Re: [EM] Sociological issues of elections
At 08:24 AM 8/31/2013, Vidar Wahlberg wrote: This may be a bit outside what is usually discussed here, but I'll give it a shot and if someone know of some resources I should check up on then please let me know. Others who know me might expect me to respond to this I've not followed this list for a long time, but my impression is that the main focus is on the technical or mathematical properties, and less on the sociological issues. Usually, yes. For instance, when voting for persons then candidates with high popularity and charisma are likely to win more votes than less charismatic candidates, despite the less charismatic candidates being far more suited for the task (more knowledge, experience, talent, etc.). The task is undefined here. Yeah, if one is hiring a technician, sure, perhaps. However, suppose the community is hiring someone to *represent them.* For that task, the character of the candidate, the popularity of the candidate, become quite relevant. What's the task? Someone who is more suited for the task of represenative would very likely have the skills to generate popularity. In the Norwegian system where we got multiple parties, but two blocks (left and right), we also see that some people vote for their second preference rather than the first, because the first is in the wrong block or intend to cooperate with another party which the voter dislike the most. Then that person is not their first preference. There is an internal contradiction in what is asserted. It assmes that first preference is a simple decision. Indeed, it assumes *popularity* as the standard, rather than, say, expected behavior in cooperating with that nasty other party. As is common with those who stumble across the problem, it hasn't been analyzed deeply. Instead, there is a focus on symptoms. It's not surprising; when I began to study the general problem, over twenty years ago, I found that the study of democratic *systems* was in a primitive state. Political scientists freqently made pronouncements that depended on unstated assumptions. Common opinions, to be sure, but we do expect a bit more from scientists. At least I do. The problem of scale in democracy is insoluble. [Follows a proof that is based on assumptions about what is possible in democracy, that ignores what is *actual practice* in some areas of society.] With that conclusion as a basis, then, the scientist suggested poor compromises as the best that can be done. After all, human nature, blah, blah. Yes, whatever we do, if we are to be effective, must work with people-as-we-are. But what is possible for real people? My sense is that much more is possible than we normally see, because what we normally see is conditioned by present circumstances, and we tend to assume that those circumstances will continue. Hence natural human responses will continue, etc. If it is within the scope of this list, what are your thoughts on the subject? It's been discussed before. I'll give some thoughts below. Alternatively: Assuming the perfect election system where voting any different than your real preference would only hurt your preference, That's quite an assumption! It incorporates a very strange concept that is, however, common. I'm referring to the concept of hurting your preference. That assumes that if the preference is not chosen, the preference has been *harmed.* Yes, we imagine that an ideal system would encourage sincere expression of preference, but we usually then set this up within complex systems, where complex preferences are expressed. But notice this: ordinary human conversation, where neighbors have some decision to make, may involve expression of preferences. If I prefer that we have white fences, indicating that I might accept yellow fences could lead rapidly to a compromise of yellow. Have I hurt my first preference? Yes, I have, though it is a weird expression, assuming that my primary goal is to get along with my neighbors, and that the color of fence is a lesser goal. If I want white, end of topic, everyone can go to hell if they don't accept my white fence, well, then, I wouldn't express yellow, because my preference is *strong*. A great deal of confusion is generated by not considering *real preference strength.* Instead, it is assumed that there is some absolute preference strength, and people either vote that sincerely, in a method that allows preference strength expression (i.e., range voting), or they are insincere.* But in real life, our preference strengths, the vigor with which we pursue a preference, is interactive with what we believe is possible! We make very complex assessments. It appears that there is no such thing as absolute preference strength. However, again in real life, we may bid in an auction, and such bids may represent some kind of sincerity! how would you design a form of government that is elected by the people, but is resistant
Re: [EM] Wikipedia article needs editing
At 02:56 PM 8/30/2013, Richard Fobes wrote: Abd ~ Thank you for warning us about this Wikipedia article (Electoral reform in the United States) being a battleground partly populated with IRV-FairVote soldiers. I'm choosing other fronts for my election-method reform efforts, which is why I don't have time for these edits. Richard Fobes (aka VoteFair) Well, the article was most recently heavily edited by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DavidMCEddy This editor does not appear to me to be a FairVote soldier, but only an ordinary editor, not terribly sophisticated as to Wikipedia RS requirements, just trying to make the article more complete and to improve it in certain ways. Rather, early editing on the article was done by someone who actually was a FairVote solider. Or who became one for a time. I don't see the article as a true battleground yet. It has not attracted enough attention. Mostly it's been neglected. My *general conclusion* about Wikipedia is that editing it can be far, far too cumbersome, and the results are unstable, whenever battleground conditions arise. One can go to enormous lengths to develop editorial consensus. Look back a few years later, and the results may have disappeared, with old, already resolved issues, being asserted again. I could show examples from the Instant Runoff Voting article. I'll provide a clue. In theory, there should be no references in the lede of the article, which briefly explains the topic and *what is not controversial about it.* But when an article becomes a battleground, a faction will want to assert its position in the lede, and then may be challenged, and so references are added. But that misses the point. To put something in the lede is not just about truth, or verifiability, but rather establishes the context in which the article will be read. A POV faction will cherry-pick the available facts to assert them in the lede. Perhaps only positive or negative facts will be so asserted. From the current lede for the IRV article, you would have no clue that there is any controversy over it. There is only promotional information. I notice that FairVote is still cited as if FairVote were Reliable Source. By definition, it is not. It's an advocacy organization. At one point, all this was cleaned out. FairVote was listed as an advocacy organization. That's been removed, because it's listed as if it were a reliable source, and it is generally not done to add additional links to reliable sources, i.e., to sites already referenced in the article. Everything in the lede should be covered in the article, and that is where references would be (or sometimes, a partiuclar point is covered in another article, which will be cited in the main body of the article, and references might be there. Again, such a summary should reflect high consensus. User RRichie continues to edit the article. Rob's edits are often helpful, but he has a consistent point of view. (He was actually blocked at one point, for behavior violating policy, while editing anonymously. I confronted that, it was my first experience with enforcing Wikipedia policy. I also supported his unblocking, provided he edited open with disclosed conflict of interest. The same with our friend from Vermont, Terry Bouricius. He'd also been blocked because he'd been supporting the anonymous Richie and a sock puppet of another banned editor. I became much more involved in Wikipedia policy in general, and moved away from tending the IRV article. There has been, perhaps, a little slippage on the matter of IRV and Robert's Rules of Order. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting#Robert.27s_Rules_of_Order Originally, Robert's Rules was listed in the lede as recommending IRV. I added to that the rather negative comments in RRONR about the method. It is suggested only as an option, based on actual practice, not as a normative suggestion. And the method they actually describe is critically different from what is implemented on FairVote recommendations. I requires a true majority for election, not the faux last round majority. FairVote argued bitterly against this. I was called a liar, even though it was blatantly clear from RRONR. Now, with my later perspective, with much more experience with Wikipedia policy, I was doing a kind of Original Research. That is sometimes allowed, and so, about this point, maybe. In the end, it would depend on editorial consensus, but if only one faction is paying attention to an article, there you go! I see it all the time: a faction slips in an edit and nobody notices. I've seen totally outrageous edits, seriously violating policy, slipped in, nobody noticed, and even when the editor is banned, nobody does anything about it, because it simply isn't realized the implications of the edit. Only someone who is aware of the various POVs and how they are pushed will notice it. Notice the
Re: [EM] Wikipedia article needs editing
At 05:12 PM 8/28/2013, Richard Fobes wrote: The Wikipedia article titled Electoral reform in the United States contains a heading Electoral Reform Proposals and then under that heading is a section titled Instant-runoff voting. Obviously this needs to be broadened to Election-method reform with IRV being just one kind of election-method reform. Does anyone have time to do this edit? (I don't.) If one doesn't know Wikipedia policy, it can be an exercise in massive waste of time, or it might be useful for a time, and it's quite unreliable. Basically, that there is what we might consider important information, even information that, among the informed, is obvious and generally accepted, is not enough for Wikipedia, by policy. Indeed, making up an article out of your own knowledge or conclusions is called Original Research, quicklink WP:OR, and is prohibited. Everything should come from Reliable Sources, but don't copy, except for short excerpts, explicitly quoted, and attributed. Reliable Source does not have the ordinary meaning, it is a Wikipedia term of art. It means something independently published, and not self-pubished by an author or advocacy organization or even certain kinds of special-interest groups. Gaming the Vote, Poundstone, is RS. A page on the rangevoting.org web site is not. Never cite anything to a mailing list!!! And, then, if someone reverts you, don't revert war, it can get you blocked quickly. Don't use the Talk page to discuss the subject, but only for evaluating suggested edits. Yeah, counter-intuitive, all right! The cited article is atrocious. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_reform_in_the_United_States#Cost_of_problems_with_the_current_system is one section. It's recentism. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia and is to be written, by policy, from an encyclopedic point of view. Everything in the article is about recent situations or proposals or organizations. There is less reliable source on this than on past reform movements. The article appears to be written from a reformer point of view, very possibly someone affiliated with FairVote. The history of the article shows extensive editing by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:DavidMCEddy. This user is not exactly a single-purpose account (WP:SPA), but close, he's a reformer, writing about election reform. He uses what appear to be self-published sources, including FairVote. First step would be to take the article down to what is reliably sourced. Much of the article looks like Original Research. A chart showing the advocacy positions of organizations is close to OR. Is that a reliable compilation? What were the standards for inclusion? By the way, the first editor who edited the Talk page, and who worked on the article, was Captain Zyrain. CZ was, at that time or thereabouts, a FairVote activist, and was, he later told me, sent by FairVote to take me out. Unfortunately, he engaged in a conversation and said, essentially, OMG, I've been on the wrong side. He was subsequently, under a different name, banned. The article had a POV tag on it for years. That was removed by DavidMCEddy unilaterally. That's not a violation of policy, but he removed it first and asked questions later In his discussion of the article, he appears to have had the intention of removing the appearance that the article was a sales pitch for Instant Runoff Voting. Indeed. But he's not a sophisticated editor. McEddy makes piles of small edits, also a sign of an inexperienced editor. Yes, one should not make one huge edit, that is also rude. But section rewrites should be done with a single edit, proofread before saving The POV tag was added by Devourer09. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Electoral_reform_in_the_United_Statesdiff=455307060oldid=455302714 This editor had five edits this year, so far, probably is not checking his/her watchlist. Recent edits: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Electoral_reform_in_the_United_Statesdiff=570492529oldid=570491180 though it appears to be a sound edit, elimination possibly POV language, was reverted by a power user, an administrator, to revert block evasion. That's standard practice if an editor is identified as evading a block, to revert their contributions without considering them. Anyone could revert that back. If they dare. I don't know that any serious POV pusher is watching this article. That reversion is odd. The IP was not blocked, there is no block log for it. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidentsoldid=570593657#Harassing_an_administrator.3F Arthur Rubin reverted this IP on a page not related to any of the reverts of his edits. Fascinating. Rubin maintains a page listing all the incarnations of this IP editor, in his judgment. He's violating common advice to ignore trolls. But this is what I've seen. Blocking an editor becomes a matter of
Re: [EM] [CES #9234] 2 hours to get 3 pledges, or I send you $5
At 12:58 PM 8/25/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: In the next 2 hours, if I don't get at least 3 people to pledge $5 a month (or $60) to the http://www.electology.org/Center for Election Science, I'll give everyone who's pledged $5 of my own money. Please reply to me (mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.comjameson.qu...@gmail.com) to pledge, and pass this on via email/twitter/etc. Suggestion, Jameson. If you don't get the three people, ask those who have pledged where to send the $5. Offer to send it to CES or to them, their choice. Define every outcome of your effort as success. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #9235] 2 hours to get 3 pledges, or I send you $5
At 03:06 PM 8/25/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: Abd's advice was good but luckily unnecessary. I made it to 20 pledges, which includes over 15 new members. Details later. Great, Jameson! Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Burlington dumps IRV; Immunity from Majority Complaints (IMC) criterion
At 08:13 AM 7/5/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: IMC seems to me to be too narrow to be a general criterion, if only one custom-built voting system passes it. WIMC is an interesting refinement of Condorcet and Smith. But neither belongs on Wikipedia without a reliable citation. 2013/7/5 mailto:sepp...@alumni.caltech.edusepp...@alumni.caltech.edu Should IMC and WIMC be added to Wikipedia? The obvious first: Many Wikipedia articles violate Wikipedia policy, it's an issue of what one can get away with. If anyone objects, and knows how to pursue the process, such articles would quickly be deleted. No wiki is considered a reliable source, for starters, nor are mailing lists. Neologisms will generally be rejected even if there is a single Reliable Source. But a redirect might be allowed for a neologism, if it has widespread usage. Many *existing* articles are vulnerable to deletion. As to IMC and WIMC, I'm not going to go into detail, but I have many times indicated that there is a problem with resolving an election contrary to the wish of a majority. In classical deliberative process, *no decision is made -- ever! -- without the express consent of a majority of those voting.* That includes, in the basis for majority, spoiled ballots, it only excluses *completely blank ballots with no mark.* Scrap paper, Robert's Rules calls them. No majority, election *fails.* Yet we know that it is possible, with a practically-ideal voting system (Range), that the optimal choice is not the first preference of a majority. So ... we can't just assert as some sort of absolute, the Majority Criterion. Rather, a full resolution of this would involve another poll. It is possible that if the voting system indicates a very weak preference on the part of the majority, under some conditions, it might be possible to complete the election. Defining those conditions would, however, be relatively complex. It's more common that there is no majority preference, only a plurality, and, under those conditions, it is well understood that a normal solution is a runoff election. So the problem reduces, then, to making sure that the nominations for that runoff are likely to truly represent the will of the majority, as might be inferred, i.e., that they will include a majority preference. It is commonly assumed that runoffs will have two candidates only. That's artificial, for sure, and it sets up finding a majority as if it were, itself, an absolute. A good voting system in the runoff can handle three candidates, and, remember, a runoff election is a very different animal than a primary. The voters will be much more informed. The point about violating the wishes of a majority is clear: it can easily lead to dumping the voting system and other responses, and the only way around that would be to *disempower* the majority. Kind of a Bad Idea in a democracy, eh? Exactly who does this job, who holds the gun? Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #9066] My Quora answer on egypt and voting systems
At 08:37 PM 7/5/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: http://www.quora.com/Egyptian-Military-Ousts-Mohamed-Morsi-July-3-2013/What-were-the-primary-reasons-that-the-Egyptian-military-removed-Morsi-from-the-Presidency/answer/Jameson-Quinnhttp://www.quora.com/Egyptian-Military-Ousts-Mohamed-Morsi-July-3-2013/What-were-the-primary-reasons-that-the-Egyptian-military-removed-Morsi-from-the-Presidency/answer/Jameson-Quinn Nice answer, Jameson. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Quotaless STV-PR suggestion
At 10:57 PM 7/3/2013, Chris Benham wrote: Some STV fans might not like that, but I'm not fully on board with the LNHarm religion. While I think a very strong truncation incentive is a bad thing, absolute compliance with LNHarm makes it more likely that the result will (at least partly) be determined by the weak, maybe ill-informed, preferences of voters who are only really interested in their favourites (and certainly wouldn't have turned out if their favourites weren't on the ballot); thereby reducing the Social Utility of the full set of winners (and maybe compromising the legitimacy of some of them). LnH was nauseating to the reviewer, I'm sure, because that criterion guarantees that a method cannot find an optimal compromise in a fairly common scenario, center squeeze. The equivalent in direct negotation is someone who refuses to let you know their alternative preferences until someone pulls out a gun and shoots their favorite. Now, will you consider an alternative? Since you put it that way I like IRV, but its compliance with LNHarm isn't IMO one of its best features. The discussion was STV. While it is optimal, LNH makes sense in the first rounds of multiwinner elections. Ideally, *there is no compromise in representation.* That is why Asset Voting was such a brilliant invention. I think Dodgson did understand the issues. If not, well, it is still brillig, and the slithy toves still gyre and gimble in the wabe. He was wabe yond nearly everyone else. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] FairVote comment on Burlington dumping IRV
At 11:38 AM 7/4/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: OK. I think we can work this out. Before I make more arguments, I'm going to try to explain the disagreements as I see them, and ask you more about what you're saying. A. MAV vs. ER-Bucklin (ERB, though we should probably find a better name at some point). That is, completion using above-median, or completion using median-or-above. I don't see a huge difference here. I think MAV is slightly better because of the chicken dilemma, but it's possible that that regular voters would see ERB as simpler by a big enough margin to make it worth supporting instead. I'm probably not a good judge of that because my mathy brain tends to see them as exactly symmetrical. I think you're beginning to understand my point about symmetry. Your view is that ERB is better because of apparent simplicity (empirical question about voters; we could find agreement here with more evidence) and also because of some Deep Principle of counting all the votes which I don't understand (because in my view MAV and ERB are exactly as likely to count a given vote or not, that is, to make a given gap in ratings between two candidates significant or not). I'm not sure that explaining your Principle further would help me understand it, because it's probably not going to fit with my logic. I would, however, like to understand more about whether you see the simplicity or the Principle as more important here. B. MAV vs. EMAV On this question, our principal disagreement is around the strategic impact of the voting system, both for general exaggeration and for specific chicken dilemma scenarios. Here's my logic: ...Start Jameson's logic... 1. In different systems, different strategies are effective. I'll give one 5 candidate linear (5CL) scenario and one chicken dilemma (CD) scenario to illustrate my point. Honest utilities 5CL: 23: L100, CL75, CR25, R00, RR00 25: L50, CL100, CR50, R00, RR00 24: L00, CL50, CR100, R50, RR25 22: L00, CL25, CR75, R100, RR50 06: L00, CL00, CR25, R50, RR100 (To make this comparison clearer, I'm going to use 4+1 ratings for both systems, though it would actually work the same if under EMAV, 25 represented a coinflip between the closest available ratings, 50 and 0) EMAV uses 25% as a non-approved rating. Bucklin-ER could be voted with the coin flip, it does not have that below-expectation rating. What I prefer to see is utilities that are normalized not only to the extremes, but also to the election expectation as midrange. This, in theory, could mean that the value of a point in the negative scale was different from that in the positive scale (i.e, below and above midrange.) Sophisticated voters would handle this by compressing the ratings at the extremes It's quite true that this is not strictly summable. We could do a separate study to see how this translation affects utility. I'll note, however, that this is the test used in Approval Voting. What I'm going to claim here, without having gone over the example, and presumably we will examine this, is that if the above are truly honest utilities -- we can treat them as absolute, not distorted by strategy -- and if 50 is the minimum acceptable rating, i.e,. the election expectation, the voter will not be disappointed by the election of a candidate rated 50, at least not by itself, then a reasonable voting strategy will be simple: vote the honest utilities as the ratings. Now, as I start to go over this, I notice that all the voters have a candidate at each utility value. That's highly distorted from expectation. A voter, for example, who only knows their favorite may have a max *sincere* utility of 100, and zero for every other candidate. I don't know if this will impact the analysis. Ah, I see now that Jameson called this 5CL, 5 Candidate Linear. I read the votes this way: 23: L100, CL75, CR25, R00, RR00 voters at L 25: L50, CL100, CR50, R00, RR00 voters at CL, balanced between L and CR 24: L00, CL50, CR100, R50, RR25 voters at CR, balanced between CL and CR 22: L00, CL25, CR75, R100, RR50 voters at R 06: L00, CL00, CR25, R50, RR100 voters at RR CL is the honest winner under both MAV and EMAV, with a median of 50. However, the utility numbers show a clearer picture: SU for all the candidates from stated ratings taken as utilities, as percentage of maximum; L : 35.50% CL: 59.75% CR: 60.25% R : 37.00% RR: 23.00% CL is not the SU winner, it is CR, but only by 0.5%. An election this close would be unpredictable. It has, as well four candidates balanced by first preference, it's rare to have three. It's clearly been set up to do this. How does this election proceed if the utilities are votes and with normal Bucklin amalgamation, majority is 50%+ : 4 3 2 L 23 23 48 CL 25 48 72 majority CR 24 46 71 majority R 22 22 52 majority RR 6 6 28 Three majorities!
Re: [EM] FairVote comment on Burlington dumping IRV
At 01:00 AM 7/3/2013, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: http://www.fairvote.org/lessons-from-burlington#.UdOvX2LE0XY (March 4, 2010) Let me cut to the chase. Despite winning in five of the city's seven wards, the use of instant runoff voting (IRV) for mayor was repealed this week by a margin of less than 4% in Vermont's largest city of Burlington. I was just looking at this post and was struck by the way in which the facts were presented. Because wards can have different numbers of voters, and because vote margins make a huge difference, winning in the most wards means very little. But Richie is trying to present a series of Hey, we almost won arguments. So I decide to look at the election. The results from some of the earlier IRV elections are no longer available, or, if they are, they are not easy to find. Turns out that some of the places where vote counts were maintained were web sites hosted by IRV supporters, and those have disappeared. Richie, in that blog post, referred to a web site that was used for that campaign. Gone. History disappears, often. http://www.burlingtonvt.gov/WorkArea/LinkIT.aspx?itemID=6116 Question 5. - Charter Change - Eliminate IRV 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 totals Yes 264 185 292 1203545 477 10063972 No 405 428 510 606 793 490 437 3669 Richie is right. 5 out of 7 wards did support IRV. However, if we look more closely, it is more divided than that. Percentages: Yes 39.5% 30.2% 36.4% 66.5% 40.7% 49.3% 69.7% 52.0% Notice that Ward 6 *almost* approved the initiative to eliminate IRV. Wards 4 and 7 very strongly voted to eliminate it. We have two wards very much opposed to IRV, and four who wanted to keep it, and one on the fence, really. Notice the wards where the number of votes were greatest. The wards with the two highest vote totals also had the largest number of voters. Under conditions in Burlingon, conditions caused IRV to effectively damage the Republicans, or at least Republicans would see it that way. Richie wrote: In the repeal, the two wards where Wright ran most strongly voted against IRV by a margin of two-to-one after supporting it when first passed in 2005. I haven't checked this, but it's likely. Actual experience with IRV soured them. So? The rest of the city voted 60% to keep IRV. He's just manipulating statistics to create an impression. While the overall vote was not a landslide, it was still a clear margin, 52%. Notice that he states the 60% figure. Okay, I'll cherry-pick my own: The two largest wards in the city, by turnout in this election, Wards 4 and 7 -- voted 67.0% to dump IRV. IRV produces erratic results. It's a shame that Burlington, instead of returning to top-two runoff with below 40% being the margin that triggers a runoff, was not educated in voting systems. This is precisely how FairVote's monomaniacal focus is harming voting system reform. The runoff system they went back to *could* produce the same results. There are simple systems that could avoid the problem, but FairVote has campaigned against them and has conspired to prevent their testing anywhere. (If conspired seems strong, then let FairVote actually show that they support real voting system reform, by opening up and truly suppporting election science, instead of arguing against it and creating mountains of misleading propaganda.) Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] FairVote comment on Burlington dumping IRV
At 12:31 AM 7/3/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: Abd, I noticed something. I don't want to jump to any conclusions, so I'm asking you directly. 2013/7/3 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com ... Bucklin ... You said Bucklin, not EMAV. So, two questions and a comment: Q1. Why did you change? EMAV is not a known method, it's brand new, I just announced it, and this is a general post, not about details about the specific method. Q2. Is there anything that would convince you to switch to saying MAV? Not in that context, not yet. Comment: To me, Bucklin is not a system, but a class of systems; at a minimum, it would include all different Progressive-era systems which were called Bucklin at the time, but to me, it includes all descending-approval-threshold-until-majority systems (including for instance MJ, GMJ, MCA, and MAV.) My comments were referring to the class of systems, but also specifically to Bucklin -- which primarily means those early systems -- and FairVote propaganda was about Bucklin. Of course I'd love to promote EMAV, but promotion is not my primary goal. The subject post was written to review Richie's response to the Burlington debacle, and traditional Bucklin -- say, three-rank, mandatory single votes in first and second rank, almost exactly the same as some of the old implementations -- would have fixed the Burlington problem easily. That does *not* mean that this would be ideal. As to MAV, I'd support it if the regression were *necessary.* I don't see it as that, and the fallback to higher preferences clearly moves away from maximizing expressed utilities. I understand that it was frustrating for you that I appeared to support MAV, for a short time, but I think that we were pandering to some shallow arguments, that we don't need to avoid the chicken dilemma, and that using the range ratings adequately addresses the concern. I.e.: original Bucklin: with a multiple majority, all at or above the found majority rating are collapsed to approval. Same with majority failure. The result is that a lower preference may count *the same* as a higher one. It's the approval problem MAV: under the multiple majority at a lower preference rule, the system ignores the lower preference votes, using only higher-level approval information. It does count the lower preference votes, but not to distinguish between those candidates. I haven't done so, but I could show some problem scenarios. It solves the approval problem, but at the cost of apparent expressed utility. EMAV: The system uses all the votes in the two cases (multiple majority and majority failure.) Thus lower preference votes do count, but only at deprecated value. The difference between full preference and minimal approval is 1/2 vote. The difference between full prefeence and the below-approval rank that is above maximum opposition is 3/4 vote. So EMAV is intermediate to original Bucklin and MAV. The attempt to fix on a consensus method, on the CES list, was premature. The voting done was premature. Ad-hoc list process can do this: it can start to vote on something before the discussion is complete. Basic democratic process: there is no vote until there is a *supermajority* declaring that the question is fixed and agreed upon and it's time to vote. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] FairVote comment on Burlington dumping IRV
At 04:17 PM 7/3/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2013/7/3 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com EMAV is not a known method, it's brand new, I just announced it, and this is a general post, not about details about the specific method. I find it encouraging that you make a distinction between which methods you'd mention on a general and a details post. My current push with MAV is intended for general posts; I'm not trying to suppress details discussion. No problem with you being encouraged, but ... general post really mean that this wasn't about Bucklin or EMAV or MAV or any other specific method, and I simply mentioned Bucklin as a possibility for Burlington in a discussion about FairVote, and that name was used there for the reasons I stated: FairVote has created much content about Bucklin. Mostly misleading. Q2. Is there anything that would convince you to switch to saying MAV? Not in that context, not yet. You gave a qualified response, when I wanted an unqualified one. What would it take in some other context, or later? A million dollars? That might do it. How many times do I need to say it? There are limits, you know. BR data showing it's better than EMAV for some voter model? Sure, if the voter model was reasonably realistic. By the way, EMAV produces the same results as MAV and ordinary Bucklin under many circumstances, and when it doesn't, it's Range, which has superior BR. So I would not hold my breath for those BR statistics showing what you propose. The caveat: I'm suspecting from what is below that Jemeson has some models of voter behavior that I find quite strange. Some aspects of this do reflect common opinion among voting systems activists, particularly the idea that Score strategy requires extreme ratings. That has never been shown, and neglects the complexity of voter motivations, i.e., the *values* that drive strategy. Naive game theory is well-known to come up with paradoxes, when real people have no trouble with supposedly difficult choices. Survey data showing voters love it? Sure. Real voters in real elections or imaginary voters in imaginary elections? Real voters participating in an imaginary election? I have suggested in the past that we do focus groups on certain issues before committing organizationally to some position or strategy. This is the CES, so focus groups are not about deciding what is best, from the point of view of voting system behavior, but rather what *communicates* to voters and what appeals to them. What do they need to know? What do they want? What do they stand for? Comment: To me, Bucklin is not a system, but a class of systems; at a minimum, it would include all different Progressive-era systems which were called Bucklin at the time, but to me, it includes all descending-approval-threshold-until-majority systems (including for instance MJ, GMJ, MCA, and MAV.) My comments were referring to the class of systems, but also specifically to Bucklin -- which primarily means those early systems -- and FairVote propaganda was about Bucklin. Of course I'd love to promote EMAV, but promotion is not my primary goal. The subject post was written to review Richie's response to the Burlington debacle, and traditional Bucklin -- say, three-rank, mandatory single votes in first and second rank, almost exactly the same as some of the old implementations -- would have fixed the Burlington problem easily. That does *not* mean that this would be ideal. As to MAV, I'd support it if the regression were *necessary.* I don't see it as that, and the fallback to higher preferences clearly moves away from maximizing expressed utilities. 1. MAV's regression is no more artificial than original-Bucklin's inclusion. That's bizarre. Bucklin simply counts the votes in each rank, seeking a majority, and adds them in sequence. When it finds a majority, it completes, candidate with the most votes wins. MAV does not use the last-amalgamated vote, but backs up (regresses) to the previous count. It has the data, then ignores it, using it *only* to distiguish a candidate as approved. Bucklin is instant runoff approval. It simulates a series of approval elections with declining approval cutoff. It's extremely easy to understand this, and multiple approvals always existed as a possiblity in Approval, and they actually happened with Bucklin. Nobody challenged that has being improper in any way. That fits with tradition with respect to multiple ballot questions, the common usage where multiple approvals are possible. The candidate with the most votes wins. That's consident with the Arizona constitution. (The only question will be about those uncounted votes at lower preferences, where they exist.) It is simpler to explain ordinary Bucklin, because the winner rule does not change. Most votes. MAV requires backing up. Now, from the point of view of utility
Re: [EM] My diffs w. Kristofer are not anti-reason.
At 01:26 PM 7/2/2013, David L Wetzell wrote: On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 11:12 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: At 02:16 PM 6/30/2013, David L Wetzell wrote: I've argued that the combination of aspects of the US political system in our constitution, namely the import of winner-take-all presidential/senatorial/gubernatorial elections(obviously hard to change), + habits built up among many US voters( used to 2-party dominated system, inequalities in the quality/quantity of eduation) + bounded rationality of voters make it wise to assume the continued two-party domination of the US political system. While it may be *reasonable* to assume continued domination, in some areas, it is not *wise*. Wisdom entails consideration of real world precedents, such as how positive election reforms have tended to be https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instantion=1ie=UTF-8#output=searchsclient=psy-abq=elite-mass%20interactionsoq=gs_l=pbx=1fp=e16824eab702e431ion=1bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.bvm=bv.48572450,d.aWcbiw=1366bih=603elite-mass interactions. If we look beyond mere electoral reform to all reform, which is a broader sample, we can see that reforms do have, generally, an elite-mass interaction stage. It is not the first stage. Something influences the elite -- the minority of politicians -- to espouse reform. It has not uncommonly been one person with an idea, which is then taken up by a popularizer, which then reaches the elite. The original idea sparked something that was latent, already. Essentially, one of the possible positive functions of voting system reform would be encouragement of a healthy multiparty system, even if there continue to be two major parties *in most elections.* IRV+ American forms of PR will do exactly that. Would, but won't. It would short-term encourage it, until it goes down in flames. (Not PR, by the way, just IRV, but IRV might possibly take down PR with it.) The presences of 2 major parties *in most elections* is the essence of a 2-party dominated system. It will be a healthy system because the 2 major parties will be more meritocratic and their duopoly will be easier to contest. Sure as to the essence. IRV would, again, have that short-term effect, if it can be implemented. The problem would be that where it succeeds, it will then fail, and this will certainly be noticed. Given that there are far better methods, easier to canvass, not requiring the expensive conversion to IRV and the difficulties IRV brings -- talk to the election audit people! -- we don't need to waste time and money on a system that we know *will* fail. We *already have* places in the U.S., with elections, where there are three major parties. Depends on how you define major parties, That's silly. Anything depends on how you define. A major party is a party that, in an election, is favorited by a large number of voters, such that it routinely finishes, as to that designation, in the top two. We are considering the situation where a third party advances to challenge this, what happens when it gets close to parity or passes it? In this discussion, it is a party that is essentially unchallegable by a minor party, the effect with plurality is only a possible spoiler effect if it preferentially draws votes away from one of the major parties. IRV fixes that spoiler effect, but then fails miserably, on occasion, when there are three major parties, i.e., a third party is close to parity. but yes regional diversity + cross-regional subsidies have been a major source of potential threats to duopoly in US political history. Duopoly is not an interest group that can be threatened. Some people do like duopoly and argued for it, and they have some points. Missing entirely in this discussion is how parties in a two-party system make their nominations. What a two-party system does is to split an election into a round-robin contest, effectively, as with baseball leagues, and with the World Series being the major election. I have argued more recently that in addition that economic factors involved with running for an important single-winner election tend to reduce the number of competitive candidates and in combination with the likely continued 2-party domination reduce the feedback loop from a change in election rule to increased numbers of competitive candidates in single-winner elections. IRV is being promoted for nearly all elections, regardless of conditions. We know that advanced voting systems will encourage additional candidates to run, that's obvious and it shouldn't be questioned. Yes, there are natural limits in those important single-winner elections, i.e,. elections on a large scale. We do not clearly know how rapidly a minor party might grow if not for the first-order spoiler effect, which IRV does resolve. dlw: It's called keeping things simple in marketing to people
Re: [EM] Outcome Design Goals
I'm just picking a couple of points from this mostly waste-of-time post. I have not read all of it. At 02:11 PM 7/2/2013, David L Wetzell wrote: On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 6:57 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com wrote: At 09:22 AM 7/1/2013, David L Wetzell wrote: Some thoughts. 1. You need to consider the difference between Cardinal and Ordinal Utility. You presume the existence of Cardinal utility. First of all, who is you. David is writing to an entire list. *Who* presumes? Who do you think? Benn. Benn is a newbie. He was just chatting and asking and exploring. Custom and courtesty, when one replies to an individual, is to address them by name. Otherwise it makes little sense. Email software routinely does that. And it will thread the posts as well. In the study of Bayesian Regret, we do *not* presume the existence of cardinal utility, we *assume it.* It's a device for studying voting systems, to see how they perform when we know *summable cardinal utilities.* dlw: It's not a neutral device. It is a non-trivial heuristic/assumption, since when it is relaxed it makes the right voter strategies with approval/score-voting indeterministic. Bringing frog implementation dynamic conclusively. Ahem. It is a device for study. It is neutral, but, yes, it makes Range (Score) ideal *if voters vote absolute utilities.* But they cannot, very likely, so Range is *not* ideal. It merely imitates, in a certain way, an ideal voting system. I am *not* proposing Range for public elections at this time (except as we consider Approval a Range method) because there is an independent value, not much studied by utility analysis, and not particularly amenable to it, ultimately, and that is the value of majority consent and the interactions involved. And my point is that there's no good reason not to relax the presumption of absoluteness of utilities, since utility is fundamentally a way to aggregate things that o.w. can't be aggregated. Let me repeat what I wrote, since apparently David needs some repetition: absolute utilities are not presumed, they are, in simulations only. *assumed.* And we can assume them in a way that is commensurable, *by definition.* Now, suppose we have a set of commensurable utilities that somewhat resemble real-world utilities. If they are not chosen in a way that is biased toward a particular voting system, and voting systems, through many trials, show certain characteristics with regard to Bayesian Regret, why would we think that a real voting system would do much differently? Real voting systems face many varying conditions. Under some circumstances, it is possible to define absolute utilities and to expect that people would rationally vote them. How would a voting system perform under those conditions? This point is meant to scale back claims like those that Warren Smith and Clay Shentrup or Dale Sheldon-Hess have made in the past that Approval/Score have been proven to be the best rule based on BR. I don't use the term proven. It's overstatement. How about shown with reasonable certainty? And that's not accurate. The system in Warren's study with the lowest BR (best), with reasonable voting strategy, was not Range. Do you know what it was? Basically, David, you have not studied this issue and you have opinions that are clearly based on your conclusions. This system makes a basic assumption that all voters are equal, equally deserve to be pleased. So the *full range* of pain/pleasure for these voters is made equal. dlw: Yeah, and that involves assumptions found in utilitarian philosophy that have been widely discredited in philosophy at large. I'm simply saying it's a heuristic and so the implications from such need to be taken with a grain (or more) of salt. I like salt. Utilitarian philosophy is a very different field than the study of utility in voting system analysis. Clay Shentrup does seem to somewhat adopt a Utilitarian religion. That's far from all of us. The utilities in the example that David is referring to seem to have been utilities on a scale, perhaps, of 0 to 100. These are utilities that have been transformed to representation on a scale of 0 to 100. They are no longer absolute utilities in the sense described, but we can still posit such utilities, for simplicity, and see how a voting system performs. And we can relax the assumption slightly by letting someone see their true utilities obscurely after having been transformed s.t. the rankings are not changed but the relative intensities are changeable. Blue ceilings obscure paintings below waterfalls. [...] [I had written:] FairVote, had they been capable of intelligent strategic thinking, would *never* have chosen Burlington as a place for IRV. Bad Idea. But Terry Bouricius was there, and they had LWV Vermont in their pockets. They were screaming when the move was being made to drop IRV
[EM] FairVote comment on Burlington dumping IRV
http://www.fairvote.org/lessons-from-burlington#.UdOvX2LE0XY (March 4, 2010) Let me cut to the chase. Despite winning in five of the citys seven wards, the use of instant runoff voting (IRV) for mayor was repealed this week by a margin of less than 4% in Vermonts largest city of Burlington. Its a disappointment, particularly with a growing appreciation in Vermont for IRV. Those strongly opposing repeal of IRV included the states leading civic groups VPIRG and state arms of the League of Women Voters and Common Cause and a host of political leaders, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, Gov. Howard Dean and nearly every state legislator from the city. He's got to lead with all the reasons why Burlington voters were stupid. FairVote convinced the LWV and CC to adopt a pro-IRV stand many years ago, and it turns out that these organizations are a bit like FairVote. They don't reconsider, they just keep on keeping on, once a cause has been decided. IRV in Burlington only has been used in two mayoral races, as it was not adopted for city council races. Its defeat stems from a simple fact: the only candidate ever to win with IRV in Burlington is current mayor Bob Kiss, who won two elections for mayor in 2006 and 2009 in hotly contested races where no candidate won 40% of first choices. In a city with three major parties, all with roughly comparable support, victories for only one party's nominee meant that a majority of voters had yet to see their first choice win in an IRV race. Kiss was the majority choice over his top opponents in 2006 and 2009, to be sure, but with new controversies in the his administration in the past year, it was clear that in a referendum on the mayor this year, he would lose. In other words, not our fault, not IRV's fault. The problem is Kiss. However, Kiss was the majority choice over his top opponents in 2006 and 2009? In 2009, Kiss had 48% of the vote. IRV creates a false majority by eliminating candidates, it's called a last round majority. It excludes all the voters who voted against the top two. Richie is so accustomed to saying that IRV finds majorities that he may even believe it. Opponents of IRV were well aware of this fact, and did everything they could to attach IRV to Kiss. At a televised debate, they carried signs saying Wheres Bob, suggesting Kiss should be the one defending IRV. They called out at the polls if you dont like Bob Kiss, vote to repeal IRV. They focused on the 2009 election results, suggesting that IRV had cheated voters into a Kiss victory so that backers would have to explain how in fact Kiss had earned his majority win. After Tuesdays vote, one city councilor called on Kiss to resign showing the direct link in many voters minds between IRV and the mayor. OMG, opponents made *political arguments*! FairVote has sold itself as politically savvy. Who would those calling out be talking to? How about the majority of voters who opposed Kiss in the election? It would especially be the Republicans, with the largest single party (because of the Democrats and Progressives being separate). Yeah, I know there is something particularly scuzzy about *appealing to the majority.* But ... wasn't IRV supposed to find majority results? Wasn't that the very point? The very fact that Richie thinks that this argument was telling shows that IRV failed. Really unfair, sure. They focused on the 2009 election results! How illogical to judge a voting system by its results! Don't they know that IRV has momentum? Never mind that voting systems experts anticipated failures like that. Totally predictable -- i.e., quite likely -- in situations as in Burlington, with three major parties. Looking at first preference votes in 2009: Republican: 2951, Progressive 2585, Democrat 2063. IRV opponents were led by Kurt Wright, who lost the 2009 race in a cliffhanger. Wright had led after the count of first choices and continued to lead in the count until the field was reduced to two. In the final instant runoff, a majority of voters ranked Kiss ahead of Wright, giving Kiss re-election. Within weeks of his defeat, Wright's supporters were in the streets collecting petitions for repeal joined by some backers of other losing candidates. Their drive seemed to falter after initial enthusiasm, but then a public scandal enveloped the mayor, and petition gatherers rushed to finish getting their repeal on the ballot. In the repeal, the two wards where Wright ran most strongly voted against IRV by a margin of two-to-one after supporting it when first passed in 2005. The rest of the city voted 60% to keep IRV. Richie is, so far, not acknowledging *any problems* with IRV. It's all politics. Yet *the majority of voters* in 2009 voted *against* Kiss. In that final instant runoff, there were many ballots no longer counted because every candidate other than Kiss and Wright, including the
Re: [EM] My diffs w. Kristofer are not anti-reason.
