Re: [EM] RV comments
On Jul 21, 2007, at 8:05 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 11:00 PM 7/20/2007, Chris Benham wrote: I think Warren Schudy put it well in a July 2007 draft paper: Range voting is a generalisation of approval voting where you can give each candidate any score between 0 and 1. Optimal strategies never vote anything other than 0 or 1, so range voting complicates ballots and confuses voters for little or no gain. Good. Since this is simple, clear, and false, we should be able to dispose of it quickly. I actually gave an example, The description of Warren Schudy is clear and compact. If there are some corrections to it, it would be nice to get them defined in some equally compact format. I can see that in some cases, e.g. when some candidates can not win, they could get also other than min and max ratings. But also in these cases the voter may want to either maximize or minimize the number of points they will get. And there are cases where the probabilities make it possible to give some intermediate values without losing voting power. I also think that Range is a good method in non-contentions polls and elections. But in the statement above a competitive election was of course the assumption. And there are some minor things in the description, e.g. Range is typically defined as having only a fixed number of possible ratings, not any value between 0 and 1. But isn't t so that the description above is a quite valid description as a main rule for competitive elections (where we want all voters to cast votes of similar strength). If someone has as exact and compact formulations (to fix this one or to propose a new one) on where and how Range works please put them forward. Juho ___ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] When Voters Strategize, Approval Voting Elects Condorcet
One more thought on the trend to reduce the level of strategic games with the votes. It may be possible to develop also automatic strategies for the votes. If there is a need to guarantee the termination of the strategy changes one could artificially force that by e.g. allowing the strategy changes only in one direction, e.g. from approving less towards approving more candidates. Here's one example calculation (with abc loop and one extra not so popular d candidate). The strategy algorithm that I used is simply to move the approval cutoff one step forward if the currently leading candidate is worse than the next to be approved candidate in the ballot, until there are no more changes to the strategies. In some situations this algorithm can also provide protection against voter strategies. 35 a,bcd 33 b,cad 32 d,cab = leader is a 35 a,bcd 33 bc,ad 32 dc,ab = leader is c 35 ab,cd 33 bc,ad 32 dc,ab = leader is b 35 ab,cd 33 bc,ad 32 dca,b = leader is b = winner is b Juho On Jul 18, 2007, at 1:59 , Forest W Simmons wrote: Mr. Schudy's article reinforces the rationale behind DYN: that with reliable partial information, Approval does as well or better than Condorcet. Mr. Schudy treats the case in which there is a clear frontrunner and a clear runnerup. In that case he shows that (what we usually call) approval strategy A is rational, and that it gets the Condorcet Winner elected, a result well known on this listserv. Of course, that requires reliable polling information. I think that a version of DYN suggested by Juho is the simplest method to meet this requirement without requiring voters to return to the polls. DYN works well whether or not there are two leading candidates. Juho's version of DYN requires each candidate to publish their rankings of the other candidates before the election, and allows only one proxy per voter. Voters approve (with Y for yes) some candidates and disapprove (with N for no) others. If there are any left over, each voter designates (D) one candidate as proxy for making the remaining Y/N decisions. After the statistics of the partial results are in, the candidates (as proxies) use their strategies to make the remaining Y/N decisions, which have to be consistent with their pre-election rankings. Consistency means that if the proxy ranked candidate A ahead of candidate B, and she gives a Y (for yes) to candidate B, then she must also give a Y to candidate A. It was Juho's suggestion that to simplify things we should allow only one proxy per voter. Also, Juho's suggestion of not giving too much leeway to the proxies inspired the idea of making their Y/N proxy votes be consistent with their pre-published rankings. That's why I call this Juho's version of DYN. On another related topic. How best to use sincere range ballots? I think maximizing the Gini score is the best (except in situations in which the spoils of the election are freely shared by the voters). For candidate X the Gini score is obtained by 1. (first) sorting the ballots in order of how they rate X from best rating to worst. 2. Then computing a weighted average of the ratings, where the rating on the j_th ballot in the sorted order is given a weight of (2*j-1), i.e. the consecutive odd numbers are the weights. For example, 50 ABC 50 CBA with B at midrange (50%) on all ballots, hence with an average of 50%, no matter the weights. It turns out that A and C are tied for last with a common weighted average rating of (1+3+...+99)/(1+3+...+ 199), which is exactly 25%. Of course, Gini optimal strategy is the same as ordinary Range optimal strategy, which is just Approval strategy, and in strategic voting the exact symmetry would have to be broken to determine a winner for this example. If exactly half of the voters approved B and the other half disapproved B, then it would be a three way tie, whether measured by Approval, Gini, or Range. Forest election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] When Voters Strategize, Approval Voting Elects Condorcet Winners but Condorcet Methods can Elect Condorcet Losers
- Some Condorcet methods (e.g. Minmax(margins)) elect Condorcet Losers with sincere votes. In some extreme situations the Condorcet Loser may be the best candidate. - Note also that the Condorcet specific problems do not do not materialize in most elections. I haven't yet seen any good examples where some large scale public elections where voters make independent decisions on how to vote would tend to fail. Juho On Jul 16, 2007, at 7:32 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I've written a short paper that I think you may find interesting. It's still somewhat drafty, but it's good enough to share. Here's the abstract: We show that approval voting strategic equilibria are closely related to honest Condorcet Winners. There exists an approval equilibrium with a clear font-runner F and runner-up R if and only if the F is the clear Condorcet Winner and R the Condorcet runner-up. In contrast, we show that Condorcet methods can elect a Condorcet Loser with non-zero probability when voters vote tactically. With strategic agents, approval voting is better at electing Condorcet Winners than Condorcet methods! Paper is available at http://www.cs.brown.edu/~ws/approval.pdf . Please send comments and/or questions my way. thanks, ws This message was sent using IMP, the Internet Messaging Program. election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] DYN
These methods offer quite interesting and quite radical horse trading possibilities. The previous version (without the published rankings limitation) is so flexible that it is hard to even imagine what kind of trading would take place. In the version below it is possible e.g. that some extreme candidates would trade votes and thereby get some advantage over the centrist ones. It is also an option not to allow trading at all but just to allow the candidates to set their approval cutoff where they want (in line with the ranking order). One more option would be to allow the voters to cast ranked votes and donate the whole vote to one candidate that would then be allowed to put the approval cutoff in those votes in the most appropriate position. Juho On Jul 12, 2007, at 21:22 , Forest W Simmons wrote: In further response to Juho's question about candidates making their approval choices before versus after the partial count, here's a compromise: Require the candidates to publish their candidate rankings before the election, and then (after the partial info is available to them) require them to make approvals consistent with their rankings, so that they can approve A without approving B only if B is not ranked ahead of A on their published list. Forest election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] DYN
Why after? (Is this somehow essential? Will they change their opinions based on the partial results? Are they supposed to reflect the general opinion more than their own opinion?) How about announcing the content of the proxy votes already before the votes are counted, or maybe already before the election? If the votes are counted after, will each proxy know the number of delegated votes that other proxies have (or the number of his/her own delegated votes) before they cast their proxy votes? Juho On Jul 10, 2007, at 2:21 , Forest W Simmons wrote: Delegable Yes/No: Each voter has a Yes/No vote to cast for each candidate. The voters can delegate some of these votes to candidates (including write-ins), if they so desire. The candidates cast the delegated votes after the rest of the votes have already been counted. Thus the voters that have strong feelings about certain candidates can vote for or against them, and delegate their remaining votes to their proxies, who will then have some firm partial results to inform their strategies. Forest election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Ka-Ping Yee's voting behavior pictures
I touched this topic briefly in last December. http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/ 2006-December/019072.html I haven't heard anyone picking up the idea and doing such simulations, including myself :-). However I still think that it would be a god idea to study also the completion methods using some slightly different simulation set-up that would reveal the differences. See also: http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/www/spacegraph.html http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/zoomout/ http://bolson.org/voting/sim_one_seat/dist/ http://www.geocities.com/stepjak/index.htm Juho On Jun 28, 2007, at 2:28 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I looked on the original images with extreme interest, as well as the images that Warren produced, and I was just wondering if anyone had produced images showing any differences in Condorcet completion methods. (At least, I *think* there should be some difference, though I know Warren Smith mentioned Condorcet images appeared clone-immune in 2-d scenarios). Of course, none of the methods would be as wacky ask IRV, but there might be interesting behavior on the borders between candidates. Anyway, if someone had a bunch of beautiful new images to show (even non-Condorcet methods), I'd be interested in seeing them. Thanks! Michael Rouse election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Presidential debate ordering
On May 22, 2007, at 16:41 , Howard Swerdfeger wrote: [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A few days ago, we had the Republican debates on TV, and I came to the conclusion that having ten people on the stage at once was an unmanageable mess. At thirty seconds per answer, candidates were limited to faux anger and soundbites, while the cheers and applause gave it a gameshow feel. (Well, okay, so it was better than the debate on MSNBC, where you had questions like What do you hate most about America?) What I'd like to see is one-on-one, round-robin debates. Now, we could pair up the candidates randomly, but where is the fun in that? What I thought might be interesting is to have each candidate pick the order he wanted to debate every other candidate, and choose the order that best matches the aggregate preference. Unfortunately, I am not certain the fairest way to piece together incomplete debate orders (each candidate would have nine debates, but the total field would have a total of 45 debates). Anyone know the best way to do something like this? It would be similar to scheduling a baseball season or other sporting event, so it would seem to have a use beyond just debates. Interesting idea. 10 people on stage is to many. but 45 pair wise debates it a lot for the public to watch. Perhaps there is a good middle ground say, 4-5 people on stage at once. and try to make sure that each candidate faces each candidate on stage once. There could be different criteria when organizing the debates: 1) Fix the size of the debate groups 2) Arrange each candidate the same number of pairwise debates with other candidates (typically one with each) 3) Give each candidate same number of minutes in TV Criterion 3 is maybe a fair criterion for politics. In addition to this one could fix the size of the groups (allowing some to debate in smaller groups could be considered an advantage). These together mean that in most cases we would need to violate criterion 2. Some candidates might meet twice. Maybe that would be no major problem. They would have maybe little less to talk to each others at the second round and they could concentrate beating the others, which would not be quite fair. But they could also continue their previous fights and balance the situation this way :-). Would this method be a fair method? Juho Thanks! Michael Rouse election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] danger of coercion (Re: First U.S. Scientific Election Audit...)
