it's inferior to Condorcet. sometimes they elect the same winner and sometimes they don't. the problem is when IRV fails to elect the Condorcet winner - when that happens, a majority of voters agreed that Candidate A is a better choice than Candidate B, yet Candidate B was elected. -- r b-j r...@audioimagination.com Imagination is more important than knowledge. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com wrote: Approval voting was used in the French presidential election, first round, where far-right nationalist Le Pen got to the second round. Le Pen was hardly a centrist. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Effect_on_elections No, they use top-2 runoff. The point being made was that approval would have picked 2 other candidates. Quote:one study [16] showed that approval voting would not have chosen the same two winners as plurality voting (Chirac and Le Pen) in France's presidential election of 2002 (first round) - it instead would have chosen Chirac and Jospin. To some, this seemed a more reasonable result[citation needed] since Le Pen was a radical who lost to Chirac by an enormous margin in the second round. I am not sure if Jospin was more centerist than Le Pen. In any case, I think that approval and condorcet are both very good methods for finding candidates that are central within the party, rather than once who represent only one wing. You should pick whichever method of the 2 you think is more likely to be accepted. Also, condorcet has the advantage of only a single ballot being required. OTOH, it is potentially harder to hand count. If you plan to convert the ballots into a computer file with a list of all the rankings for processing, then this is less of an issue. You just run the condorcet program on the same ballots as the PR-STV program is run. You can probably find open source programs to do both. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 28, 2010, at 5:26 PM, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2010/4/28 Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com OK, thanks. Please go on to propose the condorcet, if you think it is the best. Approval voting was used in the French presidential election, first round, where far-right nationalist Le Pen got to the second round. Le Pen was hardly a centrist. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Effect_on_elections Quote:one study [16] showed that approval voting would not have chosen the same two winners as plurality voting (Chirac and Le Pen) in France's presidential election of 2002 (first round) - it instead would have chosen Chirac and Jospin. To some, this seemed a more reasonable result[citation needed] since Le Pen was a radical who lost to Chirac by an enormous margin in the second round. Peter I think you're misreading Wikipedia there. Approval was not used; the passage simply says that some suggest that if it HAD been used, the results would have been better. JQ Read the quote carefully. A bunch of centrist candidates split up the centrist Plurality vote, allowing for the two non-centrist winners to inspire all kinds of threats from unhappy centrist voters. While Approval would have helped some centrists do better, Condorcet promises to hear the voters better. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 05:26 PM 4/28/2010, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2010/4/28 Peter Zbornik mailto:pzbor...@gmail.compzbor...@gmail.com OK, thanks. Please go on to propose the condorcet, if you think it is the best. Approval voting was used in the French presidential election, first round, where far-right nationalist Le Pen got to the second round. Le Pen was hardly a centrist. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Effect_on_electionshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting#Effect_on_elections Quote:one study [16] showed that approval voting would not have chosen the same two winners as plurality voting (Chirac and Le Pen) in France's presidential election of 2002 (first round) - it instead would have chosen Chirac and Jospin. To some, this seemed a more reasonable result[citation needed] since Le Pen was a radical who lost to Chirac by an enormous margin in the second round. Peter I think you're misreading Wikipedia there. Approval was not used; the passage simply says that some suggest that if it HAD been used, the results would have been better. The study was of a test election conducted in parallel, using actual voters who voted in the real election. http://rangevoting.org/FrenchStudy.html. This page on rangevoting.org describes the test, and does link to the original paper. The Wikipedia article links to the Wayback machine, and it wasn't responding. I edited the Wikipedia article a bit. The rangevoting.org paper considers the use of approval as the first round in a two-round election, and suggests that this would have chosen Chirac and Le Pen to go into the runoff. The landslide for Chirac in the runoff, with increased turnout, shows that Chirac vs. Le Pen was not a good runoff choice. The problem was massive vote-splitting in the primary. Any advanced method in the primary would have produced a better result, probably. Approval alone in the primary, if used to finish the election, would likely have chosen Chirac as well, based on the French study, but there was serious majority failure, and thus a runoff would really be important. (Trying to decide elections with *many* candidates using a single ballot is difficult. Doing it with plurality in a primary and a runoff is known to fail in exactly this way, this was not the only well-known election to show this effect.) Le Pen had very high core strength, i.e., his supporters were very exercised to elect him. But that was it; while overall turnout increased in the runoff, Le Pen only gained a small number of votes, whereas all other votes were turned to him, so this was the heaviest landslide ever seen in a French Presidential election. Had it been Chirac vs. Jospin, it would have been close. My guess is that turnout would have been substantially lower, and that Jospin would have won. But the proof would be in the pudding. Bucklin in the primary, and with that many candidates, more Bucklin ranks, possibly, though 4 ranks (3-rank traditional plus the default No vote of a blank) in Bucklin-ER can handle a lot of candidates. Would encourage a certain increase in the addition of approvals over standard approval voting, which doesn't allow the specification of a preference among approved candidates. In Bucklin-ER, one can categorize candidates in up to three ranks, with standard 3-rank Bucklin, and these are all approved ranks. Standard Bucklin had only one unapproved rank, one placed a candidate here by simply not voting for the candidate. But a range ballot could be used to feed Bucklin just as well as a ranked ballot. That ballot, if it has enough ranks, could allow complete ranking; if voters simply rank all the candidates in sequence of preference, the ballot becomes a Borda ballot, which is often a good approximation of a Range ballot. I believe that using Bucklin in a primary, with Range ballot input, but only using the approved categories to determine a winner by a majority, if that exists, and then using the ranking and rating information to make better choices of runoff candidates, allowing up to three, would handle a wide variety of election situations with a voting method that is still very easy to count, it is just the sum of votes in each rank or rating that is needed, it is precinct summable. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 28, 2010, at 9:19 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hello, I have some catching up to do here. I need to think more about some of the different methods and the proposals I have gotten. Some of the methods are new to me. As I am a layman it takes time to understand them. Condorcet methods have not been used in politics yet, I think. Are there by any chance other methods to elect centrist presidents? The most common single-winner methods (plurality, top-two runoff, IRV) are known not to be centrist oriented. For example in the quite common set-up where we have two extremists and one centrist with slightly less support they all elect one of the extremists. Approval and Condorcet are more centrist oriented. They are both also old and well tested methods although they have not been widely used in public political elections. One problem with Approval (that was not mentioned yet) is the limited expressive power of the Approval vote and resulting problems in choosing the right strategy, e.g. when there are three leading candidates and one should approve either one or two of them. That is problematic e.g when left wing has 2 candidates and is is bigger than right wing that has 1 candidate. (In Approval voters are generally assumed to vote strategically and not just sincerely list candidates that they consider approvable.) If I have understood the discussion correctly, you are still in draft phase. Many of the presented drafts can be quickly made into concrete and exact proposals. Some of the used components are more mature / well tested than others. There are some details left to decide, e.g. which STV variant (/ which proportional method) or which Condorcet variant (/ which single-winner method) to use. When some of you feel you have a good proposal at hand in this discussion, feel free to summarize and put forward a draft. I'm trying t listen to you to understand which one of the proposals would be the best for your needs :-). Now my understanding is that you still want all the listed requirements to be met and you want to use as well tested (and simple/explainable) methods as possible. Are you btw ok with the idea of limiting the choice of P+VPs to the (already elected of simultaneously elected) council members? Using the same ballots with different vote counting techniques seems like quite an elegant and interesting solution. I never thought of that possibility. If more than one ballot is to be used, then I prefer to having the P and VP elected before the councilmembers. There is a small problem here. If one elects the P and VPs first, then the voters may not give the already elected P+VPs any votes in the second (council) round for strategic reasons (or maybe they are not even candidates there any more but considered already elected), and as a result the groupings of P and VPs would be over-represented in the council. This is not ok if you want the council (that includes P +VPs) to be proportional. (For this reason my first draft used the same ballots for all elections and the second draft elected the council first and P+VPs among the council members only after that.) Just to avoid misunderstandings: The president is the party leader as in most political parties around the world. He is the main guy simply, the person appearing on television etc., the one people know best in the streets. The president also chairs the meetings of the national council (sometimes I have used the term board, the meaning is the same in this context). Think Gordon Brown or Angela Merkel, small scale :o) We have discussed splitting the external and internal funcions of the president, but it is not politically feasible to do. Two separate jobs then, and someone might be competent for one job and someone else for the other. This would make the election process more complex. The simplest approach would be to elect these two persons among the council members in two separate elections and forget proportionality with respect to these two jobs. VPs could still be elected proportionally (but they could be close to the two Ps = the set of Ps+VPs is not fully proportional). It is neither feasible to change the role of the president to be a stricly internal guy or to have him elected by the council. The president has to be elected by the delegates as is the case today, if the proposal should have a chance to pass. This should be ok. (No limitations on who can vote although in some scenarios the set of candidates must be limited to the already elected (or simultaneously elected) council members.) There was some discussion on if it is ok to elect a variable number of VPs (exact number not known beforehand) or if it is more acceptable to modify the traditional methods a bit (an innovative addition). The option of allowing some deviation from full proportionality in the Ps +VPs set (while the council would