At 02:16 PM 6/30/2013, David L Wetzell wrote: I've argued that the combination of aspects of the US political system in our constitution, namely the import of winner-take-all presidential/senatorial/gubernatorial elections(obviously hard to change), + habits built up among many US voters( used to 2-party dominated system, inequalities in the quality/quantity of eduation) + bounded rationality of voters make it wise to assume the continued two-party domination of the US political system. While it may be *reasonable* to assume continued domination, in some areas, it is not *wise*. Essentially, one of the possible positive functions of voting system reform would be encouragement of a healthy multiparty system, even if there continue to be two major parties *in most elections.* We *already have* places in the U.S., with elections, where there are three major parties. I have argued more recently that in addition that economic factors involved with running for an important single-winner election tend to reduce the number of competitive candidates and in combination with the likely continued 2-party domination reduce the feedback loop from a change in election rule to increased numbers of competitive candidates in single-winner elections. IRV is being promoted for nearly all elections, regardless of conditions. We know that advanced voting systems will encourage additional candidates to run, that's obvious and it shouldn't be questioned. Yes, there are natural limits in those important single-winner elections, i.e,. elections on a large scale. We do not clearly know how rapidly a minor party might grow if not for the first-order spoiler effect, which IRV does resolve. Howver, given that minor parties still often maintain ballot presence, given how much of an obstacle currently exists for such parties, due to Plurality voting, given that IRV would not increase the obstacle, it would relieve it and open the door, David's argument seems facile. Once minor parties can get, in public elections, validation for true support and thus increased ballot position, we can expect *as a reasonable possibility* that, in places, the minor party will rise to parity. And that is precisely where IRV breaks down, badly, as it did break down in Burlington. IRV is a *terrible* single-winner method when there are three viable candidates or more. So why set this up? Why not use a *simpler* method that also addresses the spoiler effect? Bucklin would do it with ease, it is extremely easy to understand, no surprises, and it has what I'd call historical momentum. FairVote has attempted to confuse that history, it's one of their more objectionable activities. Bucklin worked. It did not do everything that was claimed for it, that's all. It did not magically generate majorities in party primaries, but there is *no* claim that it caused harm. Bucklin is *better* than IRV as to finding majorities, in a nonpartisan election context (and a party primary is a nonpartisan election), because it can uncover support for a candidate, underneath support for the favorite. Bucklin votes only add, and there are no eliminations. It's instant runoff Approval. But no method can handle voter ignorance, which is the primary cause of bullet voting. The other cause is strong preference for the favorite, which means that Bucklin would be collecting information on *preference strength*, which is very important for party primaries! We can assume with Bucklin that first preference votes are the same as they would be with IRV, the differences will appear in lower preferences. (An exception would be if voters are allowed to vote for more than one in first preference: but voters, with Bucklin, will only do this if they have no strong preference. That's a feature, not a bug. I've argued that IRV should also allow multiple votes at a rank.) My next arg was that if the average number of competitive candidates wouldn't be likely to grow too much with the adoption of a, Condorcet-like or Approval-like or IRV-like election rule that it would lower the value-added from Condorcet-like or Approval-like rules relative to a variant of IRV. *Any method* that eliminates the first-order spoiler effect will encourage *many* more candidacies. I don't see that I understood, however, what David was saying here. Too many variable or negative conditions to parse readily. I then have argued that if the short-run probability of widespread implementation of an IRV-like rule in our current US system with all of the previous conditional factors plus the first-mover marketing advantage of IRV-like system out weighs the short-run probabilities of other alternatives to FPP then it doesn't per se matter if there is some value-added from such alternatives relative to IRV. This is a circular argument. The marketing advantage of IRV is useless if the method will be rejected. More people know about IRV, yes,
Re: [EM] EMAV?
. But if EMAV is better than MAV, then Score is even better; while if EMAV is better than Score, then MAV is even better. The problem, Jameson, is that ordinary Score misses something, called Majority Approval, a basic element of democracy. It's a complex issue, and it may, in fact, make little practical difference, in many elections, but the principle of majority consent to decisions is quite basic and is a widespread idea; therefore getting Range implemented, just like that, is likely to be difficult, because MC failure *will* be asserted as a counter-argument. EMAV begins collecting Range data, and uses Range evaluation for median tie-breaking (and plurality resoluttion), so it would break the ice. I'm going to guess that SU study of this method, with proper application of voting strategy, would take this down to *almost-Score* Bayesian Regret. I've also argued that Range should include an explicit approval cutoff, which this method effectively incorporates and uses. As you know, I would greatly prefer to complete with majority approval, and thus I'd see this method, or Range, used with a runoff if there is no majority approval shown. Ultimately, if it's a two-round system intrinsically (the first election is really a nomination primary), this could be the second round. The first round would also work, but I'd want to see Condorcet testing, both with EMAV and MAV, in the first round. Not the second. original post on EMAV From: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax Date: Fri, 28 Jun 2013 10:06:10 -0500 The other day I sent this post to the mailing list for the Center for Election Science (electionscie...@googlegroups.com). Comments are very welcome. Okay, from discussions on the EM list, I've come to a method that seems practically ideal to me. We can call it EMAV, Evaluative Majority Approval Voting. It uses the fact that a Bucklin-ER ballot, sanely voted, represents a descending approval cutoff; therefore the ballot 1. Expresses approval explicitly for all candidates so categorized. 2. Expresses preference *strength*, tied to approval cutoff, which is, from a common suggested approval strategy, rooted to election expectation. The method: 1. Ranked ballot, with three approved ranks, one explicit disapproved rank, and default maximally-disapproved rating for blanks. 2. The ranks are ratings, with values of 4, 3, 2, 1, with 0 being default. A rating of 2 or higher is approval. (so rank number is the inverse of rating.) 3. Voters categorize candidates into categories, corresponding to the ranks (ratings), and may categorize as many candidates as they choose into each category. Categories may be empty. 4. The count of all legal ballots is the basis for majority. 5. MAJORITY SEEKING. Canvassing begins with the first rank. If a majority of voters have so categorized a candidate, and no other candidate, the election is complete and that candidate wins. If more than one candidate has a majority, see the Evaluation process. 6. If no candidate has a majority in the first rank, the number of second rank votes is added in to the previous sums, and majority support is again tested as with the first rank. 7. If no candidate has a majority in the first and second ranks combined, the number of third rank votes is added in to the previous sums, and majority support is again tested, as with the first rank. 8. EVALUATION. Vote evaluation is performed if there is no majority, or if the above process finds more than one candidate with a majority at a rank amalgamation. For each candidate, all the cast votes are summed, using the rating values. If there are multiple approved majorities, from the prior process, the winner is the majority-approved candidate with the highest sum of ratings. If there is no majority approval, the winner is the candidate with the highest sum of ratings. Notes: This method is almost Range. In a runoff system, with runoff conditional on lack of majority approval, it could send top approval and top range candidates to the runoff. It could also be pairwise analyzed to send a Condorcet winner to the runoff. As a runoff method, the voters will now presumably be much better informed about the candidates. The candidate set will likely be reduced. This method is safe from ordinary Favorite Betrayal in a runoff. (There are very unusual situations that could require strategic equal-rating, they involve multiple majorities. In the primary, there are other rare situations where some level of strategic voting is required; intrinsically, the way that many define strategic voting, any use of election expectation is strategic. In a runoff system, voters would presumably vote conservatively as to adding additional approvals, those with strong preferences. That's rational and *does express real perference strength.* That includes bullet voters, based on only knowing the Favorite. A runoff gives these voters a new look at the candidates
Re: [EM] [CES #9004] Before Voting Methods and Criteria: Outcome Design Goals (long)
At 11:03 AM 7/1/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: Benjamin: You are right to point out that we should have some discussion of basic principles to underly our discussion of specific systems. Here are my own views: 1. There is no single easy philosophical answer to these questions. There will always be those who, like Clay, would rather grab the quick self-consistent certainty of interpersonally-summable utilities; and it is true that this point of view offers many advantages (for instance, immediate immunity to probabilistic or Arrovian money-pump arguments); but it also has serious philosophical critiques. There is a continuum of possible self-consistent answers to the breadth-versus-depth question that runs from maximin to summed-utility to maximax, and if you allow certain kinds of status-quo bias, the possibilities are even broader. My take on this is that the hypothesis of interpersonally-summable utiliities is useful but not the truth. What the Bayesian Regret studies do is to show how a voting system performs *if* there are summable utilities. With proper design, those simulated utilities can be quire reasonable. A voting system that peforms poorly with *known utilities* is not likely to perform well with unknown ones. So BR studies are the best measure we have, so far, for assessing voting system performance. Given this, Range voting would seem to be an ideal voting system, because, on the fact, it sums those utilities. In fact, there is a translation process between internal utilities and actual votes that introduce distortion into the system. The first is normalization, where the realistic options are mapped to the full vote scale. If there is simple normalization only, then voters would essentially disempower themselves if they have a very strong preference, a *must have* or *must defeat.* So there is what I've called magnification, where voters would stretch or compress the voting preference strengths (the differences between two voted values) in order to match assessments of relative value as adjusted for election probabilities. All this means that the actual range vote sum is not necessarily the actual social utility maximizer. In particular, if the voters don't have good data on election probabilities, and, more than that, have *incorrect information*, they may vote foolishly. This problem is handled if the system uses repeated elections, because, after the first election, they should have much better information about what is probable, if the voting system does allow the disclosure of that information. 2. However, for practical terms, we are not likely to get a better metric for voting systems than total utility. A maximin metric would philosophically give veto power to a single voter; an intermediate metric would probably be equivalent to summed-utility if you rescale utility by some monotic function; and any metric involving status quo bias extrinsic to the voters themselves, is a horrible compass for system design. So while I don't share Clay's easy certainty about the impeccable solidity of the philosophical foundations here, I do agree with him that this is the best single measure of outcome quality. And I agree on that as well. This leaves two issues: 1. The practicality of implementation. 2. Majority consent. The latter has often been seriously neglected. IRV was sold on a claim that it would find majorities. Essentially, FairVote lied, or allowed people, in some cases, to be decieved by naive expectations. We don't know that FairVote *actually corrupted the committee that wrote the voter information booklet* that led voters to approve Ranked Choice Voting in San Francisco, but we can be quite sure that FairVote took no steps to correct it, and what was said that was just plain wrong has been said by them in many places, though the gradually became more careful. They now say this majority thing in such a way that naive voters won't understand the difference, but if you call them on it, what they say is defensible. It's just misleading, not directly a lie. The biggest problem in the way of implementing Range is lack of any test for majority consent. Range (Score) is a *plurality method.* With all the anti-Plurality hype, that's totally overlooked. All that has happened with Range is that fractional votes are allowed. While, in theory, it can take an endless series of repeated elections to find a majority, the probability of that is vanishingly low. People *do* make the necessary adjustments, unless the majority *does not want to complete*, in which case that is the majority decision. Who is to say that this is wrong? However, my sense is that a two-round system with intelligent choice of nominations for the second round can find a *true majority* almost all the time. And when it fails, it would be close enough that the value of continuing the process would be less than the cost of continuing it. 3. That
Re: [EM] [CES #9013] Re: EMAV?
At 12:32 PM 7/1/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: I responded with a new subject header because I was still hoping that Abd would respond to my earlier post, copied below: I'll answer here. Abd: Frankly, I'm a bit frustrated. My condolences. Have you tried breathing exercises? I recommend recognizing frustration and the source of it and dropping the story involved. But, of course, you may think I've done something Wrong. Do you/ One of the main reasons I proposed MAV in the first place was that you seemed to support it. I looked at an idea and realized that it would resolve a certain issue, a certain kind of LnH failure. I thought, then, that MAV might be a decent compromise, if needed to get over the Later-no-Harm objections that FairVote will surely raise. However, it does that by sacrificing social utility, and that's clear. Finding a multiple majority at a lower rank is likely to be reasonably common in contested public elections. You've done a good job expressing the advantages of Bucklin systems, and I wanted to get past the point where I was talking about GMJ and you were talking about Bucklin as an individual system, since the differences are trivial. Right. Now, we could propose simple Bucklin. It is reasonable from the point of view of instant runoff approval. That is exactly what Bucklin is. But MAV complicated simple Bucklin, and it tosses out the votes that create the multiple majority, instead resolving the election on the basis of the round prior to that. Now, the good news is that it selects the winner from the multple-approved set, so the winner *is* approved, still, but I started to wonder why we were effectively tossing the score data, that would show the true social utility optimizer. And then I realized that we could combine Bucklin with Range, where the election resolves normally as Bucklin, that is, collapsing approval, but then uses the Range data from the ballots where this leads to certain conflicts. I still feel that way. Sure, I have an opinion on whether MAV or EMAV is better (I prefer MAV). Obviously, I disagree. But the similarities are more important than the differences. Unless we're all willing to give up on getting our own personal ideal in every detail, we're never going to have enough unity to make a difference. Great, Jameson, what are you proposing to give up? Actually, I *would not want you to give up anything important.* I would *much rather* seek an underlying consensus and build back from there. We are tweaking Bucklin, with MAV, *away from Range.* It can be expected to damage Social Utility. There should be a good reason for that, don't you think? EMAV tweaks it *toward* Range and actually uses Range amalgamation, much more refined and sophisticated than mere Approval. To put this in stark terms: I think it's far more of a danger that voting reform will fail because of the picky disunity of people proposing their personal best system, than that it will pass but lead to some bad result because of a minor flaw in the system. So, because of a few days of delay, which could become a few weeks or a few months, we will suffer this Failure to Agree, and the whole voting reform will go south? I suggest considering the underlying principles here. What makes one voting system better than another? What is our overall goal as CES? And it's clear that you do see the importance of the similarities, or you wouldn't have dubbed your proposal EMAV. No. I did not pick EMAV as a derivation of MAV. I picked it as descriptive. There *are* similarities, substantial ones. However, what's the difference? Does the difference improve or damage the system performance or its implementation possibilities? What is a bit complicated about EMAV is the range ballot, i.e, the values assigned to votes. I think I just wrote that those could be given values which clear discriminate between approvals and disapprovals: 2, 1, 0, -1, -2. In fact, though, on the principle of range being fractional voting, it is 1, 0.75, 0.50, 0.25, 0. Explaining this ballot is explaining a range ballot. The range ballot is then used to control voting in a series of three approval elections, followed by, if those fail to find a majority, a range summation of the values for a result, or for runoff nominations. The concern about later-no-harm is handled as it is in range: the lower preferences do not receive full strength. This differs from MAV, which *discards* the lower preferences if a multiple majority is found, or, if there is full amalgamation, it gives the lower preferences *full approval value.* EMAV balances two goals: SU optimization and the seeking of majority approval. MAV does only the latter, using a coarse approximation for the former. Why not use the real range data? So I'm willing to have a discussion about the relative advantages and disadvantages of MAV versus EMAV. Thanks. And I'm willing to commit
Re: [EM] MAV on electowiki
At 10:19 AM 6/28/2013, Chris Benham wrote: Jameson, ...But I don't think it's realistic... I don't think any of the multiple majorities scenarios are very realistic. Irrespective of how they are resolved, all voters who regard one or more of the viable candidates as unacceptable will have a strong incentive to top-rate all the candidates they regard as acceptable, out of fear that an unacceptable candidate gets a majority before their vote can help all the acceptable ones. This is probably the opposite of what would happen. The pressure is *heavily* toward majority failure, not multiple majorities. Essentially, the comment assumes that a voter will think that another candidate will get a majority in the first round before one of those acceptable to them. This would indicate that those acceptable are not frontrunners. While we have proposed to *allow* voters to vote for more than one in the first round, that is mostly to avoid tossing ballots for overvoting and to cover the rare situation that a voter actuallyh does not know which of two candidates they prefer. Given Bucklin amalgamation, it is *extremely unlikely* that voters with a significant preference between A and B will vote for both in the first round. The pressure to sincerely distinguish a favorite is high. That largely vanishes after the first round completes without a majority. Remember, it's rare that there are three viable candidates. So, here, the voter only approves of one of them. Not two. If there is a multiple majority in the first round, it's unlikely to be outside of this set. What is being said is that the voter strongly disapproves of one viable candidate, so strongly that the voter wants to nail down, absolutely do the utmost to prevent the election of this one, so the voter approves of the other two, in the first round. I'd be amazed if 0.1% of voters actually voted that way, in a real election, outside of this rare situation: the voter only knows the strong dislike for one candidate, and is ignorant of all others, so votes antiplurality. In that case, it would be a fair representation of the voter's preferences. The problem is? I still say that your suggestion only increases that incentive (even though maybe more psychologically than likely to cause extra actual post-election regret). We cannot prevent voters from making up irrational reasons to do this or that. Forget about using the mechanism for resolving the (probably very rare) multiple-majorities scenario to try to gain some whiff of later-no-harm. I came to the conclusion that the problem with MAV is that it loses the Range winner, so it damages SU, and that could reasonably commonly occur. Multiple majorities *did* occur in real Bucklin elections, though only in second or third rank. I don't recall all the specifics. Voting for more than one was locked out in original Bucklin. If the problem described *did* occur, that would be a reason for demoting first rank votes that were overvoted, they would get pushed, for Bucklin amalgamation, into second rank. (Which would be much better than considering them spoiled. Or even to third rank, if it were decided to make the top two ranks vote-for-one. But I don't like this. I'd tolerate the first rank limitation, but would still leave a meaning for overvoted first rank, for ballot position assignment, it would be split, i.e., a half-vote each if it was two.) BTW, the Majority Choice Approval Bucklin-like method using ratings (or grading) ballots, simply elected the candidate whose majority tally was the biggest. I also prefer that to your suggestion. It and yours are simpler to count than the Mike Ossipoff idea I support. That is basically Bucklin-ER. It has the virtue of simplicity. Ranked Approval voting, preponderance of the votes at the majority-found rank, or as a plurality result if all ranks have been collapsed. EMAV is the same except that the ranks are interpreted as ratings and the multiple-majority or plurality standard is based on a range sum. That automatically deprecates lower-ranked votes, without eliminating them. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] MAV on electowiki
At 06:10 PM 6/27/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: And I like to talk about the relative merits of each proposal here on the list. But if we talk like this in front of non-mathematical voters, we'll only turn them off. We need simple proposals. Approval is step one; most of us agree on that. But some voters, like Bruce Gilson, will never be satisfied with approval because it doesn't feel expressive enough. So I think it's worth having a second option to offer. To me, pitching Score feels dishonest: Look at this great system! Amazing great things it can do! (But watch out, if you vote other than approval-style, you'll probably regret it.) Condorcet is too complex. I want a simple, good system. MAV would fit the bill. If you have another proposal that would, then the way to get me onto your side is to demonstrate that it has more supporters than just you. That goes for you, Chris, and also for you, Abd. I just made a proposal, Evaluative Majority Approval Voting, designed to be a simple-to-amalgamate method that uses a full range ballot (Range 4 in the basic proposal), to seek majority approval (majority of voters rating winner at mid-range or higher), and then, failing that, to select the Range winner, if used single-round. What's a bit weird is that I don't know that this idea has been suggested before. If not, then ... demanding acceptance before consideration is a tad strange, don't you think? This, if implemented as a reform, would be collecting full range data, and voting it sincerely (i.e, voting at midrange or above if the candidate meets or exceeds the election expectation) is sane. It has limited later-no-harm protection; if it comes down to a contest between a favorite and less-preferred candidate, the favorite gets more vote strength. This method satisfied two basic purposes: 1. It respects the desirability of majority consent to a result, a basic democratic principle. The method supports majority consent in a way that gives this majority some flexibility. I.e., the descending approval cutoff of Bucklin amalgamation, down to bare minimum expectation, allows full freedom to distinguish the favorite -- and important point where Approval can fail -- without loss of voting power as to other pairwise contests. 2. Where it makes a difference, i.e., where there is no majority or there are multiple majorities, what Jameson calls a tie, i.e., the same median rating within the approved ratings, it uses the social utility optimization of Range. Votes at lower ratings, below midrage, i.e., disapproval ratings would never directly elect a candidate, unless there is majority failure or a multiple majority. It reduces, in this case, to pure range voting. Multiple majority failure cannot be a poor result, with this method. It is *possible* that the result is not ideal, and the method fails Condorcet, as does Range. In a runoff system, the full method could be Condorcet-compliant, it depends on the nomination and specific runoff rules. My sense is that, because the supporters of a Condorcet winner have the option of voting strategically in the runoff, being very well informed by the primary that this is their position, Condorcet failure in the runoff would be rare, even if the rules permit it. (i.e, there could be a Condorcet test in the runoff as well, and it would prevail.) I would rather not think about sides, here, but I do have a bit of a position with CES. Totally informal, they are not responsible for me, but, more than any other single individual, I represented the CES (then ESF) community in that Asset election several years ago. So my opinions do count. That could change, of course, I could lose it, become senile, etc., communities move on, but ... it is what it is. So I'm looking for comment on EMAV. I'll post the method to the EM list. One more point about EMAV. It's entirely possible that, with time and analysis and reaction to data from EMAV elections, Bucklin evaluation would be dropped, but only majority approval be required to complete in one round, and it's possible that the system would *never* elect in the first round, it would simply collect and analyze the range data to suggest general election nominations. There are many possibilities, all of them, to me, inspiring. Voters could use the same system in both primary and runoff/general election. People would become quite familiar with strategy, and strategic voting is another name for sane, informed voting. The claim that the only sane votes are bullet votes or full-on approval/disapproval is quite misleading. It depends on defective game-theoretical analysis, simplistic, unconfirmed, and, in fact, contrary to experience. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Evaluative Majority Approval Voting
The other day I sent this post to the mailing list for the Center for Election Science (electionscie...@googlegroups.com). Comments are very welcome. Okay, from discussions on the EM list, I've come to a method that seems practically ideal to me. We can call it EMAV, Evaluative Majority Approval Voting. It uses the fact that a Bucklin-ER ballot, sanely voted, represents a descending approval cutoff; therefore the ballot 1. Expresses approval explicitly for all candidates so categorized. 2. Expresses preference *strength*, tied to approval cutoff, which is, from a common suggested approval strategy, rooted to election expectation. The method: 1. Ranked ballot, with three approved ranks, one explicit disapproved rank, and default maximally-disapproved rating for blanks. 2. The ranks are ratings, with values of 4, 3, 2, 1, with 0 being default. A rating of 2 or higher is approval. (so rank number is the inverse of rating.) 3. Voters categorize candidates into categories, corresponding to the ranks (ratings), and may categorize as many candidates as they choose into each category. Categories may be empty. 4. The count of all legal ballots is the basis for majority. 5. MAJORITY SEEKING. Canvassing begins with the first rank. If a majority of voters have so categorized a candidate, and no other candidate, the election is complete and that candidate wins. If more than one candidate has a majority, see the Evaluation process. 6. If no candidate has a majority in the first rank, the number of second rank votes is added in to the previous sums, and majority support is again tested as with the first rank. 7. If no candidate has a majority in the first and second ranks combined, the number of third rank votes is added in to the previous sums, and majority support is again tested, as with the first rank. 8. EVALUATION. Vote evaluation is performed if there is no majority, or if the above process finds more than one candidate with a majority at a rank amalgamation. For each candidate, all the cast votes are summed, using the rating values. If there are multiple approved majorities, from the prior process, the winner is the majority-approved candidate with the highest sum of ratings. If there is no majority approval, the winner is the candidate with the highest sum of ratings. Notes: This method is almost Range. In a runoff system, with runoff conditional on lack of majority approval, it could send top approval and top range candidates to the runoff. It could also be pairwise analyzed to send a Condorcet winner to the runoff. As a runoff method, the voters will now presumably be much better informed about the candidates. The candidate set will likely be reduced. This method is safe from ordinary Favorite Betrayal in a runoff. (There are very unusual situations that could require strategic equal-rating, they involve multiple majorities. In the primary, there are other rare situations where some level of strategic voting is required; intrinsically, the way that many define strategic voting, any use of election expectation is strategic. In a runoff system, voters would presumably vote conservatively as to adding additional approvals, those with strong preferences. That's rational and *does express real perference strength.* That includes bullet voters, based on only knowing the Favorite. A runoff gives these voters a new look at the candidates. If someone the best candidate is not nominated for the runoff, a write-in campaign would be based on actual knowledge of voter preferences. A Condorcet winner, for example, if Condorcet testing is not done, could still be visible from the votes if they are all reported, and if those preferences are maintained, and voted with knowledge, this candidate should win the runoff.) If there is Condorcet failure with this method, it is likely to be a case where the Condorcet winner is *not* optimal. The canvassing is simple to understand, I suspect. This is Bucklin, purely, unless there is majority failure, or a multiple majority, in which case it becomes Range (completely or within the majority-approved set). This method could, of course, be trivially adapted to use more rating categories. I suggest that they always be balanced between approvaed and disapproved ratings, with midrange being considered barely approved, if it is Range N, N being even. If N is odd, then there is no midrange rating. Unless the previously suggested overrating method is used to allow half-ratings. (This method would allow a voter to express half-ratings by voting two adjacent ratings. It handles what would otherwise be overvotes by counting the vote at the average of the top and bottom rating expressed.) So if the method used a Range 9 ballot, voting the ratings of 4 and 5 would be considered a vote of 4.5, thus midrange, and a 'stand-aside' approval. This is a trick for almost-doubling the resolution of a
Re: [EM] another concern - the opposite of the Spoiler Effect - *Packing*
At 08:30 PM 6/27/2013, Benjamin Grant wrote: Something else came up while I was analyzing some voting methods. If you have a disproportionate number of political leaning in an election, some voting systems go awry. I didn't know what this meant when I first read it, and there is a grammatical error contributing to that. Benjamin, would you mind proof-reading your posts? Yes, some people can't do that, and if you can't, okay, but ... just understand that you lessen the number of people who will read what you write if the lead paragraph is incomprehensible. Then I guessed what it mean. And that guess was wrong. In fact, reading the further explanation, the introduction just doesn't make sense. It means something else. There may be a criterion for this, this is what I mean. Condorcet criterion, for starters. The nameless Range Criterion (i.e, maximized expressed social utility.) Some voting systems don't collect enough data to handle this. Lets say that you have three total candidates. one is conservative, two are liberal, none are moderate. If the majority of the electorate is conservative, then it may make sense that a conservative gets chosen. However, in some systems say one in which each voter gets one positive vote and one negative vote to cast having more candidates of a particular wing can hurt you. Continuing this example, if we run Gore/Nader/Bush, both Gore and Nader supporters give their negative votes to Bush, casting their positive votes for their own candidate. Standard vote-splitting problem. If Gore supporters are 36%, and they vote Gore +1, Nader 0, Bush -1; and Nader supporters are 10%, and they vote Gore:0, Nader +1, Bush -1; and Bush supporters are the remaining 54% and they vote Gore -1, Nader 0, Bush +1 Nader wins. Even though 54% of the people voted for Bush. Even though only 10% voted for Nader. The stated votes are *insane.* Not that this matters, people propose insane voting patterns all the time, to make this or that point. It would help to recognize it. (I am making up this insane voting pattern just to show how the system would handle it.) That is, the stated problem is too many voters in one wing. But the voting patterns establish Nader as in the center. You simply *said* that Nader was in the same wing, but then you did not have the voters vote that way. Of course, you can define a Wing any way you like, by placing the center where you choose. Voting that way, as in the example, we have this situation: 36% of the voters, Gore supporters: Nader is closer to them than Bush. Consisent with Nader being Center, not completely consistent with Nader being Left. (for some Gore supporters, Nader, if to the left, would be futher from them than Bush. But if there is a wide enough gap between the Gore and Nader factions, it could happen that all Gore voters would vote this way. But they are in a minority.) 10% of voters, Nader supporters: Gore is closer to them than Bush. Consistent with Nader being Left, not consistent with Nader being Center. Center factions will split on who is closer, Left or Right. 54% of voters: Nader is closer to them than Gore. Not consistent with Nader being Left, consistent with Nader being Center. From the voting pattern, it's conclusive: Nader is in the center, as viewed by the majority, and consistently with the rest of the votes, in spite of the stated claim that there is no center candidate. There is a problem with +/- range voting, having to do with the 0 default that is often assumed. But we can look at this election as Range 2, by adding a value of 1 to all votes, and considering that there were no abstentions. We have a situation where *every voter* rates Nader as midrange -- election expectation -- or better. Nader will win this election in Range, and this is an example where Condorcet compliance would damage social utility. I have suggested that it is defective to accept this result without the explicit consent of a majority, and, in this case, if a midrange rating is openly an approval rating, *every voter has consented.* The example does not show any problem except in the analysis as being a wing problem. It *looks like* a Majority Criterion failure, except that, by giving a half-vote to Nader, the majority waived its majority rights, that was not the exclusive preference that the majority criterion requires. The majority approved both Bush *and* Nader. And *everyone* approved Nader. So why would one think Bush should win? There is an answer to that, and it would be a belief in the Condorcet Criterion as what I used to call it, the Queen of Voting Systems Criteria. Is this a thing? Kind of the opposite of the spoiler effect that having many like-minded candidates actually increases the chance that one of them might win, even if their opposition is more numerous? The example does not show anything about like-minded
Re: [EM] [CES #8973] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
At 06:01 PM 6/25/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: I suspect it may be a matter of social norms. I grew up listening to theoretical physicists argue (my mother is one). They love a good fight, and the kind of language Stephen used here is actually consistent with a deep underlying respect in that context. I've certainly also seen contexts where it would be unutterably rude. On the internet, it's probably best to err on the side of assuming good faith. That's from the recipient perspective. I went to Cal Tech, and, my first two years there, we all sat with Richard P. Feynman for physics. We had Linus Pauling for chemistry. And we talked with each other like very smart, very self-confident, in-your-face jerks. And we loved it. Don't like it? Who let you in? (And we were all male, of course, at that time.) However, most of the world is not like that. I remember making a self-deprecatory joke. At least I thought it was self-deprecatory, it pretended to arrogantly think that my wife wouldn't be able to understand a conversation I was having, on a walk, with a very bright psychotherapist who was an old friend. I was in the doghouse for years over that joke. She was, see, from another planet. Earth. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] MAV on electowiki
At 11:31 AM 6/26/2013, Chris Benham wrote: Jameson, I don't like this version at all. These methods all have the problem that the voters have a strong incentive to just submit approval ballots, i.e. only use the top and bottom grades. Strong incentive requires strong preference. The method provides limited later-no-harm protection. That protection is not -- and should not be -- absolute. We know from real Bucklin elections that many voters will add lower preferences. No voting system is going to overcome the tendency of voters to bullet vote. Your suggested way of determining a winner among candidates who first get a majority in the same round only makes that incentive a bit stronger still. No, it reduces the incentive to bullet vote. That is, it make a decision to add a vote at a lower rank easier. Under the condition that the tiebreaker is active, the lower vote cannot cause the favorite to lose, because it is removed from consideration. (I have a sense that there is a rare condition where this may not be so, but it would not be something that voters would rationally worry about.) There is a problem, though. Multiple majorities are likely to occur with frontrunners. Most additional votes for the frontrunners are not so likely to come from the supporters of the other frontrunner. They will come from supporters of minor candidates. MAV, then, may disregard these additional votes by backing up. Not good. I agree with a Mike Ossipoff suggestion, that we elect the member of that set of candidates with the most above-bottom votes. There are four basic possibilities, outside of runoffs, given the appearance of a multiple majority at a canvassing level. 1. Elect the most-approved candidate, considering all votes above-bottom as approvals. Or considering all approved categories as approvals, if it is possible to vote an unapproved category above-bottom. Ossipoff's idea. 2. Elect the candidate with the most votes at or above the canvassed rating level. Basic Bucklin. 3. Elect the candidate with the most votes above the canvassed level. MAV. 4. Use a graduated median, which is a compromise between 2 and 3. 5. Elect the majority-approved candidate with the highest score, considering all the votes as scores (probably Range 4.) If the election fails to find a majority, going through the approved categories, the election may then, I'd suggest, flip to pure Range evaluation. Candidate with the most votes, considering the ranked votes as Range ratings, wins. This is a plurality result, there is no majority approval. This, the last option, is really similar to Mike's suggestion, except that the canvassing uses the preference strength data that is intrinsic to a sanely-voted Bucklin ballot. It does provide limited later-no harm protection, because the later votes are at lower strength. The problem with the Ossipoff suggestion is that all later votes, if used, are taken at full strength. His is an Approval option, I've just suggested Range. So the method does two things. It lowers the approval cutoff until a majority is found, if one is going to be found. It then uses Range amalgamation to deal with the possibility of multiple majorities. It avoids considering a better evil category as an approval, it only uses the preference data from such a vote as a small contribution to a social utility sum. Also, given the strong truncation incentive, I think 5 grades is one too many. In my opinion 4 grades would be adequately expressive. Range 3, but with the preference strength between a disapproved candidate and a minimally approved candidate being equated to the minimally weak preference strength between a Favorite and a second preference. (i.e., second preference is voted 2nd rank, instead of third rank.) That's highly unrealistic. I've suggested that a Bucklin ballot is a Range 4 ballot, realistically, with the next-to-nadir ranking being unexpressed. So the rating values are 1.00, 0.75, and 0.50 for all standard Bucklin votes. 0.50 is the minimal approval cutoff, suggestive of election expected utility. No gain, no loss. And then we can add that rating in, but *not as an approved rating*. It is not used for the ordinary Bucklin evaluation, seeking a majority. But with methods 1 and 5, that rating would be used. Method 1 does a bit of violence to the preference expression, pulling up what is sanely half of the expected election utility to full approval. My favourite Bucklin-like method is Irrelevant-Ballot Independent Fallback-Approval (aka IBFA) that I introduced in May 2010. http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2010-May/026479.htmlhttp://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2010-May/026479.html A, B, C, D are probably better names for the ratings slots than the Top, Middle1, Middle2, Bottom in that post. Comparing it to Bucklin, it meets Independence from Irrelevant
Re: [EM] [CES #8982] Two notes and a possibly interesting method from a friend
At 11:58 AM 6/27/2013, Benjamin Grant wrote: Hi, first a quick note: I havent been commenting because real life stuff, work, etc has been keeping me busy, but I fully intend to go back and answer any posts sent to me via the list(s). If just that my time and focus comes in bursts and droughts. ;) Second note, I continue to thank all who are being helpful to me in the journey. Now, I asked my friend, who hasnt read up on election stuff to come up with a good method I was wondering what someone intelligent would come up with, with no prior exposure to election science. Note: the thought experiment I asked of him had many basic constraints, for example, the requirement that a voter be able to go and vote on a single day within ten minutes, and that there would be ten candidates, among others. Right away, you have created difficult conditions for the election. Crucial: the state of voter knowledge of those ten candidates. In many elections, voters will only know their favorite, or maybe top two. The same may be true of the worst. This is the method he suggested: · Present the people with the ballot of 10 candidates and ask them to pick their top three and their bottom three. · Every time a candidate is picked in a person's top three, the candidate gets a +1. Every time a candidate is picked in a person's bottom three, the candidate gets a -2. So he's biasing in favor of eliminating candidates seen as worst. Some people have that opinion or desire. The four candidates the person did not pick for either get +0. (Sidebar: For N number of candidates, you have MOD(N/3) positives, MOD(N/3) negatives, and the rest are left neutral.) · At the end of the night, we add up the scores and the candidate with the highest score wins--even if the score is negative. Its very interesting, and I in my newness to this all dont immediately the warts, but since every method has them, I assume this one does too? Yup. It's range voting, all right, with some quite arbitrary restrictions. The maximum positive vote is half of the maximum negative. So, simplified example. I'll only consider two candidates first, A and B. 66: A +1 34: A -2, B +1. The rules seem to *require* a top three choice and a bottom three choice. So we can add the votes in this way: The voters don't really care about the other candidates, maybe don't even know who they are, but to comply, they donkey vote, as happens in Australia, where full ranking is mandatory. These votes are evenly distibuted among the remaining candidates, so that there are roughly equal numbers of positive and negative votes for each, except that one candidate is *unknown*, so nobody votes for or against Unknown. Unknown wins, in spite of the fact that two-thirds of the voters prefer A. Or B could win, under easy-to-imagine conditions. What the system does is to give extra power, not balanced power, to dislike, and in a deterministic system, not one that repeats elections seeking a majority. A saner way to accomplish the purpose of that is to require a higher margin in a normal majority-seeking voting system. What is commonly missed by naive students of voting systems is that voting systems are *simulations* or attempts to side-step normal deliberative process, which in democratic organizations *always* require majority consent for any decision. The common vote-for-one, repeat the election until a majority appears, has been used for many centuries. It works. We can make it more efficient with an advanced ballot, but we go down the Plurality road -- away from democracy -- if we don't require an explicit majority. It is my sense that advanced ballots can find a true majority in two polls. The second poll is *informed* by the first, a point that Robert's Rules emphasizes in their discussion of the Instant Runoff Voting method -- and in their version of that method, they *require an absolute majority,* not the faux last round majority of IRV, where a majority of voters may easily have voted *against* the IRV winner. The Robert's Rules editors lament the loss of that informed election. Where majority failure still exists, with a decent polling system, it should stull usually be possible to predict, from the ballots, the likely optimal winner -- *or close enough in social utility that the difference isn't worth the trouble of an additional poll.* I have just formally suggested EMAV, Evaluative Majority Approval Voting, a modified Bucklin system that uses the range ballot that drives Bucklin voting as a way to handle multiple majorities and majority failure. This comes out of almost a decade of considering these issues in detail. It is not an *entirely new idea.* Bucklin voting in Oklahoma was proposed with fractional vote values. It was rejected by the Oklahoma Supreme Court, not for that reason, but because it required voters, under some conditions,
Re: [EM] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
Benjamin Grant dove in here with some knee-jerk reactions to Approval and Score vs. Plurality. Those reactions are not uncommon. However, what I saw in these exchanges was a collapse of an interpretation, based on imagined models of voter behavior that are common, but likely very incomplete, with fact. Let's back up. The advocacy of approval voting became a consensus position among students of voting systems because it is an extremely simple tweak on Plurality. It is simply an implementation of the slogan Count All the Votes. That has some expected effects, but this is not necessarily the ideal voting system. It will, however, very likely, produce some benefits, immediately. That is, supporters of minor parties will be able to see, in vote totals, a decent indication of real preference. We can predict this if approval is adopted: 1. Some increase in the number of minor parties. 2. A reduction of the spoiler effect. 3. A reduction in spoiled ballots. 4. Some increase in majority election results. 5. Better knowledge of true support for minor parties. Approval has an obvious defect, which is the inability to express first preference. That defect must be considered in real systems, especially partisan elections, where, currently, a vote counts toward maintaining ballot position for a party. That value of a vote was completely ignored by Benjamin, he seems to think that voters are only considering the current election. So with raw Approval, something would have to be done with regard to ballot position. The only solution I see that is adequately simple is to divide the vote, i.e, if a voter has approved candidates from two parties, the vote would be split fractionally. Other solutions could include a separate vote for a party, vote for one, or if it's approval on that section of the ballot, *then* if the voter votes for more than one party, the vote would be divided. But if one is going to go to that complexity, there is then a better solution, Bucklin. Instant Runoff Approval. There are many Bucklin systems, I won't go into detail here, but the point is that true first preference may be expressed, as with IRV, but without the IRV pathologies. Many voters will continue to bullet vote, and if one truly supports a frontrunner, that is a totally sensible vote. Practically by definition, then, until and unless elections become complex, we can expect low usage of the right to add additional votes. From various histories, it looks like it could be something like 10%. But 10% is easily enough to whack the spoiler effect! It is correctly understood that Approval has some difficulty when a third party candidate rises to parity, and could win. That is where the ability to rank approvals can come in. Still, as has been pointed out, *we don't know how Approval will behave under those circumstances.* The most likely symptom of such a situation, as it approaches, would be either majority failure or multiple majorities, with multiple majority failure being relatively harmless. It is beginning to look like the most likely implementations of approval will be, at first, under runoff systems, or for open primaries. However, we have recommended Count All the Votes as a principle that can be applied with any voting system. It would make IRV perform better, for starters. Why are multiple approvals at an IRV rank considered spoiled votes? Why not simply canvass them? Doing so would actually allow voters to vote approval style, under IRV. It would give those Burlington Republicans an additional choice. But they would surely prefer Bucklin, which would still allow them to express their first preference. *Bucklin worked*, we know that from the history. Now, another imagination from Benjamin is that Range Voting would devolve to Approval. He bases this on a belief that any knowledgeable voter would vote Approval style, i.e, would either max-rate or min-rate candidates. That pushes a conflict button here, because there are a lot of students of voting systems who think this. However, the claim that this is game-theory optimal is simply false, neglecting that voters have other values than simply generating an individual maximum, based only on the effect on a particular election. In fact, from a more careful game-theoretical analysis, which I did for a limited case -- all these claims of game theory have been hot air, for the most part -- I showed that the voter could vote approval style *or* cast an intermediate vote, and the expected outcome was the same. Further, relatively sincere expression is a value of its own for voters. If there are two frontrunners, game theory indicates voting min for one and max for the other, but that is silent on how one votes for other candidates, and if the system allows an expression of preference at a minimal weight, there can be other values that would indicate even some deviation from the max/min rule. The game
Re: [EM] [CES #8967] Score Voting and Approval Voting not practically substantially different from Plurality?