On May 18, 2007, at 6:45 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 06:32 AM 5/17/2007, Juho wrote: What would be the most likely scenario where the coerced person could not avoid being coerced? I'm assuming that a typical coercer would not be a member in the team that counts the votes and he/she would not have open access to the ballots. That's not reliable. I asked for the most likely scenario. I'll take this to mean that maybe the most likely scenario is one where the coercer sits in the vote counting team. The victim does not necessarily know where the coercer, or someone allied with the coercer, sits. I don't think, in addition, that we can make any general statement about how likely it is that the coercer has inside access. We can, indeed, conclude that access to what is visibly expressed on ballots will broader the actual access of one who would coerce votes, but it also will make coercion schemes more visible and more likely to be discovered. I don't think we can predict whether ballot imaging will, overall, make coercion more or less likely. My intuition is less, but I can easily understand that someone would think that it would be more. However, the level of cooperation with coercion is very unlikely to be large; if it looks like it is headed that way, procedures can be revised. *Massive* coercion is actually easier to detect and defeat, what would be very hard would be the isolated coercion of one individual over another, such as a spouse coercing a spouse. I think this, however, would remain extremely rare. And vote coercion should be treated as a serious crime. It is a dangerous business for the coercer, actually, much more than for the coerced. If my vote is coerced, the cost for me to comply is small. It is really only when large numbers of votes are coerced, in some pattern, that a different level of cost emerges. One vote is only one vote, it is vanishingly rare that it affects an election outcome. As I mentioned, if evidence emerges, as it must with public imaging, that there is more than minimal coercion, steps can be taken to interdict it. Those steps have a cost. One of the obvious steps is to shut down the imaging program. I consider that a high cost, frankly. There would have to be more than a rare instance of coercion to make the disease less costly than that particular remedy. An alternative method is to require potential additional candidates to collect a list of e.g. 1000 supporters before the election and thereby become regular candidates. My own suggestion has been merely to require registration. The proposal Juho makes misses the point of write-in candidacies. They are for candidates who were unable to get on the ballot. Ballots are printed in large numbers, with fairly onerous security, and they must be widely distributed. They cannot be printed the day before the election, it would practically guarantee that some polling places would not get their ballots. Presses can break down, printing can be delayed. You don't want to push it. There are absentee voters as well, who need ballots in advance of election day. Maybe it would be ok to require all the candidates to wake up already let's say two (?) months before the election. Another approach would be to use ballots that do not list the names of the candidates but just contain space where the number of the candidate can be written (that's what I'm used to - adds some risk of handwriting recognition when compared e.g. to just ticking boxes, but I can use my left (weaker) hand if needed). Very much like what you propose below. Registration would result in the candidate receiving a registration number, which could be indicated on the ballot, where needed, using standard marks, avoiding the written name, which would be far more reliable for identification. But my real point is that we don't need cumbersome restrictions to solve a problem that is practically nonexistent. We are trying to avoid coerced voting where the coercer requires the voter to make the ballot identifiable. Quite simply, I expect this to be vanishingly rare. When you get millions of people voting, rare may be almost guaranteed to happen sometimes. But that does not mean that we stand everything on its head to prevent a rare occurrence. Rather, we consider the cost of that occurrence and balance it with the cost of attempting to totally prevent it. My advice to someone who is a victim of attempted vote coercion requiring validation? If you fear that your vote will actually be observed, that if you do not mark your ballot as required so that it satisfies the coercer, you will be subject to serious harm, vote as required. And if you can find any authority you trust, report that you are doing so. Your vote is visible, by the conditions of this problem. You can prove that you voted in this way. And you could, for example, wear
Re: [EM] danger of coercion (Re: First U.S. Scientific Election Audit...)
On May 17, 2007, at 7:07 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 09:07 PM 5/16/2007, Juho wrote: On May 16, 2007, at 18:26 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Yes, there are ways to *reduce* the possibility of a coercer verifying that the victim complied. None are guaranteed to work. What would be the most likely scenario where the coerced person could not avoid being coerced? I'm assuming that a typical coercer would not be a member in the team that counts the votes and he/she would not have open access to the ballots. That's not reliable. I asked for the most likely scenario. I'll take this to mean that maybe the most likely scenario is one where the coercer sits in the vote counting team. This would be the same as having marked ballots! (Write-ins would be quite recognizable but in most elections they are maybe not really relevant and need not be supported. Write-in votes are also revealing in the sense that the write-in candidates probably get relatively few votes each.) Write-ins are considered essential to democracy here, bypassing the nomination process. An alternative method is to require potential additional candidates to collect a list of e.g. 1000 supporters before the election and thereby become regular candidates. In good voting methods/processes it should be and is quite hard to prove to others how you voted yourself. It has always been relatively easy. To prevent it entirely, you have to outlaw write-ins, you have to prevent all physical contact between the voter and the ballot, and you still can't avoid the possibility of special voting patterns, which will get easier to pull off with Range. Even IRV makes it easier. I propose simple ballots and separate ballots for each race in addition to what you said. Of course cameras and video equipment should be banned in the voting location. It is not possible to guarantee 100% that such recording will not take place but one should try. I disagree. And nobody searched me for my cell phone when I last voted. No need to remove cell phones, just to make it clear to all that taking pictures is forbidden (maybe even punishable if extreme measures are needed). Combining multiple elections in one ballot is a risk. Sure. But it is absolutely the norm. In fact, I've never voted in a public election where there were not many races on the single ballot. Bad design. I have never voted in an election with several races on one sheet. (Usually there has been only one race per election, but when there have been more the ballots have been separate.) The risk of allowing access to the ballots to everyone is much riskier than having multiple vote counters (maybe not local people) each counting a small portion of the votes. You say so. What is the evidence? No evidence, just the understanding that allowing the ballots to be inspected by whoever has interest, with sufficient time to do careful analysis and with whatever techniques may reveal something of the identity of the voters of the ballots. There is a lost performative in the last comment from Juho. In having multiple vote counters *Who* is going to have multiple vote counters? The society. Sorry for my non-native English. The fact is that this is what I'm suggesting: multiple vote counters! Ballot imaging would put the public in the position of being an election observer, to a degree. The step of initial vote counting (and possibly imaging) may be even more critical point to safeguard. By the way, ever try to get correlated election data? Did people who voted for Bush vote against the school bonds? That kind of data has plenty of legitimate use. And you can't get it now, unless you are willing to spend prohibitive amounts of money to get it Sounds a bit dangerous from privacy point of view. The next step could be to include the voter's profession, age etc. Better be careful with these. Juho ___ Copy addresses and emails from any email account to Yahoo! Mail - quick, easy and free. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/trueswitch2.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] danger of coercion (Re: First U.S. Scientific Election Audit...)
