On Tue, 20 Jul 2004 17:41:44 -0400 James Green-Armytage wrote:
This is James Green-Armytage replying to Dave Ketchum.
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.
What I see is that these ratings are the change, claim more intelligent selection of winner among Condorcet cycle contenders, and have no effect unless cycles occur.
James seems to include permitting giving candidates equal rankings as part of this change. I see that as part of Condorcet - at least addable without these ratings - and thus not countable as part of this enhancement.
He prefers winning votes over margins - which seems to get general preference for Condorcet.
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).
Sure, any method that is more complex than plurality, two-round runoff,
or approval is a challenge to voters in terms of understanding exactly how
their vote will be processed. Even IRV is relatively challenging for
voters to understand, if they've never dealt with stuff like that before.
Any Condorcet method is challenging, as well... to fully understand it,
voters need to learn about pairwise comparisons, the Condorcet paradox,
and the particular cycle-breaking technique. My method probably adds an
extra layer of complexity on top of that, I admit, because the
cycle-breaking technique is relatively complex.
However, the happy part is that, in my opinion, you don't need to be
strategically sophisticated to cast an effective vote in weighted
pairwise. If people rank sincerely, and rate sincerely, the result will be
a good one. I think that there aren't a lot of situations where a
sophisticated vote will have vastly more "power" than a sincere vote, if
you keep the definition of power in probabilistic terms, such that you
assume that voters will not know what the direction of cycles will be if
they arise.
Anyway, I concede that this is a relatively complex method. Whether the
complexity is worth it depends on your situation, I think. Will the voters
be unwilling to learn the rules a complex method, and be hostile to a
method that they can't understand? If so, weighted pairwise might not be
the best bet. At this point I don't know how soon I can hope to see
weighted pairwise. I think that the first question for me is whether it is superior to
rankings-only Condorcet in an electorate that is not hostile to complex
methods. That question is important to me in itself, because I like to
peer into the future and imagine what voting methods people will be using
in a much more democratically-advanced society.
As for what to promote if people are hostile to complex election methods,
I don't know exactly... That's a whole 'nother question, one which sort of
ties your hands as a voting methods designer.
Let's see:And my answer to the question is, sure, it's a small price to pay.
"small" requires comparing benefit vs cost, and I remain suspicious on both ends.
Okay, well, specific arguments as to this are welcome. Again, I think
that the only substantial cost is getting computerized systems with an
interface that allows you to enter numbers. Once the software is produced,
the cost of providing copies to the various precincts is virtually nil. I've already talked about the benefits. First, it has all the benefits of
a Condorcet method, since it is a Condorcet method. Second, it resolves
cycles in a more meaningful way than rankings-only Condorcet, because it
takes into account strength of preference. Third, it may prevent strategy
from getting out of hand in Condorcet, which I'm still convinced is a
significant issue.
On equipment cost, I claim true electronic voting machines, able to do Condorcet and handle writein votes, should be basic. Adding ratings to this seems trivial.
On human cost, candidates in a cycle are already in a near tie for winning, and the added ratings only affect selecting the winner among these - BUT - if the feature is available, voters must consider using it if they see a possibility of a cycle.
Benefits do not happen as often as some EM members might suspect from the time we spend on cycles:
Requires at least three candidates in serious contention - MANY races have only one or two after you cross off sure losers.
Must not only be near a tie, but there must be no single winner.
So, the cost is not huge, but neither are the benefits - the candidate who lost out due to ratings had to be near winning to be in a cycle.
Argue paper trail another day.
There's actually an argument against paper trails for voting machines?
The mechanical voting machines I, and many others in NY and other states have used for decades:
DO NOT do paper trails, DO preserve voter secrecy,
DO get tested to verify that they truly are voting machines that let voters express their intent and correctly count and report the results.
Attend to the two DOs and I would not care about the DO NOT - but suspect many would then lose interest in having that expense.
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 IRV, you can put the FULL results for a precinct on one or two DVD's. You can then physically carry the DVD's via courier to the central tally location, at which point all the DVD's will be fed into a big computer, which will look at the ballots in full and give you a result. If you don't want to wait for the courier to find out the winner, maybe you could transmit an unofficial version of the full result from each precinct via a secure internet connection, tally an unofficial winner at the central location, and then wait for the couriers to come and enter the DVD's to double-check the result and make it official.
Net is that rating data can be stored and reported with Condorcet rank data, thus not creating any extra need for couriers, etc.
With your method...?
Looking closer I see summable, needing a second matrix of the same size for the ratings. You only want half the ratings, but it is likely easier to calculate them all in a single precinct district, and almost essential to do this in a multiple precinct district, since the precinct does not have a district rank matrix.
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.
Right. I can't see any reason why, if you really wanted to, you couldn't just take the sum of precinct matrices to find state matrices, in my method. Again, I think probably the way to do it is to have a straightforward pairwise matrix, which is summable, plus a ratings differential matrix, which is also summable, as far as I can imagine... these two summable matrices together will tell you the winner.
my best, James
P.S. the proposal for weighted pairwise is currently at http://fc.antioch.edu/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/voting_methods/weighted_pairwise.htm
-- [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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