At 05:24 PM 6/25/2013, Benjamin Grant wrote: Stephen doesn't realize that speaking about someone in the third person in front of them is a major dick move - or is *trying* to be a dick. It's the norm in many groups. Using the second person is often considered inappropriate in mails to a list with many readers. It would be very weird in a personal mail, but not for something sent to a community. The question is to whom the piece is addressed. If it is saying Benjamin Grant is clueless it is obviously not to you, but it isn't behind your back, either. And it's largely true, i.e., that's certainly how you occur to some here. You are somewhat perceptive, but your understanding is raw, unseasoned. N'est-ce pas? You ticked off Warren by misrepresenting what he'd written in response to you. That's how I read it. You might look back and see if you did that, instead of just complaining about how rude he was. Warren is an expert on voting systems and certain other topics, and not expert in manners and courtesy. What do you expect? Warren is quick to sarcasm but also quick to return to straightforard communication. Try him, if you have questions. *Ask*. And *Listen.* That doesn't mean lie down and believe whatever he says. Warren is not God. Simply put as much effort, or more, into seeking to understand what he writes, as he put into writing it. You'll likely learn something. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8854] impossibility theorem for monetizing voting systems
At 05:52 PM 6/19/2013, Warren D Smith wrote: [Note, the reason I am not sending this to E.Glen Weyl, is because of the following message from him dated 18 june 2013: Warren, I am unwilling to continue my communication with you. I hope you will stop contacting me.] Well, that's his choice. I'recently wrote to a published scientist, pointing out a major error in what had been printed from him, a blatant, face-palm, error (where this scientist was disagreeing with a published review of a field), where he actually showed the *opposite* of what he thought he had shown, and he responded with something like, You will do anything to avoid the truth. Takes one to know one. The error was so bad that the phalanx of scientists who then responded to him clearly didn't even understand what he'd done, it was so stupid. It's fun, so I'll explain a little more. (What follows has nothing to do with election methods.) Confirmed research has shown, that in a certain type of experiment, result A is correlated with result B. The value of the ratio, A/B is of great theoretical interest. A can be measured reasonably accurately, B is difficult to measure. A is *unreliable.* I.e., it's apparently difficult enough to control experimental conditions that hidden variables have historically caused A to vary substantially. So in otherwise identical experiments, on the face, result A may vary from, within measurement error, zero to some substantial value. (The A signal in these experiments is often about ten times noise, sometimes far higher than that.) So, in a published presentation of the data in a book, from a perticular experimental series, an author had presented a plot of A/B vs A, comparing this with a horizontal line that represented a certain value from a possible theory of what is happening in the experiments. The plot shows a certain scatter, which declines as A increases, as would be expected from the error in measuring B; error percentage declines as B increases. The author I informed had criticized this work by calculating a correlation coefficient between the X-axis and Y-axis values of the data points in this chart. Why he used the chart, digitizing the values, instead of the actual data (presented on the next page of the book!), is beyond me. It shows the same thing, though: A/B has a very low correlation with A. I confirmed his math. That is, A/B does not vary with A. He was claiming and apparently believing that the low correlation coefficient meant that A and B were not correlated. In fact, he showed that they were, because A/B is apparently a constant. So I publicly pointed this out, and informed him as a courtesy. He's an old man now, and, like many old men, has no time for fools. Literally and directly. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8848] Re: MAV on electowiki
At 03:53 PM 6/19/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: Could we do this on the wiki itself? That's what talk pages and BRD (Bold edit, Revert, Discuss) are for. We could. However, it's another place for me to check. Looks like the wiki is not set to allow email confirmation of changes. Configuration problem. I see that I never authenticated my email for the wiki. I've just requested a confirmation mail. It seems to be taking donkey's ages to show up Separately: I don't understand why you insist that D is an unapproved grade. I have never treated it as anything but just another grade. Obviously, any candidate who won with a D rating would have a very weak mandate. Here is my thinking on that. Bucklin is an approval voting method, allowing voters to categorize approval votes. They are *all* approval votes and a drop to third rank in Bucklin was very common. Now, if we are looking for a simple next system, would we make it more complex than original Bucklin to vote? It's quite possible to imagine only two levels. In fact, some actual systems had that, as I recall. So why *four*? Original Bucklin used a Range ballot, effectively. We now understand Bucklin as a method where the ballot controls voting in successive simmulated Approval elections, by following a descending approval cutoff. Thus the ballot represents a rating profile, if sanely voted. That terminates with bare minimum approval, which in common strategy considered sound corresponds to the election utility expectation. Nominally, 50% expected utility. So to translate the Bucklin votes to utility measures, I use the conversion values of 1st rank: 4 2nd rank: 3 3rd rank: 2 no vote: 0 There is thus a missing rating, an *unapproved* rating, worse than expected value. Rational approval strategy suggests voting against a candidate so rated. However, there is information missing, obviously. A single unapproved rating supplies the information. And this is all convenient, because it corresponds to classic grade-point average ratings, a scale of 0.0 - 4.0. So if D is an approved grade, why has it been added in the absence of any demonstrated need for such (it *could* be argued that two grades are enough. I won't, because I want to be able to handle write-in votes, plus an elevated approval for the preferred frontrunner, plus more general approvals. Then, with some variants, and possibly for what was are now calling tie-breaking, i.e, tied median grade, an unapproved but elevated rating becomes potentially useful. If one wants to consider D an approved rating, then, the conversions become different: 1st rank: 6 2nd rank: 5 3rd rank: 4 4th rank: 3 no vote: 0 Or, speculatively, allowing the D rating to be a slight disapproval, willing to stand aside, or some self-contradictory position, 1st rank: 5 2nd rank: 4 3rd rank: 3 4th rank: 2 no vote: 0 It's a mess. Keep it simple. GPA ratings. 1 is below an expected result approval cutoff. It becomes useful for Condorcet analysis, especially. And it can be used in a tiebreak. It can be used in study of voting system results. It can be used in runoff nomination rules. Or it can be unused because unexpressed on the ballot, simpler system. Tiebreak can still be sum-of-votes, among majority-approved candidates. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8848] Re: MAV on electowiki
At 11:48 AM 6/20/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: Separately: I don't understand why you insist that D is an unapproved grade. I have never treated it as anything but just another grade. Obviously, any candidate who won with a D rating would have a very weak mandate. ...It's a mess. Keep it simple. Right. That means, no special separate rules for D.d Like, no D. GPA ratings. Right. That means D is a 1. And that would mean that, on a 4-point range scale, 1 is the approval cutoff. Not good. 1 is below an expected result approval cutoff. Wrong. First, you're the one insisting that the system be analyzable using Score/Average. Yup. The one. Do you have any idea who I am? I'm saying that Bucklin *is* analyzable as using a Range ballot, with all ratings being approvals. It makes complete and easy sense of the system, how it works. But analyzing any set of ballots using a system other than the one they were cast under is always going to be a questionable proposition. If it doesn't work, let it go; keep it simple. No, Jameson, you have not understood. I am not analyzing Bucklin using Range Voting strategy. I am analyzing Bucklin considering the basic Bucklin ballot to represent a sincere Range ballot controlling a series of simulated approval runoffs. Range *ballot*, not Range voting system. As a single ballot, in an approval voting system, it does not make sense to vote for a candidate if one is not willing to approve of the candidate. Bucklin *is* approval voting, only with approvals staged, for obvious reasons. Classic approval strategy suggests approving all candidates above the expected election value. We've seen that advised again and again. So ... arrange the candidates on a Range spectrum, with the middle representing the election expectation. So the range represents utilities above the middle and below the middle. These are Von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities, i.e., those studied by Dhillon and Mertens. The system and translation you are proposing, Jameson, has the utility of a D, an approval, being very close to the utility of the worst possible candidate. It's radically unbalanced. Nobody would actually approve of a candidate with such a poor utility, unless they *know* that this is needed, that everyone else they prefer must lose. Just realize this: most Bucklin elections are likely to collapse all the approved ranks. The election will become pure approval. Second, if you believe that D will be the winning median, and there is some candidate with three times the utility of your preferred frontrunner, it is perfectly honest and rational and utility-consistent to vote your preferred frontrunner at D as an approved vote. It becomes useful for Condorcet analysis, especially. And it can be used in a tiebreak. It can be used in study of voting system results. It can be used in runoff nomination rules. Thank you for making my point. D has some value. And so does keeping the rules simple. It has a value, but it complicates the rules and explanation, and allowing it to be an approved category vastly disrupts the simplicity. Or it can be unused because unexpressed on the ballot, simpler system. Tiebreak can still be sum-of-votes, among majority-approved candidates. This is better for honest votes, but worse for the chicken dilemma. Yes. Slightly worse. Remember, I don't consider the chicken dilemma to represent an actual harm. The problem causes voters to balance utilities, which is a *benefit*. Removing the dilemma actually removes some information from being used by the system. The system already does pretty well with honest votes, so fixing the chicken dilemma is more important. And anyway, that would be a different system. It is *offensive* to disregard the additional approvals after counting them. Counting them at fractional vote value allows them to be considered at a deprecated value, which is accurate as far as utility expression is concerned. That deprecation ameliorates an *exactly appropriate amount of the chicken dilemma. The error from overenthusiastic approval, which is what causes multiple majorities to appear, is *reduced* to an accurate representation of preference strength. So we have a hybrid between seeking majority approval, and seeking utility maximization. Voters will be more likely to add votes at lower preference, knowing that they are *less likely* to cause the election of a more-preferred candidate. If D votes are allowed, I'd complete the Bucklin amalgamation at D. If no majority has been found, then if the election must complete, I'd consider pairwise analysis using those D votes, or better, in theory, sum of scores. Pure Range. Be there or be square. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8843] Re: MAV on electowiki
of ideology (with all voters preferring highest quality), then this system will tend to elect the candidate preferred by the median voter, that is, the one with the smallest sum of quality deficit plus ideological skew; and this tendency will hold for any unbiased combination of honest and strategic voters as defined above. Jameson, you are presenting as if it were fact, your back of the envelope conclusions. Please don't do that! The assertions in the strategic paragraph are based on some back-of-the-envelope diagrams; that is, I consider them likely to be true, but I have not run simulations to prove them. I think it would be interesting to do so. Would others be as interested as I would in such results; that is, In the opinion of Jameson Quinn Or, As shown in a poll conduced by the Center for Election Science. 1. Finding an equilibrium zero-knowledge strategy (percentile-grade correspondence) in impartial culture. (I think this would be an exciting new direction for simulation research.) I want to see Bucklin applied again, because the ballots will be collecting Range data, not only for its value as a voting system. The true revolutionary system is Asset, of course. It sweeps all these concerns aside, makes them moot. 2. Finding how broad the strategic conditions are (testing different honest grade distributions, unbiased strat/hon mixes, and strategic biases) in which MAV elects the median voter's favorite in the 2D/1D model sketched above? If my intuition is right, this model (unlike sparse or impartial models as criticized by Regenwetter) will allow good systems to show near-optimal BR; so MAV and Score will be have nearly the same (and nearly 0) honest BR, and the differences will be in that BR's robustness to different strategic profiles. I'm suspecting that a different tiebreaker rule can do better. A Range rule would *explicitly* maximize BR, as to what was expressed. Runoff systems, of course, are known to take us beyond single-ballot Range as to BR optimization with realistic votes. Jameson 2013/6/18 Jameson Quinn mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.comjameson.qu...@gmail.com I've reworked the description. See what you think. 2013/6/18 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com At 04:25 PM 6/18/2013, Juho Laatu wrote: I quickly read the article. Here are some observations. - Term Bucklin system has not been defined. I can guess that it probably refers to Bucklin style stepwise addition of new approvals, but that may not be as obvious to all readers. If there is no definition of Bucklin system, maybe one could say As in Bucklin instead of As with any Bucklin system. There is a link to Bucklin voting in the article. - Sentence if there are more than one with a majority, the B votes are removed and the highest sub-majority wins is ambigious in the sense that it is not clear if highest sub-majority refers to all candidates or to candidates that had majority after adding the B votes. It's poorly worded, all right. Minor point: There are more than one grates. (I find the use of the singular or plural with more to be ambiguous. I'd avoid it.) An example is given when the principle has not been stated. The method does not make sense as stated. The back-up is a tie-breaker, considering multiple majorities as if they were ties. They *are* ties in median vote. The tie-breaker only selects a member of the tied set. Something went south. What was proposed was a Bucklin system. Bucklin does use, I've suggested, a range ballot, but the way that it does this is with a ranked structure. I ran into this when trying to design a set of votes to show a problem that I have not seen examined. The description on the wiki page makes the system seem more complex than it is. It's been designed to be five-rank, with explicit F. That's a fish bicycle. No support means merely no support. No vote. Introducing the D vote is a later possible reform, it is an unapproved category. It makes the ballot considerably more complex, and the explanation is more complex. *D: Oppose unless there are no other majorities at all. Is that clear? I don't think so. Bucklin as Approval Voting doesn't have a disapproved rank. All blanks are disapproved. - It is not quite clear what happens and if it is possible that there is no majority after the F votes have been counted. The F votes are never counted, first of all. Listing them is a mistake. (If the F votes continued the amalgamation, then someone would be voting *for* a candidate rated F. That was the intention for the D rating. It is far better, however, to introduce a D rating in combination with a runoff system, where the D rating could improve runoff candidate selection. When a voter rates a candidate as D, they are opposing the election of that candidate. The Bucklin system required amalgamating three ranks. It's looking like MAV requires five, but that could
Re: [EM] [CES #8844] Vague impossibility conjecture for monetizing voting systems
At 11:27 AM 6/19/2013, Warren D Smith wrote: CONJECTURE that no good monetization scheme can exist for any reasonable voting system in large elections... I have stated such a conjecture and sketched a proof (which is not a real proof) of this impossibility conjecture here: http://rangevoting.org/MonetizedRV.html#monetfails Vague is an understatement. Start with good being undefined. On the page, it becomes reasonable, which merely papers over the lack of precision, and precision is essential to proofs. (However, Warren does, above, notice that it is not a real proof. It's really just a collection of anti-monetization arguments.) The core argument is that, allegedly, the cost of voting will be so high that most people won't vote. That is *not* an argument against the system. People who don't vote don't participate, have no cost, and have no benefit. However, the assumption that poor people would not vote is just that, an assumption. Poll taxes, as Warren has pointed out, are unconstitutional in the U.S., in general. However, it is possible to have monetized voting without poll taxes. I proposed an approach, which would involve allowing every voter a default, base sum that they can spend as they choose, on their votes. This sum might be small, say $1, but it would allow these people to vote. Adding weight to the vote by adding more money is really no different, in substance, from spending money on campaigns, simply more direct. Now, such a system might not be accepted, and may not even be worth proposing, for that reason, but that is *not* an impossibility argument, it's a logistical, practical argument. The default amount allowed citizens would be adjustable. It might be more than $1. The vote might include a designation of a *specific charity* to which a refund would be donated, if refunds were below some value. Otherwise the poor voter, might get a check. Notice: if they vote in such a way as to get a check, they are voting *against their own interest*. Rather, they get a check, sensibly, if they vote according to their own personal value in the election, and they get the compensation if the result is different. It works. In *some contexts*, this kind of voting might make sense. In some contexts, there is no restriction on poll taxes. A charity might run a poll as to how to distribute donations, among legitimate charitable purposes, consistent with the purpose and management of the charity, and the poll might be weighted by donation. The basic donation could be the membership dues for the organization. That gives the voter the right to vote. And then the voter can offer conditional donations for specific causes. If the voter loses, the voter might get an additional amount to be used for voting in future elections; essentially, they would not have spent their donated funds. So this, then, shades into the time-cumulative methods, being more specific with easy bookkeeping. It's possible to design the system to be workable and practical. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8848] Re: MAV on electowiki
At 12:33 PM 6/19/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: My general response to Abd: a number of good points, and a number where I'd disagree. Tough to respond to a kitchen-sink list, so I'll try to prioritize. Unfortunately that means that things I don't respond to could be either you're right or I disagree but don't think it's a productive argument. Aw, we are building something. Some pieces may be incomplete, that's to be expected. To keep this all in context, this is a discussion of an article: http://wiki.electorama.com/w/index.php?title=Majority_Approval_Votingoldid=10169 Current link (has been changed): http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Majority_Approval_Voting I see and acknowledge that Jameson has already responded to certain comments of mine by editing the article accordingly. Now, to what he wrote: 2013/6/19 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com ... If one or more candidate has a majority, then the highest majority wins. Arrghh. That is ordinary Bucklin. Just for the first rank, because at that point there's no higher rank to fall back to. Ah. The full text: Voters rate each candidate into one of a predefined set of ratings or grades, such as the letter grades A, B, C, D, and F. As with any Bucklin system, first the top-grade (A) votes for each candidate are counted as approvals. If one or more candidate has a majority, then the highest majority wins. Yes, it's stated that this is related to the first rank, but, even knowing the process, I misread it. Maybe I misread it because I know the process There is extra language here, and missing language that would make the matter clearer. For example, predefined is unnecessary, voters would not even think of being able to define the categories. So they will assume predefined, and it need not be stated. The neutral concept is categories. That also, by the way, fits with what Dr. Arrow has been saying of late. Further, multiple majorities in the first round is exceedingly unlikely. Thus we are leading with what would be a rare exception. That's to be avoided. I suggesting first describing the basic Bucklin amalgamation. This *is* a Bucklin method, and has a basic method that is followed. The case of multiple majorities is an exception, handled as such. It will almost always happen at a lower rank than first rank. First rank was called, first choice, which is decent language. I'm narrowing down the method, here. I have, for a first proposal, eliminated the unapproved category (D) entirely. It simplifies the explanation. I say: Majority Approval Voting (MAV) is an evaluative version of Bucklin voting. Voters rate or vote for each candidate, using a set of preference categories, from first choice down to a lowest-choice that is expressed by leaving the vote for the candidate blank. All votes excplicitly cast are forms of approval and may directly cause the election of the approved candidate. Voters may place as many candidates as they choose into each category. The categories are canvassed, being summed as approvals, and as needed, through the first rank to the third rank. This process ceases when any candidate has accumulated approvals from more than half of the voters. If there is only one such candidate, this candidate wins. If there is no such candidate, or if there are two or more such candidates, the process enters tiebreak. If there is no majority-approved candidate, deterministic MAV is a plurality method, it can elect without an explicit majority. The ranks are evaluated as scores of 4, 3, 2, 1 (and 0 for blanks). The scores are summed and the candidate with the highest score wins. If there are two or more candidates with a majority, the majority-approved candidate with the highest sum of scores is elected. This is a compromise between the back-up used in the first MAV proposal, and the highest vote standard that would be ordinary Bucklin. This causes lower-ranked votes to be devalued, down to a half-vote, when there is a majority conflict. It leaves the number of expressed ranks as three, keeping it simple. This could be improved at the cost of a lower rank: the D rank, which would only be used for tiebreak. This method introduces, more explicitly, Score Voting. What made me uncomfortable about the backup method of breaking a tie in median vote was the effective disregard of votes cast in the multiple-majority producing round. There is a possible legal problem when votes are cast that are not counted. In some places, the pure Bucklin method might be *legally required,* because, as in Arizona, the constitution may require a preponderance of legal votes, and we would be hard-pressed to claim that lower-ranked votes were not legal. Indeed, this may *require Range.* Or a runoff system. At some point it must be specified how rank overvotes are handled. There are possible ways: 1. Ballot is voided. We don't like that! 2
Re: [EM] HELP: Re: inline replies and Outlook 201x
At 08:04 AM 6/18/2013, Benjamin Grant wrote: Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary==_NextPart_000_01CD_01CE6C02.DB773480 Content-Language: en-us OK, I have been dealing with a huge issue, and that is using Outlook to perform inline replies. When, for example, Jameson Quinn sends a long and nuance post to the list, and I want to reply to it, the only method of reply I want to use in the inline method. That means that I post a chunk of his message, then my reply, then another chunk, then my reply to that, and so on, like this: I.e., common list practice, what I call conversational style. Benjamin, I suggest you set Outlook to general plain text responses. It's much easier to control. I have not verified this, but Outlook should be able to handle quoted material automatically with quotation markers. I use Eudora for mail, still, and it does have a non-plain text quotation marker which often gets translated to initial marks. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all?
At 03:41 PM 6/17/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2013/6/17 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com At 01:23 PM 6/17/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2013/6/17 Benjamin Grant mailto:b...@4efix.comb...@4efix.com Is *this* an example of Bucklin failing Participation? 5: ABC 4: BCA A wins Right But add these in: 2: CAB B wins. Yes, with your tiebreaker. This is not participation failure. Adding ballots ranking C highest did not cause C to lose. Abd, you're wrong. Adding BA ballots caused A to lose; that is a participation failure. I did err in my analysis. However, I would urge anyone tempted to write you are wrong to be very careful. It's a big red flag that one is, oneself, making some mistake. Would we not expect the addition of BA ballots to have the possibility of causing A to lose? No, the added ballots were AB ballots, at a lower ranking. The failure comes from causing majority failure, thus pulling in deeper votes. I had somehow failed to notice the B votes from the 5 voters. A wins in the first round without the added votes, with a simple majority. This is the sequence, which Jameson did not explore specifically, merely stating his result. 5: ABC 4: BCA A wins Right But add these in: 2: CAB B wins. A wins in the 9-voter case, by a simple majority. However, the 11-voter case has a new majority requirement, 6 votes instead of 5. We have the situation here that a majority favoring A votes second rank for B. In Range equivalents, often proposed as examples of bad Range behavior, we see the same kind of phenomenon asserted. Under straight Bucklin, if there are two frontrunners, A and B, we would expect *very few* additional votes for B, because the election is very likely to reduce, then, to A vs B. So this is like examples of alleged majority criterion failure based on the majority suppressing its preference by voting for another candidate, who gets a greater majority once they do that. First round: (majority is 6) A:5, B:4, C:2 Second round: A: 7, B:9, C:6 *All three candidates have a majority?* Who is the ideal winner of this election? The A voters elected to vote AB rather than A.B or just A. The only reason B can win is because they set it up. By second-ranking B, which indicates weak preference, they gave the election to B. The C voters merely opened that box. The back-up Bucklin system under discussion would still award the victory to A, because there was more than one majority, so the result would back up to the first rank and A would still win. Is that a desired result, or otherwise? What do we see here WRT utilities? First of all, I don't know what is really meant by the ..X preferences? Are there more than three candidates in this election? Are those actually approvals? If so, every voter ultimately approved every candidate. Jameson and another seemed to assume Bucklin votes from a preference order, which is naive. That's why I suggested that these might have been written the way below, if they were *not* approvals, i.e, if the third rank shown was the *worst* rating. Yeah, in analyzing ranked voting systems, this is common practice, to give the complete rankings. But Bucklin is *not* a simple ranked system, it uses an Range ballot, in the traditional form, with the range only covering the approved categories. You cannot translate sincere preferences to Bucklin votes, especially Bucklin-ER. There are *families* of sincere votes. So Bucklin votes, perhaps: 5: AB 4: BC If this is 3-rank Bucklin (standard), then the voters also had X.Y possibilities, or bullet votes. If they second-rank a candidate, that indicates *weak preference*. Bucklin analysis here only looks at the first rank, because a majority is found there. Range analysis gives me this: 9-voter election 5: A,4; B,3 4: B,4; C,3 So full range analysis: A,20; B,31; C,12. So the A win is actually weak, mere majority criterion compliant, an example of the failure of the majority criterion! This election is then *vulnerable* to more voter participation, and that is what happens. 5: AB 4: BC 2: CA This vote expresses, by default, AB. However, the *primary expression* is a vote for C. The A vote is a subsidiary preference. Are these weak or strong preferences (Bucklin allows four levels of preference strength, i.e., a Range increment of 4, 3, 2, or 1. The voters here all elected to express weak preference with the top two and strong preference with the third candidate.) 5: A,4; B,3 4: B,4; C,3 2: C,4; A,3 A,26; B, 31; C, 20 B is *still the utility optimizer.* Yes, there is technical participation failure. 2 votes that did express, as a lower preference, AB, did cause A to lose to B. Will the C voters be upset? On the face, yes. They got C, the worst candidate, because they voted. However, what they really did was to trigger a deeper consideration, that revealed that B was the more widely preferred candidate
Re: [EM] Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all?
At 03:58 PM 6/17/2013, Chris Benham wrote: Benjamin, The criterion (criteria is the plural) you suggest is not new. It is called Mono-add-Top, and comes from Douglas Woodall. It is met by IRV and MinMax(Margins) but is failed by Bucklin. In my opinion IRV is the best of the methods that meet it. 26: AYX 25: BYX 17: CDX 17: EFX 17: GHX The majority threshold is 51 and X wins in the third round. But if we add anywhere between 3 and 100 XY ballots then Y wins in the second round. Some error there. Total votes are 102. Majority is 52 votes. I just want it to be noticed how *crazy* this scenario is. Voting systems criteria can be like that. A totally insane situation, won't happen in a real election in a billion years, can be asserted to cause criterion failure. There is no *evaluation*, no consideration of harm or effect on social utility, just a raw definition of a criterion and an example showing failure. Or, sometimes, a proof that failure is not possible (with *any* scenario). The deeper analysis is much more difficult. What are the conditions that allow mono-add-top failure? In the example above, X wins without the additional votes because X is the *unanimous* third choice of all the voters, while being the first or second choice of none. That's, for starters, preposterously unlikely. However, a somewhat more realistic version could be constructed. The ballots that then shift the win to Y cross a minimal majority threshold for Y in the second round (With the 3 votes additional, 53 votes is majority, so this would need to be two votes, not three). I have generally suggested that in studying criteria performance that overall social utility be considered. Because Bucklin, especially Bucklin-ER -- which this election could be -- uses a Range ballot, that's what makes strategic voting sense -- it is possible to estimate social utility performance. In a hybrid system, which is what I've been coming to highly recommend as a more sophisticated reform, social utility and the Condorcet criterion can be tested, and problems, conflicts, can easily be handled with a runoff, and if the runoff *is the general election*, then the primary method is merely a nomination device. If the primary method never *eliminates* a Condorcet winner, then the overall method can fairly be considered Condorcet-compliant, with the final application of the criterion being *in the general election*. I.e., the Condorcet winner will win, *unless* the voters vary and that preference is not maintained. That pairwise majority will know the situation from the primary. How will they vote? Now, X is the *social utility winner* if this is Bucklin. The voting pattern does not reflect -- at all -- real voting behavior with Bucklin, which we know. Many or even most voters will bullet vote. The frontrunners are A and B. A and B voters are unlikely to add lower preferences in second rank, in fact, they many not add them at all. And all of this reveals problems with the majority criterion and the multiple majority criterion. I have pointed out that Bucklin uses a Range ballot to control voting in a series of approval elections. That is, the optimal Bucklin ballot will show utilities for candidates, as to those within the approved set, those where the voter is at all willing to support the candidate, to approve the candidate, and thus cause the election. Here, a deeper preference is revealed in the third rank. What does this do to a social utility estimate: 4 3 2 26: AYX 25: BYX 17: CDX 17: EFX 17: GHX --- 102 voters, max score 408 Totals, as percentage of maximum possible (i.e, 4 points per voter per candidate) A: 25.4% B: 24.5% C,E,G: 16.7% Y: 37.5% D,F,H: 12.5% X: 50% X is *obviously* the social utility winner. However, that's a wimpy decision, 50% of maximum range. Voting third rank in Bucklin is *bare minimum approval,* which is why I interpret it as 50% range. Now, we add 2: XY The two votes, when the second rank is amalgamated, lead to 53 votes for Y, a bare majority, Y wins, in the second round, with only 2 votes for X at that level. That's because Bucklin collapses to approval voting as higher ranks fail to find a majority. A and B are still two votes short of a majority. However, the full ballots show a different story. In this case, the two additional votes caused a bare majority to appear in the second round, thus concealing the *full approval* for X that only comes up in the third round. Notice that the A,B voters also approve Y, all of them. None of them approve each other. These votes, as far as I can tell, make no sense, they are preposterously unreal. While I can easily create preference profiles that match the votes -- they would be these preferences translated into Bucklin votes, which are then Range 4 utilities -- the voters are *uncorrelated* with each other, and are behaving as if purely and completely isolated. It's as if they don't
Re: [EM] [CES #8834] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding....)