On May 16, 2007, at 18:26 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 03:32 PM 5/15/2007, Juho wrote: I think some very basic methods eliminate the possibility of coercion quite well (e.g. ballots with only few options, no write-ins, marked ballots rejected, voting only manually, at places well controlled by representatives of multiple interest groups, only one person allowed in the voting booth and at the ballot box at one time, and many enough voters per voting location). Yes, there are ways to *reduce* the possibility of a coercer verifying that the victim complied. None are guaranteed to work. What would be the most likely scenario where the coerced person could not avoid being coerced? I'm assuming that a typical coercer would not be a member in the team that counts the votes and he/she would not have open access to the ballots. I also assume that vote counters do not necessarily count all the ballots but maybe just a relatively small part of them (and if really needed, we could use counters coming from another voting district), and that they do not have any special equipment nor much time to study the votes one by one. And I expect the votes to be packed and sealed after they have been counted. If the voter can handle the ballot at all, then it is possible that it could be marked in a way likely to escape notice. Small pinpricks have been used, apparently. Fingerprints can be used! And restricting access to ballots may seem to work, but, as I pointed out, who watches the watchers? The ballots are in the custody of someone, typically the government. If you don't trust the government, if the coercion is coming from an incumbent, what are you going to do? You are going to have to rely upon the fact that keeping that incumbent in power through coercion depends on the fact that to be effective, the coercion would *usually* have to be widespread. And people tend to dislike being coerced you will be alienating increasing numbers of people, and, if the government is at all functional, and coercion is illegal, the arrest and prosecution of those who attempt to coerce is the best remedy. Once again, coercion does not seem to be a problem in the U.S. I've never heard of it in recent times! But voter fraud is not uncommon -- the registration and voting of people not legally qualified, or the mysterious voting of people who have died -- and, perhaps even more common and more serious, election fraud, where ballots are altered, or, more frequently, casting ballots by lawful voters is impeded selectively, and properly cast ballots are not counted correctly. (Or voting machines mysteriously change votes. Selectively. It is bad enough when it happens at all, but when it somehow seems to preferentially affect voters of one political stripe, we certainly have grounds to suspect criminal activity. It's fairly simple: just cause malfunctions to machines in precincts loyal to the party whose votes you wish to damage. Difficult to prove. It is this counting fraud that I am seeking to interdict. The methods I recommended for coercion prevention would be quite good for this purpose too. I think most stable democracies do not have any meaningful problems with fraud in vote counting. This should not be impossible to achieve if one just wants it. We could eliminate that as a source of election inaccuracy. Not reduce it, *eliminate* it. Now, ballots can be ambiguous, for various reasons. There will always be some room for disagreement, due to the nature of the ballots themselves and how people use them. But such ballots are actually fairly uncommon, under most conditions. Excepting massive voting method changes introduced without, duh, TESTING them with a sample of voters! They are not ordinarily enough to turn elections. Using paper ballots, marked by hand, eliminates the whole access to voting machines problem. Devices can easily be provided that will print a ballot for people who need that kind of assistance. There is absolutely no good reason why people should not be able to show up at their precinct and vote quickly and easily. Steve Unger is absolutely correct: hand-marked paper ballots are the way to go. I think it is fine to make them scannable, but it is *not* necessary. In any case, and I must apologize to Ms. Dopp, the use of advanced, purchased voting technology is a serious mistake, from many points of view. It should not be necessary to purchase *any* equipment. The cost of counting ballots by hand is actually quite low, compared to the cost of purchasing relatively expensive, special purpose equipment which is going to be used once a year. And once you buy that equipment and set up the system to require it, you then will have problems with broken machines and frustrated voters who can't get access. If you must machine count, then optical scan equipment need
Re: [EM] danger of coercion (Re: First U.S. Scientific Election Audit...)
On May 15, 2007, at 18:11 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: eliminating all possibility of a coercer knowing that the victim has complied is impossible. I think some very basic methods eliminate the possibility of coercion quite well (e.g. ballots with only few options, no write-ins, marked ballots rejected, voting only manually, at places well controlled by representatives of multiple interest groups, only one person allowed in the voting booth and at the ballot box at one time, and many enough voters per voting location). Discarding marked ballots is dangerous because it creates a ready method for those bent on election fraud to invalidate ballots. In my previous mail I recommended representatives of all political groupings to be present when the votes are counted. If there are fraudsters with full uncontrolled access to the ballots they could do many tricks like replace some ballots with new ones. a coercer, under present law, can already arrange to view ballots directly. I guess this refers to the U.S law. This of course (in addition to providing some openness) introduces also some privacy and coercion related problems. Juho ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] danger of coercion (Re: First U.S. Scientific Election Audit...)
On May 14, 2007, at 13:26 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Juho wrote: (2) Direct democracy generally requires open voting. Coercion seems to be rare; Open voting opens a door to coercion. A violent husband of might easily tell his wife how to vote. Open votes also are likely to lead to less votes to candidates that represent minorities and/or values that the voter does not want to reveal publicly. This could apply to minorities (political, ethnic, sexual, religious) or any deviation from the family, village, working place or country tradition and favoured values. David Friedman has posted on his blog that when he lectures, one of the issues he has is determining if the students actually understand what he has just said. The problem is that if he asks Did everyone understand that?, nobody will raise their hand as they don't want to be seen as the one who doesn't understand. His proposed solution is that each student would be given a yes/no button. They can then answer questions using the button. This would not achieve perfect privacy, but it would likely greatly increase the accuracy of the result. He could then repeat any section of the lecture that doesn't hit a threshold. Yes, good example of a situation where privacy pays off. I have spent many hours in meetings and sometimes wondered also if other real-time feedback like I agree, proceed a bit faster etc. could have been useful. Something similar could be used in a town meeting type setting. OTOH, it might break the consensus building effect of the town meeting. If there is no penalty in acting to prevent consensus, then it is less likely to occur. One could also combine discussions and anonymous feedback so that even though extensive discussions, lobbying, propaganda, argumentation, questions and negotiations would take place the results of those discussions could be seen in the outcome of the private feedback/polls/votes. Juho Raphfrk Interesting site what if anyone could modify the laws www.wikocracy.com Check Out the new free AIM(R) Mail -- 2 GB of storage and industry- leading spam and email virus protection. 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] danger of coercion (Re: First U.S. Scientific Election Audit...)
On May 14, 2007, at 5:22 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: A simple and quite effective rule is to simply reject all votes that have additional markings. And any write-in candidate involves extraneous marks. Yes, the simplicity of ballots and the definition what markings are allowed are flexible concepts. Balance needed. The problem of miscounted ballots is very real. Incumbents, in general, may have access to the ballots (not necessarily legally, but in practice). Fraud and corruption thrive in secrecy. I'd recommend to consider calling the police (or some milder corrective steps), and to arrange the counting process so that representatives of all relevant parties are present. (I think a corrupt society and election process can be handled separately from the voter privacy related questions.) And, something seems to be forgotten here. Elections are about aggregating votes. Rarely do a few votes matter. Well, this matters at least to the individuals (and the mentality may escalate to wider circles too). An example of impact to bigger groups: Females are a majority out of which considerable part could feel the pressure of their husbands. The opinions of the females could be considerably different than those of the males, so losing part of the female votes could influence the end result. I think that standing the whole system on its head to avoid a very theoretical and unlikely scenario is nuts. I think privacy in elections is a long standing healthy principle. No need to make radical changes. And if need arises, one can seek balance between different needs. Open votes also are likely to lead to less votes to candidates that represent minorities and/or values that the voter does not want to reveal publicly. This could apply to minorities (political, ethnic, sexual, religious) or any deviation from the family, village, working place or country tradition and favoured values. Let me point out that in such an environment -- i.e., a minority position is being hidden -- that minority position is unlikely to win elections. Maybe in some two-party single-winner elections. it has not been proposed that elections be public, only that ballots be public. I took your term open voting to include also fully open processes and replied according to that assumption. (Also your Town Meeting example seemed to have such open processes. I also understood that in the direct democracy power transfers privacy of the voters could be limited.) In the situation described, a voter who feared that a vote would be considered deviant simply would not make any marks to identify the ballot. Why would he or she do this? In the case of coercion the cost could be e.g. one black eye. (And if the voting is public there's no need to even mark the ballot.) But, in any case, this is moot. We are not proposing public voting, only that public voting does exist and does not seem to have the level of problem that is being asserted. What does word we refer to? Therefore secret ballots are a good main rule (exceptions allowed but justification needed). Secret ballot can be appropriate for elections; but I would reverse what was said here. Secret ballot, in a mature system, would be the exception, not the rule. The emergence of that level of society might take time. I think for the coming years secrecy might still be the best main rule in normal public elections. It's quite difficult to corrupt direct democracy. Once the transfers of power happen secretly, it becomes easier to corrupt. These words seem to indicate that in direct democracy we would need to seek some balance between privacy and risk of corruption. Juho ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
