Re: [EM] Beatpath and SSD aren't manipulable. "Manipulable" is barking up the
Mike Ossipoff wrote: >The criteria SFC and SDSC describe why complying methods don't have a >problem with those offensive strategies. Chris Benham wrote: >46: A>B >44: B>C (sincere is B or B>A) >10: C >The defeat-dropper style "Condorcet(wv)" method you refer to here >elects B. >This looks a lot like vulnerability to "offensive order-reversal" (aka >Burial strategy) to me. Mike Ossipoff has long ago come to the conclusion that the vulnerability of WV methods to the burying strategy is not worth worrying about. He reaches this conclusion based on several assumptions (some stated and some unstated) about strategic voting behavior. There are plenty of people who believe that that the vulnerability of WV Condorcet to the burying strategy *is* severe enough to be worth worrying about. There are also some people who haven't made up their minds one way or the other about whether the vulnerability is severe enough. I belong to this last category. In my opinion, it is very hard to draw definite conclusions about strategic behavior in methods that are rarely or never used for high-stakes elections, because voter strategy as a phenomenon is very complex, probably too complex to model definitively. Thus, I prefer to make more tentative statements about strategy in methods that are largely untried in high-stakes scenarios. When a strategic flaw is very obvious in theory (e.g. as in the Borda count or margins Condorcet), I am happy to reject the method out of hand, but when theoretical strategic vulnerability is closer to the margin (as in WV Condorcet), I prefer to reserve judgement. We've been through all this several times before. At the moment, I have nothing new to say on the topic. my best, James election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] television
Is anybody interested in or able to produce a TELEVISION PROGRAM about voting methods? It occurs to me that such a program could be, e.g. shown on "public access television" for free. I believe one could get far with video and sound editing software... Warren D. Smith PhD Mathematician and CRV founder. http://math.temple.edu/~wds/crv [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] 631-675-6128 election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Some answers to "1-person-1-vote"
> MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote: > I'll refer to the "1-person-1-vote" objection to Approval as "1p1v". > > 1p1v has been demolished on EM in so many ways that I don't > claim that this > message will cover all of them. But I'd like to mention a few of them. > > 1p1v advocates imply or say that the voter who casts more > votes has more > power. But you can cast as many votes as I can. You can cast > as many as you > want to. I don't think you're understanding 1P1V. There's no argument against ranked ballots, for instance, since each voter "casts a vote for" one of the possible orderings of candidates. Each voter casts one ballot, but SOME methods "count the vote multiple times" in a way that depends upon ballot configuration. > > It's ironic that 1p1v advocates are concerned that voters who > vote for more > candidates have more power, because the more candidates you > vote for, the > less power you have. If you have to vote for lots of > compromises, that's > because you're in a poor position and must compromise. The > person who votes > for only one, because s/he doesn't need to compromise, has no > reason to envy > you all of your votes. I've never heard the "voting for more candidates" argument relating to voting behaviour. I haven't studied it, but the only reference I've seen on the list or the 'net has to do with vote counting methods being declared unconstitutional in some states. I think this related to Bucklin, which is sort of "approval with ranked ballots", and I think the court ruling was based upon inadequate argument, but nothing in this post addresses the issues actually raised by that 1P1V anti-approval argument. > > Or maybe you've voted for more candidates because you're willingly > forfeiting voting power. It's either that, or that you are in > a position of > less power and must compromise. > > So much for more power. > > Approval only lets you cast one vote for any particular one > candidate. > Approval only lets you cast one vote on any one particular > pairwise race. In > Approval, only one of your votes affects the outcome. Yes, approval is succinctly described as one vote per candidate by each voter (1c1v, 1v/c??? PLEASE, stop with the new abbreviations... they only make things arcane, not clear). But defend the statement "only one of your votes affects the outcome". I only MADE one vote in which I approved a subset of the available alternatives. To say that each of the approvals I made was a different "vote" is to admit that the "1P1V" argument is correct. It is much better (and much more likely to pass the 1P1V constitutionality requirement) to say