At 02:42 PM 6/18/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: New running tally, including Andy Jennings's latest votes (which went out on only one of the lists). Current voting tallies in parentheses, ordered JQ/AL/RB/AJ/DSH/BG/BRG. Options have been placed in descending order, which I expect to be stable from here on. Abd: please vote on MAV, MSV, CAV, AAV, and CSV. My votes are the second in each list. Majority Approval Voting: (A/B/C/A/A/D/B) Median: B, votes above: 3. PROBABLE WINNER. Additive Approval Voting: (B/C/B/C/B/E/B) Median: B, votes above: 0 Descending Approval Threshold Voting: (A/B-/B/C/C/F/A) Median B-; votes above B, 2. Cumulative Approval Voting: (A/C/B/C/D/A/F) Median C; votes above: 3 Majority Support Voting: (B/D/C/A/C/D/B) Median C; votes above: 3 Instant Runoff Approval Voting: (B/A/F/C/F/F/C) Median C; votes above: 2 Cumulative Support Voting: (A/C/B/C/F/C/F) Median C; votes above: 2 I am happy with how this went. There are still details we haven't come to consensus on such as the numbers of and labels for rating categories but I am comfortable with leaving those unspecified, and allowing each advocate to specify them if they want to. Abd: I understand that you favor the runoff terminology. However, the IRAV proposal lost convincingly. If you have any further issues to discuss, please pose them (along with your votes as requested above). Well, I could have shifted the DAT vote to tie with MAV However, the particular system is DAT with a backup as needed to avoid a multiple majority. MAV represents that. I'm still uncomfortable with the *method*, i.e., with dumping the principle of preponderance of the votes in the case of a multiple majority, and we have seen inadequate discussion of that./ I would happily have submitted to the majority here on even a name I didn't personally like. I hope that, at least on these lists, we can begin to come together to use MAV as the representative Bucklin proposal, and stop pushing our own individual variants like GMJ or ER-Bucklin. I can appreciate the intention, but not the push. The Approval Voting consensus arose rather naturally, this seems to have been rushed. What's the hurry? I see a place for using different names in different contexts, and do not see that one size fits all. MAV -- I'm happy to use that name for a defined method, and will leave the grade issue for later -- sacrifices utility maximization for some increased level of LnH protection. I *do* think it's an interesting idea, but would greatly prefer to resolve the problem with real runoffs, *whenever* the votes show the lack of a clear majority *choice.* Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] MAV on electowiki
At 04:25 PM 6/18/2013, Juho Laatu wrote: I quickly read the article. Here are some observations. - Term Bucklin system has not been defined. I can guess that it probably refers to Bucklin style stepwise addition of new approvals, but that may not be as obvious to all readers. If there is no definition of Bucklin system, maybe one could say As in Bucklin instead of As with any Bucklin system. There is a link to Bucklin voting in the article. - Sentence if there are more than one with a majority, the B votes are removed and the highest sub-majority wins is ambigious in the sense that it is not clear if highest sub-majority refers to all candidates or to candidates that had majority after adding the B votes. It's poorly worded, all right. Minor point: There are more than one grates. (I find the use of the singular or plural with more to be ambiguous. I'd avoid it.) An example is given when the principle has not been stated. The method does not make sense as stated. The back-up is a tie-breaker, considering multiple majorities as if they were ties. They *are* ties in median vote. The tie-breaker only selects a member of the tied set. Something went south. What was proposed was a Bucklin system. Bucklin does use, I've suggested, a range ballot, but the way that it does this is with a ranked structure. I ran into this when trying to design a set of votes to show a problem that I have not seen examined. The description on the wiki page makes the system seem more complex than it is. It's been designed to be five-rank, with explicit F. That's a fish bicycle. No support means merely no support. No vote. Introducing the D vote is a later possible reform, it is an unapproved category. It makes the ballot considerably more complex, and the explanation is more complex. *D: Oppose unless there are no other majorities at all. Is that clear? I don't think so. Bucklin as Approval Voting doesn't have a disapproved rank. All blanks are disapproved. - It is not quite clear what happens and if it is possible that there is no majority after the F votes have been counted. The F votes are never counted, first of all. Listing them is a mistake. (If the F votes continued the amalgamation, then someone would be voting *for* a candidate rated F. That was the intention for the D rating. It is far better, however, to introduce a D rating in combination with a runoff system, where the D rating could improve runoff candidate selection. When a voter rates a candidate as D, they are opposing the election of that candidate. The Bucklin system required amalgamating three ranks. It's looking like MAV requires five, but that could be reduced to four, but the whole idea here was to have a *simple* next step beyond basic Approval Voting, and, as well, a clear similar method for use in a runoff system. (We basically need a step up from approval as a plurality method, and from approval as a primary method in a runoff system.) - The grades could be letters or numbers, but they could also be e.g. columns without any letter or number. This part of text discusses what the ballots might look like. I'm not sure if ballot different ballot formats should be seen as an essential part of the method definition, or if the method should be defined abstractly without referring to what the actual ballots might look like. I tend to define the methods abstractly without assuming anything on the ballots, and then discuss possible ballot formats as a separate topic, but I'm not saying that's the only and best approach. The current text is thus ok. I just first read the grades of the definition as abstract grades, not as definitions on what would be written in the ballots. *Something* should be on the ballot that expresses the *function* of a vote. Jameson took this concept from me. A voter should be able to see the ballot and have a reasonably clear idea, just from it, what the vote *means* ... and the meaning is the *effect* that the vote causes. The original Bucklin ballot, however, simply instructed voters to mark 1st choice, 2nd choice, or '3rd choice. The googlebooks copy is unclear, http://books.google.com/books?id=QcIqYAAJpg=RA1-PA757dq=The+Grand+Junction+plan+of+city+government+and+its+resultshl=enei=uOTdS7aFKMKclgfq9739Cgsa=Xoi=book_resultct=resultresnum=3ved=0CDsQ6AEwAg#v=onepageq=The%20Grand%20Junction%20plan%20of%20city%20government%20and%20its%20resultsf=false Page 95. It looks like they actually instructed people to vote for all but one. But that part is quite unclear. In the first set of instructions, at the top of the ballot, they did suggest not voting for one candidate. There may be another copy of this ballot somewhere. Bucklin was widely covered. MAV *assumes that voters err if they approve two candidates by a majority.* That's why it backs up. But what, indeed, if it backs up and the multiple majority candidates are not the plurality winner in
Re: [EM] Participation Criteria and Bucklin - perhaps they *can* work together after all?
At 01:23 PM 6/17/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2013/6/17 Benjamin Grant mailto:b...@4efix.comb...@4efix.com Is *this* an example of Bucklin failing Participation? 5: ABC 4: BCA A wins Right But add these in: 2: CAB B wins. Yes, with your tiebreaker. This is not participation failure. Adding ballots ranking C highest did not cause C to lose. By the way, an oddity about this example. Bucklin is ranked approval. Did all the voters approve all candidates? Round 1. Majority is 5 A wins in round 1. Adding the2 voters, majority is now 6. First round: A: 5 B: 4 C: 2 no majority, go to next round. Second round: A: 7 B: 4 C: 6 A still wins. B does *not* win. Bucklin terminates when a majority is found. Participation criterion from previous post: Adding one or more ballots that vote X over Y should never change the winner from X to Y Showing the third preferences is confusing and irrelevant. I do not know why Jameson approved B wins. But even if B had won, it would not have shown participation failure. The vote must change the result away from C to another winner. One fact that should be understood about Bucklin: first of all, Bucklin votes are *approvals*. Every explicit Bucklin vote is voting *for* the candidate under the condition that the rank has been reached in the amalgamation process. Secondly, a Bucklin ballot is a *Range* ballot, covering the approved range only. So ranks may be left empty. Bucklin is *not* a pure ranked system. So if a voter has ABC, the voter will *not* vote for all three, unless there is some other worse candidates, or the voter really does want to completely stand aside from the election. And that doesn't work with respect to write-in candidates So if the voter has preferences ABC, the voter may vote, in the form of Bucklin we generally are working with, called Bucklin-ER (equal ranking), these votes, and all could be sincere: A AB A.B (blank second rank) A=B This *assumes* that there is a third candidate, C, that is least preferred. If there are four candidates (or more), the voter can have *many more sincere voting patterns*. Each pattern has implications about *preference strength*. That is part of why I say that Bucklin uses a Range ballot. Suppose that the voter *really prefers* a candidate not on the ballot, and wants to vote for that candidate, we'll call W. W WA WAB WA=B W.A W.A=B W=AB W=A.B W=A=B Just to make this clear. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8791] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding....)
At 01:51 PM 6/17/2013, Benjamin Grant wrote: Well, that sounds a lot like the system we have be talking about in the other thread. DAT sounds confusing to me in this context. One of the Cumulatives makes the most sense instinctually to me as (if I understand this correctly) we keep adding in more ranks until we get enough to answer the question. IRAV makes it seem like a flavor of IRV, which in my full lack of experience seems wrong (Buckley seems unlike IRV), so I guess I would vote something like this: Some facts should be known. First of all, the system as described is *almost* identical to the system called Bucklin that was widely used in the U.S. That traditional system was different in two ways (as generally implemented, there were variations): 1. It only allowed equal ranking in the third rank. With our modern perspective, we see little reason to require exclusive ranking at the top rank, and less reason to require it in the second rank. It merely makes the system less flexible for the voter. First rank exclusion *might* be required because of ballot placement rules and public campaign funding, but there are better ways to handle this, we could suspect. (The basic cost of requiring exclusive ranking is that some votes will be spoiled and some voters who have low preference strength will be *forced to choose.* Even if that is difficult.) 2. The method *is* instant runoff approval. That is, it simulates a series of repeated approval elections. In the earlier elections, voters may bullet vote, just for their favorite. But as it becomes obvious that this will not complete the election, voters will start to add approvals. They will do this according to an internal descending approval cutoff. With a series of elections, this is a powerful method. The single Bucklin ballot really does simulate a short series, essentially three such elections with three-rank Approval. In a more sophisticated version, the Bucklin ballot is the first poll in a repeated election, and my theory is that this can find a *true majority* almost always in two ballots. The second ballot has the *huge advantage* that the voters get another look, more motivate voters may show up to vote, and, if the elimination involved in listing candidates on the second ballot is fair, there is less that voters need to look at. IRV does simulate runoff voting, but a different kind of runoff voting, called sequential elimination, where the candidate with the least votes is eliminated from the ballot with each round. It's also called exhaustive runoff. So the name instant runoff is fair for both methods, but IRV is instant runoff plurality, whereas this method is instant runoff approval. The behavior is *far better,* because the behavior of approval is better than that of plurality. The name could be IRA, instead of IRAV, i.e., instant runoff approval. IRA actually should do, better, what IRV pretends to do, find majorities. When if fails, IRA is *honest about the failure,* it does not pretend to find a majority by setting aside and not counting all those ballots with votes only *against* the top two remaining. So, yes, IRA might bring up negative associations with IRV, but there are also a lot of positive associations, and runoff voting is the most common advanced voting system in use, and Bucklin balloting and amalgamation *improves* runoff voting instead of trying to kill it. It should *reduce* runoffs. How much it will do that, we are not certain. But it is a cheap method to amalgamate, it's just the sum of votes in each rank, and those can be added up precinct by precinct. (IRV gets *very complicated*, and a single mistake in some precinct can require recounting *all the other precincts.*) So, without being thoroughly aware of these conditions, Benjamin, your opinions are still valuable as to first impressions. The name of Approval voting we have already decided to promote, and it's been on the table for many years as a major proposal, with some implementations in organizations. The Bucklin method is also very old, in fact, going back to Condorcet himself, around 1800. Bucklin is named after James Bucklin, who promoted and saw applied his method in Grand Junction, Colorado, in 1909, and it became all the rage, seeing something like ninety implementations around the U.S. The method described is being considered as a suggested *second reform*, after approval is adopted. This may well already be in a runoff environment. Under some conditions, it might be a first reform. It *is* an old method. I was tried and it worked, and it was not ended because it did not work. A proper study of why Bucklin was disadopted has never been done, but it's obvious from my research. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8816] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding....)
Additive Approval Voting is a reasonable name, but ... it misses the powerful and real associations with runoff voting, and we may find that the most powerful and ready application of the method is *in an existing runoff system.* We could also call it Runoff Approval Voting to dump the instant, which was a false promise. RAV. or ARV. At 02:03 PM 6/17/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: New running tally. Current voting tallies in parentheses, ordered JQ/AL/RB/AJ/DSH/BG. Note the new option for Additive Approval Voting, which could be a winner if Abd, Andy, and Ben like it enough. Current contenders for best are in bold. Instant Runoff Approval Voting: (B/A/F/C/F/F) Median C/F. Descending Approval Threshold Voting: (A/B-/B/C/C/F) Median B-/C. Majority Approval Voting: (A/?/C/A/A/D) Median A/C Majority Support Voting: (B/?/C/A/C/D) Median C Cumulative Approval Voting: (A/?/B/?/D/A) Median B/D Additive Approval Voting: (B/?/B/?/B/?) Median B/? Cumulative Support Voting: (A/?/B/?/F/C) Median C/? Jameson -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups The Center for Election Science group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to electionscience+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_outhttps://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Absolutely new here
At 02:02 AM 6/16/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: It would work, but the rating variant is better. In the context of ranking, Bucklin fails Condorcet, for instance. Straight Bucklin does fail Condorcet, of course, as do straight Range and Approval. However, we can tell from the fact that Range fails Condorcet that there is a problem with the Condorcet Criterion, one of the simplest and most intuitively correct of the voting systems criteria. The problem also applies to the Majority Criterion. Those criteria do not consider preference strength. Practical, small-scale, choice systems do, routinely. They do it through deliberative process and repeated elections, vote-for-one, seeking a majority. And then, a process that can even review a majority choice and reverse it, where preference strength justifies it. Thus a deterministic single-poll method that optimizes social utility, and that collects information allowing that, *must* violate the criteria. And that's a problem, because this is a fundamental principle of democracy: no binding choice is made without the consent of a majority of those voting on the issue. Some are aware of the tyranny of the majority, but solutions to *that* cannot be found in deciding *against* the preference of the majority, *without their consent.* The result is minority rule, not broader consensus. So there is a solution: repeated election. Over the years of considering this problem, I've concluded that with the use of advanced voting systems, such as Range methods, and good ballot analysis in a first round, with a runoff where a majority decision is not clear, such that a Condorcet winner in a primary will *always* make it into a runoff, in addition to one or more social utility maximizers, it is possible to 1. Find a majority choice, almost always, in two ballots, with the exceptions being harmless. 2. Satisfy the Majority and Condorcet criteria. 3. Optimize social utility. These have been considered opposing goals. That is because 1. Voting systems study has neglected repeated ballot. 2. Voter turnout has been neglected. 3. The electorate has been assumed, where runoffs have even been considered, to be the same electorate with the same opinions. Neither is real. It also has some bullet-voting incentive. Say that you support candidate A. You're reasonably sure it will get quite a number of second-place votes. Then even though you might prefer B to A, it's strategically an advantage to rank A first, because then the method will detect a majority for A sooner. This is somehow assumed to be bad. That incentive exists if there is significant preference strength. Thus bullet voting is a measure of preference strength, i.e., is useful in measuring social utility. There is, however, another cause for bullet voting: voter ignorance (which is natural and normal). A voter simply may not know enough about another candidate to vote for the candidate. And this is probably the major cause of bullet voting, historically, with Bucklin, combined with high preference strength. The ignorance problem is addressed with runoffs when they are needed. One of the points of the graded/rated variants is to encourage the voters to think in absolute terms (is this candidate good enough to deserve an A) rather than relative terms (is this candidate better than that candidate). If they do, then the method becomes more robust. If somehow we could extract absolute utilities from the voters, sure. However, real-world, people make choices based on relative utility, not absolute utility. Imagining a voting system as becoming more robust, if voters behave utterly unrealistically, depends on a rather strange idea of robust. We *are* machines, but we are programmed to optimize among *choices*. Our very assessment mechanisms are relative to what is espected as realistic possibilities. What Kristofer has referred to is called the Later-no-Harm criterion. Any system that efficiently arranges for social-utility maximizing process *must* violate Later-no-Harm. I.e, the expression of a lower preference *must* harm the chance of the favorite winning. The key word here is efficient. There can be an LnH-compliant system which exhaustively determines that candidates cannot win, and those are then eliminated, but it's extraordinarily inefficient, requiring many ballots. When it is done in a single ballot, it *must*, then, eliminate, on occasion, the ideal winner. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] A better 2-round method that uses approval ballots
At 07:36 AM 6/16/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 06/14/2013 09:06 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 12:44 AM 6/14/2013, Chris Benham wrote: My suggested 2-round method using Approval ballots is to elect the most approved first-round candidate A if A is approved on more than half the ballots, otherwise elect the winner of a runoff between A and the candidate that is most approved on ballots that don't show approval for A. Yeah. My general position is that runoff voting can be *vastly improved* by some fairly simple tweaks, or by using an advanced voting system, in the primary and maybe in the runoff. Approval is an advanced voting system *and* a tweak on Plurality. Parties fielding 2 candidates is a disempowering move, in general, weakening campaigning. I'm generally opposed to open primaries in partisan elections. A unified primary makes sense in a non-partisan election. Couldn't open primaries weaken party leadership and so encourage the transition from Duverger-style two party rule into multipartyism? As long as the primary/runoff method can handle multiple candidates, that is. Or do you think the leadership would instead say that we need to stick together or the other party, that keeps party discipline, will divide and conquer us with much stronger focused campaigning? Open primaries attack the underlying principle of parties as voluntary organizations. The first chip in this principle occurred when major political parties allowed their nomination process to be handled at public expense, instead of organizing it independently. Open primaries allow candidates to declare as affiliated with a party without *any* recognition from the party. And how would a party designated a candidate for an open primary? That would require their own selection process! When a political party has a leadership that is not responsive to the membership, that party can be predicted, long-term, to lose support. And that's exactly how it should be. I don't know what the effect will be of open primaries. However, if you want to look at a pathological example, look at Lizard v. Wizard. That was an open primary. The *biggest* problem with open primaries is when they are vote-for-one. This, then, can easily lead to serious vote-splitting, with the true most-widely-supported candidate losing. And in those primaries, the party stands by, helpless, it might seem, because candidates simply claim to be affiliated with the party. If it's a *party primary,* that's different. *Hosts* of problems arise, though, when there are *public elections* that create binding results for party nominations. Bottom line, they are no longer party nominations. They are something else. A majority of party members may be against them. Tough. And we need to understand something about nonpartisan elections. They are *very different* as to voter behavior from partisan elections. What seems to be, from the behavior of nonpartisan IRV, is that voters vote on name recognition and affect. It is the kind of thing that is heavily influenced by public exposure of the candidates, and it has little to do with political position on a spectrum. Voters do not appear to be voting as if there is this spectrum, with second preferences then being predictable from spectrum position of the candidates and the voter. It'd be interesting to run some kind of SVD on cardinal polls in such elections to confirm whether that's the case, but I trust you :-) You certainly know more about non-partisan elections than I do, since pretty much every election here is partisan. It's a consequence of the party list method we use. Right. With party list you are voting for the party. Short of Asset, great system. The place to look for nonpartisan elections in such a system is in how the parties themselves determine their party list. Is that list determined democratically by party members? If it is, that's a nonpartisan election. If it is determined by leadership, it may be something else. How does the leadership make decisions? (However, I do note that in one of the few cities that have direct mayoral elections, a candidate from a very left-wing party was elected. This party has about 2-3% national support, and I get the impression he was elected on nonpartisan grounds - by character and quality rather than by political affiliation.) That happens, even in partisan elections. Was his party listed on the ballot? If so, that was what we call a partisan election. Open primaries here follow a fairly new innovation: party name on the ballot *without any approval from the party.* Yet candidates are only allowed to use a recognized party name. Specifically, this is a party with ballot recognition. All others are unaffiliated or the like. I would conceptualize Chris's system this way. It's a 2-winner approval method, designed to maximize *representation* on the runoff ballot. Voters who approve A are already represented
Re: [EM] [CES #8791] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding....)
At 09:57 PM 6/15/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2013/6/15 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com At 07:52 PM 6/14/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: So. Abd and I now agree that a Bucklin system which uses just the above-median votes to break ties is probably the best first step towards median voting. Let's stop saying it that way. I'd be happy to. What do you propose, in 8 words or less? A few more words, probably, particularly since you used more. Bucklin is a ranked approval system, where approvals are categories into ranks in order of preference. In a modern Bucklin system, voters may categorize as many candidates in each rank as they choose, may skip ranks, and candidates not voted for explicitly are considered not approved for election. Votes are amalgamated by canvassing the first rank, checking for a majority, and then proceeding to add in the next ranked votes, in sequence, until a majority is found or the ranks are exhausted. This system can produce a multiple majority, and a concern when this occurs is that voters may ahve over-enthusiastically added additional approvals, not realizing that they were in the majority as to their higher preference. Fear of this can discourage adding additional approvals, and thus encourage majority failure. Hence, with this proposed Bucklin variant, if a multiple majority is found, below the first rank, the votes from that rank are removed from the totals and the win is awarded to the majority-approved candidate with the most votes in the previous-canvassed rank. (If a majority is found in the first rank, to be explicit, the win goes to the candidate with the most votes.) However, I'm not *entirely* on board this. It violates long-standing traditions about multiple majorities. I am willing to *consider* it, under the limitation of a deterministic method. I've suggested we need more data. Both ties and median introduce concepts which are either complex or unfamiliar. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8782] Upper-Bucklin naming (was: Median systems, branding....)
At 07:52 PM 6/14/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: So. Abd and I now agree that a Bucklin system which uses just the above-median votes to break ties is probably the best first step towards median voting. Let's stop saying it that way. It's true, but it's confusing. First of all, you are using tie in an nonstandard way. You mean that the median vote is the same. But when we say that an election is tied, we mean something *very different*. The tie here is that both candidates have a majority approval. But the votes are not tied (unless they are, a rare thing.) I'd like to get the details worked out, so we can stop using different terms (Bucklin, MJ, GMJ) and settle on a single clearly-defined proposal. I'd love to hear what others feel about these issues (though this isn't really the place for debating whether some other class of voting system, such as Score or Condorcet or whatever, is better or worse than Bucklin/Median systems in general). We should know. Remember I declared a reform path. I suspect that it ends with a hybrid system that uses a Range ballot. This is the real issue: outcomes can be improved by using a system that allows greater information input from the voters. That's practically a tautology. However, there is a cost to that. At some point, the incremental value is less than the incremental cost. Hence a particular reform path will terminate, probalby, short of a naive estimation of perfection, because a perfect system will *also be economical.* I don't see going above Range 10. However, this is important. A rigid reform process must decide on the ultimate goal before there is adequate information to do so. That's not necessary. We can have some idea of the ultimate goal, we do *not* need to know details, we merely need to know enough to take the next step. *Ultimately,* I don't see single-winner elections at all! So how much should be invested in making single-winner elections perfect? What I see as of long-term value is a recognition of the usage of Range methods for *polling* participants, making repeated ballot *more efficient*, settling faster. We may ultimately see, as experience justifies it, a creeping up of the quota. I.e, from the Droop quota, toward the Hare. With binary elections, that means *toward unanimity.* In small groups, this is possible, and this was a common experience in small groups in the 20th century. Now, how can we scale that up, *without* the massive inefficiency that often accompanied the seeking of full consensus? Now, to the point here: 1. How to best express the system? Two equivalent definitions: * Top-down: Count the votes at the highest grade for each candidate. If any one candidate has a majority, they win. If not, add in lower grades, one at a time, until some candidate or candidates get a majority. If two candidates would reach a majority at the same grade level, then whichever has the most votes above that level wins. If there are no votes above that level, the highest votes at or above that level wins. First of all, grade, sorry. It grates. It will mislead, possibly. These are *actually* category ranks, i.e, ranks with equal ranking allowed (and empty ranks being meaningful). Because it is grading on the curve, it is actually accomplished by ranking, as a starting point, with, then, adjustments to more accurately show preference strength. The concept of grade confuses that, even though grading on the curve would, in fact, do the same thing. Bucklin used ranks. Bucklin is Ranked Approval, that's been a common name for it. The ranks are preference categories. To fit with voting systems tradition, I'd call them ranks. Score takes us back toward Grade. The name of Range referred to the entire range of possible fractional votes. The original Bucklin ballot used First Choice, Second Choice, Third Choice. And that's what the votes are: choices. Choice Approval, what do you think? The name Definite Majority Choice has already been used. http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Definite_Majority_Choice says that it is also called Ranked Approval Voting. Of course, we are talking about a ranked Approval method. It's really, as I've pointed out, a Range method. The final rule discourages multiple approvals in the first rank without prohibiting them. They make sense wherever the voter has little preference between favorite candidates. I would word it this way, as to what I think today: Count the votes at 1st Choice for each candidate. If a single candidate has a majority, this canditate wins. If not, add in lower choices, one at a time, until a candidate or candidates gains a majority. If two or more candidates reach a majority at a stage, then whichever candidate has the most votes above that stage wins. If this is 1st Choice, or if all the choices have been amalgamated, and no candidate has a majority, then the candidate with the most votes wins. The last
Re: [EM] A better 2-round method that uses approval ballots
At 12:44 AM 6/14/2013, Chris Benham wrote: I just want to repeat a suggestion I've made here more than once. Take my previous example where the Centre-Right candidate is elected due to some of the Left candidate's supporters using the Compromise strategy. 49: Right 28: Centre-Right (7 are sincere LeftCentre-Right) 23: Left Centre-Right beats Right in the runoff 51-49. But the Right supporters have an easy Push-over strategy to (from their perspective) rectify this. If anywhere between 6 and *all* of them change their vote to approving both of Right and Left, then Left will be dragged back into the runoff with Right and then be beaten. This is the sincere stance, to be explicit: 49: Right (? some percentage are Centre-Right) 21: Centre-Right (? some percentage are Right, some are Left) 7: LeftCentre-Right 23: Left (some percentage are LeftCentre-Right So, we have strategic voting on the part of the Left voters already, in Chris's scenario. We do *not* know, from the plurality votes, who the best winner is. I can say that, given the Right position with 49% sincere first preference, Right is *almost certainly* the ideal winner. Right is *almost certainly* the Condorcet winner. Chris has Centre-Right beat Right in the runoff. That is very unlikely to happen, at least not in the U.S. It *might happen* in a place with mandatory voting, but it's extremely close and risky to assume it will. In the U.S., realize that we often see more than 1% write-in votes. Turnout is different. If it is a runoff between Right and Center-Right, lots of Left voters will not bother to vote, because they have low preference strength. On the other hand, Centre-Right supporters might turn out in larger numbers, having gone from 21% first-preference support to a runoff position. Comeback elections occur about a third of the time. Now, what if Left makes it to the runoff. Left Voters are now highly motivated to turn out. Voters to the left in the Center-Right range of the spectrum may also be highly motivated. For a Right voter to assume that Right will win the runoff is also speculative. Preference betrayal strategies are often quite risky. It would *never* be completely safe to vote for the total turkey, the worst candidate. FBC works when voting for a less evil or a compromise. Be careful what you ask for, Right voters, by voting for Left here, would be *establishing the Left party as more credible,* encouraging their supporters to maximally organize, and will pull some of the center toward the Left. It *looks* like a coherent strategy, at first. Now, coherent strategies that involve preference reversal somewhat assume owned voters.* They probably require coordination. And coordination on a large scale probably cannot happen without being visible. Such a strategy would *outrage* many voters. Right, if it tolerates this strategy, may start to lose support, even core support. So even with vote-for-one, Plurality, in a two-round system (top two to runoff if no majority), turkey-raising strategy can easily fail. It might still be tried. Any clear examples? I saw one election asserted that was *not* a clear turkey-raising strategy. It was participation in a Republican open primary by Democratic voters, attempting to get a supposed loser nominated. On closer examination, this was Democrats, inspired by a maverick Republican, and *neither Republican was likely to win.* This maverick, indeed, ended up endorsing the Democrat. And still got a lot of votes. He was, basically, an amazing person, a real Vermonter, indeed a movie version of a Vermonter, literally. Those Democrats who voted for him in the Republican primary would not have been displeased by him winning. Now, to Chris's proposal: My suggested 2-round method using Approval ballots is to elect the most approved first-round candidate A if A is approved on more than half the ballots, otherwise elect the winner of a runoff between A and the candidate that is most approved on ballots that don't show approval for A. Yeah. My general position is that runoff voting can be *vastly improved* by some fairly simple tweaks, or by using an advanced voting system, in the primary and maybe in the runoff. Approval is an advanced voting system *and* a tweak on Plurality. The Arizona proposal was for nonpartisan elections, that should be understood. Turkey-raising strategy is thus almost certainly irrelevant. The proposed Arizona system is not a deterministic primary, it is really just a nominating procedure for the general election, which is then top-two Approval, simple. The general election is Plurality, with write-ins allowed. It could obviously be improved with an Approval general election (which could allow safer write-ins) or, better, Bucklin in both. Even better, Bucklin using a full Range ballot, and with pairwise analysis to detect a Condorcet winner if different from what would otherwise be chosen.
Re: [EM] Does Top Two Approval fail the Favorite Betrayal Criterion [?]
At 02:46 AM 6/13/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: Finally, I'd like to say that I do understand that reality is a lot less neat. What Abd says about differences in turnout in the first and second rounds of a runoff means that criteria are not as useful as for single-round methods because the votes in the different rounds would change. One could even argue that if they don't, there's no reason to add a runoff to an advanced method, and the only reason for Plurality to have a runoff is to patch problems in Plurality itself. I have seen reasoning of this sort from some IRV advocates who both say top-two runoff is also nonmonotonic, so don't go around saying TTR is better than IRV and IRV is better than TTR in every way because it's clearly better than the contingent vote. IRV advocates, in general, do not value an actual majority choice, and have left centuries of democratic traditions entirely behind. Plurality in nonpartisan elections is based, my suspicion, on a *simulation*. That is, the leader with a plurality will *usually* go on to win a repeated election seeking a majority, and if not being the best, is at least the second best, perhaps good enough. Partisan elections are then based on an expectation that most people will be divided into two major parties. Voting systems activists have, in general, demonized Plurality, when it, *in context and usually* works much better than might be expected. However, it has obvious breakdowns when there is a three-party system and partisan elections. We know this about runoff voting: the election is a comeback election about a third of the time. I base this on a FairVote study. What should actually be done, I don't recall if they did it, is to look at the *margins* in those elections. IRV, *in nonpartisan elections*, almost never is a comeback election, and the exception I saw was with a *very close* margin. I don't recall clearly, but there might have been an additional example, which was an election where the ethnic identity of the candidate was clear from the name, and thus this was a *different kind* of *partisan* election. Ethnically partisan. (For those who don't know, a partisan election permits party affiliation of the candidates to be on the ballot. Voters may thus choose candidates based on that, which is a more stable preference, and more predictable, having little or nothing to do with the candidates themselves. I.e., we might assume that a Green Voter, in an IRV election, might then rank the Democrat second. The problem in Burlington was that the wider second choice was *eliminated* before the Republican, and many Republicans did rank the Democrat second, because the alternative was the Progressive candidate. Hence Bucklin, in that case, could easily have elected the Democrat *with a majority.* Someone tell Burlington that they can have their majority, probably, they do not need to be content with 40%, and their present system can do quite the same thing as IRV. It didn't in the last election, back to TTR/40%, because no Progressive candidate ran! FairVote has been strangely silent.) IRV activists generally will not mention that TTR produces different results than IRV. However, they hint at it by claiming that runoff elections are less representative, completely ignoring that many runoffs are held with the general election. Further, less representative results are commonly accepted in democratic organizations, as long as every qualified voter had the right to vote. They are *not* worse choices, in general. Rather, those who vote represent those who care enough to vote -- it's an effort! -- and thus results are probably *more generally acceptable.* When a *major choice* is presented in a runoff election, people turn out to vote in droves, even if it's a special election. Lizard vs. Wizard, and a similar French election, a boring centrist vs a right-wing extremist. This is the problem with FBC: it is interpreted *strictly*. I.e, *if there is any possible scenario where a voter might have an incentive to betray the favorite, and no matter how small the incentive, the method fails, the criterion becomes functionally useless. There are methods which obviously and routinely fail FBC. There are methods which don't, period, or at least no scenario has been proposed. Now, Range does not fail FBC. However, Range has a problem. It can declare a winner when the majority of voters oppose that result. By the nature of range, that opposition is not at full strength, obviously, but it is a *lack of consent* to the result. Further, because of normalization error, the Range result, even with votes considered fully sincere, can fail to be *actual utility optimizing.* Hence, Smith found that Top-Two runoff Range had better BR results than ordinary Range, with voters who vote with ordinary strategy. I.e, they normalize. They might also bullet vote or expand ranges, but, in
Re: [EM] Focus of runoffs?
At 03:15 AM 6/13/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: Say we have an organization or government that wants to use a better type of two-round runoff than top-two Plurality. What kind of distribution should the candidates for the second round have? To be a little more specific, and to make the concept a bit easier to think about, consider a top-n runoff with Approval ballots in both rounds. Furthermore, to not have to deal with differences in cloning problems, say that each group has at least n candidates, so you have at least n centrists, n left-wing candidates, n right-wing candidates and so on. This analysis is highly restricted to partisan elections. I understand why this analysis is done. However, real *nonpartisan* elections with real voters don't work that way, apparently. The signs are strong that voters vote based on positive affect, and that the supporters of one candidate are, in general, a fairly accurate sample of the preferences of all the other votes as to any different candidate. That explains why IRV would not change preference order, the shifts tend to be small. Partisan elections are very different, because, to a large extent, it is the party that matters to voters, not the candidates. So I might have an opinion about a Republican candidate, say, *even though I really don't know anything about the person.* Then what candidates should the runoff method pick for the second round? It could pick according to ordinary Approval. If we consider the electorate to be centrist, that would lead to n centrists being elected to the second round. The lack of variety might keep the voters from bothering to turn up in the second round. On the other hand, because they're all similar, it might lead to a more detailed discussion of different shades of centrist policy, thus informing the voters more and letting them make better choices in the second round. It would be top-two or top-three approval. Approval has some obvious problems. On the other extreme, the method could pick the candidates for second round using minmax Approval. This would produce a great variety of candidates, so the second round decision would probably seem more meaningful to the voters. On the other hand, because the ideological positions are so clearly defined and the n candidates would be spread across the spectrum, it would be easier for say, a right-wing candidate to say that guy over there is a leftist; vote for me if you like capitalism (or whatnot) instead of discussing the more subtle aspects of politics. In pure repeated elections, there are no eliminations, but candidates might voluntarily withdraw. Basically, as a baseline, I suggest considering repeated elections seeking majority approval, no eliminations. I would have thought that the only way to practically do this would be Asset Voting, because Asset could effectively run continuous elections, among the electors, the public voters. However, there is another example from U.S. history. Reading the compilation done of the history of voting in Vermont, prepared by the state-established commission on IRV, which essentially turned the matter over to the League of Women Voters and Common Cause, i.e., to FairVote, I found that Vermont, until some time into the 20th century, *required a majority* for some elections, including Congressional elections. They simply kept voting until they found a majority. This was either with Town Meeting, or with actual repeated balloting at some interval. It was said, there, that sometimes they took a year to settle. I'm sure that was repeated balloting with vote-for-one, because this is something that could take a few polls with Approval, and some fewer with Bucklin, which simulates a series of approval elections with declining approval cutoff. My sense -- unproven -- is that Bucklin with proper design, used in a 2-round system would *almost always* not only find a majority, but would find a Condorcet winner to boot. The trick is in how the runoff candidates are chosen. First of all, something needs to be specified. Many runoff systems allow write-in candidates in the runoff. That provides a way for the electorate to fix problems with the system, and this has actually happened, I've cited Long Beach, California. The first poll in a runoff system can show the problem, and the electorate can then fix it. However, advanced voting systems can handle three candidates, generally. Where they might fail to find a majority, in the final round, the likelihood is high that the regret will be small from the choice they will then make, as a plurality result. So what three candidates? Or two? Basically, my sense is that two candidates will usually be enough. But we need a more complex ballot than Approval. I suggest Bucklin-ER, because it simulates a series of approval runoffs. If there is a majority failure, it is because voters, in effect and often with knowledge,
Re: [EM] Median systems, branding, and activism strategy
At 06:24 PM 6/12/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: Uh, Score systems can ba amagalamated as median or as average or as sum. This isn't the misunderstanding I was talking about, but by saying Score with a capital S I was referring to a summed or averaged system. The latter fits most closely with democratic traditions, it is just Count all the votes, i.e., Approval, plus the allowance of fractional voting. Median systems are introducing what appears to be, for public choice, an *entirely new* concept. So, the obvious question, why? You are the one who likes Bucklin. Bucklin is a median system that's nearly 100 years old. How is that *entirely new* You can conceptualize Bucklin as a median system, because the first candidate to pass the majority post has the highest median vote. However, that's not how Bucklin was understood. It was seeking a majority, that's all. Explaining median, and, particlarly, graduated median, is a bit of a chore, as we have seen. This is something that is missing from many voting systems that have been designed with non-inutitive amalgamation process. I can read a description of how to amalgamate, but what I want to know, and I suspect most people will want to know, is the *sense* behind the system. And, remember, we are talking about first reforms, not the *ideal*. But median systems have a problem. There are too many of them, and even more names. Off the top of my head, I can think of the following names: * Bucklin: A general class of median systems which are implemented via a descending threshold. Also used to describe various specific ranked or hybrid ranked/rated systems used during the progressive era. For instance, some use Bucklin to mean median using full or truncated rankings, using the highest majority as a tiebreaker; others mean the Grand Junction system of median using 3+1 numbered rank/grades with skipping allowed and ties allowed at the third grade only; highest majority tiebreaker. Bucklin is a median system, that's true, but that is not the *concept.* I don't even know what that means. In my book, making a distinction between median systems on one hand and Bucklin systems on the other is unsustainable. Any Bucklin system is a median system; and if you want to define things so that there is a median system that isn't a Bucklin system, that's a distinction without a difference. Bucklin is a median system, but only because majority *fits* with the median concept. That is, *majority approval.* Bucklin only allowed approval votes, and that they were ranked was a refinement. I remember when we started discussing approval, and the common tope that approval voting had never been used in the U.S. It was repeated over and over. But Bucklin is a form of approval voting, and in many, probably most, elections, collapsed to straight approval, unlimited number of candidates may be approved. It is the *obvious* next step beyond Approval. In a few places, it's possible that a system will go directly from Plurality to Bucklin. And any poor performance of Bucklin would come, quite likely, from using median amalgamation. (I.e., a Bucklin ballot is really a Score ballot, and a score ballot can be used for Bucklin amalgamation, it is an obvious and simple extension.) I literally cannot parse this at all. It's obvious, Jameson. The first sentence and the parenthetical comment are separate. Notice: I was here acknowledging, specifically, that Bucklin uses a kind of median amalgamation. Since the ballot *could be* the same as a Score ballot, the only difference being an explicit approval cutoff, what I consider a necessary tweak to Score (it can be handled simply by defining 50% Score as the approval cutoff, i.e., 50% or higher is approved) then poor performance, now meaning increased Bayesian Regret, would come from the amalgamation difference, quite likely. I do expect that the vast majority of Bucklin voters will vote sincerely, and real-world breakdowns will come from bullet voting, which is *unavoidable without requiring full ranking.* The breakdown simply means that a majority is not found. And that's *easy* to fix, and people all over the planet know how to fix it. It's called a runoff. However, with the Arizona initiative, we have started looking at mandatory two-round systems, with the primary being a special election, and the runoff being the general election. The primary then becomes a feeder to the general election, a nominating device. I assume you understand that a score ballot can be used for Bucklin amalgamation, as you use a score ballot for median amalgamation. So the poor performance would come from variation in utility sum caused by using the median rather than the mean. This is quite well known; i.e, majority rule is not utility-sum optimal. However, this is something that actually transcends utility sum: majority consent. An alleged utility-maximizing result, if
Re: [EM] Electorama wiki requires login to view????