% - 10 C 10 B 0 A This is a very basic example on how the strategic voting style might emerge. Once it emerges (and people vote in Approval style by default), also the first example could quite easily lead to the described end result. Once Approval style voting becomes common it may be difficult to make the voters use again the full range of values (that are available in Range). In summary, all methods have some problems. One needs to estimate which problems are lesser and which worse. Indeed. The example given shows, however, that Range -- at least in this example -- reduces to Approval if all voters exaggerate their ratings. Which is actually a decent outcome. Approval is quite decent. Therefore also Range may be too. Some remaining prolems are that 1) use of strategy replaces the sincere voting style of (sincere) Range with more strategic voting style, 2) the voters need to guess who the front runners and to take risks, and that 3) not all voters will learn the strategies and therefore insincere/strategic voters will to some extent be rewarded. (These points should be taken into account also when comparing the performance of Range and Approval.) (I note that it is up to the definition of the method which votes are considered sincere and which insincere. Also strategic votes could be called sincere. I hope you can read the description above in the correct spirit. Terms could be also different. If Range was explained in a close to Approval style, a larger percentage of voters would probably be able to apply the strategies in the most efficient way.) Again, I have certainly not proven this, but this is my impression and intuition. While I suspect that scenarios can be manufactured which would show strategic (in Range, this only means exaggerated) voting as converting a Range win into a Condorcet loser win, I doubt that these scenarios would be at all realistic, and thus unlikely to show up in randomly-generated voting patterns where the patterns are based on issue or approval space. (I.e., are relatively realistic.) Ok, the Condorcet compliance of Range is another case. My explanations didn't cover this yet (unless you take the original example as one where Condorcet winner is changed to someone else). This Condorccet compliance evaluation could maybe mean checking how use of Range changes the (quite well known) difference between Approval and Condorcet. (One interesting issue in all comparisons is to check if voters are able to state their sincere opinion or if they better vote some other (strategic) way.) The explanations of IRV that purport to make it seem batter than Condorcet seem to me to be thoroughly specious, essentially manufactured by people who have already decided to back IRV for reasons other than the superiority of the method. To me one possible explanation behind the strong support of IRV in U.S. is that is is a compromise that allows the support to minor candidates to be expressed but still keeps the probability of major candidates winning high. Core support is a totally bogus argument. The best explanations I have found (again for U.S.) is that in the presidential elections the election is not only about one person but that person is expected to replace half of Washington with new people. In some sense bigger core support helps in this duty. But on the other hand surely also a competent independent candidate can collect a good set of people around him/her. Of course, if the rest of the system is two-party based (e.g. legislative body) then the president will not get much support on that side (no core support there???). These arguments are country and use case specific and do not say much about which methods are good in general or in all/ typical/most environments. Range *also* allows the majority to rule. Ok, if the voters go use the Approval strategies. Juho ___ To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
Ok, your example demonstrates a case where Condorcet elects someone who is not liked very much (but majority would change e.g. the Democrat candidate to PW if they were allowed to do that). I note that the name Professional Wrestler is not very natural name in the example since people that are called PWs are generally considered not to be good politicians. Therefore PWs would probably be ranked more often at the last position (e.g. 10 D 2 R 0 PW). So, the end result is not as bad as it seems. The PW must be a very good PW. (Same with OMRLP.) As you said, Condorcet and IRV don't see the ratings. I give another example of IRV. C=Centrist, ER=ExtremeRight, EL=ExtremeLeft. (I use the slightly exaggerating word extremist (although I just complained about use of PW above) to make it clear that there is no exact match to the main parties of current two-party systems.) 34% - 10 ER 8 C 0 EL 34% - 10 EL 8 C 0 ER 32% - 10 C 5 EL 0 ER IRV first drops C and then elects EL. The centrist candidate would have been a quite good end result, also from sincere ratings point of view. One more example on Range (that takes the ratings into account but is vulnerable to some strategies). The example is as above but the numbers are a bit different to make it clear who the font runners are. Sincere opinions: 40% - 10 ER 8 C 0 EL 40% - 10 EL 8 C 0 ER 20% - 10 C 5 EL 0 ER Actual ballots when voters exaggerate their votes and apply Approval style strategy after observing that EL and ER are the major candidates / front runners (and after assuming that the final decision will be between these two): 40% - 10 ER 0 C 0 EL 40% - 10 EL 0 C 0 ER 20% - 10 C 10 EL 0 ER Range picks EL as the winner. The sincere opinions would have given C the best score but strategies changed the situation. In summary, all methods have some problems. One needs to estimate which problems are lesser and which worse. Use of ratings would maybe be nice, but in competitive elections (where giving sincere ratings means losing power) methods like Condorcet seem to perform better. Condorcet allows the majority to rule and make decisions where the sum of utilities is actually smaller that what electing the proposal of the minority would have given. Out of the ranking based methods Condorcet seems to me to perform better than IRV. (But if you need IRV to make the case easy to explain, that is maybe not a catastrophic move. :-) Juho On Apr 25, 2007, at 3:32 , Tim Hull wrote: I know the Condorcet winner is preferred to every other candidate - however, I'm in particular assuming ballots like this: 48% - 10 D 2 PW 0 R 47% - 10 R 2 PW 0 D 5% - 10 PW 5 D 0 R (the numbers being the sincere range rating for the candidate) Under Condorcet, PW would win despite the fact that he or she is barely liked by anyone. Under range and IRV, D would win. I know that Condorcet and IRV don't use ratings, but you need to take into account the fact that #2 is not always a strong #2 or is some eccentric joke candidate. For instance, imagine a similar election in the UK with Labour, the Conservatives, and the Official Monster Raving Loony Party (assume no Liberal Democrat ran)... Would an OMRLP MP really be a quality result? It may be entertaining, though... On 4/24/07, Juho [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Apr 25, 2007, at 0:40 , Tim Hull wrote: The partyless method is seen as a plus - our current parties as somewhat diverse in their composition, and people generally don't like the vote counts for candidate and party when you can have wildly diverging ideologies on the same ticket. It also encourages party discipline and voting in bloc at the Assembly level, something no one likes the idea of... As far as Condorcet for single-winner, it's yet another complex explanation and has the issue of failing later-no-harm, which I feel would cause massive amounts of strategic and bullet voting, no matter how low the real risk of LNH failure. That's called uneducated and mistaken voters ;-). The cases where there would be some real reason to vote that way are extremely rare. Note that also IRV is not free of strategic voting related problems. I don't think Condorcet performs poorly here. (Negative propaganda can be made though on any method.) It also can elect centrists with very weak support along the lines of my pro wrestler example (assuming that he'd get a 2 or 1 our of 10 in Range). Note that a Condorcet winner, even if coming from a small party, is a candidate that majority of voters would prefer in comparison to any other candidate. I'd say that is strong support, although the number of first place rankings in the ballots may not be as high as with some other candidates. Juho Also, dominance by two major parties would be a significant improvement over the status quo - as of now we have dominance by *1* major party. On 4/24/07, Juho [EMAIL
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
I'm not sure if I understood all of this correctly, but my thoughts go in the direction that democracy may be a representative democracy where voters need not be directly involved with all topics and all decisions. It s enough if the voters are able to tell which politicians or parties (or why not proxies) seem acceptable to them. Juho On Apr 25, 2007, at 6:44 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 03:56 PM 4/24/2007, Juho wrote: On Apr 24, 2007, at 1:51 , Howard Swerdfeger wrote: 4) The ultimate form of democracy is one that * maximizes voter knowledge of issues * seeks to Involve the voters at every stage of decision making process (direction, Discussion/deliberation, Vote) Agreed. These are some very key principles that make a democratic system work well. Actually, while this is a common opinion, it is utterly impossible on a large scale. It doesn't even work that way in fairly small direct democracies. To me, the key element in democracy is consent. Ideally, informed consent, but that isn't always possible. Think about it. I'm tired of repeating this stuff over and over, besides, it's late and I have jury duty tomorrow. Somebody else can explain it, if necessary. ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
On Apr 25, 2007, at 7:48 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 06:41 PM 4/24/2007, Juho wrote: The reason why I talked about learning is that Range is often described so that the first impression voters will get is that they should put their sincere ratings on the ballot (and they would not be aware of how to vote with full strength). what ballot instructions have you read that so instructed voters? I have never seen any official instructions. I checked wiki that talked about rating each candidate. I'd expect that not to mean typically max and min values but some more even spread of values. First of all, we think that it will be common knowledge that if you don't vote the extremes for at least one candidate on either side, you are casting a weak vote. In most cases any use of intermediate values makes the vote weaker than it could be. That is correct. You vote the extremes where you have a strong preference, you vote in the middle when you don't. And this also happens to be necessary where you face opposing risks. Range *never* requires you to vote strategically in the sense of reversing preferences. Nobody is recommending that truly weak votes be cast. (But some people may want to cast them anyway, and they should be able to. Consider it a partial abstention, and many people abstain from this or that race now.) That's ok. Weak votes and abstention can be options for the voters. But they are not options in ranked systems. Abstention and equal rankings (typically) are. (Btw, in October 2006 I wrote on this list on Ranked Preferences that is a ranking based method that supports also different preference strengths.) If A was the favorite, why in the world would the voter vote A=5 in the first place? The voter didn't find him/her excellent but just reasonably good. Hey, I'd be happy with that! I wish! Instead, we get truly awful. We get a uniter not a divider, who, it turns out, means by unite, you all do it my way or you are a traitor. With fully sincere (utility based) ratings maybe no candidate gets the max or min score. That's correct if we are talking about pure utility. Indeed, there is no max or min score. But Range really asks voters to rate candidates *relative* to each other, with Best being max rating and Worst being min. It really should be explained that way. We have sometimes suggested that Range Votes be normalized. That is, if a voter voted, in Range (0-10), 0, 3, 5, this would be normalized to 0, 6, 10. But I think it better to keep it simple. A ballot could actually say, instead of numbers, Best, Good, Acceptable, Not-Acceptable, Worst. Range 5. This description may easily direct voters to giving weak votes. Let's say there are five candidates (A1, A2, B1, B2, B3) out of which three have no chances to win (B1, B2, B3). The voter might vote B1=Best, A1=Good, A2=Acceptable, B2=Not-Acceptable, B3=Worst. Basically, those who object to Range on the basis that voters will be confused and mistakenly vote weak votes are assuming idiotic or at least inadequate ballot instructions. This is not to be confused with weak votes, meaning intermediate votes, which are another matter. These are votes where the voter has no strong preference, or, for a more sophisticated voter, is balancing opposing considerations: I'd like to see A defeat B, and B to defeat C. Range requires voters to weigh the relative merits, the preference strengths of these pairs. If the first consideration is more important than the second, then the rating of B will move closer to that of C, and if the second is more important, then the rating of B will move up toward A. There is really no alternative to this that makes sense. Either preference strength matters or it doesn't! If it matters, then it *must* follow that a weak preference will be expressed in a weak vote. What is continually asserted here is that voters with weak preferences will somehow decide to vote strategically. I assumed that voters with strong wish to win, or those that (strongly) want to counter the ones that vote with full power, would vote with full power (strategically). Yes. However, voting strongly *requires* you to vote weakly. Haven't you noticed that? What is a strong vote? Well, bullet voting is strong, it's been presented that way in this thread. Okay, three candidates, and you vote A=10, B=0, C=0. Strong vote? Actually this is a maximally *weak* vote in the B/C pairwise election. If you care seriously about that pair and you want to vote strongly regarding it, favoring B, you must vote A=10, B=10, C=0. But then you have cast a maximally weak vote in the A/B pairwise election. I would expect this voter to follow some Approval strategy. The optimal strategy depends on which candidates are expected to be the strongest candidates. If there are voters who are bullet voting