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
2010/4/26 Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) Why not: - ranked votes - STV for council. Keep track of which members are elected first and second, one of them will be VP. - Condorcet winner among the councilmembers is P. (You could use original ballots or have the council revote.) - VP is first councilmember, or, if that person is P, second councilmember. As to my own method which I mentioned earlier (RBV for Reweighted Bucklin Voting): it's actually pretty simple if you don't need it to be precinct-summable. (For precinct-summability, you need to keep two 3D matrices, one for each level of approval, and do heavy algebra.) Here's the non-precinct-summable version. *Voters vote into three categories: preferred, approved, and unapproved/unvoted*. If there are organized factions, they can publish lists for people to use in the approved category, or there could even be some way to make a single mark to approve a given list. (If you want to guarantee full Droop quotas, you need to make people approve at least half the candidates plus half the council size. If they vote almost that number, you almost have a guarantee. As a practical matter, I'd require approving at least a quarter of the candidates, or as many as seats on the council, whichever is greater.) Start by counting only the preferred votes. *Elect the highest score greater than a droop quota, then discount all those ballots* so that they add up to one droop quota less. (ie, if there were three droop quotas of ballots preferring the elected candidate, weight them all at 2/3). *Continue until no candidate has a droop quota.* *Now start again counting all approvals, ignoring preferred.* Start with all ballots fully-weighted again, and go through the already-elected candidates in order and re-discount their ballots (they will probably have more ballots getting a smaller discount each). Then elect discount, as above, until you fill the council. (If you didn't guarantee enough approvals for full droop quotas, you may elect some candidates with less than that. Of course, at that point, you can't discount a full droop quota from their votes anymore. That is not a big problem.) The 3D summable matrices are only used so that you can keep track of who to discount at each step. (Technically, the summable version SRBV is not quite identical to the non-summable version after the 2nd candidate is elected, but they're highly probable to be the same - provably over 50% probable, over all possible ballot combos -; they're only different for voters who get at least 2 of their approved candidates elected - that is, one voter might get 4 favorites elected while another voter FROM THE SAME PARTY might get only 2 favorites -; there is really no way for the voters to tell when a difference has occurred; and, when there is a difference, the summable version's results are actually arguably a hair superior - more Condorcet-like.) Both versions are monotonic, unlike STV (because RBV is all top-down, there's no bottom-up elimination. This also means it tends to start with slightly more centrist candidates, though the PR properties mean that this system moves on to the fringes after covering the center while STV moves to the center after covering the fringes, so RBV might not be any more centrist overall). Like any PR system, RBV and SRBV do not obey the participation criterion - by getting one of your favorites elected earlier, you can displace your other preferences. Because of that, like STV, there's a small possibility of the same free rider strategy; but the risk is that your preferred candidate is not elected, so candidates will encourage their voters not to free ride, and those candidates who fail to do so risk losing (deservedly, IMO). Probably the biggest advantage over STV is that it's much easier to vote - you don't have to require full rankings. Ballot design is also simple and it's tough to spoil a ballot. But, as I said in the previous email, the disadvantage is that it's not (nearly) as field-proven. I'd be happy to code a program for either version (open source, simple inspectable code) if you're interested. If you used this method, the president would be the highest second-round approval on the council, and the VP would be the highest first-round approval on the council besides the President. Simple and clear. Jameson Quinn Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Juho, the requirements are correct, except that several elections is not a big problem. Thus I do not require, that board, P and VP elections will take place at the same time (= one can use the same ballots in all these elections), it would be nice to have, though. I have to study your proposal and the discussion a little bit more. Peter On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:45 AM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: I think there are good and well tested single-winner and proportional multi-winner methods that the Czech Green party could use (like Condorcet methods and STV). For the election of president (P) and vice-presidents (VP) there maybe are no good existing solutions (see requirements below), so we may need to propose a new one (hopefully just a combination of old well tested tested methods). Here's one proposal for your consideration. Based on the discussion my understanding of the requirements is as follows (please correct if wrong). - P and VP are regular members of the elected board (or council) - it would be a good idea to elect a centrist P (one that appeals to all, not just to the biggest grouping) - VPs should be elected in a proportional style (the strongest group shall not be able to take all the P and VP seats) - the board (including P and VPs) should be proportional - the board election should be based on voting individuals (not named sections of the party or their nominated representatives) - board, P and VP elections will take place at the same time (= one can use the same ballots in all these elections) - the method must be easy to understand and also well tested where possible Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process would be similar. If one needs to elect new members to the board to replace old ones one could use the old ballots + special rules that will not eliminate any of the sitting board members. Does this work? Is this practical? Can this be considered to be understandable and well tested? Are there some strategic opportunities? Does this maintain proportionality as it should? Any conflicts with the expectations and needs of the Czech Green party? 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 election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Hi, I would prefer to have the P. elected by the same people electing the board. The P. is indeed the person most often representing the party on the outside. Peter On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 4:02 AM, Jonathan Lundell jlund...@pobox.comwrote: On Apr 26, 2010, at 5:54 PM, Juho wrote: On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:22 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Apr 26, 2010, at 5:18 PM, Juho wrote: On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:01 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Apr 26, 2010, at 4:45 PM, Juho wrote: Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process would be similar. This is a better approach, I think. Protecting already-elected members and preserving proportionality is a subtle problem, and I don't think there's a completely satisfactory solution available. It's defensible for filling vacancies (below), but when it can be avoided, it should be. (Unless someone has a great idea for this kind of countback.) A burial strategy for P would have unfortunate effects for the STV election, is a possible problem. The STV election that follows may also reduce the incentives to try the burial strategy. That is because (in addition to burial not being a very efficient strategy in the first place) the benefit would be only to get a better P but not more voting power in the board, and because the modified vote could well contribute to the benefit of the competing sections in the proportional election. It's a reasonable argument (though the STV election should go first), if the voters are reasonable and if they regard the P office as less important than the makeup of the board--that depends on how the office is defined, I suppose. Another alternative would be to hold a separate P election (new ballots) once the board is defined. Or to let the board elect the officers from amongst themselves. That appeals to me, actually, again depending on the definition of the roles. A fully separate P election would make the board less proportional - unless the elected P would have voting power only if he/she is already a member of the board. That wasn't my suggestion. Rather, one would hold an STV board election, and then elect P from the proportionally elected board. Depending on the role of P, the voters for P would be the at-large membership or the board itself (the latter makes sense if P/VP is largely an internal role, as opposed to an external independent executive). 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 election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:54 AM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: A fully separate P election would make the board less proportional - unless the elected P would have voting power only if he/she is already a member of the board. I think if there are a reasonable number of members, then the non-proportionality will only be slight. I think both the President and VP should be centerists. The President should definitely be a centerist, so making the VP a non-centerist gives that faction more power. Also, by having 2 centerists on the council, you get a mix of councilors who represent portions of the party and councilors who represent the entire party. I would suggest Each voter casts a ranked ballot 1) The condorcet winner becomes President 2) The runner-up becomes Vice-President 3) Use PR-STV to elect the remainder of the council This is simple and doesn't does require special rules to protect from elimination. The same ballots are just processed three times. Also, the fact that the ballots are used three time should help with strategy protection. For by-elections, another option is to elect the condorcet winner. However, ballots held by any of the other are not included. This means that if you have 5 PR-STV seats, the ballots will be split into 6 piles A) Ballots held by councilor A B) Ballots held by councilor B C) Ballots held by councilor C D) Ballots held by councilor D E) Ballots held by councilor E F) Ballots held by none of the candidates If councilor C decides to resign, then you work out the condorcet winner based on the ballots in pile C and F. Also, if the President resigns, the VP becomes President. Vacancies in the VP office are filled by the condorcet winner based on all the ballots. A Councilor must resign his seat to become President or VP, so that triggers another vacancy that has to be filled. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com wrote: Why not: - ranked votes - STV for council. Keep track of which members are elected first and second, one of them will be VP. - Condorcet winner among the councilmembers is P. (You could use original ballots or have the council revote.) - VP is first councilmember, or, if that person is P, second councilmember. The order of election with PR-STV shouldn't be used to determine VP, all seats are equal. However, I think your idea to run condorcet after the PR-STV election is a good idea. I would change it to: - ranked ballots - PR-STV elects the council - Excluding non-elected candidates -- Condorcet winner is President -- Condorcet runner-up is Vice President Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