At 12:04 AM 6/12/2013, Rob Lanphier wrote: On Tue, Jun 11, 2013 at 8:19 AM, Jameson Quinn mailto:jameson.qu...@gmail.comjameson.qu...@gmail.com wrote: The electorama wiki is an important resource for communicating about new methods. It allows linking to or searching for canonical definitions of the methods we like to discuss here, and that many of us hope to promote for real-world use. I just noticed that it has been set to not display pages except to logged-in members. That is a serious problem, in my opinion. Hi folks, Mea culpa. It should be available again for all readers. Anonymous editing is off still. Additionally, accounts need to be approved now. I'm planning on opening it up such that pretty much anyone can approve anyone else, so that will lower the barrier a little bit. Thanks for responding. Rob, I have substantial WikiMedia experience, and I could assist. There may also be others. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Median systems, branding, and activism strategy
At 09:55 AM 6/12/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: As voting reform activists, we must work together as much as possible. In general, that means that raising awareness should start with teaching people about approval. Still, if someone is unsatisfied with the expressivity of approval, we should have a backup offering. That is, we should have a plan for future improvement. Really, unless a place already has IRV in place, a more complex ballot is not the first step to take. It's like our decision to promote Approval. An obvious first step, a do-no-harm improvement. More complex ballots mean spending money. The actual reform we suggest should depend on local conditions. They vary. Personally, I think that median systems offer the best backup offering in that sense. That doesn't mean I intend to undercut people promoting Score or Condorcet; just that I think median systems offer a good compromise between expressivity and low rewards to strategy. From my perspective, Score is great for honest voters, but for strategic voters it has exactly the same expressivity problems that approval does. And Condorcet is too complex not just to describe in the abstract, but to present the results of even a single election in a clear, intuitive form. Uh, Score systems can ba amagalamated as median or as average or as sum. The latter fits most closely with democratic traditions, it is just Count all the votes, i.e., Approval, plus the allowance of fractional voting. Median systems are introducing what appears to be, for public choice, an *entirely new* concept. So, the obvious question, why? And, remember, we are talking about first reforms, not the *ideal*. But median systems have a problem. There are too many of them, and even more names. Off the top of my head, I can think of the following names: * Bucklin: A general class of median systems which are implemented via a descending threshold. Also used to describe various specific ranked or hybrid ranked/rated systems used during the progressive era. For instance, some use Bucklin to mean median using full or truncated rankings, using the highest majority as a tiebreaker; others mean the Grand Junction system of median using 3+1 numbered rank/grades with skipping allowed and ties allowed at the third grade only; highest majority tiebreaker. Bucklin is a median system, that's true, but that is not the *concept.* And any poor performance of Bucklin would come, quite likely, from using median amalgamation. (I.e., a Bucklin ballot is really a Score ballot, and a score ballot can be used for Bucklin amalgamation, it is an obvious and simple extension.) * Majority Choice Approval (MCA): I've seen this applied to various 3-rank median systems, but I think the canonical one is: if there is a majority top-rank, then the highest such; otherwise, the candidate with the most non-bottom rankings. * Majority Judgment (MJ): as defined by Balinski and Laraki * Graduated Majority Judgment (GMJ): as defined by me. There are also a number of possible descriptive branding terms for a median / Bucklin system: * Instant Runoff Approval I created that one, because that is exactly what it is, and it simulates a series of descending cutoff Approval elections, hence a way-cool implementation, as a primary and runoff method in a two-round system, thus, if it has N approval grades, it simulates 2*N approval runoffs in the full two-election set. Jurisdictions that want to ensure majority approval can probably reach that, even with many candidates, in a two-round Bucklin system, and I've suggested that if the Range ballot is a little deeper, i.e, includes unapproved ranks, it can also, in the primary, be analysed for a beats-Range top two (or beats-Bucklin top two) winner, using the lower preferences, thus making the *system* Condorcet compliant, if a Condorcet winner must always be in the runoff. If a majority is found, depending on the wishes of the jurisdiction, the runoff may not be necessary. Increasingly, though, I've become aware of systems that *always* go to the general election. So the primary is just a unified primary, as distinct from party primaries. And with a good runoff method, and with write-ins allowed in the runoff, the electorate can still have three choices on the ballot, if certain conditions are met, plus write-ins that don't necessarily vote-split. What, I'd like to know, is not to like about this? * Graded Instant Runoff * Descending Threshold Approval * Majority Threshold * Grade Voting * Majority-Based Grade Assignment Instant runoff Approval fully satisfies expectations. It is what the name implies. It seems to me that Median and Bucklin advocates should come to a consensus on what specific system to promote, and what to call it. That doesn't mean we should cease discussing the different systems in fora like these; just that when promoting systems to
Re: [EM] Electorama wiki requires login to view????
At 10:19 AM 6/11/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: The electorama wiki is an important resource for communicating about new methods. It allows linking to or searching for canonical definitions of the methods we like to discuss here, and that many of us hope to promote for real-world use. I just noticed that it has been set to not display pages except to logged-in members. That is a serious problem, in my opinion. I understand that it's not easy to deal with spam. It is not necessary to deal with spam. The wiki can require a log-in to *edit* pages, and it can require registration approval for log-in. Something has just recently changed. Looks like yesterday. I've been viewing pages there routinely without log-in, but I confirm that a log-in was just required. I see that RobLa was active yesterday, but haven't seen a log of any changes, it might be to the basic configuration file, outside of the MediaWiki software itself, but loaded by it. So he made massive changes with no notice or explanation. But there must be a way to handle this. Do we need more volunteers for the spam-fighting brigade? Should there be a separate, quasi-secret URL (that is, one which is freely announced in a human-readable format, but which is obfuscated from dumb spambots) for editing? Or maybe some other solution I haven't thought of? I don't know; but in my view, making the wiki members-only is a very bad answer. What do you think? It's going to be up to RobLa, basically. I just checked electorama.com domain hosting. It's hidden. That's a tad strange, in itself. I suspect that RobLa owns the domain, and he appears to have been the first user with advanced privileges. RobLa also appears to maintain this mailing list, http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Election-methods_mailing_list The election-methods list is maintained by Rob Lanphier. I give a number of links in this post that you will not be able to check at this time without a log-in. The Rob Lanphier test above is a link to robla.net. http://robla.net/ Jameson Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info It's the death of the wiki, if this continues. The software is MediaWiki. I'm an experienced MediaWiki administrator (from Wikiversity). I did create a MediaWiki installation, but for Wikiversity, I was not handling basic configuration. But I could learn to do it. The last logged actions were on June 10, 2013, by RobLa. That's Rob Lanphier, who is also a MediaWiki developer with high privileges in the MediaWiki foundation family of wikis, he should know what he's doing. His logged actions were the deletion of many user accounts. On or before June 10, he deleted and hid many user names. Yes, this was a response to spam, I'm sure, but hiding all those accounts actually would make it harder to identify and fix spam, unless he did all that himself first. Deleting user accounts does not remove the content they added. I don't see that he deleted page spam, but I can't find it, not easily, because of all those accounts being hidden. His many logged user account changes filled up Recent Changes so it can't be reviewed. Seeing all the work RobLa did, it's clear why he'd want to take some drastic action. However, wikis are *community projects.* I don't recall seeing RobLa, anywhere, asking for help. He's a bit out of touch with the voting systems community, as he acknowledges on his own site, linked above. His contributions don't show reversions of spam in that period. http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Special:Contributions/RobLa They show almost no activity, for a long time. Looking at Bureaucrats, I see Homunq has been active, in addition to RobLa. The full list of Administrators and highly privileged users is at: http://wiki.electorama.com/w/index.php?title=Special%3AListUsersusername=group=sysoplimit=50 Looking over what RobLa did, he appears to have tried to create an account called Disabled account. But then he merged a huge list of registered accounts to Anonymous. Above, I say that he's experienced. I'm now doubting that. I don't know that he has actually participated in *running* a MediaWiki site at the administrative level. He now works for the WikiMedia Foundation. He has high privileges, including Root, but he appears to have chosen a tedious procedure for handling what could have been relatively simple, without making the history obscure. It's a mess. I would wonder if it would be better to start over with a restored databased. That's a question, not a firm assertion. (He's trashed some of the page edit history, as far as any of the spam edits are concerned. I was able to find one edit, under contributions for Anonymous That edit was reverted by another user, referring in the edit summary to the original user name, which, of course, now shows no contributions. And Anonymous, in spite of being the target of massive renaming, only shows a couple of
Re: [EM] Does Top Two Approval fail the Favorite Betrayal Criterion [?]
Thanks to Chris for attempting this. This is a partisan election, apparently, which is an issue in terms of whether or not scenarios are realistic. But I'll set that aside for the moment. At 03:16 PM 6/8/2013, Chris Benham wrote: Yes. Say there are three candidates: Right, Centre-Right and Left, and the approval votes cast are 49: Right 21: Centre-Right (all prefer Right to Left) 23: Left 07: Left, Centre-Right (sincere favourite is Left) It's really irritating that Center is misspelled, and favorite, too. :-) Okay, this is an election where Left is no-hope. The winner is going to come, with a sane method, from Right or Centre-Right. 51% of voters prefer Centre-Right to Right, reasonable compromise. The votes are reasonable, except that 23 Left bullet voters are unreasonable, in fact. I'd assume they know their position. Not too unreasonable, though. After all, Left is in second place as to first preferences. This is a center squeeze election. Approval votes: Right 49, Left 30, Centre-Right 28. The top-2 runoff is between Right and Left and Right wins 70-30. I've generally pointed to the problem of assuming the same electorate for runoffs, but let's, again, leave that aside. This is reasonable. What is somewhat unreasonable about this scenario is the Right bullet voters. It is *very strange* that none of them also approve Centre-Right. All the voters who approved Left prefer Centre-Right to Right. The 7 voters who approved both Left and Centre-Right can change the winner to Centre-Right by dumping Left (their sincere favourite) in the first round. 49: Right 28: Centre-Right 23: Left Now the top-2 runoff is between Right and Centre-Right and Centre-Right wins 51-49. Seven voters have succeeded with a Compromise strategy. Looks correct to me. They can do that. The strategy works, in fact, because Centre-Right is the best winner, though only by a small margin. The strategy is *necessary* because of the 23 Left voters who don't approve of Centre-Right. But there is something else going on here. In a real runoff election, those 23 Left bullet voters are not likely to show up to vote. Motivating them will be difficult. Remember that they didn't vote for Centre-Right in the primary; this represents low preference strength between R and CR. Why will they suddenly have high enough preference strength to show up and vote? In the U.S., that is. If the turnout of those original Left voters is even slightly depressed, Right will win the runoff. Right has high preference strength, that's shown by the lack of additional approvals for Centre-Right. I think the strategy could easily fail. Would *probably* fail. The low Left vote count in the primary would damage the Left party. They might *possibly* get a better result from this election, but the next, they are dead. Left will become increasingly irrelevant. I agree that the example shows FBC violation on the face, and thank Chris for this example. I also see that this example is (1) implausible, ultimately, and (2) would not lead to voter backlash. I.e., the Left voters would vote as they voted, and the Left voters would be kicking themselves for not voting for Center-Right, those that didn't, not for *failing* to betray their favourite. The problem that led to Right winning was not that they voted for their Favourite, but that they failed to vote for second-best, leaving that to the runoff. Just barely, they got their favourite into the runoff, wasting everyone's time, and their own campaign funds. Approval has this problem, we know that. To fix it, Bucklin. Let's take the same apparent voting strengths 49: Right translates to 40: R 9: R,-,CR 21: Centre-Right (all prefer Right to Left) translates to 21: CR,-,R 23: Left translates to 15: L 8: L,-,CR 07: Left, Centre-Right (sincere favourite is Left) translates to 7: L,CR I just guessed at some voting patterns, I did not tweak them to produce a desired result. In real Bucklin elections, we saw *lots* of additional preferences added. I assumed the voters here are sophisticated enough to know that skipping middle rank expresses higher preference strength, that third rank is *minimal approval*. 1st rank: 49: R 21: CR 30: L shows sincere first preferences. That's an advantage in itself. A strategy might win, but has other costs. 2nd rank pulled in 49: R 28: CR 30: L both L and R are failing to get additional preferences. 3rd rank pulled in 70: R 73: CR 30: L Either CR wins or there is a runoff between R and CR, so the L voters do not need to betray their favorite. I used all the preferences mentioned, but I added some level of delayed second-choice for the R voters. That's not necessary. If those voters continued to bullet vote, the result would be the same with a mandatory runoff. What makes the election work with Bucklin is the addition of second preferences for supporters of a no-hope candidate. The only reason the 7 voters
Re: [EM] Quod non erat demonstrandum?
At 12:27 PM 6/7/2013, Michael Ossipoff wrote: [quote] QNED, quod non erat demonstrandum, this is not demonstrated. [/quote] Incorrect. Quod non erat demonstrandum would mean ...which was not (intended) to be demonstrated. If you want to say ...which is not demonstrated, then that would be Quod non est demonstratum. Ah. Makes sense. Thanks, Michael. Now, what does this have to do with the point. My meaning was clear enough, even if my latin grammar sucked. I did look it up. A google search can be misleading So now I find: If you take quod erat demonstrandum as a phrase, and you want to negate the phrase itself, then the non should be outside it. Non (id) quod erat demonstrandum. Personally I'd labour the point to avoid any misunderstanding at all. Hoc non est quod demonstrandum erat. or Hoc est extra postulata huius argumenti. For simplicity, NQED. I can claim this is English, since QED is in English usage, so it means Not QED. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Does Top Two Approval fail the Favorite Betrayal Criterion
At 10:51 AM 6/7/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: I'm sorry, I don't want to get into an interminable back and forth with someone who misuses my name and doesn't apologize, and prefers you didn't prove it! to working anything out for themselves or asking nicely for evidence. Jameson, I responded substantially and in detail to your claim of FBC failure. You are not obligated to respond to anything. You showed nothing, not even a weak evidence, beyond the name turkey-raising, just a claim. And if you are content with that, that's your privilege. For me, and so far, unless someone comes up with a plausible scenario, it stands as demonstrated that a claim of FBC failure for top-two runoff, based on a turkey-raising strategy, is meaningless. Turkey-raising, under Approval/runoff, does not establish FBC failure, because one could still vote for the Favorite without harming the strategy. As we will see more proposed usage of approval and approval methods with runoff voting, it's an important issue. Who misused your name? What are you talking about? What is to apologize for? It's not nice to point out that a point has not been supported? What? (no more original content below.) JamesON 2013/6/7 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com At 06:28 PM 6/6/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2013/6/6 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com Subject was: Re: [EM] Someone thinks that Approval should meet the Mutual Majority Criterion James does not help us out with a description of why it fails. Should I start calling you Joe now? :) You may join any club that will admit you. Ask Michael. Others have said how it fails: through a turkey-raising strategy. Implausible, unlikely, as you may have it; but still clearly possible. Actually, that was not said recently. It's not only implausible, it does not appear to violate FBC. That is why I have asked for specifics. Favorite Betrayal Criterion: Wikipedia: A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_systemhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_systemvoting system satisfies the Favorite Betrayal Criterion (FBC) if there do not exist situations where a voter is only able to obtain a more preferred outcome (i.e. the election of a candidate that he or she prefers to the current winner) by insincerely listing another candidate ahead of his or her sincere favorite.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion#cite_note-1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favorite_betrayal_criterion#cite_note-1[1] Scorevoting.net (article by Ossipoff and Smith): Voters should have no incentive to vote someone else over their favorite. After my usual carping about absolute standards like no incentive -- Space Aliens can provide strong incentives -- I don't see how a turkey-raising strategy with an Approval primary involves betrayal of the Favorite. It does involve betrayal of a lower preference. I.e., primary unconditionally feeds top two to runoff, which is vote-for-one. I.e., this is the Arizona system, without the Approval feature. Voter prefers ABC. Voter fears that if runoff is A vs. B, B could win, so votes for C. This voter is going to wet his or her pants if C leads, but, never mind, maybe in the runoff A will win, because these turkey farmers are not going to vote for C in the runff. But, now suppose this is an Approval primary, i.e, this is in Arizona and it's a municipality that's implemented the system. Never mind that turkey raising is something that turkey farmers in Arizona would never admit to. Out in the Arizona desert, folks get along, and are straightforward and honest with each other. But, just suppose they try this. Okay, how does it show up? They could vote for C, hoping to push B out of the runoff. They actually can't do that, because of write-ins, which are allowed, but, hey, they can dream, they could even dream of Space Aliens telling them to vote this way. In fact, given that this is Arizona, that's fairly plausible. Something about the cloud formations. No, wait, that's New Mexico. But a little detail about FBC. Sure, they could vote for C, but if what they want is for A to win, which is the whole motivation for running this devious plan, why don't they also vote for A? They are pushing for B to be excluded, and, this way, they push with two candidates (or more). from the Smith-Ossipoff page: one can prove FBC-compliance by the following strategy: If betraying favorite F in order to make X win is the plan, and if that plan actually works, then the alternate non-betrayal plan of simply raising X to be co-equal top with F (carried out by the same set of voters who planned to betray F, using the same set of votes they planned on) also works to make X win. Q.E.D. There is no incentive to vote C above A, the favorite. Want to raise the turkey, C, to exclude B? Fine. Also vote for A. No Betrayal. Indeed, this is part of a more sophisticated
Re: [EM] Does Top Two Approval fail the Favorite Betrayal Criterion
At 06:10 PM 6/7/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: Let's just drop this. You're technically wrong but substantially right, and I don't see what's to be gained by convincing you of that that's worth the time I think it would take. As to the name thing, you called me James. No big deal, really. I made the Joe joke, then you didn't realize what I was talking about and implied I was serious. Misunderstanding. Weird. I actually looked through the mail to find where I might have used the wrong name for you and didn't notice that *it was right there.* But I didn't think you were serious, Jameson. After all, you had a smiley face there. I responded, then, deadpan. How did I imply you were serious? As to the issue, no, I want to know, but it doesn't have to be from you. You are claiming I'm technically wrong, and perhaps I am, but I have not see the evidence. Turkey raising didn't cut it. Once again, anyone, see the question in the subject header. If it fails, please show an example. To repeat, let this be the basic definition of top two approval. Approval voting is used for a primary and the top two candidates are placed on the ballot in the general election. Write-in votes are allowed in the runoff. Does the primary fail FBC? (This is the Arizona proposal, recently referred to a special advisory committee on approval voting, it appears, if the House passes the amended version.) Trick bonus question: if the general election is also approval, does the method fail FBC? Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Someone thinks that Approval should meet the Mutual Majority Criterion
At 11:18 AM 6/6/2013, Michael Ossipoff wrote:
Someone recently accused me of contriving the definition of sincere
voting so that Approval would fail MMC (which specifies sincere voting
in its premise).
Michael has a bit of misunderstanding floating in his head about
this. I pointed out that definitions have been manipulated with
certain voting systems criterion, in general, in order to generate
failures. And, of course, they can be manipulated in the other
direction. This was on the Center for Election Science mailing list,
which Michael just unsubscribed from, saying there were no open issues.
So he brings one here? Ah, well, to each his own.
He did clearly misunderstand the issue. First of all, the definition
of sincere vote was not the issue. In Approval Voting, there is a
large set of possible sincere votes. Rather, the issue is about the
question of whether or not a vote that does not express a preference
that is at the foundation of a voting system criterion satisfies the
precondition for applying the test of the criterion.
Michael, here, did not give the relevant definitions. That is
irritatingly typical. There were two definitions examined:
From Wikipedia:
The mutual majority criterion is a criterion used to compare voting
systems. It is also known as the majority criterion for solid
coalitions and the generalized majority criterion. The criterion
states that if there is a subset S of the candidates, such that more
than half of the voters strictly prefer every member of S to every
candidate outside of S, this majority voting sincerely, the winner
must come from S. This is similar to but stricter than the majority
criterion, where the requirement applies only to the case that S
contains a single candidate.
The Schulze method, ranked pairs, instant-runoff voting, Nanson's
method, and Bucklin voting pass this criterion.
The plurality vote, approval voting, range voting, the Borda count,
and minimax fail this criterion.
The point I have made is that strictly prefer must require that the
voter actually vote the preference. Otherwise we have what I call
Space Alien Failure. Under Space Alien Failure, Plurality fails the
Majority criterion, because the voter, being informed by Space Aliens
that their favorite cannot win the election, vote for someone else.
No, the voter must *actually vote the preference* to set up the
condition for the test.
Otherwise we are led to a series of preposterous conclusions.
The term stricly prefer is ambiguous, unless we interpret prefer
as act to prefer. With Approval voting, a voter acts to prefer A to
B by voting for A and not for B. The voter acts to prefer a set by
voting for every member of the set and not for every non-member.
If a voter votes for a nonmember, in addition to voting for members
of the set, the voter is no longer strictly preferring the set, so
the precondition fails to apply.
Notice that this does not, at all, reduce the criterion to mincemeat.
Approval voting passes, but range voting does not. That is, by the
way, not necessarily the fault of range voting, because Range voting
fails in a situation where the failure may improve the outcome, in
ways where *every voter might agree.*
One way to answer his objection is to ask him to compare Approval with
methods that meet MMC, and ask himself if he notices a difference.
That's not an answer, it's a socratic question, and it requires me to
study matters where I have little interest.
I see no sign that Michael has understood the objection.
The methods that I recommend for the Green scenario, IRV, but
especiallly Woodall or maybe Benham, also are free of chicken dilemma,
and so maybe comparing Approval with them would be unfair--because
we're only trying to show the benefit of MMC.
So then, let's compare Approval with a method that has chicken
dilemma, but passes MMC. Let's compare Approval with Beatpath:
The A voters and the B voters all prefer both A and B to C. The A
voters and the B voters are, together, a majority of the voters.
They are a mutual majority, and {A,B} is their MM-preferred set.
Let's assume that there is no chicken dilemma. The A voters and the B
votes are co-operative and amicable. None of them are inclinded to
defect against eachother. The A voters and the B voters have no
chicken dilemm need to not rank eachother's candidate.
So, voting sincerely, the voting looks like this:
AB
BA
C
Because the A voters and the B voters add up to a majority, C is defeated.
The A voters and the B voters succeeded in getting a winner from their
majority-preferred set by merely ranking sincerely.
If the A voters are more numerous than the B voters, then A will win
instead of B. The A voters can gain that, while still fully supporting
B againist C.
Can they do that in Approval?
It's entirely a different question. Approval does not allow ranking
beyond two ranks. The method that is analogous could be Bucklin,
which is instant
Re: [EM] Someone thinks that Approval should meet the Mutual Majority Criterion
Another issue that was left a bit hanging in discussions on the CES list: Does top-two Approval fail the Favorite Betrayal Criterion? There are really two forms of top-two Approval to be considered, plus a third detail. 1. Top two approval where two candidates advance to the general election. 2. Top two approval where a candidate with a majority can win, otherwise two candidates advance. 3. If write-in votes are allowed in the runoff, the primary is actually a nomination device, not the actual election. The actual election being Approval, the combination must satisfy FBC if Approval does, and it does. (If write-in votes are allowed, in this concept, the runoff must also be Approval.) Arizona had a method up for legislative passage that would have allowed municipalities to use a two-stage voting system with an Approval primary, top-two advancing to the general election with ballot placement, and, apparently, write-ins allowed in the general election (as well as in the primary). The primary has no majority test, it is top-two plurality, but voters may vote for as many candidates as they choose. The runoff is standard vote-for-one. So, first of all, does this method fail FBC? If so, is the scenario plausible for real voters? These are nonpartisan elections. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Approval MMC, contd.
At 02:50 PM 6/6/2013, Michael Ossipoff wrote: Mr. Lomax says: [quote] Michael has a bit of misunderstanding floating in his head about this. [/quote] When someone is as vague as Mr. Lomax, no one can be blamed for not knowing what he meant. Ossipoff confuses dicta with substance. What is this blame thing, anyway? What does blame have to do with whether or not Ossipoff understood something, or didn't? [quote] I pointed out that definitions have been manipulated with certain voting systems criterion, in general, in order to generate failures. And, of course, they can be manipulated in the other direction. This was on the Center for Election Science mailing list, which Michael just unsubscribed from, saying there were no open issues. So he brings one here? Ah, well, to each his own. [/quote] Yeah i decided to answer Mr. Lomax's confusion about Approval MMC, though of course I didn't expect to thereby help his confusion. While simultaneously proclaiming (on the CES list) that there were no issues remaining involving him. Ossipoff has earned the FOS award, many times over. Ah, well, has nothing to do with voting systems, but Ossipoff is probably the world's foremost proponent, standing, of using voting systems criteria, as arbitrarily defined by him, to issue definitive judgments on voting systems, so his probity and clarity do become issues. [quote] He did clearly misunderstand the issue. [/quote] Forgive me if I misunderstood what Mr. Lomax meant :-) Forgiven. Cause unspecified. [quote] First of all, the definition of sincere vote was not the issue. [/quote] Sure it was. Mr. Lomax said that I contrived to define sincere voting so as to make Approval fail MMC. No. I did not say that. Denied. Notice that Ossipoff does not quote me. And I made the issue clear, I submit, in the post to which Ossipoff is here replying, so his concern is what was said before, he's defending his error, even though it's really moot who said what when. Now, looking for a statement like that can be tedious. However, I did search and found this: Here's what you're missing. MMC's premise says that a majoriity of the voters prefer the set S candidates to all the other, and vote sincerelly. In Approval, though you prefer all the Set S candidates to all the other candidates, you can vote a sincere ballot that doesn't vote all of the set S candidates over all the other candidates. Michael just redefined the Mutual Majority Criterion. Essentially, he defined votes sincerely in a way that causes the method to fail the Criterion. His definition of MMC differs from that of Woodall's Majority. Watch the ball under the shells: I explained my meaning in detail. It's possible to interpret the raw statement the way that Ossipoff is apparently doing, but the issue was not over the definition of sincere vote, but what *kind* of sincere vote is cast. Michael crafted the definition *as used with the MMC,* to allow an unexpressed but necessary preference, even though the voting system allows the expression of the preference. If a preference is not expressed, the system cannot use it. Therefore it must fail. Space Alien Failure. We preferred A and B over C, but we voted for A and B and C, all sincere votes, but that darn system allowed C to win even though we preferred A or B. Big surprise. The original definition of Majority, Woodall, referred only to preference listings, and it is *obvious* that the preference must be voted, when we translate the criteria to voting systems, or no system could use it. http://www.votingmatters.org.uk/ISSUE3/P5.HTM Majority. If more than half the voters put the same set of candidates (not necessarily in the same order) at the top of their preference listings, then at least one of those candidates should be elected. Approval allows a preference listing, setwise, a primitive one. Range allows deeper preference listing, also setwise. Approval passes Majority, Range does not. What is a preference listing? It is a *list*, not some mental preference. The voter votes sincerely. *What does the voter vote?* We are concerned with a preference for a set, so, I claim, the simplest meaning is that the voter votes the set. That is the obvious meaning of prefer. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/prefer 1 : to promote or advance to a rank or position 2 : to like better or best prefers sports to reading prefers to watch TV At first glance, it seems like I am insisting on the first definition, and, indeed, I'm suggesting that, since no system can use an unexpressed preference. By adding the vote for C, the voter *unexpressed* the preference for BC, choosing to do that. The expressed preference is no longer exclusive. However, the second meaning, if we look closely, also requires an *action* to be clear. How do we know what someone prefers? If they always do something else, how can we say that they prefer it. Such a saying would be
[EM] Does Top Two Approval fail the Favorite Betrayal Criterion
Subject was: Re: [EM] Someone thinks that Approval should meet the Mutual Majority Criterion At 01:56 PM 6/6/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2013/6/6 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com Another issue that was left a bit hanging in discussions on the CES list: Does top-two Approval fail the Favorite Betrayal Criterion? There are really two forms of top-two Approval to be considered, plus a third detail. 1. Top two approval where two candidates advance to the general election. This fails FBC. I am sympathetic to Abd's arguments about how the electorate will change based on preference strength, and how well-informed voters will tend to find a way to avoid FBC failure, but that doesn't mean that it passes the criterion, merely that the failure is minor. James does not help us out with a description of why it fails. Further, failure is minor is an issue when using voting systems criteria to study voting systems. That's the problem with using the criteria as absolutes. I did not give examples because I'm not asserting failure. Someone who is asserting it, I'd prefer that they at least show an example. It would be generous to cover the underlying utilities motivating the behavior, but I'll do that if the writer doesn't. (Or will infer them and might show that they do not significantly motivate the behavior, as a rough and nonspecific analysis is telling me.) 2. Top two approval where a candidate with a majority can win, otherwise two candidates advance. Still fails, although it's slightly better. From what point of view? *How* is it better? *How much* better? 3. If write-in votes are allowed in the runoff, the primary is actually a nomination device, not the actual election. The actual election being Approval, the combination must satisfy FBC if Approval does, and it does. This is true... but only if there's a hard threshold for making it to the second round. That is, all candidates with over 1/3 approval advance, or some such; and if there are fewer than 2 such candidates, the highest approval wins in the first round. No. Threshold has nothing to do with it. If the primary is only a nomination device, it is like petition requirements or partisan primaries. Understand that this is like the Arizona proposal, but with Approval in the final election. If the final election is Approval, Approval satisfies FBC, because the voters may still vote for their Favorite in the general election. There is no cost to that, and by the rule that a method satisfies FBC if there is a simple way for the voter to actually vote for their Favorite and not betray the Favorite by voting for someone else *over* the Favorite, and gain as good an expected result, then FBC is satisfied. (If write-in votes are allowed, in this concept, the runoff must also be Approval.) Arizona had a method up for legislative passage that would have allowed municipalities to use a two-stage voting system with an Approval primary, top-two advancing to the general election with ballot placement, and, apparently, write-ins allowed in the general election (as well as in the primary). The primary has no majority test, it is top-two plurality, but voters may vote for as many candidates as they choose. The runoff is standard vote-for-one. So, first of all, does this method fail FBC? If so, is the scenario plausible for real voters? These are nonpartisan elections. I'm not seeing any actual analysis here, just authoritarian statements. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Summary of psych/market-research studies of rating scales
At 12:24 AM 6/4/2013, Richard Fobes wrote: While reading the information about score ballots, I wondered what the range-voting advocate's response is to the belief that a big preference gap in one ballot will have more influence than a smaller preference gap in another ballot. So, Richard wants to know what one believer will say about the belief of another believer? What's the belief here? A big preference gap on one ballot will have more influence than a small preference gap on *any* ballot. That's not a belief, that's Score voting! Range Voting is Approval Voting with fractional votes allowed, it's seriously that simple. Thus the ultimate characteristic is that a larger fractional vote has more influence than a smaller fractional vote, and, in the extreme, that a full vote has more influence than no vote. This applies to all candidate pairs. For example, suppose one voter votes: A = 1 B = 2 C = 10 and another voter votes: A = 1 B = 5 C = 10 and, combined with the other ballots, the winner is C. Now, suppose the first voter changes hisher ballot to: A = 1 B = 5 C = 10 and now B wins. I don't like ranges that don't have a zero. Is that first vote one-tenth vote *for* A -- in which case it *might* cause a tie for A -- or is it *no* vote for A? I'm going to assume that the first vote is actually a zero, not 1. It makes the matter clearer. And I apologize for writing Range instead of Score. The name of Score voting was a political decision that not only attempted to obsolete many usages in notable publications, it also shaded into the whole set of misconceptions behind grading systems, which take us away from a clear understanding of voting as a process of *choice*, not of absolute rating. Above, the voter changed their vote for B from 2/10 vote to 5/10 vote. They increased their vote for B. And this, indeed, could cause B to win. This implies that the big gap between B and C in the first ballot has more influence than the smaller gap between B and C in the second ballot. I.e., a larger fractional vote has more influence than a smaller fractional vote, just as a full vote has more influence than no vote (or 0/10 vote). How do range voting advocates resolve this apparent unfairness? What unfairness? *That* is a belief, or, perhaps more accurately, an occurring. What is unfair about it? I'm asking out of curiosity. (Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought him back.) 2/10 killed B, but 5/10 brought him back. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Re2: Fobes wrt IRV w. relatively few competitive candidates.
At 01:44 PM 5/29/2013, David L Wetzell wrote: I believe the diff IRV makes makes it worth it. Given the current habits of the US, I don't see advanced-systems havinge sufficient additional value-added to justify switching from the extensive marketing campaign already in place for IRV. If things evolve, it will be easier to switch from IRV, in part because of widespread habituation to IRV and how it'll make it harder for those who benefit from the status quo to divide and conquer advocates of reform. This has been, of course, the FairVote argument for a long time. FairVote, however, did not merely market IRV. They also deprecated other systems, such that the President of FairVote Arizona, putting on her Arizona League of Women Voters President hat, lobbied against the recent Approval initiative based on old FairVote arguments that actually did not apply to the circumstances where Approval has been proposed, old and discredited arguments, which she did not understand, promoted by FairVote. That's the problem with a divisive marketing campaign! And it can backfire. IRV was known as a seriously defective single-winner voting system, since it was proposed as the Ware system. It's a make the world safe for major parties system. It breaks down badly when a third party starts to attain parity, or passes parity, as in Burlington. The FairVote campaign oversold IRV, and there is a backlash, implementations are being rescinded. Previously, IRV was dumped for (unfair) political reasons, as in Ann Arbor, MI. Much rescinding of late has not been unfair like that. It's been based on substantial method failure. Because FairVote focused only on IRV for single-winner elections, it was not prepared for this. It recommended IRV blindly, regardless of context. In Burlingon, it's obvious, instead of going back to a plurality-satisfied (40% ) runoff voting, a hybrid could have been proposed: Bucklin, using the same 3-rank ballot, can handle a three-party situation with ease, tending to find a majority, and if no majority were found, it's then possible to design an optimal runoff. FairVote should be *ready* with alternatives, and ready to recommend them, not just to slink away. In Arizona, it's quite possible that IRV could be ruled unconstitutional, because of the most legal votes standard of the Arizona constitution. IRV discards and does not consider some legal votes. Some it counts, some it does not, treating ballots differently. It's a problem. Because court decisions with regard to voting systems do not always consider all the issues, I can't predict how the Arizona Supreme Court would rule. If my argument here is legally supported, what, then, should FairVote Arizona recommend, short of amending the constitution? Is Arizona hopeless? Hint: Bucklin counts all the votes, and uses them. (There could be an issue with unused ranks, but my sense is that this would pass muster, because all ballots are treated equally, and all ranks are either counted or not.) Bucklin is American preferential voting. Yet FairVote used invented arguments to discredit Bucklin, not election science. FairVote supported the decision in Brown v. Smallwood, when that decision would just as easily have dumped IRV, the arguments would be quite similar. The decision was idiosyncratic, not supported anywhere else, and not supported by the current Minnesota court. The point is that FairVote distorted the information available to the public, pursuing a narrow campaign for a particular method. The case can be made that FairVote has done significant damage to election reform in the U.S., by attacking runoff voting, widely recognized as more democratic than raw plurality. Instead of *improving* runoff voting, IRV gutted it as an expensive nuisance. Replacing it with an expensive single-ballot system missing most of the advantages of actual runoff voting. I'm hoping that FairVote will begin to cooperate with the Center for Election Science. We have certain common goals, most notably proportional representation. The question of optimal voting system is often dependent on the specific circumstances of a jurisdiction, and that, as well, can be studied. Yes, political practicality is a crucial issue for an advocacy group, but if what is advocated is *actually harmful*, what then? We need clear-thinking activists *and* we need election science. How about it, David? Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] A simple thought experiment.
At 02:52 PM 5/29/2013, David L Wetzell wrote: Also, the bottom line is that when you're advocating for a change in which single-winner election rule alternative ought to be used, it's not right to dump the burden of proof on IRV advocates. The amount of time spent marketing IRV already is a sunk cost and so the burden of proof for switching ought to lie on the challengers not the defenders of the status quo progressive electoral alternative to fptp. Sunk cost for you, David. The rest of us are singularly unimpressed. We didn't ask you to spend that time and money. Voting systems scientists have been advising strongly against the method you adopted since the 19th century. The voting system community, including *many* former IRV supporters and even FairVote activists, settled on a first voting system reform propoosal, not as the ideal voting system, but as a do-no-harm improvement, Count All the Votes. I.e,. Approval Voting. It will not fix all problems. But it costs almost nothing. It has an obvious problem, but that problem only arises because, with it, voters who support a minor party will be able to express a vote for their favorite party, and all analysts agree that they will do this, it is strategically sound. Approval always allows voting for your favorite. However, once voters can do this, they will *also* want to be able to express a preference for their favorite, which they cannot do in Approval where they choose to support, say, their minor party favorite and to cast a vote in the major election. This is the problem that IRV solves. However, the problem was solved long ago, with a voting system that does not have IRV's serious malfunctions: Bucklin. It's ranked approval voting. It actually uses a truncated Range ballot, this has often been missed by analysts. A voter who has a strong preference can skip ranks to express it, causing the second preference vote to show up in a later round of canvassing. I call that Limited Later-no-Harm protection. Voters will use this -- or bullet vote -- depending on preference strength, which is precisely how the system performs well in utility evaluations. Bucklin was oversold, as was IRV recently, as a way to guarantee majorities. No voting system can do that except by restricting the freedom of the voter, in which case the majority is coerced or artificial. However, in contested public elections, Bucklin *did* find majorities even with many candidates on the ballot. Later, in party primary elections, with many candidates and bullet voting rates approaching 90%, it didn't find majorities. In that context, runoff voting makes *much more sense,* because what voters need is *information.* It's not about Later-no-Harm failure, an old speculation that FairVote enshrined as being The Reason why Bucklin didn't find majorities. And, given that, what would really have made sense would have been a Bucklin primary, with intelligent choice of runoff candidates if needed. And maybe a Bucklin runoff; with an advanced voting system, finding a optimal winner with three candidates should be possible. Bucklin is *vastly* easier to canvass than IRV, it is just sums of votes. So, David, sunk cost is also water under the bridge. What you have left is an organization with some established reputation. How you use that will determine if all the cost is truly sunk, or there is something that can be salvaged and used to build a brighter future. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why LTPs/Am forms of PR matter for more local democracy...