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
On Apr 24, 2007, at 1:51 , Howard Swerdfeger wrote: a) I guess I was thinking of Non-competitive as one where the winner is obvious long before the contest is held (boxing: Me vs Mike Tyson). and competitive as one where the winner is not known until the last possible moment (Running: Me Vs. You!). This use of the word correlates with the way I used it (but may also differ in many cases). b) accepting your definition for the purpose of this thread. Ok, my use of the term is not a stable definition in the area of election methods, so also different terminology may be used. 4) The ultimate form of democracy is one that * maximizes voter knowledge of issues * seeks to Involve the voters at every stage of decision making process (direction, Discussion/deliberation, Vote) Agreed. These are some very key principles that make a democratic system work well. * generates a laws and directions for society that is representative of the beliefs of all well knowledgeable voters. Yes, assuming that we try to make all voters knowledgeable (as in the first bullet) and don't deny the less knowledgeable ones the right and recommendation to vote as well. Many people in the last election who voted Conservative did not really want the conservative in power. They mainly wanted the ruling Liberals out of Power. and the only party with enough support to do that was the Conservatives. Same goes for the one before that election. Many people Plugged there nose and voted Liberal because they were afraid of the hidden agenda from the Religious Right in the Conservative Party. This sounds like the one dimensional (binary) spectrum of alternatives of a two-party system is not sufficient for the voters in this case. Multiple parties and/or ability to provide opinions in more than one dimension (traditionally often the left-right axis) would probably reduce the nose plugging effect. Juho P.S. One more comment on the older mails. The number of voters has an effect in the sense that the higher the number of voters is the more probable it is that one voter doesn't feel that he/she can trust all the other voters to be his/her friends but will vote against him/her (in a competitive way). This may increase the probability that this voter decides to vote strategically (since probably others do so too). In small groups people may thus trust that all members of it know the needs to all others and will take them into account in a fair way. In big groups others may be seen as strangers that one needs to defend against. ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] PR in student government
Some short observations: - It looked to me that the original proposal was planned for single- seat districts. Maybe the party level outcome would be decided fist and only then the individual approval votes within that party. - Small parties could now also win the seat. - There are also multi-winner Approval based methods (e.g. http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_approval_voting). Juho On Apr 24, 2007, at 1:50 , Gervase Lam wrote: Date: Tue, 17 Apr 2007 14:28:56 -0400 From: Howard Swerdfeger Subject: Re: [EM] PR in student government Voting Instructions: 1. You only have ONE vote. 2. Place an X in the box NEXT to your candidate of choice. 3. Your vote counts both for your candidate and your party. Party AParty B Party C Independent [ ]Candidate1 [ ]Candidate1 [ ]Candidate1 [ ]Candidate1 [ ]Candidate2 [ ]Candidate2 [X]Candidate2 [ ]Candidate3 [ ]Candidate3 [ ]Candidate3 --- Seats would be allocated proportionally by party. But the member of the party that gets each seat would be determined by the number of votes the received. One slight variation to this is to use Approval voting for both the voting of the party and candidate. That is, a voter can approve as many parties as the voter wishes and as many candidates as wished. Alternatively, the Approval and Plurality voting could be mixed (i.e. Plurality voting for parties and Approval voting for the candidates or vice versa). Also (for either Plurality or Approval) one could allow voting of candidates on lists that a voter did not vote for. But may be disallowing this would be better. This type of thing was discussed on this list before: http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods- electorama.com/2004-March/012455.html http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods- electorama.com/2004-March/012503.html Thanks, Gervase. election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ Copy addresses and emails from any email account to Yahoo! Mail - quick, easy and free. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/trueswitch2.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
Good description. In addition to this of course also the topics to be decided have an impact. Voting on issues that have major impact on the individual voter's life easily make him/her vote in a way that guarantees an acceptable outcome. Polls, entertainment, favourite colours and other small things don't force voters to push their viewpoints through. Juho On Apr 24, 2007, at 6:01 , Michael Poole wrote: Abd ul-Rahman Lomax writes: At 05:53 PM 4/23/2007, Juho wrote: Political elections are typically competitive. Polls are typically less competitive. Voting on which family size Pizza (of several good ones) to buy for the family today may well be a quite non- competitive election. That's true. And one might ask why. Certainly it's understandable in a family. But it is also understandable in any functional neighborhood or community organization. Why does this non-competitiveness break down, and under what conditions? It generally breaks down when a voter no longer has a strong enough personal connection to a large enough fraction of the others involved. That threshold varies from person to person, and probably from time to time and from subject to subject. The same kind of breakdown happens in many online interactions: it is easy for a person to be extremely rude to someone whom he has never met, especially if the audience does not contain many people whose opinions of him are important to him. A similar breakdown is well-documented in mob behavior, where the actions of an individual may be quite different when he is anonymous than when he is known or memorable to the victims of his behavior. There will always be some people whose behavior is consistently honest, repulsive, or whatever else, but a large majority of people are swayed by peer pressure -- even the potential or imaginary kinds. Michael Poole ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
On Apr 24, 2007, at 6:48 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 06:37 PM 4/23/2007, Juho wrote: Another explanation to the emergence of Approval style strategic voting is that an individual voter might learn that, in a case where there are only two candidates that have chances of winning the election, voting A=9, B=0 instead of A=5, B=4 makes his/her vote 9 times stronger. A voter might learn this? Why didn't the voter know this from the start. *Of course* voting the extremes is a strong vote. The question is why you'd cast a strong vote if your preferences are weak. Why? Because you want to win? Many voters want that. The reason why I talked about learning is that Range is often described so that the first impression voters will get is that they should put their sincere ratings on the ballot (and they would not be aware of how to vote with full strength). First of all, we think that it will be common knowledge that if you don't vote the extremes for at least one candidate on either side, you are casting a weak vote. In most cases any use of intermediate values makes the vote weaker than it could be. Nobody is recommending that truly weak votes be cast. (But some people may want to cast them anyway, and they should be able to. Consider it a partial abstention, and many people abstain from this or that race now.) That's ok. Weak votes and abstention can be options for the voters. If A was the favorite, why in the world would the voter vote A=5 in the first place? The voter didn't find him/her excellent but just reasonably good. With fully sincere (utility based) ratings maybe no candidate gets the max or min score. What is continually asserted here is that voters with weak preferences will somehow decide to vote strategically. I assumed that voters with strong wish to win, or those that (strongly) want to counter the ones that vote with full power, would vote with full power (strategically). This behaviour may make also the originally weak preference more radical. Voters that intentionally want to cast a weak vote (and that are ok with others using strong votes) would not be affected. Look, if there is an election, and I sincerely rank A as 9 and B as 8 (and other candidates lower than that, let's say zero) and B wins, I'm happy! That's an excellent outcome! The danger comes in quite the opposite direction from what Juho proposes. Suppose I rate B as 8 and C wins, with B being the runner-up. Close runner- up. I might regret rating B at 8. I believe this voting pattern os in line with the Approval style strategic voting that I discussed. If you vote Approval style, you fail to express your true appreciation of the candidates, and this can backfire. Yes, but typically/statistically Approval strategy improves the outcome. It is just as reasonable to consider that Range elections will move *away* from Approval-style as that they will move toward it. A simple example of this would be nice. I expect that they will start out, actually, as close to Approval for many voters. Smith thinks differently, and I really don't know which of us is right. He's got reasons to think his way. We might both be right. I.e., many voters, maybe most, will vote Approval style, and it will be bullet voting. But there will be quite a few, from the start, who do something different. I think much depends on the media and other discussions before the elections. I say that we are not going to really know until we see real elections using Range. The alleged devolution to Approval is not a serious harm. It would only mean that some ballot space and a counting effort had been wasted. Yes, Range could be roughly as good as Approval (with some wasted effort, and ability to cast weak votes). The biggest hiccups might come in the form of people realizing that their vote was weak although they didn't understand that when they voted, or if some candidate won as a result of efficient use of strategic voting. Rating the least preferred candidate at 0 reduces the probability of that candidate getting elected (and doesn't carry any risks with it). But from the conditions of the problem, there was no risk of that. No, I don't buy it. (By the way, none of us involved with Range would recommend giving the least preferred candidate any other vote than the minimum. I assumed that PW was being given a 1 because voters somewhat liked him, there were *worse* candidates involved. There were no worse candidates involved. The voter liked PW somewhat. But since PW was the least liked candidate and the voter wanted to avoid electing him, giving him 0 was a perfect solution. (I thus used sincere utility based ratings instead of normalized ones.) (If the probability of PW getting elected is strictly 0%, then any rating would be equally good.) In the two-party environment, Range strategy, like