2010/4/27 Raph Frank raph...@gmail.com On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com wrote: Why not: - ranked votes - STV for council. Keep track of which members are elected first and second, one of them will be VP. - Condorcet winner among the councilmembers is P. (You could use original ballots or have the council revote.) - VP is first councilmember, or, if that person is P, second councilmember. The order of election with PR-STV shouldn't be used to determine VP, all seats are equal. Why? Actually, it could be first seat, or plurality winner, which is mostly equivalent. This would help IFF you wanted to increase decrease the probability of a simple majority disproportionately sweeping P and VP. Since it's only VP we're talking about, the chance of plurality-style strategy is slim. JQ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 27, 2010, at 6:09 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2010/4/27 Raph Frank raph...@gmail.com On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com wrote: Why not: - ranked votes - STV for council. Keep track of which members are elected first and second, one of them will be VP. - Condorcet winner among the councilmembers is P. (You could use original ballots or have the council revote.) - VP is first councilmember, or, if that person is P, second councilmember. The order of election with PR-STV shouldn't be used to determine VP, all seats are equal. Why? Actually, it could be first seat, or plurality winner, which is mostly equivalent. This would help IFF you wanted to increase decrease the probability of a simple majority disproportionately sweeping P and VP. Since it's only VP we're talking about, the chance of plurality-style strategy is slim. The problem with FPTP in this case is that it's largely accidental. In the obvious counterexample, a significant majority of voter splits their vote across several clones, causing their representatives to be elected late, even though they have the most support. One way to order the winners in an STV election is to count for the the original board, and then re-count for successively smaller groups, but with only the most recent winners eligible, giving a complete ordering of the board. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 2:09 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com wrote: Why? The principle on which PR is based is that all seats are equal. Actually, it could be first seat, or plurality winner, which is mostly equivalent. It could also have some strategic effects, where people decide to rank their favorite of the top-2 first, so as to capture the VP position. This would help IFF you wanted to increase decrease the probability of a simple majority disproportionately sweeping P and VP. Since it's only VP we're talking about, the chance of plurality-style strategy is slim. Hmm, maybe. However, if the President resigns, the VP presumably becomes President. IMO, this means that they should both be centerists. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 10:36 PM 4/26/2010, Andrew Myers wrote: On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Asset doesn't resemble what the Soviets had in the least There is no party control, parties become unnecessary with Asset. Abd, The phrase parties become unnecessary is redolent of utopian idealism. Redolent. Nice word. Where can I buy some redolence? Parties will exist. Sure. In FA/DP I call them caucuses. The problem with present parties is that they are too difficult to create, so FA/DP makes them trivial to create. When they are hard to create, they develop their own inertia, it becomes my way or the highway. It's easy to say that one could just found another party, if you're so smart, but what if one has just spent years of one's life developing a party, and it is taken over by a faction that is highly motivated and highly biased, maybe even corrupt? Look, I've seen it happen with really great nonprofit organizations; the natural oligarchy that develops substitutes its own vision for the collective vision, the group loses connection with its roots, and eventually it fails or becomes a far less effective fixture of the political environment. Or do you think somehow asset voting is going to prevent concentrations of power, despite the iron law of oligarchy you are fond of quoting? Or there will be concentrations of power, but they virtuously will not engage in the give-and-take on the issues that at least some asset voting proponents have argued is a positive feature? Will not engage in give-and-take? Where does this idea come from? However, note: I'm not proposing Asset Voting as a utopian solution, but merely as a possible solution to a basic problem in democracy: how to create a fully representative assembly. It's possible to do it through a party system, but party systems create a serious kind of inertia that causes them to become unrepresentative. They end up representing party interests rather than the interests of the members. Yes, Iron Law of Oligarchy. OLigarchies will form, but I do have experience with organizations where this fact is harnessed rather than becoming dominant. In any case, FA/DP would be the utopian solution, and, strictly, it isn't utopian, because there exists a specific plan to get from here to there, and that plan does not require a fixed (utopian) vision, it only requires small improvements, each step funding itself and preparing for the next steps, and, since what is being constructed is an intelligent decision-making system, it will modify its own course as it sees fit, and the FA aspect essentially requires and insists that no FA is controlling, so there will be independent FAs, as needed, and the most efficient and effective of them will survive, and the others will be absorbed without having caused harm. This *sounds* utopian, but only because most people don't have experience with organizations that work like this. I did't invent the FA concept, I simply found it and gave it a name. It works, and does what most people routinely consider impossible. No, of course there are and will be concentrations of power. The Soviet system had layers of electors. This allowed voting power to become more and more concentrated toward the top of the hierarchy until the top levels were pure Communist apparatchiks chosen for their unblinking loyalty to the system. Sure. They had what appeared to be democratic mechanisms. But they absolutely didn't have the FA concept. There was a supposedly democratic structure, but it was *coercive.* My guess is that those who designed the Soviet system, originally, were quite idealistic about it, but they were doing this within a context that blamed the defects of goverment on enemies, and they were trying to build a New Man who would only act for collective interest. FA/DP -- and asset voting -- work with people as they are, and they do not incorporate any such assemptions, the opposite. Using the term Soviet implies coercion. The Soviets also used a form of approval voting. That doesn't make approval voting soviet. Asset Voting doesn't create, as proposed, formal layers beyond one. (I.e, it creates, from the original Voters/Seats, Voters/Electors/Seats). I'd be interested in seeing what the Soviets actually had, but there are no intermediate councils unless the electors themselves decide to form them, and they would not be legally binding entities. Indeed, they might be parties, in effect, or political parties might create such associations. But they would not control the voting of electors, though they certainly could advise it. An elector doesn't have anything to lose, which is different from elected seats, who must maintain the support of their electors, certainly to be re-elected, but, in some systems, even to maintain the seat, because it might be continuous election, revocable. --- because of the nature of the scale problem, I've suggested that seats might
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 04:36 AM 4/27/2010, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hi, I would prefer to have the P. elected by the same people electing the board. The P. is indeed the person most often representing the party on the outside. Okay, structural defect. The president is normally the presiding officer of the board of trustees. That person should be chosen by the board itself, since they are the ones who have to live with it! This person should mostly be chosen for fairness, so that board members are treated fairly, an abusive chairperson is very damaging to an organization. You want to elect a public figure. This person should *not* be a member of the board, probably, but it's the board's job to support this person. Call it the President, fine. The person should have board rights, maybe a vote on the board, but isn't chosen as a person to control the party, but to speak for it. Important difference. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