that an approval ballot is voting for ONE proper subset of the available alternatives. Everything else about the method is how the votes are counted, and that has NOTHING to do with the individual voter. (Hint, to prove that "only one of my votes affects the outcome, note that if I approve all alternatives I've only cast one vote. If I approve NONE of the available alternatives, I've also only cast one "vote", but if my not approving any caused "one of my votes to affect the outcome", which of my votes did?) > Approval is Set Voting. It lets every voter vote one set of > candidates over > another. Every voter equally has the power to do that, and > the freedom to > choose which and what size sets. THIS is clearer than the terminology I found unhelpful above, and is consistent with 1P1V - just take the view that in approval voting the voter is casting one vote for a proper subset of the alternatives. That's 1P1V. > > I've told why everyone has the same voting power in Approval. > But what if we > define a "voting power" that can vary among voters? Then it > can be shown > that that voting power is much more unequal in Plurality than > in Approval. I > could find that demonstration and post it here again if you'd like. I don't even know what you're talking about, so please do, but define terms and avoid abbreviations, please. > 1p1v is a rules criterion. That's a criterion whose > requirement is about > what kind of rules a method must have. Rules criteria have no > meaning or > value. Results matter. A rules criterion says, "A method should (or > shouldn't) have a certain kind of rule, because I say so." > You could say > that a results criterion says something similar about > results, but results > have material consequences. I have no idea what this paragraph is talking about. But whatever the heck a rules criterion is, 1P1V is not such. 1P1V is a REQUIREMENT. Separate the ballot collection process from the vote counting process. A VC process that gives more weight to some ballots than others a priori would violate 1P1V. Approval doesn't, as long as you don't describe "approving alternative A" as a "VOTE for A". It's not, it's a vote for the specific subset of candidates which coincidently includes A. > > Of course someone's rules criterion could be of some interest > if it ca
[EM] Ossipoff: "strategizers can take advantage of sincere voters" with Range Voting?
I think this is a wrongheaded view. Ossipoff is falling into a mental trap here
and then figuring it provides a basis for saying Approval is superior to Range.
The argument presupposes the world is divided into some camps ("us" and "them")
an
that the poor little honest voters are in one camp and the nasty strategic
voters
are in the other, at which point the strategic ones win.
Bull.
In practice, there are honest & strategic voters in every camp and no
advantage can be taken if the honest/strategic fractions do not depend on
the camp. Do they depend on the camp? In the 2004 election,
they did not if the two camps were Bush & Kerry voters.
The "third party" voters (by which I mean, those giving a nonzero score to
somebody besides B&K), however, *were* distinctly less strategic than
the B&K voters. (This is all based on my 2004 exit poll RV & AV study.)
So that would seem, by my opponent's reasoning, to mean the third parties
would be better off under approval than range voting.
Bzzz. Wrong. Range Voting was far, far superior to Approval
from the standpoint of every third party in the 2004 US presidential election.
And the reason was the honest voters, not the strategic ones.
So this whole argument is just bunk in reality.
As for Schulze beatpaths being conjecturally "highly manipulable"
(or in general by the words "highly manipulable") what I mean
by that is that (perhaps) there often are small subsets of
voters, who, by changing their vote in retrospect, can make the election swing.
I do not claim to have any, e.g. computer simulation backing of this feeling,
though.
--Warren D Smith.
election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Beatpath and SSD aren't manipulable. "Manipulable" is barking up the wrong tree.
MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote: > > Warren-- > > You wrote: > > I would expect it [beatpath] is extremely manipulable. > > I reply: > > Critics of pairwise-count methods speak of how they're vulnerable to > two offensive strategies: > > Truncation and offensive order-reversal. > > And, for all Condorcet methods other than Condorcet(wv), they're > right. All Condorcet methods that don't use winning-votes are a > strategic mess, just as you suspect. But wv is different. You're > ignoring the distinction between different kinds of Condorcet. 46: A>B 44: B>C (sincere is B or B>A) 10: C The defeat-dropper style "Condorcet(wv)" method you refer to here elects B. This looks a lot like vulnerability to "offensive order-reversal" (aka Burial strategy) to me. Chris Benham election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