At 03:09 PM 5/30/2013, David L Wetzell wrote: * LR Hare has one vote per voter and one candidate per party and one or two vice-candidates on the party-list who win the extra seats if a party's candidate wins multiple seats. But the top candidate would have to beat the third place candidate by more than one-third of the vote to win two seats and (s)he'd have to beat the 2nd place candidate by more than two-thirds of the vote to win all three seats. So if the vote %s were 40:30:20:10 then there'd be 3 winners. If they were 50:35:10:5 then the top candidate would win two seats and her/his vice-candidate would hold the second seat. If they were 80:10:5:5 then the top candidate would win all three seats and get to choose two vice-candidates (or have her/his list specified before the election) but that outcome is not likely outside of Russia or other DINO areas. Party-list PR is interesting, and STV is a very fair system for handling it. I'm not going to get into best system yet. If we are looking at a practical possibility in the U.S., we will need to answer that question. There is no sunk cost, so to speak. Asset Voting was originally a tweak on STV. Most voters only know their favorite. I find it interesting that David assumes that an asset-like condition is possible, either by free choice of the candidate, or by a predetermined list. In the long run, I find the former to be the deepest reform because it can take us *beyond* the party system to something that can shade into direct/representative democracy, a profound transformation. Possible in NGOs, immediately. Now, the quota. It's clear that the Hare quota creates proportionally fair winners, generally the first two. What about that third seat? The Droop quota gives more voting power to the winners of the first two seats, effectively. It treats all seats equally. The Hare quota gives minority representation better. In a two-party system, the Hare quota is more likely to elect a minority party candidate. It does not go too far in this. That candidate *will* be elected with fewer assigned voters, by definition. In the Asset systems I've proposed, I've used the Hare quota, and *tolerate* the possible unfilled seat. I'd allow the unrepresented votes to be cast *directly* on Assembly issues. These are public voters, those votes could be cast over the internet without the security issues we associate with internet voting. (All votes would be public.) So the function of a *seat*, then, is representation in deliberation: in introducing motions, and in debating on the floor, this can be distinguished from amalgamation, actual choice. However short of that, Hare will accomplish this goal better than Droop: a goal that the number of citizens who are represented in the Assembly be maximized. Hare will produce a *slight* bias toward minority representation over Droop. That's not going to give away the assembly to a minority party, just give them a voice. Obviously, using larger districts will enhance this. But what about the desire of local representation? That can happen spontaneously. Under full Asset, people will very likely tend, most of them, to vote for someone local, and because full Asset does not waste votes, it's totally safe to vote without any restriction as to electability. I know that I'd prefer a representative in an Assembly who lives relatively far from me, but who represents me more accurately, to one who is close but with whom I cannot communicate well. After all, there is the telephone and email and, even, snailmail. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #8441] true expressivities of voting methods
At 11:53 AM 5/27/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: Interesting, that you can usually calculate the median using 1.5 bits per grade. That would seem to indicate that a 3-level Bucklin system such as MCA uses approximately all the info on the ballot. As to Bucklin, historically, it usually did. I recall looking at some elections where the second and/or third ranks were not amalgamated. (Rank information, within the approved ranks, was used with each rank, but the ranks then are subsumed or collapsed. The information from first rank is used to determine if there is a first rank winner, and then, if not, the second rank votes are elevated to be equal to first rank, etc. So each rank is considered, in turn, before the lower ranks are addressed and used.) Following the principal of Count All the Votes, I'd strongly recommend that in a Bucklin election, all the ranks would be counted and reported, even if they are not used to determine the winner. As my readers may have noticed, I also recommend using a Range ballot (which can be a Bucklin ballot with an additional unapproved rank) with pairwise analysis, which would, then, also be reported. There is value to that information for purposes other than determining a winner, and it's a courtesy to voters to count the votes they have cast. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] help w. planning/working on a monte-carlo simulation?
At 02:13 PM 5/17/2013, David L Wetzell wrote: Thank you Abd, I agree consensus is feasible when there are few people and they are committed to working together. Right. We learned how to accomplish this with modest-sized groups in the 20th century. Scaling this up has been thought impossible. It's not. Indeed, it is *necessary*. I'm focusing on US elections and more so more local elections that tend to be chronically non-competitive. Great. It's the place to start. The goal that I see as realizable is that voting systems, and, more importantly, the *political process* can be designed to increase connectivity and trust between the people and government. When I started this, I felt like a voice crying in the wilderness. I don't feel that way any more. Lots of people are getting it. Structures are being built. I agree we all use short-cuts in voting and that that shd be considered in thiinking about what sort of election rules we should use. The interesting possibility, to me, is that the *simplest* system, vote-for-one, can be used in Asset as a ballot, and handling votes for more than one can easily be done without harm. Voting strategy is so simple it's hard for people to understand? What do you mean, vote for the single candidate you most trust? How would I know who this would be out of what might be thousands of candidates? People get it backwards. Identify the person in your community you most trust, talk to them and ask them to register as a candidate, and vote for them! And if you don't know anyone, well, that's the source of your sense of isolation and disempowerment right there! Meet some people! Or find someone else like yourself, do what it takes, and cooperate. (People think that the you most trust is about comparing all the candidates and finding the one who most matches your opinions. A difficult task indeed! Trust is not about matching opinions, though it may correlate with them in some ways. And if we don't know what trust is, again, *there is what stops us!*) For simulations, I could generate utilities like Warren Smith did, or I could sample from historical data. For complete work, do both. Either way, my goal wd be to refute the notion that a Droop quota is needed for 3-seat elections, when the purpose of the droop quota is served by another means, like the use of an at-large seat. That's a goal that will distort your results. Do some real science here. It starts with exploration. Find some historical data, I suggest. Become familiar with how the methods work in actual practice. Then design simulations, see if you can predict the behavior of real elections with them. The advantage of simulations is that you can observe how absolute utility profiles create results, and then you can, for the simulations, measure Bayesian regret. Real performance as to a measure of overall social satisfaction, known because the profiles were *defined.* That's what you cannot do with real elections, or at least not generally. There might be some ways to do it. If you believe that the Droop quota is not needed, try to prove you are wrong, by designing tests. If you try to prove that your theory is true, you can always make up evidence to prove it. What's likely is that the Droop quota has functions and the Hare quota has functions. I always suggest the Hare quota for Asset elections because it's thoroughly fair, all seats fully and without compromise represent a quota of voters. However, the Droop quota does the same thing, *if one may elect an extra seat*. That seat might have some difference in funciton; it represents what I call dregs. Left over votes from elected seats, isolated electors who haven't found a compromise. Attempting to complete the election immediately is what leads to wasted votes and wasted votes means people who aren't represented. Essentially, the quota can be arbitrary, it simply will produce a different number of seats if all votes are used. Is there harm in this? *How much harm*? If you look at what seems like unfairness, I suggest it will be found in the rules that attampt to reqiure completion in a fixed time. What if the results of elected seats are announced, and not all seats have been elected, and over the next weeks and months, electors get it together to create more seats? If enough seats have been elected initially, the Assembly can begin to function, and it could simply decide to consider the threshhold for substantive motions to pass to be the majority of electoral votes. It could even allow electors to vote directly, while still restricting the right to introduce motions and debate on the floor to elected seats. There are creative ways to address the problem that could transform the entire way we look at politics. Asset elections complete through *cooperation,* not competition. Every seat is *unanimously elected by a quota.* For N seats, that's the Hare quota. Single-winner
Re: [EM] [CES #8174] Criteria satisfied (and not) by score voting
At 09:11 PM 5/11/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: What's with renaming later-no-harm as secret preferences? If you want to make the argument that the name should be changed in general, this one obscure web page seems to be a funny place to do so. Sometimes it's worth just using the same words other people do. Warren did add to the page that Secret Preferences was also known as Later No Harm. I can readily understand why he did use a different name. The name is horrible. It implies harm is done by voting sincerely. Later-No-Harm implies that revealing a secret preference harms someone. Whom? The more-preferred candidate is alleged harmed by someone else being elected. LNH-compliant methods *force* voters to keep lower preferences secret, the method does not uncover them unless the preferred candidate is eliminated. Note that this elimiination cuts both ways. The secret preferences of other voters cannot save the candidate from losing the election. The implication is strong: compromise must only be allowed if the first preference is *impossible*. Therefore Later-No-Harm compliant methods are inimical to compromise, and negotiating an optimal compromise is the principal mission of voting system. Along this line of thought, Approval fails LNH, because a voter who votes a second preference as well as a first can cause the first preference to tie, or, if a tie exists between the first and second preferences, it can cause the second preference to win. However, this is only visible if we know a secret preference. The ballots won't show this. Now, if the voter voted for A and B, which one did the voter harm? It is true for either one that the other vote can cause the other to win. In Approval, the situation is exactly balanced. Both votes helped both candidates toward a win against all others. Essentially, the voter has, if bullet voting, helped only one, and if voting for two, has helped two *equally*. Only in the case that both candidates are frontrunners is this problematic. LNH failure, then, is only of interest to voters who might consider approving both frontrunners. Where voters have a significant preference, they will only approve one frontrunner, and not the other. They have a *choice* of whether or not to approve both. We must assume that if they do approve both, they have a weak preference between them. The two votes then effectively expresses that weakness. Approval is the first step into a world of methods that rank (or rate) categories of candidates rather than candidates. It's up to the voter what categories to place candidates in, and Arrow recently explained in an interview that his famous Theorem did not apply to methods like this. Yet it is as simple as Counting All the Votes. Essentially, LNH is a Criterion that can sound good on first contact. It actively prevents a voting system from negotiating a fair compromise, hence the Spoiler effect in Plurality and Center Squeeze in IRV. It's simple to fix, but inevitably the fix causes LNH failure. In highly polarized situations, voters will bullet vote and cause Approval to default to Plurality. We can fix this either by using IRV, with conditional lower ranked votes (i.e., all ranks allow voting for more than one), but that method hasn't been well studied, to my knowledge. It should work at least as well as IRV, though. (With this, the voter chooses whether to vote approval style or IRV style). And more complex methods can be designed. IRV probably maximizes additional votes, but then proceeds to ignore many of them. Bucklin appears, from history, to encourage substantial additional approvals, in contested elections, possibly almost as many as does IRV, because Bucklin offers conditional LNH protection. For unless candidate is eliminated substitute candidate does not win with higher ranked amalgamations. Another approach to a fix can be done by using runoff voting, while not reverting to Plurality in the first round. If the first round is Bucklin, we can expect this system to somewhat depress the number of lower ranked votes, because voters can defer that additional approval decision even further than possibly by assigning a lower Bucklin rank. (All Bucklin votes are approvals, merely conditional ones.) If the runoff is also Bucklin, a voter could take an extended stand for the favorite, waiting down through five simulated runoffs (if it's three-rank Bucklin), before finally adding additional approvals. There is a cost to this: the voter may then need to add additional approvals, and may fail to get a more-preferred candidate into a runoff. For a truly advanced system, I've suggested using a Range ballot in a runoff system. The Range method must also indicate approval cutoff, and that could be as simple as setting a certain rating as the minimum approved rating. And Approved has a very specific meaning. It doesn't meant that the voter has some absolute Approval
Re: [EM] help w. planning/working on a monte-carlo simulation?
At 10:28 AM 5/17/2013, David L Wetzell wrote: The Droop quota is often presumed for proportional representation over the Hare quota that is more proportional, due to how the Hare quota can result in a minority being in power. (I guess the majority get in power only a majority of the time with a Hare Quota. ) It's unlikely to result in a minority being in power. A minority may get a disproportional number of seats, based on what is done when no more candidates get the quota. That is only one possible solution; it's based on the assumption that *all seats must be filled.* Indeed, since all seats meeting the Hare quota is pretty unlikely, setting the quota to aim for N+1 seats and then *not awarding that last seat unless the quota is met*, is a kind of solution. Asset demolishes the problem. One would indeed set the number of seats one high and tolerate it being met, because if it is met, *every voter is represented, no exceptions.* There is another solution as well. We actually held an Asset election, for the Election Science Foundation Steering Committee, and it seemed possible that only two candidates would get the Hare quota. The election was defined unilaterally by one of the candidates as electing the top three after transfers. The transfers made it Asset. I'd never have set the top three criterion. I was first in votes; this candidate was second, and Warren Smith was third, and there were two others with votes. I had enough votes to be elected by the Hare quota, with some votes left over. Nobody else had the Droop quota without transfers. I had enough votes to push Warren over the Hare quota, as I recall, certainly it was over the Droop. So since we had no clear rules, and the declaration of the candidate as to the method, was unilateral, and Warren and I now represented a supermajority of voters, I felt free to handle this the way I generally desire: push for maximized consensus. So I essentially declared Warren elected and, if we had been unable to agree on the third seat, we still had two members of the committee and could have made any necessary decision on behalf of the full electorate by mutual consensus. As it happened, the candidate in second place decided to finish the process by awarding his votes to another candidate. That left one candidate who was holding two votes. I asked him if he approved the election. He did. So we elected three seats with *unanimity*. All candidates had the Hare quota. As policitical scientists about this, they will tell you it's impossible. Sure, it was not really difficult because we only had 17 voters. But how does one elect a 3-person committee with 17 voters, and *quickly* manage that it's unanimous? If the 2nd candidate had held out, we could have then done whatever necessary to move on. Personally, I'd have invited him to participate fully, but without a deciding vote, unless an agreement had been made transferring those votes to him. That wasn't impossible. I wasn't actually *opposed*, I merely wanted to see what would happen if I held back. With a more formal method, the same thing could easily have happened. Basically, the elector left with the two votes had an obvious way to cast them. If they were not cast, all those who voted for that elector would not be represented. That's a high social pressure to find the best compromise. What disturbs some people is that *this process cannot be predicted,* at least not with high confidence. I'd not have predicted the 2nd candidate would do what he did. It was a surprise. It upset one of the voters, in fact, who thought that somehow this person had been deceptive. Why did he run if he wasn't willing to serve? But he *was* willing to serve, he simply made a compromise, for his own reasons. However, electors in Asset elections need not have any intention to actually serve, and they could even announce that in advance. They serve in the process of the election, that is the promise that they make, not to actually move to some location and spend their life dealing with endless minutia, the real service of real polticians. So: an option isto just leave that last seat vacant if there is no compromise found. And a way to handle that in the Assembly is to treat this vacant seat as part of the basis for a majority. Or just neglect it. However, Asset creates a body of *pubic voters* -- we did all the negotiations on a public mailing list; we *could* have negotiated privately and then announced our decisions as to vote transfers, but we didn't -- and it's possible, because these are real people with established identities (I'd require that for electors to be eligible), internet voting becomes possible with high security. It's secret ballot internet voting that's a problem. They electors have the elected seats to participate in deliberation, and to vote for them *by default,* but if the electors vote directly, the votes that went to them from
Re: [EM] Approval Voting
As with many such scenarios I've seen, it assumes an electorate that is firmly attached to one or the other major party, and then, in this case, it assumes a third candidate who has supporters similarly attached. Any idea how preposterous this is in an established two-party system? Then, Kristofer again assumes rigid partisan voting, while the election method (Approval) sets up the possibility of different voting styles, and if free entry of candidates to this election -- implied by the setup -- is allowed, again, there is rigid voting. But the majority of voters in the U.S., anyway, quite simply, don't vote that way, and a third party isn't going to arise unless it vote-splits with an existing major party. And those who would be split with plurality would easily vote for both the new candidate and the existing one. Emotional weight is added to the argument by calling the new candidate(s) Hated. But in the circumstances described, it would be *easier* -- slightly -- to ascribe that to the D and the R. So what is set up is a situation where there are three rigid factions, and they hate each other. But we then give this a spin by *claiming* that the D and the R don't hate each other as much as they hate H. Yeah, but in a situation like this, obviously, Approval isn't expressive enough. Approval is a Range method, but with the minimum expressive range. Bucklin, Instant Runoff Approval, could handle this pretty well. And if the Ds and Rs hold out, each trying to win, yes, H could win with a plurality method, *and as described, Approval is a plurality method.* That is, it elects with a plurality. I hope that Kristofer is aware that the U.S. President is never elected with a plurality of electoral votes, this only could happen in a direct election by plurality. IRV would handle this situation, because of it's LNH satisfaction, but there are much better ways without the IRV pathologies. (Which don't bite in this situation, this is one where IRV works.) To keep the original intention of the U.S. Presidential system, I'd suggest Asset, vote for one -- or FAAV, which is Asset with any overvotes fractionated to keep it one total vote per voter, since all the votes will remain active. Then a majority of electoral votes can be required, as with the original intention. The electoral college without districts, and defined by candidate votes directly, instead of indirectly. If a runoff method is to be used -- which many countries do -- then I'd use Bucklin for both elections (or a range hybrid). With Bucklin in the runoff, it can be top 3. Any election with leading candidates so equally balanced is only resolved based on that data, at substantial risk of making a poor decision. A more sophisticated ballot than Approval is needed, unless the election is a series of approval runoffs, with only one eliminated at a time. We aren't going to do that. At 04:42 PM 5/6/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 05/06/2013 11:21 PM, Jonathan Denn wrote: In these likely scenarios, and assuming there is no electoral college, doesn't a runoff of the top two seem the best method until someone gets a majority? It would solve that problem, but the problem can be reintroduced if each party gets greedy. Say each party thinks like this: We can get our partisan voters to vote for only our own candidates. If we'd win an ordinary Approval with a single candidate, then by fielding n candidates, we can win a top-n runoff. So they each field two clones, and you get a result like: H1: 34% H2: 34% D1: 33% D2: 33% R1: 33% R2: 33% now H1 and H2 go to the runoff. For Approval, it'd be better to pick the challenger as the candidate who's approved by most people who didn't approve of the winner. Then H1 and a non-H candidate go to the runoff, and the non-H candidate wins. There may be more sophisticated methods that solve that problem as well. My pick the candidate who's approved by most who didn't approve of the winner was just something I thought of as I wrote this, and it may (for all I know) have strange strategy incentives. 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] Current SODA not monotonic; fixable. (mono-voter-raise)
At 01:09 PM 4/19/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: Consider the following scenario in SODA: 1: A(CBD) 2: B,X 2: C(BAD) 1: D(ACB) 1: null Presume all ties are predictably broken for the alphabetically-first candidate (without this presumption, you'd need larger numbers, but you could still make a similar scenario). Under SODA with rational delegation assignment, C has a choice. If C does not approve B, they are giving A and D a choice between approving A and C so C wins, or only A so A wins; since both A and D will choose the latter, this is tantamount to electing A. If C does approve B, then B will win regardless of what A and D do. C prefers B, so B wins. Notice that SODA is, generally, an Asset Method, but, first of all, heavily restricted. It loses the most appealing and probably the most useful aspect of Asset, the creation of a *deliberative* body that can resolve an election. Instead, because of the rules, the votes of canididates are *predictable*, within the restrictions, and thus C is able to, in the scenario given, know how the others will vote, and to use that information for personal advantage. The vote that is allegedly non-monotonic is an odd one, and I've made this point about Asset many times: why would one vote for a candidate, who presumably will represent the voter in hundreds or thousands of decisions, if elected, but not trust that candidate to delegate? Which is what real representatives and executives do, a great deal of the time. Not having the skill and understanding to delegate rationally is a major shortcoming in any person heavily participating in executive or governmental decisions. Making poor choice in delegation has led to the downfall of many. But if the last null voter adds an undelegated approval for B, then if C approves nobody and D and A approve only A, the result shifts from A to B. Since C knows that A and D will prefer to give the win to C, now C can safely not approve B, and win. Essentially, the lone voter makes the world safe for C. B has apparently also not indicated delegations. Perhaps that's why the null voter didn't allow delegation. The *system* defanged B. C essentially betrays B (though we have no clue as to the depth of that betrayal, and since B did not declare delegations, we also don't know how B would have voted in the further process.) I've generally written that without knowing underlying utilities, we cannot understand the impact of a criterion failure. However, we can guess that the preference strength of the null voter for B over the others is weak. I don't know if the rules would have allowed B to vote the null voter's ballot if the vote had been delegable, given a lack of prestated delegations. SODA is *not* simple, as the name claims. Asset is simple, and we suggested, years, ago, FAAV, fractional approval asset voting, which would *allow* voters to vote for more than one, with the vote being divided if needed for completion. Most voters would presumaby vote for one only. So the ballot is a pure approval ballot, and there is *only one question* the voters need to address: whom do you trust most to represent you in the ensuing process? And such a vote is clearly monotonic, in itself. That is, it always increases the voting power of the candidate(s) voted for. However, in real life, in real decisions, it can occur in the process that an increase in power of a faction shifts the process in a way that ultimately is against the interest of that faction. That's a *basic problem*, not a voting system problem. It's rare, but simply not impossible. The most common situation would be overreach. I.e., a faction might have a position that will prevail, but if, believing that they have the power, they disregard and reject whatever compromises might be needed to complete implementation, they might eventually lose out. We see that excess power has defeated many movements, i.e., *too much success*. So then they act arrogantly, and create a counterrevolution or strengthen it. So an extra approval for B caused B to lose. So what happened? To review it: 1: A(CBD) 2: B,X 2: C(BAD) 1: D(ACB) 1: null Realize that the process described doesn't happen in the ballots. The voter voting for B gives B additional power in the process, just not enough to prevail without the cooperation of another. 1 vote short, in fact. I'd claim that the *voting* system was monotonic, but the additional vote shifted strategic considerations on the part of C. And SODA sets up pure, full-information strategic voting, and that is a major flaw. Without that extra B vote, the results are, without delegation, A: 1 B: 2 C: 2 D: 1 There are six voters (unless the null voter does count by having cast some ballot, perhaps with a write-in). Majority is 4. C can complete the election for B. Does C do so? Maybe. The assumption here is that C would, but that is an assumption based on no other votes being present.
Re: [EM] a comment
At 12:20 PM 4/20/2013, David L Wetzell wrote: If you're going to pit two election rules against each other by using them both and then have voters decide between the cases when they differ then you're going to have sample selection problems. The comment seemed to assume public elections. Voting systems can be tried in NGOs, and that's where the future lies, my opinion. It's very unlikely that we will see major voting reforms take place in governmental election systems without them having seen usage in NGOs. Having said that, history isn't necessarily friendly to my idea. Bucklin voting was all the rage in the period 1910-1920 and a little later. Yet I never heard of it being used outside of public elections. It worked in public elections, no pathologies were asserted at the time other than that it allowed a runner-up in the first preference votes to win the election. That was considered horrifying to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which, effectively, interpreted the state constitution as *demanding* plurality. Very strange (FairVote later argued differently, but I'm quite sure they would have disallowed IRV just the same.) The only problem was that in nonpartisan elections -- party primaries, much later -- it frequently failed to find a majority at all. That wasn't Bucklin's fault; IRV would have failed even more. The real fix to that problem would have been a runoff, and what was *actually done* was to dump Bucklin and to use top-two, vote-for-one in the primary, with a runoff when no majority was found. If they had simply used a hybrid system, say a Bucklin primary, with a runoff when needed, history might be different. But Bucklin had been sold the same as IRV more recently: find a majority without expensive runoffs Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] secret ballots and proxy voting
At 12:49 PM 4/8/2013, Bayle Shanks wrote: Typically when large numbers of people are voting you'd like to have secret ballots so that the Mafia can't buy votes or intimidate people and also so that people feel free to make unpopular choices. However, when the people voting are representing others, you often want to publish who voted for what so that the constituents can use the past voting records of their representatives to decide whether to vote for them in future elections. In a proxy voting system, where voters can allow other voters to vote for them 'by proxy', and particularly in a transitive proxy voting system, where the proxies can be re-proxied (e.g. Alice can give a proxy to Bob who can give both Alice's proxy and his own to Caroline), you want to satisfy both these objectives. You want everyone's vote to be secret, because you don't want the Mafia to intimidate them or buy their votes, and you want unpopular outcomes to be feasible. This is why I've suggested delegable proxy in two contexts: one is Free Associations, which don't move power, as such. They are advisory in nature, and there are some fairly easy ways to handle attempted corruption. In Free Associations, generally, I recommend that the proxy assignments and discussions be (1) generally open (2) locally private by choice of participants. However, in Asset Voting, we have created public voters. These are people who have chosen to participate *openly* in public discussions. At a large scale, there are definitely risks, but the small-scale electors move very little power, individually. Very dangerous for the Mafia to try to coerce them. The actual governmental power would be with the *seats*, and I'd expect the usual attempts at corruption. Same problem as today, really, except that the seats will be very closely connected with those electors who elected them, and the *communication* between seats and electors may be private. For the accountability of electors, their *effective actions* -- i.e., their votes -- must be public. But you also want everyone's votes to be public, because you don't want to give your proxy to someone who says they'll do one thing with your proxy and then actually does another, without you ever knowing. That's correct. But not everone's votes. The votes of *electors* who voluntarily registered to serve as electors, as public voters. One fear is that the Mafia will say, 'You'd better give me your proxy or you'll be punished'. I think you can probably fix that by not giving proxy holders very precise information on how many proxies they hold, when they were given, or who gave them. In Asset Voting, it's a secret ballot election. And the Mafia is not going to worry about one or two votes from voters. Even if each person casts their own vote secretly, but can see which way their own proxied vote was vast, the Mafia just has to secretly ally with a small number of proxy givers in order to see which way the proxied votes are being cast (note that even if the system let the vote caster know whose proxies they hold, they don't know which proxy-ers are allied with the mafia). You can make up complicated scenarios that bear no resemblance to what would actually happen, and scare yourself with them. The Mafia is just another interest group. Attempting to apply large-scale coercion tends to piss people off. They don't want that. No, classic corruption goes after a power node, a focus of substantial power. So ... does the Mafia in New York threaten City Council members? I'm sure it's happened. In Asset, I generally assume that the election of seats will be accomplished by a direct assignment of votes by electors. That isn't delegated. However, a delegable proxy structure might be used to *suggest* such votes to electors, to allow coordination and efficiency. That's up to the electors, it would not be a formal part of the system. One idea is just to say, if you accept proxies your votes are public, otherwise they are secret. You are trying to mix power structures (governmental) with the initial place where delegable proxy will be used, advisory associations. This essentially reduces the transitive proxy system to ordinary voting however because it provides no way to have proxy holders who can cast proxied votes in a way that the Mafia can't control. Strictly speaking, as we understand advisory association process, voters simply vote for themselves, and support structures provide information estimating how wide a consensus the results indicate, through indirect participation through the proxy. In that sense, the proxy is *not* a classic proxy, it is simply a designation indicating some level of trust. In Asset Voting, in the electoral college (and later, if direct voting is allowed on Assembly issues, which becomes possible), the elector is not casting their *own* vote, they already assigned that in the general election, to themselves or to someone
Re: [EM] Cloneproofing Random Pair and Random Candidate?
At 12:12 PM 4/4/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 04/04/2013 08:02 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 02:24 AM 4/3/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: However, there is a rated method that is also strategy-proof. It is called Hay voting. Some time ago, I stumbled across http://www.panix.com/~tehom/essays/hay-extended.html , which seems to be a proposal to make Hay voting cloneproof. I haven't really understood the details yet, but I'm wondering if this could be used to also make the two Random methods cloneproof. Hay voting, as described, is a multiple-round system, it appears. Now, why would this complex system be superior to standard Robert Rules elections, i.e., vote for one, repeated ballot if no majority, no eliminations with only voluntary withdrawals -- or shifts in voter preferences -- , in an Assembly able to change rules, effectively, by agreement? Not as I understood the description. Ordinary (not Extended) Hay voting consists of voters submitting the rated ballots, and the Hay method probabilistically picks a candidate. The method is designed so that the optimal thing to do is for each voter to report ratings proportional to their real utilities. The multiple rounds of Extended Hay (again, if I understood it right) don't actually happen. They're like the multiple rounds of IRV: the algorithm goes through multiple stages, between which the effective ratings change according to the logic of the algorithm itself, but each voter only has to submit a single ballot. Thus, I don't think your comments about organizational unity and deliberation apply to this method. And yes, repeated ballot may be more effective than single ballot, but that's not what extended Hay is about. Okay -- the pages were not explicit about this. Is there a simple description of Hay Voting? However, the obvious complexity could be a fatal flaw in itself. The impact of strategic voting on Range has been vastly overstated, if the Range resolution is adequate. Such voting has a limited impact, because Range never encourages preference reversal. Some have claimed that optimal range voting will suppress preferences; my own opinion is that this will happen to a much lesser degree than some expect. The gain from bumping up a candidate a single rating to make it equal, in Range of sufficient resolution, when one actually has a preference, is small, and the satisfaction of actually expressing true preference is high. We overthink how much people want to win elections. (To be sure, we need systems where everyone wins. With Asset, there is no incentive at all to vote for anyone other than your settled favorite. I'd allow multiple votes, with them being fractionated, because Asset wastes no votes, but only to avoid tossing ballots from overvoting, or to help out a voter who really has trouble distinguishing between two or more favorites. Asset has no losers, only winners, as chosen, and in direct/representative Asset, where electors may have an Assembly vote -- but not deliberative rights directly -- that's absolute. And voters will know this and see this. Their vote counts.) Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Cloneproofing Random Pair and Random Candidate?
At 01:54 PM 4/4/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: Hay voting seems to have been invented to encourage the expression of sincere utilities, as distinct from von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities, and there is a whole practically knee-jerk assumption in voting system theory that strategy is bad. You've made that assertion, that people are looking for low-strategy methods only out of an inherent aversion to strategy, before; and I disagree. There are several problems people could have with strategy, and different people (theorists) focus on different ones: 1. Some say it's inherently bad because it's dishonest. (I don't care). Right. However, before Brams proposed Approval, strategic voting meant reversing preferences, and Brams proclaimed Approval as strategy-free. So a *different meaning* was invented so that Approval voting could be asserted to be vulnerable to strategic voting. The argument went like this. Supposedly a voter *really* approves of both A and B, but wants A to win, so the voter strategically bullet votes for A, the dishonest, greedy thing that he is. The argument assumes that there is such a thing as absolute approval. In fact, approval, the ordinary process in life, depends on context. What I would approve of in one context I would be disappointed with in another. It depends on my expectations. And expectations are strategic considerations, i.e., what I think I can get. I'll vote to maximize my expected return, and this is what we actually want voters to do in Approval. But there are also other considerations. If the voter bullet votes, the voter fails to participate in the other elections. Approval can be a difficult decision. Bucklin makes it somewhat easier, but there is still the ultimate approval (i.e., in the lowest approved rank). Runoff Bucklin can make it even easier, there will be a little more tendency to bullet vote, unless voters want to avoid the burden of a runoff. And they can make the choice of whether or not to vote in a runoff later. Depends on how much they care! 2. Widespread strategy can have a disastrous impact on utility/BR. (Think Borda, where this phenomenon is pretty well-documented, at least anecdotally.) Uh, strategic voting in Borda involves preference reversal. That's a different animal. A system that rewards preference *reversal* is a poor system. (Borda becomes an excellent system if equal ranking is allowed, and empty ranks. Essentially, it's Range.) No, the kind of strategy I'm talking about is adjusting *preference strength expression,* that's all. In the extreme, down to zero. *Not* preference reversal as in Borda. 2a. If different factions have different inclination or capacity for strategy (for instance, due a take-no-prisoners attitude or better access to polls) it could lead to unfairness. This would impact legitimacy as well as utility/BR, and the mere whiff of this could be enough to cause a system to be repealed. Uh, intelligence and knowledge are rewarded? Quick! Who are these people so we can stone them! No, this is basic. If a voter has clear knowledge of how others will vote with any system, they can cast a maximally effective vote. The easiest way to understand this is to consider that the knowledge is so complete that it is as if they are the last voter, and they know the results so far. So their vote is either useless (and they might not even bother) or their vote can change the results the way they want. If a system is repealed because knowledgeable voters can vote more effectively, and because this is true for every system worth considering, to some degree, this could always be alleged (providing a whiff of suspicion) and thus the best system could be shot down. Certainly Range Voting provides greater expected utility for a more effective vote, in terms of how preference strength is expressed. *However*, any unfairness to voters with lesser knowledge is simply a matter of them being politically naive. And are we attempting to even out the power between those who know the situation and those who do not? If voters don't know the situation, they probably have little clear knowledge of the *candidates*. A modest disempowerment of these people is not a bad thing. They can remedy it, easily. And if they don't care enough to do that, *Bayesian regret would suggest that some loss of effective power for their vote will improve results.* By the way, this position is not elitist. That could be me who doesn't understand the situation. Some people take a great interest in politics, others are much more passive. Neither of these is wrong or bad. Turnout already exerts a major push in the direction I'm talking about. However, a situation where *reversal* of a vote produces a significantly improved result for the voter so reversing it, represents a system failure. It shouldn't happen, and good systems don't encourage this. Basically, a naive voter can vote, in Range, just
Re: [EM] Cloneproofing Random Pair and Random Candidate?