(Second try. It seems that the first message didn't get through.) Here are some comments to multiple mails in this stream. On Apr 27, 2010, at 2:45 AM, I wrote: Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process would be similar. If one needs to elect new members to the board to replace old ones one could use the old ballots + special rules that will not eliminate any of the sitting board members. On Apr 27, 2010, at 9:19 AM, Jameson Quinn wrote: Why not: - ranked votes - STV for council. Keep track of which members are elected first and second, one of them will be VP. - Condorcet winner among the councilmembers is P. (You could use original ballots or have the council revote.) - VP is first councilmember, or, if that person is P, second councilmember. This method picks P and VP among the candidates that would be elected as council/board members. You assume that there is only one VP. We could have also two and keep track of which members are elected first, second and third. The election of the VPs differs from my draft where the quota for council election is different from the quota for electing P+VPs. This may lead e.g. to electing VPs in a non-proportional way from some small groups that have only one candidate (while the larger groupings distribute their first preference votes to several candidates). On Apr 27, 2010, at 11:36 AM, Peter Zbornik wrote: I would prefer to have the P. elected by the same people electing the board. The P. is indeed the person most often representing the party on the outside. Ok, to be included in the requirements. On Apr 27, 2010, at 2:55 PM, Raph Frank wrote: On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 1:54 AM, Juho juho4...@yahoo.co.uk wrote: A fully separate P election would make the board less proportional - unless the elected P would have voting power only if he/she is already a member of the board. I think if there are a reasonable number of members, then the non-proportionality will only be slight. In a competitive political environment often also one member makes a big difference, and more so if the size of the board / council is small. This election is however within a party and I have understood that there are no clearly defined segments within the party, so the competitiveness is probably not as heavy as in an environment with clear border lines between parties. (I leave it to the Czech Green party to decide how accurate proportionality they want.) I think both the President and VP should be centerists. The President should definitely be a centerist, so making the VP a non-centerist gives that faction more power. I think this is not in line with the targets that Peter Zbornik gave. The set of P+VPs should be proportional. I proposed to elect a centrist P but complement that by electing the VPs so that the whole team becomes proportional (as much as possible after possibly electing a P from a small but widely approved grouping). Each voter casts a ranked ballot 1) The condorcet winner becomes President 2) The runner-up becomes Vice-President 3) Use PR-STV to elect the remainder of the council This is simple and doesn't does require special rules to protect from elimination. The same ballots are just processed three times. This method has the benefit of simplicity but P+VPs and the council are not proportional. (The council is to some extent proportional but not fully, depending on the size of the council and the number of P +VPs.) On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:01 PM, Raph Frank wrote: On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.com wrote: Why not: - ranked votes - STV for council. Keep track of which members are elected first and second, one of them will be VP. - Condorcet winner among the councilmembers is P. (You could use original ballots or have the council revote.) - VP is first councilmember, or, if that person is P, second councilmember. The order of election with PR-STV shouldn't be used to determine VP, all seats are equal. However, I think your idea to run condorcet after the PR-STV election is a good idea. I would change it to: - ranked ballots - PR-STV elects the council - Excluding non-elected candidates -- Condorcet winner is President -- Condorcet runner-up is Vice
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Peter Zbornik wrote: Hi, I am a member of the Czech Green party, and we are giving our statutes an overhaul. We are a small parliamentary party with only some 2000 members. Lately we have had quite some problems infighting due to the winner-takes-it-all election methods used within the party. I am sitting in the working-group for the new party statutes, and would like introduce proportional elections instead. So I thought I might find some help in this forum in formulating my proposal. There are several practical different types of elections in the party, which need to be addressed: 1. election of council members 2. election of delegates to regional and national rallies, where the regional and national council members are elected 3. election of candidates to the ballot - primary elections In this letter, I would like to ask you to propose good proportional election system for the election of the council members. A council exists at all levels in the party organization: national, regional and local. SCENARIO 1: COUNCIL ELECTIONS We have to elect the following: 1. Election of the party president 2. Election of one or more vice-presidents in order of importance, i.e. first vice president, second, third etc. 3. Election of the rest of the council members Normally the council has five or seven members. Elect the president and VPs by a good single-winner method. I would recommend Schulze or MAM - the former is used elsewhere so you can use organizational precedence as an argument, whereas the latter is quite easy to explain. The vice president/s would just be the second, third, etc on the ordering provided (i.e. if you want to elect president and VP, whoever finishes second becomes VP). Elect the rest of the council by STV. With a size of five or seven, you could reasonably do that election by Schulze STV (with a computer count), but you don't want that complexity, so I suppose that is out; thus use ordinary STV. You can use OpenSTV to determine the winner: http://www.openstv.org If lack of precedence is not a problem, you might use QPQ instead. This method provides results similar to Meek STV, yet without the iteration required by Meek. QPQ is also supported by OpenSTV. I prefer STV and QPQ to RRV because the former two satisfy a proportionality by bloc criterion that RRV doesn't: if a group of at least k Droop quotas worth rank the same set of r candidates above the rest (not necessarily in the same order), then the outcome will contain at least a number of candidates equal to the minimum of r and k from that set. If you need the single-winner method and the multiwinner method to be fundamentally the same, patch your version of STV to, when eliminating in an n-seat election, eliminate the loser of an (n+1)-way Plurality contest among the lowest ranked candidates (all other candidates removed from that count). For IRV, n=1, so this means that the loser runoff is for the bottom two so that the one that is ranked above the other most often is spared from elimination, thus ensuring the Condorcet winner is never eliminated. Using a proper Condorcet method is better, but if you must, it's better to have a somewhat Condorcet method than one that isn't at all. DELIVERABLES FOR IMPLEMENTATION: In the end, if proportional elections are to make their way into the party statutesm, then I have to deliver the following: 1. a proposal of a text to the statutes, describing the election rules and procedures There's an unfinished statute concept for the Schulze method here: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Condorcet/message/645 . The text is missing a definition of weakest defeat, which is the defeat of one candidate by another where that defeat is closest to not being one at all, i.e. a tie. See http://www.telematicsfreedom.org/en/project/15/ssd-and-cssd-condorcet for an example. 2. a motivation of the proposal which shows why it is better than the present one. The single-winner methods are better because they don't polarize as much as top-two runoff. Condorcet methods tend to find centrists with wide support, which should help moderate the infighting you speak of. Using STV (or QPQ) rather than bloc vote is better because bloc vote/SNTV is only proportional under strategy (and considerable coordination) whereas STV is proportional when voters vote honestly. In simple terms, STV and QPQ distort proportionality less than does plurality at large. 3. a vote counting computer program which works See OpenSTV. 4. preferably a ballot scanning program I am not familiar with these. I think the best approach would be to find a general scanning system (OCR or optical scan), then feed the output to the vote counting program. 5. preferably some good examples that the system works in real life. There should be plenty of examples for STV. For Schulze, I don't know of any explicit such examples or statements, but organizations like Debian and Wikimedia use it and
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 04:24 PM 4/25/2010, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hi, I am a member of the Czech Green party, and we are giving our statutes an overhaul. We are a small parliamentary party with only some 2000 members. Lately we have had quite some problems infighting due to the winner-takes-it-all election methods used within the party. You are familiar, I presume, with http;//en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy For a small party to be effective, it must be coherent. Every time a winner takes all, i.e., forces a large minority (or sometimes an actual majority due to poor voting systems) to either support the winner or leave the party (or at least not support the winner), it weakens the party. A string of these can devastate it. I am sitting in the working-group for the new party statutes, and would like introduce proportional elections instead. So I thought I might find some help in this forum in formulating my proposal. There are several practical different types of elections in the party, which need to be addressed: 1. election of council members 2. election of delegates to regional and national rallies, where the regional and national council members are elected 3. election of candidates to the ballot - primary elections In this letter, I would like to ask you to propose good proportional election system for the election of the council members. A council exists at all levels in the party organization: national, regional and local. SCENARIO 1: COUNCIL ELECTIONS We have to elect the following: 1. Election of the party president 2. Election of one or more vice-presidents in order of importance, i.e. first vice president, second, third etc. 3. Election of the rest of the council members Normally the council has five or seven members. The best way to handle council officer electinos is within the council itself, and repeated ballot is the standard way to do it; these officers should serve at the pleasure of the council, they are servants of the council. Thus ordinarily majority vote is adequate, and simple. How you elect the council determines whether the council is representative of the members or of only certain powerful members. Since a political party cannot compel its members to vote or to donate to the party, it will do best if it truly satisfies the members that it is *their* party. However, some members, being very active, come to think that they know best for the party, and as long as they are reasonably popular, it can seem like what is good for them is good for the party. But the influence of the party will be limited, roughly, to their personal power, rather than to the normally increased power of a coherent group that seeks consensus and that is open to new members and their ideas. If the organization has local councils that are open to attendance and participation and that seek consensus rather than simply making quick decisions by