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
On Apr 25, 2007, at 0:40 , Tim Hull wrote: The partyless method is seen as a plus - our current parties as somewhat diverse in their composition, and people generally don't like the vote counts for candidate and party when you can have wildly diverging ideologies on the same ticket. It also encourages party discipline and voting in bloc at the Assembly level, something no one likes the idea of... As far as Condorcet for single-winner, it's yet another complex explanation and has the issue of failing later-no-harm, which I feel would cause massive amounts of strategic and bullet voting, no matter how low the real risk of LNH failure. That's called uneducated and mistaken voters ;-). The cases where there would be some real reason to vote that way are extremely rare. Note that also IRV is not free of strategic voting related problems. I don't think Condorcet performs poorly here. (Negative propaganda can be made though on any method.) It also can elect centrists with very weak support along the lines of my pro wrestler example (assuming that he'd get a 2 or 1 our of 10 in Range). Note that a Condorcet winner, even if coming from a small party, is a candidate that majority of voters would prefer in comparison to any other candidate. I'd say that is strong support, although the number of first place rankings in the ballots may not be as high as with some other candidates. Juho Also, dominance by two major parties would be a significant improvement over the status quo - as of now we have dominance by *1* major party. On 4/24/07, Juho [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Apr 24, 2007, at 6:26 , Tim Hull wrote: In this case, the only *tested* method which is fully candidate based (i.e. no party lists, open or closed) - and does not use anything other than votes cast for candidates to determine winners - is STV. (There are also other interesting methods like http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_approval_voting and http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPO-STV. STV is however more established and closer to real life, so I don't recommend any more complex or experimental systems to be promoted in your case.) (I have also written about MultiGroup that is a method that could, despite of seeing candidates as members of various groupings, be fully based on individual candidate decisions on what kind of groupings/ideologies the want to promote and benefit of ( i.e. not party lists but candidate lists of groups he/she likes). This one is also experimental, so not for you.) In the case of voting, it seems like a good idea for the method of voting to be consistent for everyone. Hence, it only seems logical to use IRV. Doing anything else would only make the explanation of how voting works twice as long, and make said effort more likely to fail. (You didn't say if you want the method to be consisted to the voters or also to the ones who will decide what method will be taken into use. If it is enough to provide a consistent voting experience to the votes, any ranked ballot based method would do. But I guess you refer also to the latter case.) Until these is a good, *proven* single-winner/multi-winner combination that works well, I don't see this type of situation changing. (Does the combination mean combination of multi-seat and single- seat districts (within a multi-winner election) or combination of government and chairman elections? I guess the latter is the case. Also other combinations would work technically, but maybe would be more difficult to explain to the decision makers (= not work well).) In my push to implement a better voting system than our truncated Borda/FPTP combo, I see IRV and STV as the best chance to actually make a change. I don't see myself trying to push two separate and complicated systems (one alone is hard enough), or trying to sell a system that has not been widely used anywhere. Ok, you know best what is possible and what not. Note however that with IRV you'll choose a direction where the major parties will be favoured (centrist compromise candidates from smaller parties probably won't be elected). Maybe that is ok in the environment in question. In short - I would say that the lack of any good, tested multi- winner system with a better-than-IRV single-winner version is part of why IRV is so popular... (I guess this you mean that this is the reason why IRV is so popular to you in your current case (not in general).) My summary of the STV-IRV combination is that - IRV favours big parties (Condorcet would not, and also it would be ranked ballot based) - explaining STV and IRV to the decision makers at one go is a bonus - you have decided to use a partyless method, which is ok, but I'm still wondering if the existing major groupings will agree with this - STV-IRV would surely be a significant improvement to your current voting practices Juho
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
On Apr 23, 2007, at 17:40 , Howard Swerdfeger wrote: Range is expressive and it is able to treat these two different types of Pro Wrestlers differently. Its problem is that it in practice easily becomes Approval (only min and max values used) in competitive elections. does it? I have seen arguments stating that a knowledgeable voter would alter there preferences in this manner. But I am unsure if this would happen in the reality of a large scale (10^5 voters) election. Let's say that in the U.S. presidential elections roughly 48% of the voters vote D=9, R=7, PW=1 and roughly 48% vote R=9, D=7, PW=1. Either D or R wins. In the next elections the Democrats notice the possibility of strategic voting and advice their supporters to vote D=9, R=0, PW=0. In these elections Democrats win. In the third elections Republicans have learned a lesson and now recommend their voters to vote R=9, D=0, PW=0. Now the election is in balance again, but the method has in practice reduced to Approval (actually Plurality in this example). This strategy doesn't require the voters be rocket scientists. Probably the strategies would not spread as described above. Maybe there just would be discussions between voters and in the media and all parties would be impacted in roughly same speed. In competitive elections it is quite possible that majority of voters would not stay sincere but would vote in Approval style. Once strategic voting becomes wide enough to be meaningful to the end result, voting sincerely could be commonly seen as donating the victory to the strategists. A key property of this evolution process is that those parties and individuals that are strategic will have more voting power than others (this breaks the possible balance of having same percentage of strategic voters in each party). I think the size of the election doesn't influence much on if voters become strategic. I think it is more like a balance of media / yellow press interest, strength of rumours, overall requirement of good moral in the society, and (maybe most importantly) the level of competitiveness in the elections in question. Juho ___ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
On Apr 23, 2007, at 21:59 , Howard Swerdfeger wrote: In America there is a culture of voting for one of the duopoly because in voting for anybody else there is a perceived (and actual) lack of effectiveness. Yes. In a very similar way voters might learn to think that not using full max and min values in Range would be lack of effectiveness. However in Many other Countries, Canada, France, GermanyVotes are given to many different parties in large numbers. I believe that this is because there is often actual/perceived (opposition parties, 2nd round) reward for voting the 3rd or 4th party. In many voting systems also small parties may get representatives. The #1 reason behind emergence of a two-party system is maybe the use of single seat districts. smaller number of voters I think the same logic is mostly there. Let's arrange some two voter elections. First we will vote on if I shall give you $1000 (A) or if you shall give me $1000 (B). I will vote A=0, B=9. I expect you to vote A=9, B=0. It is a tie and we will decide by flipping a coin. This election was very competitive since both of us felt strongly that donating that amount of money for no good reason would be terrible. Second vote. Which fruits are better, Apples or Oranges. I might vote something like A=7, O=9. You might vote A=5, O=7. Apples win, but I'm ok with the result since I did not feel competitive. This was more like a poll (that could be defined to be a non- competitive vote). I am mainly of the opinion that very large elections should not be conducted in a single winner method if there is any other possible way. Do you refer to multi-winner elections with single-seat districts? This would mean that some single-winner method will be used in each district. For me this is a question on if a two-party system is ok or if multi-party system (and maybe PR) should be considered better. (maybe most importantly) the level of competitiveness in the elections in question. If by competitiveness you mean 2 candidates close in popularity leading everybody else. Maybe my comments above already made my use of term competitive clear. I used it to refer to situations where voters feel strongly that their side should win and they typically assume that both others and themselves will use all the allowed voting power they are allowed to achieve that result. Term non-competitive would refer to situations where voters don't care that much if their viewpoint will win but are happy to accept whatever solution the combined opinion of all the voters will point out. Political elections are typically competitive. Polls are typically less competitive. Voting on which family size Pizza (of several good ones) to buy for the family today may well be a quite non-competitive election. Juho ___ To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
On Apr 23, 2007, at 22:34 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 02:14 PM 4/23/2007, Juho wrote: Let's say that in the U.S. presidential elections roughly 48% of the voters vote D=9, R=7, PW=1 and roughly 48% vote R=9, D=7, PW=1. Either D or R wins. The premise is utterly insane and, quite simply, not reasonable. Range is difficult to analyze through the simplistic this block voted this way kind of analysis we are accustomed to using for election methods. Ok, this example was not intended to describe a real life situation but just to demonstrate theoretically how a Range based system might change in time. In the real world, there is a set of voters who are dedicated party supporters, and then there are other voters, perhaps the majority, who aren't so nailed to a party. A minority, perhaps, would vote as described. And, in fact, they are much more likely, I'd suggest, to rate a third party candidate higher. Another explanation to the emergence of Approval style strategic voting is that an individual voter might learn that, in a case where there are only two candidates that have chances of winning the election, voting A=9, B=0 instead of A=5, B=4 makes his/her vote 9 times stronger. Similarly he/she could learn (maybe from experts) that in general voting in Approval style (as defined in the well known Approval strategies) in elections where there are several potential winners typically gives him/her the strongest voting power. I used this style of explanation since this explanation does not talk about parties, or voters belonging to them, or about the candidate set-up, but only about the strength of the vote of the individual voter. Further, note that the PW candidate now gets zero from this group. That's really not much different from the vote before. But it is totally unnecessary. Why would these voters suddenly drop their (small) support for the candidate with no chance to win? Rating the least preferred candidate at 0 reduces the probability of that candidate getting elected (and doesn't carry any risks with it). If you are going to propose that Range will *reduce* to Approval, you will have to use reasonably likely scenarios. I