At 06:25 PM 4/4/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: 2013/4/4 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mailto:a...@lomaxdesign.coma...@lomaxdesign.com At 01:54 PM 4/4/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: Hay voting seems to have been invented to encourage the expression of sincere utilities, as distinct from von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities, and there is a whole practically knee-jerk assumption in voting system theory that strategy is bad. You've made that assertion, that people are looking for low-strategy methods only out of an inherent aversion to strategy, before; and I disagree. There are several problems people could have with strategy, and different people (theorists) focus on different ones: 1. Some say it's inherently bad because it's dishonest. (I don't care). Right. However, before Brams proposed Approval, strategic voting meant reversing preferences, and Brams proclaimed Approval as strategy-free. So a *different meaning* was invented so that Approval voting could be asserted to be vulnerable to strategic voting. That's not quite true. Gibbard's proof said honest voting can be any single ballot you want to define it to be; I don't care. Strategic voting is any ballot which differs from that. So for approval, you can (and people have) defined honest voting to be bullet, anti-bullet, average utility cutoff, approve-half, intrinsic arbitrary cutoff, and others. Any of those definitions are kosher, but Gibbard's theorem says that none of them can be always strategically correct. That is a different issue. Without going through a formal proof, consider any election by any method, that does allow me choice and influence. I know -- say I'm psychic -- how everyone else has voted. But before this, I defined my honest vote. And I see that two other candidates than my favorite are tied. The method requires a different vote than my honest vote in order to influence the outcome. I don't see how a single honest vote could also be strategically maximal. However, often lost in discussions of strategy is cost and benefit. In real life, we don't know the other votes so accurately. We make decisions based on averages and expectations, and a dishonest vote generally has a potential cost, and a semi-honest vote also a cost, compared to what might be called full disclosure. I don't know what Gibbard actually wrote, I'm depending on the above description. Basically, if a single ballot can shift the outcome, then that the requirement that the ballot consider, for example, possibly irrelevant alternatives -- such as all possible write-in votes -- in order to be honest -- seems impossible to meet with a deterministic system. I see the effort to eliminate strategy from voting -- when it covers semi-honest votes -- which are essentially choices to approve or equal-rate sets rather than individual candidates -- as attempting to eliminate social consciousness from voting. The argument went like this. Supposedly a voter *really* approves of both A and B, but wants A to win, so the voter strategically bullet votes for A, the dishonest, greedy thing that he is. The argument assumes that there is such a thing as absolute approval. In fact, approval, the ordinary process in life, depends on context. What I would approve of in one context I would be disappointed with in another. It depends on my expectations. And expectations are strategic considerations, i.e., what I think I can get. I'll vote to maximize my expected return, and this is what we actually want voters to do in Approval. But there are also other considerations. If the voter bullet votes, the voter fails to participate in the other elections. Approval can be a difficult decision. Bucklin makes it somewhat easier, but there is still the ultimate approval (i.e., in the lowest approved rank). Runoff Bucklin can make it even easier, there will be a little more tendency to bullet vote, unless voters want to avoid the burden of a runoff. And they can make the choice of whether or not to vote in a runoff later. Depends on how much they care! 2. Widespread strategy can have a disastrous impact on utility/BR. (Think Borda, where this phenomenon is pretty well-documented, at least anecdotally.) Uh, strategic voting in Borda involves preference reversal. That's a different animal. A system that rewards preference *reversal* is a poor system. Forget the Borda example. The point is, even semi-honest approval strategy can bring a social utility penalty, as Warren's original BR calculations showed. This is why a Bucklin system like GMJ could in practice have better BR/social utility than Score. Please acknowledge the point. Is that a disastrous impact? Yes, *inaccurate estimation of probabilities* by voters can cause some loss. But not, with Approval, generally, a disastrous loss. I.e, you prefer A to B, but because you think A can't win, you also approve B. And then B wins by one vote over A! You avoided the maximum
Re: [EM] Historic opportunity in Arizona for Approval Voting
At 11:52 PM 3/17/2013, Andy Jennings wrote: Abd, Thanks for your support. Municipalities in Arizona have great flexibility in choosing their own voting systems. I wouldn't say that municipalities have great flexibility in choosing their own voting systems. That's why we need this bill. Okay. Home rule municipalities may have some flexibility. And how much, I don't know. What I know is some. Tucson demonstrated that. In particular, Arizona statute says if there is one winner then the ballot verbiage must say Vote for no more than 1. The way I see it, they were just trying to standardize ballot language for the state and (since all they knew was plurality) they inadvertently restricted us to either single-shot plurality or plurality with a plurality primary. Since the constitution mandates a primary, that leaves us with either segregated primaries or jungle primaries. Combine this with partisan/no-partisan ballots, i.e, party designation, then the two sane choices are segregated primaries (by party), or unified nonpartisan primaries. In any case, then, using Approval in the primaries is a major step foward. Approval in party primaries, though, could use Approval. Could a city, as well, hold, in addition to party primaries, hold an open primary for all candidates who choose not to affiliate with the party primaries? The problem I'm seeing is that HB2518 appears to mandate two candidates to go to the general election. That doesn't work with party primaries. A partisan primary should choose one candidate. The Bill calls the second election a Runoff, as one alternate name. But it explicitly excludes any consideration of majority. Now, from an election methods perspective, with an Approval election, this is actually spectacular. The design of the system, with the primary being held early, i.e., not held with the general election, and with, then, the final election being held as a general election, with generally higher turnout, addresses some objections to Approval Voting, i.e,. multiple approval majorities and therefore failure of some definitions of the majority criterion. (The courts have ruled that cities, if they want, can implement a rule that avoids the runoff if someone gets a majority in the jungle primary.) What I'd recommend is that cities begin with the process in the Bill, and study results. It is possible to extrapolate margins in the runoff from those in the primary, and this is especially true with nonpartisan elections. However, the cost of adding and canvassing an additional runoff election in the general election is relatively small. It's really just another question on the ballot. The big issue is turnout. However, turnout can cut both ways. It rewards motivation, which is probably a good thing. Classically, advanced voting systems cause candidate numbers to increase. That appears to have happened in San Francisco. It's particularly true with nonpartisan elections, if people can run at low cost. As to the problem of what the election law says -- I haven't read the entire code, just large chunks of it -- there is a *very* advanced system that vote-for-one works fine with, Asset. But we are focusing on Approval, one small step, Count All the Votes. And the next refinement would be to allow ranking on the ballot, which allows, then, a series of advanced canvassing techniques. By the way, if a city has an accumulated record, with the Approval two-ballot system, there is one majority condition which really could be with total safety used to determine the result from the primary: where the absolute approval number for the winner exceeds half of the high-normal turnout for the general election. That would kill the participation problem. My guess is that better than this could be done. But there is great value in that second election, there is media focus on two candidates, instead of what could be many. That's a reason why Robert's Rules of Order objects to IRV (and all deterministic preferential voting systems). That's the only statute I know of in AZ law that prohibits approval voting. Though there may be others. HB2518 expressly allows approval voting, thus overriding any other inadvertent prohibitions. And says so. 5. The passage of this bill in the Arizona House is the best news I've seen *ever* as to U.S. voting systems. Thanks. Maybe I'm just downplaying the accomplishment here, but the way I understand it there are already hundreds (thousands) of home rule cities around the US that could enact approval voting with an ordinance. We're just trying to catch AZ up to where these home rule cities already are. Right. But it's much more than that, as you go on to state. But it is movement, hopefully it would be momentum to go to cities and say, The legislature just allowed this. You can try it. Right. Note that IRV is also prohibited by that language. The language was overspecified in
Re: [EM] Parliamentary compromising strategy
At 01:03 AM 3/18/2013, Michael Allan wrote: I still want to salvage Kristofer's liquid democracy approach to the problem. My last post didn't properly describe the executive primary, however, and it seems to be crucial. I'm totally pleased to see that Michael Allen has grasped the concept of using Liquid Democracy for an advisory function. That's exactly what I see and predict. I will add that how to analyze delegable proxy polls is *up to the one who wants to be advised.* That's why I want the nuts and bolts of the canvassing process to be completely visible (excepting only a possible Asset Voting front-end, that establishes raw proxy representative power.) Thus an advised person may use very sophisticated analysis, that includes such things as length of participation, whether or not a proxy is representing known persons, only only anonymous ones, and other measures that an advisee may freely choose. It is possible, as an example, for advisees to consider cash donations, or, say, labor and political activity, ascribed to proxies. Whether that's a good idea or not depends on many details. The *advisory system* does not need to and should abstain from drawing organizational conclusions from polls, except as needed only for its own process. I.e., is there an official web site? Who are trustees? Or are there multiple sites which ordinarily cooperate and identify as being organizational sites. Are there restrictions on such identification, etc. Free Associations avoid property, but still do support property-holding organizations that are directly responsible to those they serve. They avoid centralization of power, except over very narrow issues (like the usage of the organizational name in any controversy.) If Asset is used, while ordinary members may comment and participate in certain discussions, as allowed, the only *voting* power is from those who have received votes in the Asset election, which would be repeated periodically, say once a year. That would be a secret ballot election. Anyone consenting to be an elector, then, is voluntarily taking on the responsibilities -- and risks -- of public action. It *is* possible to imagine control systems that use Asset techniques, and it *is* possible for electors to designate proxies, but this either must be public, or have high security over what is not public. What I recommend is to first implement advisory systems, because they are fail-safe. Thanks again to Michael Allen for all his work, I've been watching for years. I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. Is it parliamentary, in that the primary decides upon the composition of the legislature, and the legislature decides upon the composition of the executive? Or is it presidential, where there are two separate primaries, both decided by the voters through a liquid method? I describe both parliamentary and presidential systems in this new document: http://zelea.com/w/Stuff:Votorola/p/power_structuring Looking at the parliamentary system, there are two continuous, open primaries. One nominates the legislature (still as described in my last post) and the other nominates the executive. If the technical parties that run the primaries (parties like Pirates and Partido de Internet, which we can also call open parties) do well enough in the election, then the head of state invites the winning primary executive to form the government. Why? Because the open parties take for their titular leader the current leader of the executive primary. So although there is no executive election (no constitutional change, just a primary), neither does the new parliament decide the executive, as it did before, at least not where the open parties are concerned. They instead defer the decision to the executive primary. So your next question still needs to be answered. It seems to me that you're saying it is presidential (separate executive elections), but the assembly has to give confidence to the government. What, then, happens if the assembly doesn't? Is there another executive election? Or does the assembly just watch the candidate executive until the voters rearrange their voters to produce an executive they approve of, and then they pick that executive? If parliament brings down the government on a motion of confidence, then probably parliament is dismissed for an election. That much is the same as now. The difference is that parliament no longer decides the government. But it can still bring the government down, and this raises (again) a question of stability. Suppose the bone of contention (budget or whatever) is itself open to a continuous primary. If a budget that's unpopular in the budget primary is pushed by the government, which therefore begins to suffer in the *executive* primary, then the assembly has a clear licence to bring down the government. Otherwise it does not and might itself be punished in the resulting election. I'm thinking this
Re: [EM] [MG] Helping the Pirate Party to vanish
At 03:58 AM 3/18/2013, Paul Nollen wrote: Liquid democracy is tested for many years in every big (and small) corporation. It is unthinkable that shareholders have the obligation to give their voice for more than one General assembly to anyone. Every shareholder can vote for himself or appoint a representative at his choice only for that dedicated General Assembly. This system of liquid democracy is proven over many years all around the world. It is only in politics that voters are forced to give a mandate for many years for decissions unknown. Close, but not quite. Liquid Democracy is Delegable Proxy. What has been tested is direct proxy. I have often proposed that shareholders could build a delegable proxy structure that advises shareholders about how to designate their proxies, but that structure would not run a majority vote to designate a single representative to exercise all the proxies, though certainly shareholders could then choose to name that proxy. However, the *corporation* is not going to acknowledge delegable proxy, it is only going to respect actual signed proxy designations by the shareholders. That is, to apply this to Demoex, the corporation of the Town is going to allow representation on the Council when members of Demoex *actually* vote for the party. But this is not the delegable proxy concept, there is no delegation, so it is not Liquid Democracy, in fact, on the public recognition side. Back to that shareholder FA/DP organization. Through its own structure, it would develop recommendations to shareholders, and these would be accepted by the proxies or not. Any proxy could recommend something different than the majority vote. The more actual proxies designated, the more must attend the Annual Meeting of the corporation. There is a natural balance, and cooperation to share representation is thus encouraged (as well as natural competition, i.e, the continued availability of free choice). What I'd expect is that most shareholders would *actually be represented*, but some not, because they failed to designate a proxy who actually will attend, and they did not attend themselves. Proxies in corporations are generally allowed to vote as they see fit, based on participation in the Annual Meeting. They are assignments of a power of attorney, and for a client to designate a proxy upon an agreement to vote only in a certain way is foolish. No, trust the proxy, or don't name him or her! Demoex is, in my view, both a success and a failure. And we need to see what worked and what did not work. Paul, it looks like you are defending Demoex, using arguments designed for people who are completely unsophisticated about delegable proxy. I've been working on the concepts for over thirty years, and I've been in good communication with Michael Nordfors, who may have been responsible for the initial usage of delegable proxy by Demoex. But Demoex focused on a more traditional party structure, and the principle of election by majority and choice by a majority (which is the norm, business-as-usual, for many political parties). Single-winner, in practice. Demoex, then, particularly because it runs against them, is perceived by other parties as a competitor, not a partner. If Demoex supporters *really* want to promote liquid democracy and wide public participation, they must abandon this attitude, it will keep Demoex small and ineffective. Demoex did not distinguish between its own structure and that of a political party, a player in the political scene. The classic Free Association way to handle the problem is to create separate organizations -- or to utilize existing ones. So, given Demoex, conceived as a structure that purely facilitates public discussion on issues, with polling, using delegable proxy to create results expandable intelligently beyond the views of the actual immediate participants, using a proxy structure and other member information, but that does not itself *make a decision* where controvery remains, then a *separate political party* could be created if the existing parties did not serve the purpose. In the environment of the Swedish town, creating a new party is relatively simple, which is why Demoex was successful in gaining representation on the Town Council. They only needed to get something short of 2% of the vote. In most places, that level of success would represent failure, it would be moot. (But if the party polls significantly in the public election, a party representative would have some level of clout in negotiating with other politicians. To be effective at this, though, the representative must have the ability to believably promise election support. Hence, to be powerful, the Demoex party would need to give up running its own competing candidate. It could effectively endorse more than one candidate, so what would be promised, in negotiations, would be not to *oppose* the candidate. But it
Re: [EM] Helping the Pirate Party to vanish
At 04:41 AM 3/18/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 03/18/2013 03:49 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 05:29 PM 3/17/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: Given that there has been zero experience with the use of liquid democracy for the exercise of power, yes, I am asserting something on which there is zero experience. There's zero experience either way. I'm not proposing liquid democracy for the actual exercise of power, precisely because it's untested. Alright, I think there's been some confusion here. Let's clear it up. Great idea. Since I was talking about this in the connection of the primary mentioned by Allan in the parliamentary compromising thread, I was thinking of liquid democracy in the sense of a continuous election for the purpose of exercise of power. And, in fact, you and Michael Allen may also have been talking past each other. Or at least one past the other, and does it matter which one? No, let's just get it clear. Allan was referring to what he calls a primary. This is *not*, I expect, the kind of primary we see in two-round runoff, where options in the second round are limited and maybe a decision is made in the primary. He uses the term primary to refer to a discussion and process that, among other things, measures the degree of consensus among participants on some issue. It does not, itself, decide the issue. Someone or something else does that. In all the more-complete structures I've proposed, a more traditional structure is hybridized with a delegable proxy structure, such that the latter is *purely advisory.* While advice can be powerful, if it is trusted, the decision of what to trust is left to those who are going to *act* (or not act), whether the action is voting in an election, making some decision using executive power, or voting in an assembly on some issue, whatever. In a free association of shareholders, the delegable proxy process would advise shareholders individually, and they choose the degree to which they want to trust their own proxy in the DP process. The process does not officially assign their corporate proxy (unless a corporation decides to automatically do it, which is a kind of decision I'd not yet recommend, until we know much more about how delegable proxy *actually works*. The inconvenience of actually needing to personally and individually assign a share proxy is small, compared to the security of not tossing everything into the care of an untested system. This is a concept which reserves power for individuals. That's why it is relatively secure, by design. Yes, if there is some *binding character* to delegable proxy discussions and polls, that's dangerous. There is then an attractive target for corruption. While a highly trusted proxy might be targeted, that's just normal talk to power. I.e., through the proxy, talk to the entire natural caucus. It's the caucus itself that has the power, not the proxy who defines the caucus. The problems of trust in the proxy are the problems that we routinely face in life. Do we trust our physician, knowing that the physician might be tempted to advise according to standards of care If you're arguing that my objections do not hold when liquid democracy is used in an advisory setting, then we're talking past each other; and then I should repeat that I agree with your suggestions of what to do. Let's use liquid democracy to produce advice. Let's see what happens, and gain experience. Perfect. If, on the other hand, you're arguing that even though there has been no experience in the use of liquid democracy for the exercise of power, my objections to it are inapplicable for logical reasons, then I can explain and elaborate on my reply. No, there are reasons to object. We could argue about how *strong* they are, but that's actually speculative no matter which way we slant. The objections may be valid in one context and not in another. There may be some problem that none of us can anticipate. FA/DP is *actually revolutionary,* but I noticed something about prior revolutions, where they were developed first in thought and abstranct analysis. When applied as if the thinking and analysis were truth, the results were sometimes totally horrific. I'm thinking of the communist revolutions in particular. It is not necessarily that the analysis and abstractions were wrong, but that they were incomplete and did not understand all the details of how human societies function -- and fail. Instead of being implemented with caution, they were implemented with force and such certainty that it was considered legitimate to kill for them. That was hubris, and the results were disastrous, and we still have not completely recovered from the damage. That does not mean that, what, laissez-faire capitalism is perfect. It isn't. But some aspects of it work, and have worked for a long time. In order to replace what we have without great harm, we need
Re: [EM] [MG] Helping the Pirate Party to vanish
At 05:00 AM 3/18/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 03/18/2013 09:58 AM, Paul Nollen wrote: Liquid democracy is tested for many years in every big (and small) corporation. It is unthinkable that shareholders have the obligation to give their voice for more than one General assembly to anyone. Every shareholder can vote for himself or appoint a representative at his choice only for that dedicated General Assembly. This system of liquid democracy is proven over many years all around the world. It is only in politics that voters are forced to give a mandate for many years for decissions unknown. The way I understand liquid democracy (and correct me if I'm wrong), people can give their votes to proxies, and these proxies can in turn give their votes to other proxies; whereas in corporations, the proxying happens only once. That is, either you vote or you say X will vote for me. (I imagine that if indirect proxying had been possible in corporations, we'd heard more about cycles. But again, I could be wrong. I've never been to a general assembly.) It is theoretically possible. A corporate proxy is essentially a power of attorney. The power of attorney can allow the attorney to delegate tasks, and, in fact, this is often assumed. But the corporation may have specific rules about what it will recognize. One of the FA/DP principles is to not expect others to change, but to reach out and create structure, among those willing to participate. It's not necessary to get the corporation to recognize delegable proxy, just as there should be no need to get the City Council to recognise Demoex. There is an action that is a real exercise of power, and it remains with the shareholders themselves -- democratic process, as one-person, one-vote, being equivalent to a share corporation in which each original elector has one share. Also, for corporations in general, there are arguments that the real power resides as much with the board as the assembly. It's all subject to the assembly, legally. It must be. However, boards may possibly attempt to hinder this in some way, and shareholders, individually, have the option of moving their funds away. This is given as an explanation for the weird incentive structures that often appear, with enormous bonuses given to executives even when the companies struggle or fail. The recent Swiss Minder referendum can be seen in that light. Basically, the shareholders are typically not organized except through the corporate structure. It's the same with democratic societies, where the common people are not organized except through the defective power structures of majoritation organizational structure. Those structures work, to a degree. But they also fail, and FA/DP is a suggestion for how to create coherent public (i.e., member, citizen, shareholder) supervision, so that the *actual sovereigns* -- the citizens collectively, or similarly the shareholders or employees or whatever is the foundation of the FA -- can use their individual power wisely and effectively. Are those bonuses wise? Probably not, but how is it that the Board favors the executives over the shareholders? We can look at the pathology, how it works, but it's probably easier to fix it. Shareholders have a critical interest in preventing abuse of power by the Board and executives. (The Board hires the executives, and it offers golden parachutes to encourage what are considered competent, powerful executives to work for the corporation. I am not prepared to judge that this is *wrong.* It's really up to, with a corporation, the shareholders, but corporations really represent or serve larger communities, they serve the interests not only of the owners (the shareholders), but also the employees (the executives and the general employees), the customers, and the whole society in which the corporation operates. A sane governing structure considers the concerns of *all* these stakeholders. Hybrid corporations may, for example, involve the employees in ownership. They may also attempt to make organizational decisions collectively. I'm suspicious, but if it works, fine. It's the right of the *owners* to decide, legally, plus there is legal responsibility, generally on the corporate officers, to prevent harm to society, including employees. More normally, employee-owned companies simply consider employees as shareholders, as vested, and then the shareholders -- which may also include regular *investors* -- manage the company through an elected board which then hires executives. Such a structure may be associated with independent organizations; I recommend an FA/DP organization to which *anyone* can belong, but within it natural caucuses will form that may individually represent verious classes of stakeholders. Everyone needs advice from other players. The point is that the legal structure can be *very* traditional, very well tested and understood -- and
Re: [EM] [MG] Helping the Pirate Party to vanish
At 05:31 AM 3/18/2013, Paul Nollen wrote: -Original Message- From: Kristofer Munsterhjelm Sent: Monday, March 18, 2013 11:00 AM To: Paul Nollen Cc: Metagovernment Project ; Meinungsfindungstool ; Votorola ; Comunicación ; Election Methods ; AG Liquid Democracy Subject: Re: [MG] [EM] Helping the Pirate Party to vanish On 03/18/2013 09:58 AM, Paul Nollen wrote: Liquid democracy is tested for many years in every big (and small) corporation. It is unthinkable that shareholders have the obligation to give their voice for more than one General assembly to anyone. Every shareholder can vote for himself or appoint a representative at his choice only for that dedicated General Assembly. This system of liquid democracy is proven over many years all around the world. It is only in politics that voters are forced to give a mandate for many years for decissions unknown. The way I understand liquid democracy (and correct me if I'm wrong), people can give their votes to proxies, and these proxies can in turn give their votes to other proxies; - Multiple proxies is, or has to be, an option. There is nowhare any rule that liquid democracy has to allow indirect proxy. If I say that the tail of a dog is a leg, how many legs does the dog have? The standard answer to the riddle is being, Four. Because I say a tail is a leg doesn't make it one. I had been working on delegable proxy for long before the usage liquid democracy came into being, but it was published before I published anything, in the 1990s, as I recall. The concept was independently invented in at least a hafl-dozen places around the world, over roughly a decade. Delegability is essential to the *new* concept. Yes, it's based on old concepts, and in some cases, traditional proxies could be delegable in some sense, but that was not expected or reliable. The current Demoex parliamentary rep has a blog and is writing a book, in which he suggests that Wikipedia is a fine example of democracy. It is, in fact, a fine example of how direct democracy can fail. In any case, currently, if you load the link, you are redirected to the article on deletaged voting. However, that is the result of an anonymous edit -- and nobody who has a clue was paying attention. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy Until a few months ago, and almost four years, the page redirected to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_voting#Delegated_voting There was originally an article on Liquid democracy itself. It was moved to the title of Delegable proxy in 2008. That page was deleted, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Delegable_proxy The content, though, was moved to http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Delegable_proxy It was never properly reformatted for that wiki. If you want a clue as to what *really* happened back then, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Delegable_proxy. This proposal was merely for an experiment, setting up a proxy table system, it proposed no changes in policy and did not implement proxy voting. But it would have made proxy analysis possible. The rejection was violent, almost visceral. The proposer was rapidly blocked; he'd been a long-term editor who had a habit of changing names, but I checked at the time. His previous incarnation had been an editor in good standing, for years. He was indefinitely blocked for offenses that might have raised an eyebrow for an ordinary editor, and it all came down very rapidly once he proposed delegable proxy structures. I don't frequently use the term liquid democracy, but ... here are some old pages. http://www.communitywiki.org/LiquidDemocracy seems to be from 2004, but the page history indicates an earlier version existed in 2003. http://www.communitywiki.org/en?action=rc;all=1;from=1;showedit=1;rcidonly=LiquidDemocracy Soemthing from 2003, specifies delegation: http://ming.tv/flemming2.php/_d10/_v10/__show_day/_w2003-05-15#10-000797 This seemed to be from 1999, and it has a dead link to a page by James Green-Armytage, who I consider one of the various independent inventors of delegable proxy. http://maparent.ca/Why_online_tools_for_public_deliberation_ This page doesn't discuss delegation. Apparently the concept of ordinary proxy representation is so radical for some people they don't understand it's been around for centuries. I now think that this page was not from 1999, but later. However, here is a link to a paper written later by James G-A: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~armytage/voting/proxy.htm#introduction He explicitly discusses delegation, and he calls the method delegable proxy. I think he may have gotten that usage from me, but may have been working on the concepts as liquid democracy or proxy voting long before we had contact. I'm not certain. I've also called it fractal democracy, and some people like that name, because the organizational structure is a fractal. A large DP structure
[EM] Historic opportunity in Arizona for Approval Voting
Subject was: Re: [EM] Historical perspective about FairVote organization At 12:32 PM 3/17/2013, Richard Fobes wrote: I agree that using better ballots and better vote-counting methods in real situation -- using real data -- is essential for making real progress. A very unusual opportunity for voting system reform has recently presented. The Arizona House of Representatives just passed HB2518, which provides an approval voting method for use in municipalities which choose to adopt it. For background, all Arizona municipalities but one hold nonpartisan elections. The exception is Tucson, which holds party primaries and then partisan elections. (A partisan election has the candidate's party affiliations on the ballot, and, also, provides for ballot placement for parties, based on petitions and continued election perfomance.) The measure allows voters in a primary or first election to vote for more than one candidate and then the top two candidates go on to the second election. 1 Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona: 2 Section 1. Title 16, chapter 4, Arizona Revised Statutes, is amended 3 by adding article 8.2, to read: 4 ARTICLE 8.2. OPTIONAL CITY AND TOWN APPROVAL VOTING 5 16-559. City and town approval voting; requirements 6 A. NOTWITHSTANDING ANY OTHER STATUTE, A CITY OR TOWN IN THIS STATE MAY 7 BY ORDINANCE ESTABLISH AND USE A SYSTEM OF APPROVAL VOTING IN THAT CITY'S OR 8 TOWN'S PRIMARY OR FIRST ELECTION. AN APPROVAL VOTING SYSTEM SHALL PROVIDE 9 FOR THE FOLLOWING: 10 1. THE VOTER IN THE PRIMARY OR FIRST ELECTION SHALL BE PERMITTED TO 11 VOTE FOR AS MANY CANDIDATES FOR A SINGLE OFFICE AS THE VOTER CHOOSES TO 12 APPROVE. 13 2. THE TWO CANDIDATES WHO RECEIVE THE HIGHEST AND SECOND HIGHEST 14 NUMBER OF VOTES IN THE PRIMARY OR FIRST ELECTION SHALL ADVANCE TO THE GENERAL 15 OR RUNOFF ELECTION FOR THAT CITY OR TOWN WITHOUT REGARD TO WHETHER ANY ONE 16 CANDIDATE HAS RECEIVED A MAJORITY OF THE VOTES CAST FOR THAT OFFICE. 17 3. THE BALLOT AND ALL OTHER VOTING MATERIALS SHALL CLEARLY INDICATE 18 THAT THE VOTER MAY VOTE FOR AS MANY CANDIDATES IN THAT ELECTION AS THE VOTER 19 CHOOSES, AND THAT THE CANDIDATES WHO RECEIVE THE TWO HIGHEST NUMBER OF VOTES 20 SHALL ADVANCE TO THE GENERAL OR RUNOFF ELECTION. 21 B. EXCEPT AS OTHERWISE PROVIDED IN THIS ARTICLE, CITY AND TOWN 22 APPROVAL VOTING ELECTIONS SHALL BE CONDUCTED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE 23 PROVISIONS OF ARTICLE 8 OF THIS CHAPTER. 24 16-559.01. Approval voting; charter; ordinance 25 THIS ARTICLE DOES NOT REQUIRE A CITY OR TOWN TO ADOPT AN APPROVAL 26 VOTING SYSTEM, BUT A CITY OR TOWN MAY AMEND ITS CHARTER IF REQUIRED FOR THAT 27 CITY OR TOWN TO ADOPT AN ORDINANCE TO IMPLEMENT AN APPROVAL VOTING SYSTEM AS 28 PRESCRIBED BY THIS ARTICLE. Municipalities in Arizona have great flexibility in choosing their own voting systems. I have looked at four cities in Arizona, and I have found two systems in use. Tucson is the only municipality which runs partisan elections. In Tucson, there is a regular party primary, and the winner of the primary advances to the general election. So Tucson runs five elections each election cycle. In all other towns, that I've checked, there is currently top-two runoff. It is no easy to check small-town elections, some of those may simply be plurality. My experience in small towns is that often there is only one candidate anyway It is possible that municipalities could tweak this, or even do something different. Tucson has demonstrated that it can defy the state; the legislature attempted to prevent Tucson from holding partisan elections, and Tucson won in court. HB2518 has the support of the majority of the Republican Party in Arizona. The vote in the House was, Clay Shentrup's analysis: Republicans: Yes: 31 No: 4 Not voting: 1 Democrats: Yes: 0 No: 22 Not voting: 2 So 86% of Republicans voted yes. So what are prospects in the senate? http://www.azleg.gov/MemberRoster.asphttp://www.azleg.gov/MemberRoster.asp 17 Republicans 13 Democrats 86% would be 14 Republicans. JUST ENOUGH to pass. I did more research. This bill was introduced as HB2569 in last year's legislature. See https://groups.google.com/d/msg/electionscience/QTpV0Qr3Tfo/POWiz0m15NcJ for coverage of HB2518 committee actions in the 2013 session, and https://groups.google.com/d/msg/electionscience/QTpV0Qr3Tfo/X9fgzrTPOoEJ for the Judiciary Committee in 2012. Three Democrats approved this bill in the committee vote in 2012 (which was unanimous, 7-0). Two of them left the legislature, the one that remained (Hale), voted in the first committee meeting in 2013, No. And then in the second, Yes. And then on the floor, No again. I have been unable to find any coherent criticism of this bill. What was semi-coherent, *one blogger*, I addressed in https://groups.google.com/d/msg/electionscience/QTpV0Qr3Tfo/eaDRR4WLDAEJ (which was written just before the previous two linked posts). I'd like election
Re: [EM] Helping the Pirate Party to vanish
At 05:29 PM 3/17/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 03/15/2013 09:27 PM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 04:16 AM 3/14/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 03/13/2013 05:09 AM, Michael Allan wrote: If the experts in the Election Methods list can't find a serious fault with this method, then it might be possible to bring down the party system in as little as a few years. Mind you, it would be no bad thing if it took a while longer, given the disruption it might cause. Regarding liquid democracy methods in general, I think the vote-buying problem is pretty serious. Or rather, that's not the worst part of it, but it's a symptom of a more general aspect. Kristofer is asseting as a serious problem something on which there is zero experience. It's not clear that vote-buying is *ever* a serious problem. A system that seeks broad consensus, where possible, is only vulnerable to *truly massive vote-buying, where it is more like negotiation than vote buying. I.e., Walmart will donate $100,000 to the town if voters allow a store to be sited there. Much more likely to be successful than trying to pay voter $100 or whatever and run legal risks. Given that there has been zero experience with the use of liquid democracy for the exercise of power, yes, I am asserting something on which there is zero experience. There's zero experience either way. I'm not proposing liquid democracy for the actual exercise of power, precisely because it's untested. Since I make the assertion, I should provide something on which to base it, though. And my assertions are based on analogous systems. In the matter of vote-buying and coercion, that analogous system is simply the election of candidates for office. Vote-buying and coercion were here serious enough problems that one moved from the initially open ballot onto a secret ballot. Clearly enough, openness at the lower end was not a good thing. I don't think the history as presented is sound. Secret ballot has been used for a long, long time. And major vote corruption occurred in secret ballot systems. Open voting *on issues* is still done in all legislative bodies, and that includes Town Meeting, where ordinary citizens directly vote. They *never* use secret ballot for this, and it's probably illegal. However, by law, some issues have to be decided by registered voters in an election by secret ballot, not by Town Meeting. (In Massachusetts, I've only seen this for debt overrides.) The same arguments you provide against vote-buying and coercion could be applied to a regular election. You say that vote-buying is illegal. Yup. Yes, so it is in regular elections, but we still have secret ballots. You seem to think that I'm opposed to secret ballots. We do have secret ballots, but only for general public voting. In the systems I've proposed, hybrid representative/direct democracy, electors would be empowered by secret ballot. These would be able to vote directly, in some versions, on issues. The same electors would vote publicly for seats in a deliberative body. There is *lots* of precendent for open voting by those enabled as representatives, indeed, it is *always* done that way. And, yes, these people can be bought, sometimes. But we don't allow representatives to vote secretly to prevent them from being corrupted! You say that if the small town is too oppressive, then just move. No. I said that this is a bigger problem than vote coercsion. Sometimes you can't move. Essentially, if one is in a situation where one would suffer from the expression of opinion, publically, one would not run to be an elector, just as one would not run to be a member of the city council. Unless willing to take the heat. You could vote in an Asset election for someone who was willing. And pay them, if you like. That's actually legal, as long as you don't attempt to influence legislation with the money. You could say that about public balloting for candidate elections, too. Only by electors. Not by general voters. Again, we elect Presidential electors, state by state in the U.S.. They vote publically. And since we still have secret ballots, it would seem that those arguments for a public ballot are not considered sufficiently strong. Would you prefer public (open) ballots for regular elections? No. If not, what's the difference between your arguments as applied to liquid democracy, and as applied to regular elections? I don't recommend elections at all by liquid democracy. Basically, Kristoger, I suspect you've understood hardly anything I've written. I recommend delegable proxy for *advisory organizations.* For public elections, I recommend Asset Voting, as the ultimate reform. The electors *may use* delegable proxy to help guide them how to vote, but that's *advisory* and optional. What is unusual about this concept is that a deliberative body is created that could be very large. Anyone who does not want
Re: [EM] [MG] Helping the Pirate Party to vanish
At 01:53 AM 3/14/2013, Paul Nollen wrote: About demoex and related iniatiatives (E2D http://e2d-international.org ), it was, as far as I understand not the intention to overtake the whole political system with this experiment. It is just a Trojan horse to breach the power of the political parties in order to establish a direct democracy more or less build around the Swiss example (to start with). The question still is: How do you evolve to a direct democracy in a particracy that does not allow direct democracy and where parties have direct democracy in their program just to forget it after elections. And Demoex was, and is, a possible answer. Not really, not as Demoex was run. It *was* an experiment and thus some aspects of answer may be learned from it. We are, however, short on deteiled information about Demoex. First of all, direct democracy, just that simple, is a Bad Idea when the scale becomes large, and it can be untenable even on a small scale, long-term. Direct democracy is what people do naturally, when the scale is small. However, as the scale increases, difficulties arise. The democracy that has been successful is *deliberative* democracy. Deliberation on a large scale can *seem* to work for a while, but participation bias can kill it. Wikipedia is a case in point. I don't know what Demoex is currently doing, but this is from http://demoex.net/en/ Demoex concept is to mix direct- and representative democracy. Our arena is this Internet site. How does it work? When Demoex get the summons to a new meeting we sort out the issues we are interested in. These issues are then debated before we finally send our ballots the day before the meeting. Our representatives in the local government votes like the majority of the members. Demoex originally used Nordfors software, which implemented delegable proxy. However, they shifted to Membro software, and then, in 2008, to their own. It is unclear whether or not they are using delegable proxy. If they are, it could be working reasonably well, but ... they are still apparently electing, not a true representative, but a rubber-stamp for majority opinion in the Demoex process. That does not fit with the deliberative process in the local parliament. The last reports I see show Demoex went from 1.7% in the 2002 election, raised to 2.6% in 2006. They elected one seat both years. For perspective, the population of Vallentua is reported in Wikipedia as 25,228. It is unclear if the associated municipality, Taby, would be represented in the parliament, if so, the population basis would be 85,425. The page above refers to a blog for more information about Demoex. http://pernor.wordpress.com/category/demoex/ This blog is obviously promoting Demoex and deprecating at least one of the other parties that took seats in the election, the Sweden Democrats. In the latest post in this Demoex section of the blog, Juluy 4, 2012, the Demoex Way (roughly) is promoted for use around the world. Posts of November 2 and December 12, 2011, announced a book being published about Demoex and plans to create software for on-line democracy, following the Demoex model. Are they aware of Votorola? January 18, 2011: Demoex has tried, but failed, to create a platform for joint public political debate on the web. The elected representatives from the traditional parties have refused to participate in this democratic experiment. Instead they have marginalised Demoex through out the eight years. In other words, it's their fault we failed. The blog goes on: The greatest obstacle is the party systems hierarchical structure. Hierarchies in politics mean that power is concentrated on only a handful of people. None of them benefit from sacrificing party interests for the benefit of a greater good. This assumes that representatives benefit by being elected. It totally ignores the other side of this issue, and it identifies, as the problem, what is probably inevitable in *any organization* -- including Demoex. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy There are solutions to the problem, but the Demoex model won't work. What we see below is an assumption that members of a town council will vote purely according to party interests, rather than their own opinions. Now, it looks like a system of PR is being used, probably party-list. So members *are* identified by party. In the US, town offices are commonly elected without party designations. In hybrd direct/representative democracy systems, as I've been proposing, party-list and party affiliations, while they might be known, would not be on the ballot, and, indeed, there would be no names on the ballot. Old-style ballot, the name -- or a numerical code -- is written in. But this assumes the election of *representatives* with *discretion.* And the system being proposed, Asset Voting, creates an Electoral College of all those who
Re: [EM] Helping the Pirate Party to vanish
At 04:16 AM 3/14/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: On 03/13/2013 05:09 AM, Michael Allan wrote: If the experts in the Election Methods list can't find a serious fault with this method, then it might be possible to bring down the party system in as little as a few years. Mind you, it would be no bad thing if it took a while longer, given the disruption it might cause. Regarding liquid democracy methods in general, I think the vote-buying problem is pretty serious. Or rather, that's not the worst part of it, but it's a symptom of a more general aspect. Kristofer is asseting as a serious problem something on which there is zero experience. It's not clear that vote-buying is *ever* a serious problem. A system that seeks broad consensus, where possible, is only vulnerable to *truly massive vote-buying, where it is more like negotiation than vote buying. I.e., Walmart will donate $100,000 to the town if voters allow a store to be sited there. Much more likely to be successful than trying to pay voter $100 or whatever and run legal risks. First of all, Kristoger is assuming exercise of power through delegable proxy. I don't recommend it for that, not without substantial experience first. I recommend it for *advisory structures.* Advice *can* be powerful, but with advice, created by -- and validated or transmitted through proxies, who can advise differently than the majority, there is essentially no danger of vote-buying, I covered this years ago, the buyer, would, at great expense, end up with a mouthful of hair. Most likely. We can't say impossible to anything. This general aspect is that the network of delegation can't decide when the power vested in a person is sufficiently great that he should be public, and conversely, when the voters have sufficiently little power that they should be anonymous. I've made two proposals: first, delegable proxy in NGOs, advisory in nature. I strongly recommend that all proxy assignments in this organization be public. The other proposal is for NGOs and for governmental organizations, running public elections, and that's Asset Voting. There is a tweak for what I've called difficult situations, meaning places and circumstances where an isolated individual with certain views might be in physical danger, but Asset Voting, I generally assume, does have a secret ballot input. The *electors* empowered by this election would, I assume, vote publically, except under very unusual and very dangerous situations. These situations do not exist in major democracies. (And there are ways to address this issue, but they complicate matters greatly. I don't recommend anything but electors being public voters, under ordinary circumstances. Note that I've lived in a small town meeting town, and how citizens vote on issues before the Town Meeting is very visible. And, yes, it can take courage to confront a fake consensus; basically you need to know what's real, and one of the things that an FA/DP organization that is *not* in control can do is to measure consensus. And it can do it with process that is largely hidden, i.e., is only direct communication between proxies and clients.) Intuitively, for proxies with great power, the need for transparency outweighs the repercussions of doing so, while for individual voters the opposite is the case. But the voting method has no way of knowing where one changes into the other. Beyond a possible initial assignment of voting power through Asset Voting, I *highly recommend* total transparency, while not preventing or even discouraging private discussion between willing participants. What I expect would naturally arise when there are large numbers of voters, and no inhibition on candidate numbers, is that the number of *initial voters* per candidate will stabilize at a ratio of voters/elector that optimizes communication efficiency, generally. Some voters with low interest might add to that, without increasing communication burden on the elector. You get what you pay for. Thus there seems to be two standard solutions. The first is to keep everything private, and the second is to keep everything public. And the hybrid, where initial assignments are secret. For FA/DP organizations that, as Free Associations, do not collect and exercise power by majority vote, but operate to structure and negotiate and collect and report on consensus, I *highly* recommend that it all be public, within the organization. I.e., any recognized member may access the proxy table. It's essential for the most efficient and effective communication model. The first is rather more difficult than the second, since one has to know something about the proxies in order to subscribe to them; and neither is really desirable. Open is highly desirable. Imagine an open system. Not *everything* is open. There is a web site, say. There are rules for registration, these are essentially membership rules. In a
Re: [EM] Historical perspective about FairVote organization
At 12:45 PM 3/14/2013, robert bristow-johnson wrote: except for IRV *any* existing runoff method is a delayed runoff, a second ballot that is marked, usually weeks later. the expense of the delayed runoff was not the major argument against it. the principle argument is the greatly reduced voter turnout at the runoff (it's generally argued by election reformers that increasing voter turnout is good for democracy, one reason why we're for motor voter laws). Increasing voter turnout, by itself, is not particularly a benefit. It can just increase noise, and it makes elections more vulnerable to mass-media influence. Yes, this is an argument often advanced. the next argument is that if the loser (whether this loser was the first or second vote-getter in the first election) dumps a truckload of money into the runoff election that is not matched by his/her opponent, that he/she can pull 'victory' out of the jaws of defeat. but victory for who?? might be a defeat for the majority of the original electorate, thus also decreasing the value for the electorate.) the cost of the runoff would come in about 3rd place as reasons for ditching it. It's never a defeat for the original electorate, in fact, because if they care, they see that fancy campaign and they turn out and vote. In reality, in the kinds of elections where IRV is being considered, if it's replacing runoff voting, real runoffs allow dark horses to win. Not by money, but by convincing the voters! i would add that it is *not* necessarily the case that the top two vote getters are the correct pair of candidates to put into the runoff. certainly not in Burlington VT in 2009 (if we had not adopted IRV in 2005, the Condorcet winner would not have advanced to the delayed runoff). this problem is *not* addressed by IRV. That's correct. I could easily be addressed in a better two-round system, and why runoff systems, for a long time, were presumed to always be vote-for-one systems, while single ballot systems were proposed as sophisticated and complex methods, is beyond me. Simply Approval Voting in a two-round system can improve it, Bucklin actually simulates progressive-Approval-cutoff three rounds -- in the original form, with the final round allowing multiple votes, but a hybrid system using a Range ballot could make much better choices, including identifying Condorcet winners and guaranteeing that such get into the runoff, if a runoff is needed. My sense is that with good primary and runoff systems, far better choices could be made, many runoffs could be avoided, and, then, when a runoff is necessary, it would include the best candidates. With a decent runoff system, that could easily be three plus write-in, or *at least two plus write-in.* I'll add that in Canada the FairVote group directly advocates STV and European-based PR methods, not the stepping-stone IRV path. no FairVote group advocates IRV as a stepping stone. Of course not. However, FairVote *chose to work for IRV* as a stepping stone. Advocating it as a stepping stone would be a losing strategy! the problem is getting Rob and the other FairVote advocates to learn something from *both* the failures of IRV in function (the Burlington 2009 election is the textbook example, but also is the surviving IRV elections where the number of ranking levels is limited to far less than the number of condidates on the ballot, like in SF) and politically (the few places that have repealed it). Sure. like certain corporations that sell a product and cannot admit to themselves the intrinsic shortcomings in their product until the market makes it clear (and the product and company fail in the marketplace), FairVote will not risk admitting to any blemishes in their product, let alone admitting to the failure of their product to work in a meaningful test case (a test case that is difficult, like when there are 3 or 4 candidates, all roughly equal in popular support). IRV will prevent a true spoiler (that is a candidate with no viable chance of winning, but whose presence in the race changes who the winner is) from spoiling the election, but if the spoiler and the two leaders are all roughly equal going into the election, IRV can fail and *has* failed (and Burlington 2009 is that example). Exactly. the purpose of having more than two viable parties (and/or having viable independent candidates) is to give the voters another choice when otherwise they may be forced to choose between Dumb and Dumber. unfortunately, after this failure, we were faced again with the choice between Dumb and Dumber (IRV vs. plurality or delayed runoff) and this time, as has happened before, Dumber won. The tragedy is that delayed runoff ... i.e, real runoff elections ... could easily be improved, so that many or most would be unnecessary. Doing this in San Francisco with over twenty candidates, though, might be difficult. There is a common
Re: [EM] Robert: Condorcet, IRV, Approval, Score
An error in here. But first a simple comment. At 02:20 PM 1/11/2013, Michael Ossipoff wrote: For rank-balloting, the ideal would be a voting machine that would print out a paper ballot, for the voter to examine, and then deposit in a ballot-box in the usual way. Nowadays, that paper ballot would be designed to be machine-readable. I've argued that paper ballots should be serialized (in a way that makes the ballot not traceable to the voter), and *publically* viewed and imaged immediately upon opening the ballot box. These images would be *published.* In addition, the ballots would be scanned and analyzed by machine. The public scans, and the machine analysis, would alse be published. The advantages: 1. Cheap. Public hand counting, at state expense, is not needed, usually. 2. Verifiable. Anyone can sample and verify. Manipulation of the public scan would show up as a variance with the opening images, and any doubt raised could be resolved by finding the actual paper ballot. Those ballots would be sequestered immediately after the public imaging and the official scans. The *equipment* for this, maintained by the government, at each precinct, could be as simple as a fax machine. (Analysis could be done with computers at the central polling facility.) Robert said: and as far as election method, i am convinced that inherent simplicity is important . [endquote] Yes, and that's why Approval and Score are the only proposals deserving of consideration for official public elections. If Approval is deserving of consideration -- and it certainly is -- Bucklin becomes a fix for an obvious Bucklin problem, the one that almost everyone thinks of as a defect in Approval. Bucklin (-ER) is still Approval, for the most part. Robert continued: and i will concede that First-Pass-the-Pole is the simplest to vote and simplest to count and determine the winner. [endquote] ...And Approval is 2nd best, and Score is next best. That's true for low-resolution score. Approval is *almost* as simple to count as Approval, particularly if most people bullet-vote, which could be likely. In fact, Approval could sometimes be cheaper to count, because no ballots would be rejected for overvoting. Robert continued: and i think that precinct summability is the simplest way to be transparent in that regard. [endquote] No. There is nothing non-transparent about IRV's count. Arrgh. This is quibbling over expression. Counts from precincts depend on the previous counts. Precincts cannot merely count and forward data from the ballots -- unless they forward the complete rankings as they are (it could be done, but, then, it could be a *lot* of data.) IRV and Bucklin suffer from the disadvantage of being multistage methods in which there are a number of counts at each precinct, whose results must be relayed to central count headquarters--and a number of counts at headquarters that must be broadcast. In IRV and Bucklin that amounts to broadcast information about whether or not there is a majority yet. In IRV, there is the additiional information about who is eliminated at that stage. Bucklin can be counted and forwarded at all ranks, without waiting for response. I've considered it a courtesy to voters to Count All the Votes, even if they don't matter. (Don't we report all the votes from Plurality, not just the votes for the winner?) There is no harm in reporting the full Bucklin sums. It can give information about who might be popular enough to win the next election. IRV cannot be counted that way. The totals from each round of counting depend on who was eliminated in the previous rounds. It's a disadvantage because it slows down the count. But that isn't entirely bad, because it divides the count labor into smaller parts, giving counters a rest while they wait for the central count at each stage. But there is no loss of transparency. Transparency may not be the best term here. There are errors made in transmitting and receiving the data, and sometimes those errors require a recount. When such an error is discovered, all subsequent rounds of counting are *invalid* and must be repeated. IRV presents many opportunities for close ties with a major impact on the next round. These are then sensitive to small errors. [...] Precinct results and central count results should be broadcast and posted. And securely recorded and stored. The ballots themselves should be securely stored. Actually, if the ballots are immediately scanned, the ballots can immediately be sequestered. If a hand count is going to be done, they can be done with projected images of the ballots. Everyone can see the image at the same time, no crowding, and *no handling of the ballots.* (The ballots could later be scanned again for a verification; if pubic ballot imaging is used, my guess, most of the time no additional scan would be needed. The public imaging would be done in full view of all
Re: [EM] Clean Government Alliance
At 01:53 PM 1/13/2013, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: I think term limits, at least for actual political positions (as opposed to party positions), have a real purpose, and that they would still have a purpose under a better voting system. I'm not going to argue for no real purpose, that would be silly. However, term limits can represent a fundamental rejection of a basic democratic principle, the sovereignty of the *present* citizenry. It represents the past binding the present. However, it's possible to have term limits *and* preserve the right of the citizens to elect whom they wish. And the Mayor of Long Beach did it. The term limit law did not prevent her from being elected mayor again, and, properly, it's up to the voters, right? However, it did limit her access to the ballot. She wasn't eligible to *register as a candidate to be on the ballot.* She ran as a write-in, and she had a plurality in the election. A majority was required, this was top-two runoff, so when the runoff was held, she won that as well. She was not allowed to be on the runoff ballot either (that was going to far, I'd say, once she won the primary, she should at least have been on the runoff ballot, or even if she placed in the top two.) There was another write-in, and her total was still less than a majority, but, as I recall, close. Term limit laws, like a number of laws, represent one electorate (these are usually passed by initiative) limiting what another can do. Some have been talking recently about polarization in American politics. There are a series of phenomena that increase polarization. One is the pervasive power of the media, and of money in politics. An experienced politician can resist, to some extent, monied interests, having independent public support. New faces may be lacking in experience and deep support, so are more dependent on special interest support. Further, to rapidly attract supporters, politicians need to align with special interest groups that can fire up voters. It's not just about money. Politics becomes more about fighting than about cooperation, as the media portrayal becomes ever-more caricatured for simplicity of presentation. The Good Guys and the Bad Guys. The *whole society* becomes polarized. The Other Side is out to destroy Everything Good on the planet. And all issues become polarized and linked. If you believe in Right to Life, you must be for the Right to Bear Arms, and against Gay Marriage. Or you are just Not Welcome at the Party. Asset Voting, folks. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #6990] Re: Wow: new, simple Bucklin motivation for CMJ. So renaming to Graduated MJ.