majority (they can still make decisions that way, including the decision of how much consensus is enough), the party will be a living thing, open to new growth. But the natural tendency of organizations is to devolve into oligarchical structures that self-limit, and that expand, then, only under certain conditions, as when a candidate, say, becomes personally popular among the general public. It's remarkable to me how rarely do organizations arise that truly attempt to change the dominant paradigms of political structure. Mostly they imitate what they have seen operating in more powerful parties, or, occasionally, they choose alternate structures that seem better but that are inefficient and ineffective. Structure determines what elements in the party rise to power, just as it does for the overall society, so new political movements that use traditional structures recreate traditional problems with new faces. CURRENT SYSTEM: Currently the president and the vice presidents are elected in several two-round run-off elections (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-round_system). Bad idea. Elect a representative council and let it elect the officers. Use elections like that and you are limited to fixed terms for officers. The model is the old King model, really, all we changed was that we elect Kings for fixed periods. There is a reason for this model; a King can make rapid decisions; but that requires a dedicated army responsible to the King. In democratic structures a president is a servant of the members, not the other way around. And the members can change the president at any time. That is, any direct democracy can vacate the office of chair and elect a new chair, at will (following the rules for meetings). The purpose of a chair of a democratic meeting is only to ensure orderly process, so that members can be heard and decisios aren't railroaded through. A dominating or over-controlling chair in a real democratic organization is quickly gone, a chair who knows how to facilitate consensus, who is trusted to be
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Peter Zbornik wrote: Hi Kristoffer, The election methods you proposed are a great help. Just one clarification in order to avoid misunderstandings: The president and the vice presidents are all members of the board, i.e. you have X board members out of which one is the president, vice president etc. Should have stated this more clearly. My idea was that you elect all boardmembers in one election, and the person getting the highest number of votes will become the president, and the runner-up the vice-president etc. Or maybe it is required to elect these people in two elections, as you write below. Could I ask you to reconsider a reformulation of your answer to the questions below (especialy point c]) and if appropriate send it to the group? Yes, I can do so. I hope you don't mind me just replying to this mail but on-list as well as off-, so that the election-methods list also gets a copy. I'll get to the other mail - I just need a bit more time for that. I wrote: 2. In which order should the election of the board members be performed in order to insure that all the voters will be reasonably satisfied with. a] how should the elections be done, it the current election order should be preserved (i.e. first you elect the president, then the vice presidents etc.)? You wrote: First do an election for president and VPs. Run the ballots through the method of choice to get an ordering. The one who is listed at top on the ordering (outcome) becomes president. The one who is second becomes the first VP and so on down. That's one election. Then elect the rest of the council. Run the ballots through STV (QPQ, ...) to get the composition of the rest of the council. c] if you reverse the election order, i.e. first you elect the board members, then the president and the vice presidents, and lastly you elect the president? This order of election seems to be more simple to conceptualize. You wrote: I think it's better to do the presidential election first. Consider the case where the council/board is elected first. Then those who support a candidate X has to be careful not to rank him too highly, because they may want him for president, but if they ranked him too highly he would be elected to the rest of the council first and so be excluded from standing for president (as he couldn't keep two positions at once). Therefore, it makes sense to elect the higher positions first. The voters that don't get their candidates elected as president can still vote for them in the ordinary council election. I'll try to explain why I set it up as two separate elections as shown above. The primary reason I did that is as a concern of proportionality. Consider a situation where the party members are evenly split between two opinions - there are two wings, each of the same size. I think that in such a case, a tied council should be broken by a centrist - a candidate that considers all sides of the issue. A Condorcet method is good at finding and electing such candidates, but a proportional method would allocate half the council to each wing, and so there would be no such centrists in the council from which to elect. Therefore, it makes more sense to elect the centrists from the same pool as the rest of the council, then elect the rest of the council separately. If making use of multiple ballots is a problem, you could just make use of the same ballot input for both the Condorcet method and the multiwinner method. Elect the president (and VPs) first, then remove those candidates from the ballots and elect the rest of the council. If you need to elect new presidents from the council/board more often than you elect the council itself, then you have little choice but to elect from the council itself, of course. If that is the case, elect the whole council first (using STV), then elect the president and VPs from the council using Condorcet. There is also, more theoretically, the issue of proportionality. Say you have a board of 9 members, and two of these are president and VP. If the party is divided into three wings that are of nearly the same size, then removing the two members from the proportional council (to serve as president and VP instead of just members of the board) will distort the proportionality no matter how you do it, because one can't cleanly divide 7 by 3. An election in two parts would let the multiwinner method try to compensate, since it knows the council size will be 7. This issue is less important than those I've already mentioned, but I thought I should show it for the sake of completion. --- Thanks for your understanding and your help. Vänliga Hälsningar Peter Zborník :-) You're welcome. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
Hi Jameson, answers in the text. On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 6:58 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: Two questions, before I respond more fully: 1. 2010/4/25 Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com (v) asset voting is excluded due to lack of political support Can you clarify? Is the problem with vote secrecy of the lower delegates, and/or with the back room process among the higher delegates (that is, the candidates in the current system)? Yes that is indeed the problem - it allows for bribery and blackmailing. The secret ballot was introduced together with the equal voting right in many states of Europe, including the Czech Republic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot. There are versions of asset voting which avoid either or both problem - the former, by only allowing votes for qualified candidates (however that's defined), and the latter, by having each candidate pre-declare their transfer order, which is then made public simultaneously before the vote and used to automate the transfer process. In other words, it's basically STV with one predeclared ballot type per candidate. The latter system is acceptable to me provided you can chose to cast either an asset-type vote or a STV vote (in any case you can always vote for yourself). The latter system means that the preference orderings should be clearly stated, which actually could be a good thing to make the voting more transparent, but I wouldn't call it an essential part of the STV. Usually the negotiating goes on until shortly before the voting, so I am not sure if the added value would be so big. Normally the party fractions have this preference ordering set up anyway. The former system breaks the principle of the secret ballot. 2. Would you be interested in another proportional system, based on two-rank Bucklin (favor, approve, or unvoted), which can be explained as STV-like - that is, candidates accumulate a pile of a droop quota of (possibly fractional) ballots to win, no ballot fraction is in more than one pile or in a pile it doesn't approve. The advantages over STV are that my system is monotonic, because it can find condorcet-like compromise winners for each proportional segment of voters; that it's simpler to vote, either a considered individual ballot, a vote for one candidate, approve one faction simple vote, or a party-line factional vote; and that, unlike STV, it has a good single-winner special case. The disadvantages are that it's completely unknown as a system, that the internal mechanics are complicated (except for single winner), and that I don't have a working implementation - but I would be willing to code one if you're interested. If you are, I would be happy to say more about this. Maybe a description of your system for dummies in three sentences would be a help, since I don't understand it from your description. Brand-new unproven systems will have troubles of gaining support, but give it a shot, I am curious of your system anyway. Jameson Quinn Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Peter Zbornik wrote: On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 4:20 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax a...@lomaxdesign.com mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: At 04:24 PM 4/25/2010, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hi, I am a member of the Czech Green party, and we are giving our statutes an overhaul. We are a small parliamentary party with only some 2000 members. Lately we have had quite some problems infighting due to the winner-takes-it-all election methods used within the party. ... The best way to handle council officer electinos is within the council itself, and repeated ballot is the standard way to do it; these officers should serve at the pleasure of the council, they are servants of the council. Thus ordinarily majority vote is adequate, and simple. I'll be surprised if a version of asset voting is appealing to these folks. To me, asset voting has always sounded very similar to Soviet democracy. A multistage process with a hierarchy of voters creates rich opportunities for various forms of coercion, and distances voters from the choice of leaders even more than they are now. That's the way it worked in the Soviet Union, and I'm sure the Czechs are familiar with the history. -- Andrew - Andrew Myers Associate Professor Department of Computer Science Cornell University Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 9:24 PM, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com wrote: DELIVERABLES FOR IMPLEMENTATION: In the end, if proportional elections are to make their way into the party statutesm, then I have to deliver the following: 1. a proposal of a text to the statutes, describing the election rules and procedures 2. a motivation of the proposal which shows why it is better than the present one. I posted a simple explaination of PR-STV in a post back in August. http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2009-August/024720.html However, you would also need to cover why a PR method is a good idea in general. 