think the vote strength argument that I presented above is quite generic and applies in all typical elections - assuming that we talk about competitive elections where the voter wants to do his/her best to make his/her favourite alternative win. The fact is that if even the majority of voters bullet-vote, it has not reduced to Approval. I expected the voters to vote in Approval style (not to bullet-vote, although in this particular example the best Approval strategy for the mentioned voters was to bullet-vote). spoiler effect (Approval and Range are less vulnerable to the spoiler effect than plurality.) And if it *does*, under some difficult-to-anticipate circumstance, reduce to Approval, that isn't a bad outcome! Approval is not very bad. There are different ways of describing Range to the voters. I think a description that advices voters to indicate their sincere utility values of the candidates in the ballot is not a good description since that makes those voters that vote strategically (Approval style) and not as told more powerful than those that vote as told. Defining Range as like Approval but with option to give only weaker fractional preferences would be more fair. I have also suggested that if the analysis of Range ballots shows divergence between the Range winner and a Condorcet winner, a runoff be held between the two. Some, seeing this, imagine that the outcome of the runoff would be that the Condorcet winner would prevail. If true, that's fine with me. However, it is much more likely to occur that the voting public would take into account how everyone else voted, and *might* vote to, instead, elect the Range winner. After all, that is the winner who, the poll indicated, would maximize voter satisfaction. How important is that to *you*? Let's assume that a Condorcet winner exists. In this case this method could be said to be a method where the voters are given a second chance to think again if the Range winner could be seen as a good compromise even though the majority could easily vote as in the first round and elect the Condorcet winner. I'm not sure this method would be a very practical method in real life large elections but in principle the idea of recommending the Range winner to the voters is a positive idea. Some strategies where people would try to influence who the Range winner will be could take place (i.e. the Range winner of the second round would not be the sincere range winner). Juho ___ Now you can scan emails quickly with a reading pane. Get the new Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
On Apr 22, 2007, at 6:44 , Tim Hull wrote: Anyway, as this does require a 2/3 vote of the Assembly, I face quite a battle. Good luck! Maybe your positive efforts will be rewarded. Also, they are skeptical of any system that reduces student control over the result (such as party list Please make a clear difference between open and closed list based methods. They are quite different with respect to student power. (There are also enhancements to open lists.) Given the fact that I'm going to face an uphill battle - and will need to cite examples that show that my new system has benefits - what would be the best approach? There are of course tens of approaches here. I just note two that could be used in proving the benefits. If the students are conservative, use some real life examples of well known, well working and tested methods. If the students are radical, add some flavour of latest innovations, maybe still untested, but good so they will get interested. I like the idea of reweighted range voting, but it hasn't been implemented anywhere of significance. Compare also with Proportional Approval Voting (see Wikipedia). These methods are interesting but not problem free. For single-winner, despite its flaws it seems like instant-runoff voting is the best bet, as it is the same as STV with one winner and is one again a widely used system. IRV is not all bad, but note that STV with multiple winners avoids some of the problems of the single winner version. IRV may be liked by large parties (that you seem to have in your set-up) since it to some extent favours them. Range voting once again seems like a good idea, but also has the major drawback (at least as far as supporting arguments) of not being used in a real election of any significance. Compare to Approval voting. In a competitive environment Range may become Approval in practice (if all give only min and max votes to the candidates). I don't even want to THINK about Condorcet, due to the fact that a random unknown candidate can easily win in a race with two polarized candidates. Not even think? This sounds like you have received a heavy dose of anti-Condorcet influence somewhere :-). Condorcet has its well known and studied problems but despite of these it is considered by numerous experts to be the best family of single winner methods (in competitive environments). In almost all set-ups Condorcet is likely to be quite problem free. Juho ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] election-methods Digest, Vol 34, Issue 22
On Apr 22, 2007, at 7:37 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Some voters may trust trust the candidates, some not. Both OK. The new method may be so good that it makes the candidates/ representatives less corrupt than before. But there is also the risk that candidates will use their negotiating power (e.g. in Asset voting) to gain personal benefits. Risk? I find this astonishingly naive. We are talking about candidates for public office, who will serve in assemblies with legislative power. The *status quo* is that many representatives already use their negotiating power to gain personal benefits. Are you saying that this status quo would vanish overnight when moving to an Asset voting based system? What is so frequently overlooked by commentators on Asset Voting and Delegable Proxy is that there is *already* negotiation for the exercise of power, but it happens at the next state, in the legislature Yes, negotiations are needed at many phases. To me the question is how many layers there are. When compared to traditional representative democracy, Asset voting seems to introduce one additional layer of indirection/negotiation while direct democracy seems to eliminate one (direct as opposed to representative). So the question is not whether Asset will lead to the abuse of negotiating power, for such abuse, if it is abuse, already exists. The question, rather, is whether or not it will make it worse or better. I think it opens one new layer of negotiation, which increases the risks. I'm not saying though that there would not be any impact in the opposite direction too (e.g. publicity). I know where my votes went, generally. If they go somewhere due to corrupt influence, why would I be satisfied with this? The candidates probably will not advertise being corrupt, and will present their whatever interesting viewpoints and whatever negotiation results they were dragged into in the most positive light they can find. This applies in all systems. Some may consider it better not to open doors for the temptations, If it weren't so damaging, this would be hilarious. We operate in a system which is thoroughly vulnerable and manipulable by special interests. The door is wide open *now*. With Asset, we can start to watch the door! I guess this is a reference to the U.S. system. There are many alternative paths forward. Ones where current rules are not modified or are just improved in small scale, one could touch the rules of funding, increasing the number of parties etc. Juho ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
and Republican voters think that the Pro Wrestler would be a good compromise candidate that would be better than electing the representative of the competing major party, then maybe the method should elect the Pro Wrestler. Condorcet is known to elect also compromise candidates (that do not have large first rankings support) when such candidates exist (unlike e.g. IRV). I still repeat my comment that Condorcet should probably be among the candidates to consider. It allows voters to give quite a lot of information (ranking) and is still almost never vulnerable to attacks. Juho ___ All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
On Apr 22, 2007, at 20:58 , Tim Hull wrote: Regarding the constituencies, the 19-seat one is elected 10 seats one semester, 9 seats the other. The other multi-seat constituencies are similarly divided. I would say that none of these can be combined for a simple reason - they do represent a clear group (each individual school/college within the University) as opposed to being a territorial district. Additionally, each such group has its OWN student government - which makes them somewhat resemble states. Thus, combining the single-seat districts would make about as much sense as combining several of the one seat at-large Congressional districts for small U.S. states for STV purposes. Likewise, there is no logical subdivision for the 19-seat grouping - any such division would be an arbitrary new construction. One might be able to split based on class status or on off-campus/on-campus residency, but such designations tend to change much more than school/college, leaving some students who run for the seat they are eligible for becoming ineligible to hold it the next semester. Regarding major party domination of such districts - often these seats are not even contested by the parties, and half of them are won with a few votes by independent write-ins. This does present a somewhat weird situation as far as PR and elections, though it seems as if the best solution would be to leave the division of representatives alone. However, the division between two elections is something to consider. According to what people think in here, it seems that this may be good for the 19- seat constituency. However, it seems like it may not be for the others (especially the 2 and 3-seat constituencies, but also the 6 and 7 seat). The problem, though, with doing this (combining some multi-seat elections and dividing others) is that each election is contested by only half the campus (whereas now, each election is contested by 90% of students - everyone minus the 1-seaters not up for election). Thus, advertising and getting turnout becomes more of a problem. Any comments on this? As far as single-winner goes, I see IRV as being the likely choice with STV used in multi-winner due to the fact that it would reduce the amount of explaining (as opposed to doing something like Condorcet). Both IRV and Condorcet are based on rankings = equally complex to voters. IRV is a single winner STV so you save in words when explaining them to the decision makers, but simplest Condorcet methods are easy too (and complex ones more or less explainable too). The only reason favouring IRV I have seen in this stream is the simple explanation. I this is crucial, then that's maybe the way forward. Note that IRV and Condorcet differ also on their behaviour. IRV favours large parties. For example in the case of three parties the candidate of the smallest of them (in first place support) will be eliminated in all elections first, even if he/she would be a good compromise for all (would e.g. beat both others in pairwise comparisons). As far as approval, I really don't see that working very well - only voters who think their favorite has NO CHANCE to win would vote for more than one. In this case, it seems like IRV is better. Tim P.S. Under my pro wrestler example, I was assuming that the voter would, under a range system, give the pro wrestler a 3 or a 2 out of 10, except for those who prefer them first. In this case, both IRV and Range would not elect this candidate. Range is expressive and it is able to treat these two different types of Pro Wrestlers differently. Its problem is that it in practice easily becomes Approval (only min and max values used) in competitive elections. IRV and Condorcet pay no attention to the numeric utility values, only to the relative preferences, and therefore can't make a difference between these two Pro Wrestler cases. (The reason why Condorcet (a ranking based method) is good despite of this is that it is not easy to get sincere numeric utility values from the voters, and it may be better not even try to use that information in the calculation process than to try and fail.) Juho ___ To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] PR in student government
