On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 03:35:00 -0400 James Green-Armytage wrote:
James Green-Armytage here, replying to Dave Ketchum.
Is this method worth the pain?
There is no pain involved. You are simply giving the voters the option of
supplementing their ranking info with ratings. If they don't feel like
doing that, it's fine. If voters fill out the rankings but not the
ratings, then the system can easily assign default ratings to the ballot,
by giving the highest candidate(s) 100, the lowest candidate(s) 0, and
evenly spacing the rest of the ratings gaps.
The method cannot avoid introducing pain. While I have the option of refusing to do ratings:
I cannot do that intelligently without understanding the option.
Since other voters could use the feature, I need to understand what they could do to me with it.
If I get in deep enough, I start wondering how default ratings interact with truncation (I see that you do describe one variation - bullet voting).
Voters can even bullet vote if they want to, just like they can in
regular Condorcet. That way, you would be voting your favorite in first
place with a rating of 100, with everyone else tied for last and with a
rating of 0.
When you talk about "is this method worth X", I think the main thing is
just to spring for a computerized voting system / interface (that is
secure and leaves a paper trail, dammit!), and that supports both ratings
and rankings in a snazzy, non-baffling way. And my answer to the question
is, sure, it's a small price to pay.
Let's see:
"small" requires comparing benefit vs cost, and I remain suspicious on both ends.
Argue paper trail another day.
That system should be computerized - this is the part I STRONGLY support.
Does not matter unless you have more than two candidates evenly matched enough to produce cycles - often enough to justify the pain (because cycles can happen they must be attended to - question is how
much complexity to build in).
If you don't have more than two viable candidates, then your election is not very exciting. For elections like that you can use IRV or two-round runoff and things will turn out fine. But I'd much rather have elections with more than two viable candidates. Keep in mind that in close multicandidate elections you might get insincere cycles as well as sincere cycles... so I'd be relatively cautious as to how evenly-matched candidates have to be before I want this method instead of rankings-only Condorcet.
You about have to decide what method will be used before you know how exciting any particular election will be - many have only one viable candidate - on the other side we had three viable candidates for NY governor two years ago (out of around ten total).
It is true that more excitement should result from ranked ballots - but even this cannot guarantee more than one viable candidate will turn up.
Condorcet precinct results are an array, with the arrays summable for the whole district or any subdistrict. IRV is not so simple.
I think it is summable, probably, but to be honest, the summability criteria seems like a bit of a red herring to me. Whether you use IRV or Condorcet, when people ask for the results, they are going to want the full results, that is, not just the matrix, but how many people voted a particular preference ranking. So why does it matter that you can produce a summable matrix for Condorcet? Anyway, it seems like you are underestimating the power of contemporary (and future, since this method won't be implemented for awhile) information technology. I think that the full rankings & ratings information for any given precinct is really not a big deal when you put it in a digital format. For example, you could probably fit it all on a DVD or something like that.
With plain Condorcet, each precinct does a matrix that records, for example, how many voters rank Green over WF, and how many WF over Green. If precincts report to counties, county simply adds the matrices together, needing nothing more. Likewise for county reporting to state. This much effort is doable at the end of election day, just as it is for Plurality. When absentee and other counts come in later, they are simply added to the totals.
With IRV, voter's first choices can get summed by state but, when a loser is recognized, voting patterns are needed to do the substitution. These patterns could have been sent up by the precincts (added load - NY has a few million ballots for governor), or could be requested as needed by state (computers with this data must stay available).
With your method...?
True, immediate demand is about who won, and how close it was. Later there will be desire to look at details such as which counties liked Green or WF best.
Also true that each precinct should do a detailed record on DVD or equivalent. BUT, I would expect more desire for county results that are both detailed and of manageable size for human analysis.
I do admit that it's going to be pretty hard to report the full results
of a weighted pairwise election in any kind of succinct way. The full
results can and must be made available, but they would hardly make for
nice bedtime reading. Of course, just as with ranked ballot methods, you
could digest them in different ways to bring forward the kind of numbers
that people can look at without their heads exploding.
Anyway, I haven't really answered your question. To be honest I'm not a
big computer science guy, so I'm not sure I know what I'm talking about,
but my best guess is that it is summable. You can have one summable array
for the pairwise comparisons, and then maybe a second summable array for
the ratings differentials. Then, if you put them together you can
determine the winner?
This math is no challenge for computers. Large volumes of data have to demand storage space, time to move them around, and time to process - none of these are worth noticing for one data item BUT, get enough items and it adds up.
Brian is almost certainly doing the equivalent of a precinct, where almost anything would be doable - and the doing could be useful to his audience. I am leaning on the problems of multiple precincts, such as states.Hmm. I know that Brian Olson implemented a simple version of the weighted pairwise method in his election calculator. http://bolson.org:8080/v/vote_form.html Plug in some ratings, indicate "ratings" in the box up above, and when you get to the results, scroll down to where it says "Pairwise Rating Differential Summation". I don't really know how he did the code, but the way he has it, it looks summable to me.
my best,
James
-- [EMAIL PROTECTED] people.clarityconnect.com/webpages3/davek Dave Ketchum 108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY 13827-1708 607-687-5026 Do to no one what you would not want done to you. If you want peace, work for justice.
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