3. a vote counting computer program which works OpenSTV has already been linked to. 4. preferably a ballot scanning program That would be cool. I don't think there is any open source software available that actually does it though. It should be possible to have simple software that can process ballots based on an image taken from a webcam or camera phone. 5. preferably some good examples that the system works in real life. PR-STV is used in many countries. (iv) votes are cast secretly on paper ballots, alternatively on some smart electronic voting system that is as secure as paper ballot voting. This is a good plan. Combining this with scanning software gets you the best of both worlds. ASSUMPTIONS: There are several types of board elections in the party, where several types of assumptions apply: 1] 70-90% of the voters are dishonest PR-STV has pretty good strategy resistance. There are some strategies called free-riding, but shouldn't be that big an issue. Currently I am considering Re-weighted range voting and range voting, since it fulfills the criteria above, but other simple-to-understand methods could be used. It would be very interesting to see how RRV works in practice. The problem is that with any change is that it is hard enough to get voting reform to happen without also trying to push an untested method. Maybe the RRV system will have be reduced to approval voting for the high dishonesty scenario. This would lower its attractivity. Then it would be proportional approval voting, which should still be a reasonable method. b] Is one election enough to give an unambiguous winner, even if the president is elected by the margin of one vote? The talk about RRV not electing the Condorcet winner makes me a little nervous. The election of the president has to be unambiguous, and several elections is not a problem. It probably would elect the condorcet winner. However, with PR methods, there is no guarantee that it picks the middle candidate. d] what are the main advantages of the your preferred method to the current election system? Improved proportionality means that voices from all parts of the party are represented. If you elect using a majority based method, then you only get one group represented. e] (optional question) if a member of the board leaves his/her position before the end of the election period, and a new member of the organ has to be elected, how should this election take place in order to insure proportionality is retained? It is unclear how best to handle this. Some possible options: - The outgoing member gets to nominate his replacement - re-count the original ballots If they are still available, you re-run the PR-STV system, but current councillors are not allowed to be eliminated. - a single seat by-election - this breaks proportionality - the council appoints someone with similar views to the person who left This can be abused. f] what is the minimal number of votes a person needs in order to be elected (if all voters except for one put an X for the candidate and the last voter puts maximum points, is this candidate normally elected?) By X, you mean no vote? Actually, I am not sure how RRV handles no-opinions. I don't think they are allowed. Maybe Warren can comment. In most cases, you would need a roughly a Droop quota. However, you could get elected with less, especially, if the votes are fragmented. 3. If the following exists for your selected election method, could you please provide a reference to: a] a text which describes the election procedure and can be used in statutes (preferably a text in existing statutes) It would depend on how you actually want to implement the method. For PR-STV, there are some subtleties here in how transfers are calculated. Why d'Hondt? Why does it give proportional representation? Do you mean why does D'Hondt work in general, or just for RRV? Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 7:50 PM, Peter Zbornik pzbor...@gmail.com wrote: Yes that is indeed the problem - it allows for bribery and blackmailing. The secret ballot was introduced together with the equal voting right in many states of Europe, including the Czech Republic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot. But, asset does use a secret ballot for the first stage. If I was implementing it large scale I would include a rule that says that only electors who receive, say 20+ votes count. Each vote would then indicate 2 choices. If their first choice doesn't get 20 votes, then their vote goes to their 2nd choice. It would proceed as per normal Asset after that. The people who receive votes then can cast then in the 2nd stage of the election. Why is this different from when legislators vote in a parliament? They are also open to corruption and bribery. You could also implement where a voter can rank the candidates and then if the vote becomes exhausted, then their first choice gets to decide how the vote is transferred. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
I think there are good and well tested single-winner and proportional multi-winner methods that the Czech Green party could use (like Condorcet methods and STV). For the election of president (P) and vice- presidents (VP) there maybe are no good existing solutions (see requirements below), so we may need to propose a new one (hopefully just a combination of old well tested tested methods). Here's one proposal for your consideration. Based on the discussion my understanding of the requirements is as follows (please correct if wrong). - P and VP are regular members of the elected board (or council) - it would be a good idea to elect a centrist P (one that appeals to all, not just to the biggest grouping) - VPs should be elected in a proportional style (the strongest group shall not be able to take all the P and VP seats) - the board (including P and VPs) should be proportional - the board election should be based on voting individuals (not named sections of the party or their nominated representatives) - board, P and VP elections will take place at the same time (= one can use the same ballots in all these elections) - the method must be easy to understand and also well tested where possible Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process would be similar. If one needs to elect new members to the board to replace old ones one could use the old ballots + special rules that will not eliminate any of the sitting board members. Does this work? Is this practical? Can this be considered to be understandable and well tested? Are there some strategic opportunities? Does this maintain proportionality as it should? Any conflicts with the expectations and needs of the Czech Green party? Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 02:50 PM 4/26/2010, Peter Zbornik wrote: Hi Jameson, answers in the text. On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 6:58 PM, Jameson Quinn mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.comjameson.qu...@gmail.com wrote: Two questions, before I respond more fully: 1. 2010/4/25 Peter Zbornik mailto:pzbor...@gmail.compzbor...@gmail.com (v) asset voting is excluded due to lack of political support Can you clarify? Is the problem with vote secrecy of the lower delegates, and/or with the back room process among the higher delegates (that is, the candidates in the current system)? Yes that is indeed the problem - it allows for bribery and blackmailing. You know, that's claimed, often. I've not seen a shred of evidence, but it would depend on context. Bribery is something that can appear when there is concentrated unsupervised power, and you are going to get that if you have elections for officers who serve fixed terms. It's pretty unlikely in your context. Blackmail is likewise, or probably you mean vote coercion. Who would be coerced, the secret ballot voters (Asset has a secret ballot initial stage), or the electors, the candidates who hold votes. And why would not any kind of delegate then be subject to these risks? Tell me, in a political party the size you mention, someone tries to coerce you into voting for them. What would you do? And what would make you think that others would do differently? It would be political suicide. (There can be literally crazy people who will do anything, but that's a risk under all circumstances.) The secret ballot was introduced together with the equal voting right in many states of Europe, including the Czech Republic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballothttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot. Notice that the protections of secret ballot are not absolute. Those who count the votes can modify them, often, computers can be hacked, etc. But under reasonably settled conditions, people can be and are very open about their politics. I'm very skeptical that there is a risk from Asset Voting as to bribery or coercion, that wouldn't exist with any system you set up, practically. There are versions of asset voting which avoid either or both problem - the former, by only allowing votes for qualified candidates (however that's defined), and the latter, by having each candidate pre-declare their transfer order, which is then made public simultaneously before the vote and used to automate the transfer process. In other words, it's basically STV with one predeclared ballot type per candidate. The latter system is acceptable to me provided you can chose to cast either an asset-type vote or a STV vote (in any case you can always vote for yourself). The latter system means that the preference orderings should be clearly stated, which actually could be a good thing to make the voting more transparent, but I wouldn't call it an essential part of the STV. Asset Voting is STV, but with a chosen human being transferring votes instead of a mechanical process set up by the voter. The problem with the latter is that most voters don't have enough information about candidates to do it well. The declared ballot variation is similar to STV, and in real STV elections, parties sometimes hand how how to vote cards. I like Asset because it is not faction-dependent. The voters simply choose whom they want to represent them and this person then either represents them or helps choose who will. There are certain possible vulnerabilities with asset voting that don't exist with large-scale elections; the problem with asset is its very strength. You can vote for yourself if you want in Asset, and then you become an elector who can participate in the direct process of composing a Council. However, you would then be just one person, and in situations where security is a problem, and police protection must be assigned, it's not practical to protect every single isolated person. But my guess is that these hazards don't exist for you. I presume that there is a list of party members, and that is as big a security risk as I could imagine being real. The other problem is that someone could demand that you vote for them, and if you don't, and they don't get any votes, they will know that you didn't. Of course, you could simply lie. Those idiots, they can't even count the votes! Or, wait a minute, what did you say your code was? Damn! I maybe I wrote it wrong. Ah well, next time. (Because there can be a huge number of candidates in Asset, there would be no candidates' names on the ballot. And that is the norm in small organizations, it seems you are trying to use large-organization process! I.e, printed ballots with the names of nominated candidates, which then favors them, computer processing of ballots, etc. Why?) Usually the negotiating goes on until shortly before the voting, so I am not sure if the added value would be so big. Normally the party