At 09:30 PM 1/8/2013, William Waugh wrote: On Tuesday, January 8, 2013 2:04:06 PM UTC-5, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 09:34 PM 1/7/2013, William Waugh wrote: If I were a strategist for a party that has not had a plurality but may be coming close to one, I would see no reason to treat any kind of Bucklin election differently from an Approval election, unless I am missing something. It is an Approval election, just staged. Instant Runoff Approval would be pretty accurate. For Approval, I'd have to teach my voters to make randomized choices. Ah, that's not necessary if the method is Bucklin. This is going too far. It's Approval, therefore randomize for an intermediate choice. In the US presidential election, I expect my opponents to bullet vote, and I don't expect them to find a majority if my faction is close to plurality. It will be a three-way race among factions that are each near 1/3 of the electorate in size. So the Bucklin grades will collapse together, resulting in an Approval election. So, we have to use Monte Carlo methods to make the effect that of a Score election. Real voters don't vote like that! There is an idea here of opponents. There is a U.S. Presidential election, which is a very unusual situation, an indirect election through a bizarre misapplication of a old -- great -- idea, that could actually be Asset voting if electors were assigned through Asset voting on the state level, which *states could do,* constitutionally. (States have total freedom and power over how the electors are chosen. The party system was *not* anticipated, apparently, by the constitutional convention, and it became established because it favored the majority party in each state, and for that majority party to go to a fair distribution of electors would be politically suicidal if others did not go the same way.) In a three-party system, as described, a voting system is severely challenged. But that system is highly artificial and unrealistic. Yes, you could realistically have a three-party system were first preference is balanced like that. But parties don't own voters. And individual voters will vote differently, depending on their preference strength. Some will bullet vote (as assumed, and, in fact, if all voters do that, as expected, *there will be no votes in second and third rank.* But some voters will add additional preferences, *because their preference for the Favorite will be weak.* This can be predicted from any normal distribution in issue space. The assumption here is pure Bucklin, plurality win. Yes, voters can add randomized choices for an effective intermediate vote, but where would this vote be placed? 2nd rank? 3rd rank? If second rank, it's silly; instead, one would just use third rank. If 3rd rank, sure. However, there is a much better choice: fix the voting system to handle this kind of situation better. There is some question of how far we should stand on our heads to handle a situation that is highly unlikely to arise. What's seen in many-party TTR elections is huge vote-splitting, with two parties leading, but still with less than 30% of the primary vote. There is no doubt but that Bucklin would pull up the numbers. Voters could express a clear favorite, providing valuable information, while also participating in a *virtual runoff.* France could use Bucklin for their Presidential primary. There is practically no doubt that it would improve election performance, given historical data. So how to improve on Bucklin. I have generally assumed Bucklin, now, as a primary method in a maximum two-round runoff system. We know that simulations show that runoff range improves performance over single-ballot range, given realistic voters. (If voters voted accurate sincere utilities this improvement would not happen. If they vote strategically, which is how people make choices, in the real world, the improvement is definite. If they simply normalize, normalization error can occur, and normalization is probably essential.) If a Range ballot is used, and if it includes Approval information (which is simplest by considering 50% range or above as approval), we have a fairly simple system for Runoff Range. To win the primary, one must have the highest Range vote *and* majority approval. If no candidate has majority approval, there is a runoff. This will handily address Mr. Waugh's situation, in fact. If they want, they can express their preferences in below-approval range, bullet voting for the Favorite *as to approval.* Or if their preference is weak, and they would rather avoid a runoff if possible, they can add an above-approval additional preference. But more becomes possible. The Condorcet Criterion is the most intuitively appealing of voting systems criteria. Because a Range ballot allows pairwise comparison, the votes can be tested for a Condorcet winner who would *not* appear on the runoff. If one exists
Re: [EM] Survey of Multiwinner Methods
At 03:24 AM 1/8/2013, Greg Nisbet wrote: There's some definite motivation for writing the list of criteria to exclude parties, districts, and relying on candidates making decisions. These sorts of mechanisms are not always available (for instance, picking pizza toppings or locations or something of that nature). That's not to say that these methods are never useful or not competitive with party-less, district-less, candidate-decision-less methods in some sense ... it's just harder to compare their merits in some sort of universal sense without considering very specific factors about the community associated with the election. In that sense, limiting focus to methods that don't impose these sorts of additional structure or requirements on the candidates or voters helps to simplify things rather dramatically. Sure. It *also* can be expected to produce results that are less than optimal. Relying on candidates to make decisions is a narrow view of Asset Voting. Rather, Asset Voting delegates decision-making, not to candidates, per se, but electors. Because we are so accustomed to voting for candidates, we overlook this when we think of Asset. In the Pizza election, obviously the Pizza doesn't decide (but that Mushroom-Olive pizza makes a mean argument!). But one could perfectly well, in a complex multiple-choice election, choose, not the result, but who or what process makes the choice. However, there is a classic method for doing this that works perfectly well, and it is simply supermajority rule, even consensus process. (If the majority feels that the group is taking too long, We're hungry, dammit! the majority can simply make its own decision, and invite others to join, o not.) The real point is that classic decision-making process is *interative*. It is not a simple one-shot amalgamation. In classic process, someone may say, Let's get a Pepperon Pizze! and the group shouts Yes. Supermajority. But then someone says, I really can't eat that! And the majority will, in a functional social group, back up. Range voting can be used to speed this up, but the speed up only will occur with fairly large groups, and especially groups that cannot meet in person. In person, Approval is the departure from traditional formal process that makes sense. The final key to showing a decent decision is a *ratification,* if there is any doubt. I've seen an apparent 97% A, 70% B, under Approval, turn into 100% A, no exceptions, when presented for ratification, but this was in person. This whole process can take less time than setting up and adding up the votes for a Range poll. Asset can pick a result that would be *completely* unexpected, something entirely outside of initial consideration. Asset can be understood very simply: instead of making decisions only from ballots, delegate the final decision process to representatives, for efficiency. With the pizza election suppose that it develops that all but one member of the group *really wants* pepperoni, and one can't eat pepperoni. The problem with buying separate pizzas is that a smaller pizza, or by the slice, is more expensive. However, the group, if it wants to accomodate the minority person, could in fact, decide to by two pizzas, one small, and could present the contribution to be put in to be sufficient to buy both pizzas (if we assume equal contributions, say). Or someone could decide to contribute a bit more. Balancing all this, discussing it, etc, could be difficult, but if two people end up discussing what to do, it's quite possible that 100% consensus could be obtained on a result. Everyone would agree that the result is fair. The universe of possible candidates is large! The complexities of various voting systems arise from the limitations, generally, of single-poll pure amalgamation processes. Asset is a *generic solution,* and it works without party structures or districts. (Asset can work for district elections, but the universality of representation is damaged, that's all.) Short of Asset, various reformed versions of Majority have been suggested, with the compromise that a runoff can complete with a Plurality result. I've shown how a maximum 2-poll system can satisfy the Condorcet Criterion, for example, with an appropriate first-poll ballot. (Esentially, range polls collect the most detailed voter preference information, and, with decent rules, can be interpreted as ranked ballots. Hence I highly recommend range ballots, which would include Bucklin with balanced preference options (standard Bucklin was Range 4, but with a missing disapproved rank). Range resolution can be increased for larger candidate sets. And Asset could actually be used as a tweak to increase majority completion rates.) Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #6984] Re: Wow: new, simple Bucklin motivation for CMJ. So renaming to Graduated MJ.
At 09:34 PM 1/7/2013, William Waugh wrote: If I were a strategist for a party that has not had a plurality but may be coming close to one, I would see no reason to treat any kind of Bucklin election differently from an Approval election, unless I am missing something. It is an Approval election, just staged. Instant Runoff Approval would be pretty accurate. For Approval, I'd have to teach my voters to make randomized choices. Ah, that's not necessary if the method is Bucklin. This is going too far. It's Approval, therefore randomize for an intermediate choice. Score would simplify the teaching by allowing the party to give its fractional vote as simply a fraction rather than having to get each member to extract a random number to compare to the fraction. Less math, less chance to mess up. Bucklin *is* a score ballot. It was classically missing a single unapproved rating; adding that makes it a Range 4 ballot. In majority-seeking Bucklin, that unapproved rating wouldn't be used, but it could be. That is, it's fairly obvious, it might be better to create a majority using the unapproved -- but not worst ratings -- rather than ignoring them, lumping all unapproved candidates into the same rejected category. Bucklin, of course, fails Later-No-Harm. But all those Approval voters who randomize and vote for the intermediate choice *are* harming the favorite, i.e., making it possible for their vote to cause the intermediate candidate to win. They would be harming less by casting a lower-ranked vote. Most eligible voters in the U.S. are not party-dedicated. For a party to try to tell voters, at least here, how to vote, could be suicidal. Graduated MJ is simply a somewhat more sophisticated method of canvassing. I remain unconvinced that it would be better than sum-of-votes Range analysis. But it isn't unreasonable. By the way, we tend to assume that there is a bi-valued choice: Defalt min rating, or average rating wins (perhaps with some quorum rule, which can get complex and which is necessarily arbitrary). Say the method is Range 4. It could be interesting to assign the default rating at 1 in stead of the minimum, zero. In a majority-required system, this would not create a winner, but it might help the range ratings to be a little higher, giving a write-in a better chance to make it into a runoff. (I also don't like grades, precisely because it can suck voters into devaluing their vote. This is often asserted as a problem with Range entirely, that voters will do that, and it is all based on the idea that the votes are absolute *evaluations*. Range voting works as being von Neumann-Morgenstern probability-adusted utilities over the range of 0-1 vote. (And that is how we actually make real-world decisions. We deprectate and give very little voting power to improbable outcomes. Thus the argument over independence of irrelevant alternatives is interesting. Adding irrelevant alternatives to a range ballot can seem to shift results, but only if the voters don't think they are irrelevant and don't realize how the voting system works. A truly improbable candidate, as to winning, should generate no significant shift in the other votes, and we can roughly assume that the vast majority of voters, once they understand Range, will vote the full range, and will make intermediate votes, as they see fit, based on both relative preference and perceived relevance.) (The MJ scoring, the Range equivalents, and the suggested meaning. A, 4.0, Best B, 3.0, Good C, 2.0, Minimum Acceptable D, 1.0, Better than Worst F, 0.0, Worst. Because people *will* overvote, I have suggested an interpretation of rating overvotes: the average of the extremes voted. So if a voter marks D and F, for example, the vote would be treated as 0.5. This converts a 5-rating ballot (with the 0 rating being explicit as well as assumed for a blank), into a 9-rating system. And people could use it that way. It's better than tossing the votes, and it might actually be an improvement. Understanding this, voters who wanted to could vote Borda style for up to nine candidates! Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #6985] Re: Wow: new, simple Bucklin motivation for CMJ. So renaming to Graduated MJ.
At 01:03 PM 1/8/2013, Warren Smith wrote: So should this realization by Jameson Quinn tell us that all previous historical examples of Bucklin voting should be regarded as examples of the Majority-Judgment median-based system, and hence can be used to help evaluate how the latter behaves in practice? Unfortunately I think not because I think Bucklin voters historically were urged to provide rank-orderings not ratings. That's a bit ... narrow-minded. It's true that the Bucklin implementations only allowed equal ranking in the third rank. However, given that limitation, we can expect that voters would have voted according to their relative utilities, out of which information falls ranking. That is, those Bucklin votes, for real voters, probably roughly expressed relative ratings. We did see skipped ranks, and that is a clear indication of rating rather than pure ranking. It indicates preference strength. It made sense. There was one attempted Bucklin implementation that explicitly assigned fractional votes. (2nd rank was 1/2 vote, 3rd rank was 1/3 vote, as I recall.) Unfortunately, the Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, not because of the voting system, but because of a rule requiring additional rankings under some conditions, or the ballot would be invalidated. Reformers sometimes over-reach! Good lesson: one step at a time! If you try two, you might not get any. That was a well-meaning effort, I assume, to help produce a majority result. For some reason, an obvious way was neglected, using runoff voting. Bucklin was actually replaced with runoff voting in some places, and using Bucklin as a first poll in a runoff system would have been a very effective reform, reducing -- but not eliminating -- the need for runoffs. To reiterate, the encouraged to provide rankings comment is inaccurate, for two reasons: the 3rd rank category was pure Approval, one could approve of as many candidates as desired. Those are *ratings,* an absolute category of approval for election. And empty ranks were available, and were actually used. Empty ranks are meaningless in a ranked system. Bucklin was a ratings system, effectively using a range ballot that was restricted in the first two ratings to one candidate, and that was missing the normal linear-distribution Range vote of 1/4 vote. It was analyzed by a descending search for a majority, using sum-of-votes. Because a voter was represented in that process by more than one vote, it's essentially an Approval method. The descending analysis is similar to MJ. However, the ties are resolved by plurality of votes, that's the difference. Stepwise reforms to this older Bucklin are obvious. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [CES #6984] Re: Wow: new, simple Bucklin motivation for CMJ. So renaming to Graduated MJ.
At 02:31 PM 1/8/2013, robert bristow-johnson wrote: On 1/8/13 1:03 PM, Warren Smith wrote: So should this realization by Jameson Quinn tell us that all previous historical examples of Bucklin voting should be regarded as examples of the Majority-Judgment median-based system, and hence can be used to help evaluate how the latter behaves in practice? Unfortunately I think not because I think Bucklin voters historically were urged to provide rank-orderings not ratings. well, isn't that how it works for Bucklin? the inclusion of the 2nd-choice or 3rd-choice votes in the total vote count is a sorta discrete decision. then only inequalities exist for the decisions made by Bucklin. if that's the case, the only information that matters in rating candidates are the relative ranks. i dunno. Equal ranking in classic Bucklin was allowed in the third rank. It's a bit of a mystery why they did not allow it in the first two ranks, but I suspect it was merely to make it more familiar to people accustomed simply to vote for your favorite. The third rank equal ranking possibility made the system even more clearly an Approval system, and when there were many candidates, it was common for the ranks to be completely collapsed, so it really did end up as an Approval election, with the standard Approval phenomenon of candidate totals exceeding the number of voters. It was also allowed to skip ranks. That is characteristic of Range, and not of ranked systems, and the meaning of a skipped rank in Bucklin is quite the same as skipped ratings in Range: it indicates a stronger gap in preference strength. Bucklin really was Instant Runoff Approval, quite the same as a simulated series of Approval elections (but, unlike a real series of elections, voters in subsequent rounds have, with plurality-electing Bucklin, no additional information. They are guessing, more or less.) Imagine that voters have a range-ballot-in-mind, and are with each round, lowering the approval cutoff a bit. Voting reform in the U.S. has neglected Bucklin, to its cost. And voting systems experts have frequently neglected Top-Two runoff, the most widely-implemented voting reform. TTR has some obvious flaws, but the *concept* of iterated voting has tremendous power. The flaws can easily be fixed by using a more sophisticated primary system, and with a better ballot, a runoff, if needed, could handle two candidates plus write-ins, without a spoiler effect there. With improved ballot analysis, which could still be simple, a runoff system could be made Condorcet compliant *and* SU optimizing. That last one has been controversial, but it works by testing absolute preferences with a runoff. Low absolute preference difference between runoff candidates equals low turnout from those with low preference. When there is a pairwise beaten Range winner, the preference strength is necessarily low for that pairwise winner (otherwise this would be the Range winner!). Real runoffs produce comeback elections, in about one-third of the cases (for nonpartisan elections), where the runner-up in the primary wins the runoff. Runoff electorate is not the same as primary electorate, in addition to vote transfers. (In non partisan elections, simple vote transfers will generally not shift relative position; that is why IRV fails to produce this comeback effect in nonpartisan elections. It does only in partisan elections, where vote transfers are strongly correlated with the first preference.) Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Survey of Multiwinner Methods
At 04:04 PM 1/7/2013, Greg Nisbet wrote: Hey, I'd like to get a sense of what sorts of multiwinner methods are currently known that are reasonably good and don't require districts, parties, or candidates that are capable of making decisions (I'm looking at you, asset voting). Right. We only want to elect candidates not capable of communicating and negotating on behalf of the public. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Wow: new, simple Bucklin motivation for CMJ. So renaming to Graduated MJ.
Some more specific comments At 01:28 PM 1/6/2013, Jameson Quinn wrote: I worked out a new, simpler way to explain CMJ based on a Bucklin-like process. To accord better with this improved explanation, I'm renaming the system to GMJ, or Graduated Majority Judgment. Here's the explanation: ===Ballot=== The ballot will ask you to grade each candidate on a scale from A (excellent) to F (unacceptable). You may give two candidates the same grade if you wish. Any candidate whom you do not explicitly grade will get an F from you. It should be 0 (worst) to 4 (best). If grades are going to be used, those should be the descriptions. C is generally considered a minimally passing grade. So if this is going to be used in a runoff system, 2 or C should be minimally acceptable. ===Counting=== To find the winner, first the A votes for each candidate are counted. If no candidate gets over 50% of the voters, the B votes are added to the count, then C votes, etc. The first candidate to get over 50% is the winner. If two candidates would reach 50% at the same grade, each candidate's votes for that grade are added gradually, and the winner is the one who needs the smallest portion of those votes to reach 50%. This gradual process can be stated as a graduated score for each candidate. If a candidate reaches 50% using 8/10 of their C votes (along with all their A and B votes), then their graduated score would be 1.7 (a C-). Another candidate who needed only 2/10 of their C votes to reach 50% would have a graduated score of 2.3 (a C+), so between those two candidates the second would be the winner. The graduated score mentioned above is exactly the same as the old CMJ score, and the old formula can be used. As you can see, this conception of gradually adding the votes in cases of ties is very natural. In fact, I now feel that this is clearly the most natural extension of Bucklin to the fully-evaluative (graded/cardinal/equal and skipped rankings) domain. The explanation for the graduated score will be confusing. The basis for graduated score is the half-point below the grade. The percentage of the C votes needed in the examples given is added to 1.5. Under this is an assumption of C grades arising out of a spectrum of grades, evenly distributed, between 1.5 and 2.5, that have all been rounded to C, 2.0. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] electowiki article edit won't post
At 12:45 PM 10/14/2012, Michael Ossipoff wrote: I edited the article, and clicked on Save Article. The screen asked me what is the word in the website's logo, excluding the exclamation mark. I answered, in the blank that was provided, Electorama. (without the quotes). Then I, again clicked on Save Article. But again I was returned to the editing page, with the same question asked, about the word that is in the website's logo, excluding the exclamation mark. What does it take to post an edit? It may take reading the instructions more carefully. It asks for the word in the logo, *including* the exclamation mark. Having read your comment, when I first tried it, I read it the same way as you! Then I suspected that I needed to log in. After I did, I found that it's still running a 'bot test for logged-in users, with an old account like mine. I read it more carefully. Oh. Including. So the word that must be typed is Electrorama! with the exclamation point. It seems too me that what I did when trying to post this edit was the same thing I did whan I posted the initial article. Unless it's presenting a different test, no, you may have remembered incorrectly. And followed what you remembered instead of what it was actually saying. The mind does that. It may trust what it remembers more than what it sees. Happens all the time. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [RangeVoting] A procedure for handling large numbers of candidates using scorevoting with primaries and runoffs.
At 10:57 AM 8/15/2012, Michael Allan wrote: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax said: Asset Voting blows the whole issue out of the water. Agreed. Transitive voting in general is an elegant solution. Some methods even allow for an informalized candidacy where anyone is eligible to receive votes without prior registration. Thanks. I've suggested registration for public elections where, I know from personal experience, it can be very difficult to decipher and identify whom a voter intended to vote for as a write-in. In fact, to avoid this problem, many jurisdictions actually don't count write-in votes for the individual candidates but instead amalgamate them all as Write-In, and the ballots are only reviewed if those votes could make a difference. Add the freedom to shift votes on the fly and even run-offs can be informalized. The election then becomes an extended (even intermin- able) process of consensus making and re-affirmation. This is more suitable for open primaries of course, than for official elections. The process can be interminable when only one or a small number of seats are to be elected, or a single decision must made that requires a majority but is complex. (Actually that's an exaggeration. Any democratic voting process can have no fixed end, but in practice they don't last forever.) For official elections, I've suggested Asset, with some necessary restrictions due to the context. As the number of candidates rises, as I strongly expect it would, naturally, once Asset is in place, it will become important to set up methods for the electors (the now-public voters who hold received votes) to efficiently coordinate their votes. What I've recommended, in more detail, would be: 1. Electors may name a proxy, but this does not actually transfer voting power. Consider it a provisional transfer, an expression of trust. It is *assumed* to be transferable, but, remember, no actual power is transferred. 2. Being named as a proxy, you would get the email address of the namer. You may choose -- or not -- to provide your own direct address to the person who names you. 3. The proxy assignment may be changed at any time. 4. Electors may transfer a vote, without delegating the right to transfer. 5. Electors may transfer a vote with the right given to the receiver to further transfer. 6. Vote transfers, unlike proxies, may be partial, i.e,. X votes to A and Y votes to B. There might be some limit on complexity, or not. 7. Vote transfers may be revoked at any time, provided that a transfer that has been used to elect a seat may become irrevocable. (I don't like this, but this is essential for fixed elections without provision for direct democracy through the EC.) 8. Whenever a quota of votes are assembled, through this process, for a seat, the seat is declared elected. (There must be rules for how excess votes are handled. They might be held, provisionally, by the elected seat for redistibution, or they might revert, fractionally, to the electors who provided the votes.) This system does allow electors to use delegable proxy if they choose; otherwise they retain the power and responsibility of casting their own votes. If delegable proxy is not considered mature and safe, then, this system can disallow transferability in the voting. Delegable proxy for generating advice is fully safe. For an overview, see the intro sections of Green-Armytage's 2010 paper here: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~armytage/proxy2010.pdf Also: http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~armytage/voting/#proxy And: http://zelea.com/project/votorola/d/theory.xht#fn-1 -- Michael Allan Toronto, +1 416-699-9528 http://zelea.com/ Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] [RangeVoting] A procedure for handling large numbers of candidates using scorevoting with primaries and runoffs.
Asset Voting blows the whole issue out of the water. I've assumed that Asset would be most functional if the ballot has no names on it at all. A booklet is published and available at the polling place with names or codes to enter for listed candidates. A registration fee for candidates is sufficient to pay for listing in the booklet. The listing is just identification, so that a voter can unambiguously vote for a candidate that they have chosen. With a state with 10 million voters, there might well be 100,000 candidates or even more. In asset, it's only necessary to vote for one person. While Warren's original Asset system was hi-resolution Range, it's vastly overkill. It's not necessary for representation, and Asset is basically a parliamentary system, it creates representation for the purpose of completing elections. I've mostly written about Asset as a method for creating accurate proportional representation, where every voter, at least in theory, is represented by a candidate they chose, or (probably far more often) by a candidate chosen by a candidate they chose, directly or indirectly). If it's done right, voters will actually know whom they elected, *their* representative. And if they vote as I expect voting to go in a mature question, they can actually talk with the candidate they actually voted for, who has publicly transferred the vote to the person actually elected. That's access to power, *for every voter capable of communicating civilly, or at least civilly enough for the candidate who got the vote. Asset can be used single-winner, though. I just think that once one can elect a proportional assembly, that truly represents the *entire electorate*, direct elections of office-holders becomes an obviously Bad Idea. Much better to hire them, let the assembly hire and fire. Take a hint from business. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Another reason why Greens won't vote Dem, due to previous count results.
At 10:38 PM 5/31/2012, Michael Ossipoff wrote: As I was saying in a recent previous post about this, Approval's count results will tell Green-preferrers whether or not they need Dem to protect against Repub. And I gave a reason why that is: Preferrers of the middle of 3 parties have no reason to approve either extreme. I told of a reason why that is. Perhaps you did, but you are framing this as a general truth, when your arguments, here at least, seem to be based on a very particular assumption about the two major parties, not the general case at all, nor do I think that most readers of this list will agree with you. Further, improved voting systems, of the kind that are most-discussed here, generally lead to increases in the number of candidates. Now I'd like to tell of another: On EM, it's been shown by at least three people, in at least two ways, that the expectation-maximizing strategy of Approval is to approve the above-expectation candidates. I think that's so. It's obvious why that's so: Your expectation is the sum, over all of the candidates, of the product of a candidate's win-probability and hir utility. It's obvious that when you increase the win-probability of a candidate who is better than your expectation (you do that when you approve hir), that will raise your expectation. Seems sound. Well, suppose you're a Democrat-preferrer (if there really are any). Say it's Green, Dem, Repub. If it's certain that some particular candidate will win, then your expectation is the utility of that candidate. Otherwise your expectation is somewhere between the utility of the Green and the Dem, or somewhere between the utility of the Repub and the Dem. Say it's somewhere between the Green and the Dem. As I said above, your best expectation-maximizing strategy is to approve (only) all of the above-expectation candidates. By assumption, the Green is farther from you than is the point representing the utility equal to your expectation. So you don't approve the Green. What would it take to make your expectation worse than the Green? No, even if it were almost certain that the Repub would win, that wouldn't do it, because Dem and Repub are so close that you couldn't squeeze an amoeba between them. This is in your view, Mike, not necessarily the view of the voters. I find it bizarre and disappointing that you would base a general argument about three-party elections on something so flimsy. I expect more of you. Someone who considers the two major parties to be Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee, is almost by definition out on the left or right edge. The major parties do tend, frequently, to nominate toward the center, hoping to attract the real middle. Indeed, that's the force behind Center Squeeze. The *parties* may have great differences, but the candidates are pushed toward the center, squeezing out a true centrist. The expected utility for you would have to be a candidate farther away from you than the Green and the Repub. And that would be impossible with just 3 candidates. Let's see how this works without the assumption of almost-identity for the voter of the two major parties. Let's assume a left-right scale of 5 (left) to -5 (right). Say the Green is 5, the Democrat is 1, and the Republican is -5. Just picking numbers. Suppose a voter is located at 2.5. The voter prefers the Democrat (regret 1.5), then the Green (regret 2.5), and the regret for the Republican is 7.5. Normalized to a scale of 0-6, this is 0 Dem, 1 Green, 6 Repub, and inverting to show utilities, it ends up 0 Repub, 5 Green, 6 Dem. (I'd have preferred to represent this with four parties, including a rightist party, more to the right than the Republicans, but I'm sticking with Mike's three-party situation.) Suppose the expectation is that the election is close between the Democrat and the Republican, and the Green is unlikely to win. The expected utility is then 3, so the above-expectation strategy is to approve both the Democrat and the Green. Further, our voter is in the left wing of the Democratic party. The voter may wish to encourage the Democrats to move to the left, and while the voter, by definition, prefers the Democrat to the Green, the loss of utility if the Green wins, because of so many voters pushing in that direction by approving the Green, is small. But the Republican winning is a disaster to this voter. What we don't know, really, is how many supporters of a center party will actually approve the closer of the left or right party candidates. There are indications from Bucklin history that there will be quite a bit of such crossing of party lines. In reality, there are more than three parties in U.S. Presidential elections, and voters vote as they vote for complex reasons. Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