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 26, 2010, at 4:45 PM, Juho wrote: Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process would be similar. This is a better approach, I think. Protecting already-elected members and preserving proportionality is a subtle problem, and I don't think there's a completely satisfactory solution available. It's defensible for filling vacancies (below), but when it can be avoided, it should be. (Unless someone has a great idea for this kind of countback.) A burial strategy for P would have unfortunate effects for the STV election, is a possible problem. If one needs to elect new members to the board to replace old ones one could use the old ballots + special rules that will not eliminate any of the sitting board members. Does this work? Is this practical? Can this be considered to be understandable and well tested? Are there some strategic opportunities? Does this maintain proportionality as it should? Any conflicts with the expectations and needs of the Czech Green party? Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
One more thing. If needed, the method could allow nominating only some subset of all the candidates as candidates for the P and VP positions. Juho On Apr 27, 2010, at 2:45 AM, Juho wrote: I think there are good and well tested single-winner and proportional multi-winner methods that the Czech Green party could use (like Condorcet methods and STV). For the election of president (P) and vice-presidents (VP) there maybe are no good existing solutions (see requirements below), so we may need to propose a new one (hopefully just a combination of old well tested tested methods). Here's one proposal for your consideration. Based on the discussion my understanding of the requirements is as follows (please correct if wrong). - P and VP are regular members of the elected board (or council) - it would be a good idea to elect a centrist P (one that appeals to all, not just to the biggest grouping) - VPs should be elected in a proportional style (the strongest group shall not be able to take all the P and VP seats) - the board (including P and VPs) should be proportional - the board election should be based on voting individuals (not named sections of the party or their nominated representatives) - board, P and VP elections will take place at the same time (= one can use the same ballots in all these elections) - the method must be easy to understand and also well tested where possible Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process would be similar. If one needs to elect new members to the board to replace old ones one could use the old ballots + special rules that will not eliminate any of the sitting board members. Does this work? Is this practical? Can this be considered to be understandable and well tested? Are there some strategic opportunities? Does this maintain proportionality as it should? Any conflicts with the expectations and needs of the Czech Green party? 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 election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:01 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Apr 26, 2010, at 4:45 PM, Juho wrote: Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process would be similar. This is a better approach, I think. Protecting already-elected members and preserving proportionality is a subtle problem, and I don't think there's a completely satisfactory solution available. It's defensible for filling vacancies (below), but when it can be avoided, it should be. (Unless someone has a great idea for this kind of countback.) A burial strategy for P would have unfortunate effects for the STV election, is a possible problem. The STV election that follows may also reduce the incentives to try the burial strategy. That is because (in addition to burial not being a very efficient strategy in the first place) the benefit would be only to get a better P but not more voting power in the board, and because the modified vote could well contribute to the benefit of the competing sections in the proportional election. Juho If one needs to elect new members to the board to replace old ones one could use the old ballots + special rules that will not eliminate any of the sitting board members. Does this work? Is this practical? Can this be considered to be understandable and well tested? Are there some strategic opportunities? Does this maintain proportionality as it should? Any conflicts with the expectations and needs of the Czech Green party? Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 26, 2010, at 5:18 PM, Juho wrote: On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:01 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Apr 26, 2010, at 4:45 PM, Juho wrote: Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process would be similar. This is a better approach, I think. Protecting already-elected members and preserving proportionality is a subtle problem, and I don't think there's a completely satisfactory solution available. It's defensible for filling vacancies (below), but when it can be avoided, it should be. (Unless someone has a great idea for this kind of countback.) A burial strategy for P would have unfortunate effects for the STV election, is a possible problem. The STV election that follows may also reduce the incentives to try the burial strategy. That is because (in addition to burial not being a very efficient strategy in the first place) the benefit would be only to get a better P but not more voting power in the board, and because the modified vote could well contribute to the benefit of the competing sections in the proportional election. It's a reasonable argument (though the STV election should go first), if the voters are reasonable and if they regard the P office as less important than the makeup of the board--that depends on how the office is defined, I suppose. Another alternative would be to hold a separate P election (new ballots) once the board is defined. Or to let the board elect the officers from amongst themselves. That appeals to me, actually, again depending on the definition of the roles. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:22 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Apr 26, 2010, at 5:18 PM, Juho wrote: On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:01 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Apr 26, 2010, at 4:45 PM, Juho wrote: Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process would be similar. This is a better approach, I think. Protecting already-elected members and preserving proportionality is a subtle problem, and I don't think there's a completely satisfactory solution available. It's defensible for filling vacancies (below), but when it can be avoided, it should be. (Unless someone has a great idea for this kind of countback.) A burial strategy for P would have unfortunate effects for the STV election, is a possible problem. The STV election that follows may also reduce the incentives to try the burial strategy. That is because (in addition to burial not being a very efficient strategy in the first place) the benefit would be only to get a better P but not more voting power in the board, and because the modified vote could well contribute to the benefit of the competing sections in the proportional election. It's a reasonable argument (though the STV election should go first), if the voters are reasonable and if they regard the P office as less important than the makeup of the board--that depends on how the office is defined, I suppose. Another alternative would be to hold a separate P election (new ballots) once the board is defined. Or to let the board elect the officers from amongst themselves. That appeals to me, actually, again depending on the definition of the roles. A fully separate P election would make the board less proportional - unless the elected P would have voting power only if he/she is already a member of the board. Juho Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 03:39 PM 4/26/2010, Peter Zbornik wrote: The best PR system in terms of producing decent factional representation is STV-PR, and others can explain how to do it. There are programs that exist. But with 400 ballots, counting ballots is trivial. Has it occurred to you to wonder why, with 2000 members, you only get 400 ballots? I can tell you, it's pretty simple. We have 400 ballots because the local organizations elect their delegats to the natonal rally, where the national council is elected. The election of these delegates have its own irks and quirks, this is another scenario, which I would like to discuss separately. So you have delegates at the national rally? If you have 2000 members and 400 delegates, that's one delegate for five members, that's extremely low. However, an average of five might work, if delegates are chosen, not elected. Elections on a small scale create warped representation, if the elections are majoritarian. If you have a local group with, say, 20 members, and they are electing four delegates, Asset could be used, it can do amalgamation on that scale (ESF proved it). But it would be much simpler to use proxy voting or delegable proxy. There are hosts of issues involved. Are delegate expenses paid? How? If they are paid centrally, that then creates a dependence of the members on the party, when it should be the other way around If you are going to hold a single-winner election, I highly recommend Bucklin-ER with runoff if there is no election in the first round. And, in fact, if you are doing elections at a meeting, Bucklin simply is more efficient, and you can hold all the rounds you need. Could you please send a description of this method? A number of variations on Bucklin were used in the United States in roughly 1915-1920. Political scientists were enthused. And then it disappeared, almost without a whimper, and I haven't been able to figure out what happened. The reports of elections were that it worked, and it worked well. People liked it. But, I suspect, there were powerful forces that didn't want improved voting systems. I'll describe two variation. The first is what was actually used in Duluth, Minnesota, it is described in detail in the Minnesota Supreme Court decision that outlawed it based on a rather strange interpretation of one-person, one-vote that was not confirmed anywhere else, and the Court knew that it was defying the precedent of other states. The ballot has three ranks. A form that could be used would be a list of candidates. Next to each candidate are three check boxes. You may check only one candidate in first rank, one candidate in second rank, and as many candidates as you like in third rank. You may check no candidates in any or all ranks (you may skip a rank and, say, approve a candidate in first rank, none in second rank, and others in third rank). If you check no candidates in all ranks (and don't write in a candidate in a space provided), your ballot is invalid and is not counted in the basis for a majority. But if you write in a name, it's a valid ballot (-- according to Robert's Rules, any mark that might possibly be a vote makes it a ballot for the purposes of determining a majority.) The first rank votes are counted. A majority is more than half of all ballots cast. If a candidate has a first rank vote on half of the ballots, that candidate wins. If no candidate has a majority, the second rank votes are counted and added to the first rank votes. If any candidate has a vote on a majority of ballots, considering the first and second rank votes, that candidate wins. Otherwise the third rank is counted. If this is a final poll, and there is no majority required, the winner is the candidate with the most votes. Ties can be decided by backing up and comparing the tied candidates with the third rank votes struck, then second. The candidate with more votes in 1st and 2nd rank would then win, or if that is also a tie, then in 1st rank only. If still tied, it's decided by chance. However, if a majority is required, then the election must be repeated. In pure deliberative process, the repeated election is not restricted, candidates are not eliminated, but some might withdraw. It gets simpler if it is Bucklin-ER, which I'll describe next. For Bucklin-ER, it's the same except that the voter may vote for more than one candidate in each rank. It's simpler because there is no need to eominate candidates in order to make room for additional votes at a higher rank. What is needed for an election to complete is for voters to make a compromise, to start adding additional approved candidates, candidates who are ranked in at least the third rank. Now, for a more sophisticated version, the ballot is a Range ballot. For equivalence with Bucklin-ER, it can be a Range 4 ballot; there is, in addition to the 3 Bucklin ranks -- which are now considered ratings -- and the no-vote
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
At 03:50 PM 4/26/2010, Andrew Myers wrote: I'll be surprised if a version of asset voting is appealing to these folks. To me, asset voting has always sounded very similar to Soviet democracy. This is downright weird. A multistage process with a hierarchy of voters creates rich opportunities for various forms of coercion, and distances voters from the choice of leaders even more than they are now. That's the way it worked in the Soviet Union, and I'm sure the Czechs are familiar with the history. Asset doesn't resemble what the Soviets had in the least There is no party control, parties become unnecessary with Asset. It's also not necessarily multistage. If voters fear coercion of small-scale electors, they can decide, in advance, to give large numbers of votes to single candidates whom they trust. Those candidates will simply be elected, and will have extra votes to distribute, and if they could be coerced when they hold that many votes, they could be coerced, period. I find the response fascinating, because what is being proposed is what solves the problems that have prevented the promise of democracy from being realized. I remember a friend who, when I described delegable proxy, said, Oh, I could never trust anyone with my vote. Now, I hadn't suggested that the proxy could *actually vote* for her, those who know the proposals would know that. But this is the reality: Because she will not trust anyone with her vote, someone is nevertheless voting for her -- based on her existence in the population, since seats in Congress are based on population -- whom she did not trust, almost certainly. The choice is not whether or not someone will vote for her. Someone will. The choice is whether or not she will choose this person. One aspect that I suspect might be operating. As long as people imagine they are powerless, they imagine they are not to blame for what happens. After all, it's them. But what if we actually do have power? And we don't use it? Horrors! We might then be to blame for the Bad Stuff that happens! And this is the fact: the people have the power, but we do not believe it is possible to use it. So the machine rolls on, unperturbed. In order to use the power, people are just like capital. Capital is powerful because it is organized and because it can be spent for purpose with an efficient decision-making system. The people have more power than the corporations, and that is easy to show; corporate power is almost entirely dependent upon the people and the choices that people make. But the people are not organized. What's stopping them? Some will say that the corporations are preventing it, but I strongly suspect not. I don't think the corporations believe it is possible for the people to organize either! No, the obstacle is what we are seeing right here, with this charge of Soviet democracy. I don't for a second think that Mr. Myers is a stooge of the corporations. He's merely ignorant. (As we all tend to be when encountering new ideas that we haven't actually explored. Ignorance can be fixed, if we don't get attached to it.) We will organize anyway, whether Mr. Myers likes it or not. He can join us, or not. We are not going to coerce him. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On Apr 26, 2010, at 5:54 PM, Juho wrote: On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:22 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Apr 26, 2010, at 5:18 PM, Juho wrote: On Apr 27, 2010, at 3:01 AM, Jonathan Lundell wrote: On Apr 26, 2010, at 4:45 PM, Juho wrote: Draft of a method: - collect ranked votes - use Condorcet to determine P (Condorcet tends to elect a compromise candidate that all voters find reasonably good) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect the group of P and VPs (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) - use STV (using the same ballots) to elect members of the board (some special rules are needed to guarantee that the already named P and VPs will not be eliminated in the process but will be elected) One could elect P and VPs also later. In that case one could elect them from the members of the (already existing) board. Otherwise the process would be similar. This is a better approach, I think. Protecting already-elected members and preserving proportionality is a subtle problem, and I don't think there's a completely satisfactory solution available. It's defensible for filling vacancies (below), but when it can be avoided, it should be. (Unless someone has a great idea for this kind of countback.) A burial strategy for P would have unfortunate effects for the STV election, is a possible problem. The STV election that follows may also reduce the incentives to try the burial strategy. That is because (in addition to burial not being a very efficient strategy in the first place) the benefit would be only to get a better P but not more voting power in the board, and because the modified vote could well contribute to the benefit of the competing sections in the proportional election. It's a reasonable argument (though the STV election should go first), if the voters are reasonable and if they regard the P office as less important than the makeup of the board--that depends on how the office is defined, I suppose. Another alternative would be to hold a separate P election (new ballots) once the board is defined. Or to let the board elect the officers from amongst themselves. That appeals to me, actually, again depending on the definition of the roles. A fully separate P election would make the board less proportional - unless the elected P would have voting power only if he/she is already a member of the board. That wasn't my suggestion. Rather, one would hold an STV board election, and then elect P from the proportionally elected board. Depending on the role of P, the voters for P would be the at-large membership or the board itself (the latter makes sense if P/VP is largely an internal role, as opposed to an external independent executive). Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Proportional election method needed for the Czech Green party - Council elections
On 7/22/64 2:59 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Asset doesn't resemble what the Soviets had in the least There is no party control, parties become unnecessary with Asset. Abd, The phrase parties become unnecessary is redolent of utopian idealism. Parties will exist. Or do you think somehow asset voting is going to prevent concentrations of power, despite the iron law of oligarchy you are fond of quoting? Or there will be concentrations of power, but they virtuously will not engage in the give-and-take on the issues that at least some asset voting proponents have argued is a positive feature? No, of course there are and will be concentrations of power. The Soviet system had layers of electors. This allowed voting power to become more and more concentrated toward the top of the hierarchy until the top levels were pure Communist apparatchiks chosen for their unblinking loyalty to the system. It's also not necessarily multistage. If voters fear coercion of small-scale electors, they can decide, in advance, to give large numbers of votes to single candidates whom they trust. The ability to vote for the single candidate you think will win does help with the problem. But then what's the point of the asset mechanism? And if voters fear coercion of small-scale electors, they will vote the way those electors tell them to. That's the nature of coercion. Giving their vote away to someone else could open them up to reprisal. Maybe you think the vote will be anonymous? Then you need to design the protocols that protect anonymity. Not so easy. We should assume that the voting system is run by the parties and they will cheat if they can. The more layers your vote filters through, the more opportunities to cheat. Also, we must remember that coercion comes in both negative and positive forms -- the latter is called vote buying. Asset voting seems to me to offer great possibilities for efficient distributed vote buying. Peer-to-peer vote buying, if you will. If you propose something new that appears to have some of the features of a system known to be horrible, the onus is on you to convince others that these features are not a problem. You say asset voting isn't like Soviet democracy because it doesn't have party control. But how do you think that party control was established in the first place? Many totalitarian regimes (Soviet, even Nazi) start with a base comprising mostly idealists who sincerely want to make things better. The idealists are purged in the first few years via the governance mechanisms they have naively established. We will organize anyway, whether Mr. Myers likes it or not. He can join us, or not. We are not going to coerce him. Classic. -- Andrew Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