On Apr 17, 2007, at 21:28 , Howard Swerdfeger wrote: Again, I recommend a Regional Open List System. It would be my second choice (behind STV) in therms of results given the requirements you mentioned. But it would be my first choice if one was to give more weight to simplicity of counting and simplicity for the voter. I agree. For me the three very basic (vanilla flavour) multi-winner methods are: - STV = if one wants to avoid parties; expressive votes; computer based calculation for fractional votes - open lists = if parties and/or groups are used; simple manual calculation - single member districts = does not provide full PR; clear links between representatives and citizens of the region There are many mixes and variants of these but I think these three basic methods already pretty well stretch the space. Ballot Would look something like this --- Voting Instructions: 1. You only have ONE vote. 2. Place an X in the box NEXT to your candidate of choice. 3. Your vote counts both for your candidate and your party. Party A Party B Party C Independent [ ]Candidate1 [ ]Candidate1 [ ]Candidate1 [ ]Candidate1 [ ]Candidate2 [ ]Candidate2 [X]Candidate2 [ ]Candidate3 [ ]Candidate3 [ ]Candidate3 --- One very simple alternative is to just write the number of one's favourite candidate in a blank ballot paper. The numbers of the candidates are advertised elsewhere. Seats would be allocated proportionally by party. But the member of the party that gets each seat would be determined by the number of votes the received. This basic version works reasonably well. The candidate election process within parties (plurality like) could however be improved (if wanted) (e.g. by making the group structure more detailed). Juho ___ All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] MultiGroup voting method
Some delayed comments on MultiGroup. On Apr 8, 2007, at 7:20 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 06:01 AM 4/7/2007, Juho wrote: it is an imposed system that the party names are on the ballot at all That could also be called information It is one particular kind of information, one which provides information about candidates affiliated with a party and no information about candidates not. Note that the MultiGroup method allows also non-traditional-party candidates to form groups, and it allows party candidates to form groups across parties (and other groups and candidates). Parties are just one of the reasons to form a group. If you allow one kind of information, you favor candidates who look good to the voter in the light of that information. It introduces a bias to provide one or two bits of information, I've never seen more than that. All information and groupings are allowed, so there should be no bias in that sense. All candidates are allowed to advertise themselves by announcing membership in any group that they consider positive. (Well, some groups might handpick their members while others could be open to anyone to indicate support. There could be also limitations set by the system, e.g. only one region/state allowed. And existing parties are likely to influence in all voting methods, one way or another.) One difference is that in MultiGroup the declared associations to different groups are used in determining which candidates will be (proportionally!) elected. What this must mean is that, effectively, the voting is for groups rather than for candidates. which in my view is the exact opposite of what we need The MultiGroup (vanilla) votes are to individual candidates. Only the proportionality calculations are based on groups that are announced before the election. I can understand support to methods that are free of parties and other groups. In some countries the parties have currently stronger role than the citizens would like. But getting rid of all groupings in large societies is not probable. This leaves groupless methods (like STV) the benefit of flexible votes that are not bound to announced relationships between different candidates. Ok, but I don't know if the benefits weigh more than the complexity. The rules on who is allowed to become a candidate in groupless elections may have some further impact (do parties have a role? anyone free to become a candidate?). Groupless methods have also the problem that if the number of candidates is large voters need lots of information (one could distribute informal grouping related information that doesn't influence the vote counting process) and filling a ballot could require lots of work (e.g. to list all the 100 candidates of the favourite party). Note that to some extent grass always looks greener at the other side of the fence. Current political systems may not work optimally. But also future and alternative political systems are subject to corruption. The claim is made. The proof is actually lacking. I can't prove that. Too difficult for entire social systems. But I give one example. There have been lots of sincere belief and theories about the benefits of single-party systems. Practical experiments were not entirely successful. In the partyless methods I expect some new form of parties to arise. In FA/DP I'd expect power hungry people to get interested if the FA/DP system becomes influential. I mean that when people learn the dynamics of the new systems they also find ways to utilize whatever weaknesses the systems may have. I do support studies on these topics and their success, but better be careful and study carefully also the threat side of the coin. Delegable proxy, well implemented in a society which has learned how to use it, would be highly corruption-resistant. Essentially, there aren't any critical nodes to target. The obvious targets are high-level proxies, but high-level proxies can lose their power in a flash if their clients smell a rat. So the high-level proxies, who are generally proxies for quite sophisticated clients, have to be able to convince their clients that the proposed action (which is actually the product of bribery of the proxy) is the best action. Now, if these arguments exist, the corruption isn't necessary! The property of losing power in a flash is common to all methods that support continuous elections (= not necessarily a proxy method, and all proxy methods might not have this property). Sophisticated clients are more clearly a proxy related property. Also lower layer clients could change their proxies when the media informs them about the political events and this would immediately impact also the higher layers. Proxies and continuous elections however provide a nice setup that certainly has some positive properties worth trying. Sometimes
Re: [EM] MIT News: Math of elections says voters win with 'winner take all'
On Apr 13, 2007, at 2:37 , Chris Backert wrote: See this story from MIT News that begins: “If we want individuals and small groups to have the democratic power to elect the president fairly, we must score presidential elections by winner- take-all states--not in a single giant national district too large for small numbers to turn, said Alan Natapoff, a research scientist at MIT who has studied the mathematics of voting power and has testified before Congress concerning the Electoral College.” http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2007/natapoff.html The claims refer to both voters and state. The title says that voters win but most of the text talks about states. Maybe Florida was proud that they decided what the outcome of the presidential election would be, but I'm not so sure if the democratic voters of Florida were happy with the outcome of the election. In politics parties often want all their representatives to vote the same way. This gives them in some sense more power. In the presidential election example it is however probably more important to the voters to elect the best president than to form a state policy and then (all people of the state to) stick to that (to see the power of their state). In the world of parties this kind of party internal discipline could be justified by some other higher goal. If for example the party wants to launch a revolution, then lesser individual opinions could be sacrificed to achieve the higher goal first (and thereby a better world where also those sacrificed individual goals could now maybe be easily achieved). But in the discussed case I didn't see any this kind of higher goals. In addition to the higher goals the party (or state) internal discipline may serve the needs of the party management. If all the representatives vote as the party management tells them to, that sure increases the power of the management. But not necessarily the power of the representatives themselves. The states could benefit also in other more indirect ways that just electing the best president. The states could e.g. get some promises during the campaign (and maybe even some more concrete benefits between the elections). States whose opinion is considered decided already before the election may get less promises/benefits than states that whose opinion can still be influenced. This gives more power/benefits to the undecided states, more to the big ones than to the small ones. It may be that the majority in each state that got all the votes of the state is not interested in changing the current practice of that state in most cases. But this fact and other discussion points above do not indicate any clear reasons for the citizens in general to support the state level winner take all practice. Juho election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Finding SociallyBest. Is it impossible?
On Apr 8, 2007, at 4:01 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This might be a stupid question but I was wondering if SociallyBest exists at all, and if some day it will be found. One approach to this question is to say that there is no such generic function but the choices of the society should depend of what they want to achieve. Elected food for lunch should be such that all group members can eat it, but electing a recreational activity for the same group could be allowed to optimize the outcome for a small group of people (the others will have their lucky day some other day). Juho Laatu ___ All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] MultiGroup voting method
/system. The bills before a legislature are generally not topics. There is not one legislature for, say, business law, and another for criminal. The vanilla version of MultiGroup doesn't address this problem. Of course proxies and different proxies on different topics could be used to elect different legislators settings for different areas is an option also in MultiGroup (maybe practical, maybe not). Asset Voting... A political party that was small and spread thin, but with enough loyal voters, state-wide, to gain a quota of votes, would gain representation state-wide. A party with even less support than that, could cooperate with other similar groups to create a seat that represents more than one party, presumably with similar agendas or interests. I tried to go also further, to allow even country wide small (roughly quota size, cross region, possibly cross party) groups to get one representative. That's not further. That's what I proposed and describe, and what I described went a little further. Ok, sorry, I thought you limited the interest groups to the (U.S. style) states and did not allow federal level support to be collected. One very key property of MultiGroup is to be able to support cross anything groups (if the society so wants). If the system doesn't *require* formal groups, and Asset does not, it fully allows them. Ok, STV and Asset Voting could be used e.g. so that the candidate lists clearly present the candidates as belonging to parties. Voters are then free to either support candidates of one party or make some other choices. To apply the terminology of imposed system, you would look at the election methods and procedures. Currently, political parties in the U.S. typically own the ballot. Yes, you can get on the ballot as an independent, but it can be an onerous process. The U.S. system is one very special example. I see it as a two-party system. You could say that it fails to elect anyone outside the two parties, or you could say that since the system is (intentionally planned to be) a two-party system it is not even supposed to elect anyone outside the two parties. Also the latter viewpoint has some interesting justification behind it. One could say that in a two-party system the intention is to seek the median opinion of the voters, and the opinions of the two parties are expected to change so that the borderline between them always moves towards the median opinion when the median opinion changes. I leave it to the U.S. citizens to decide if they want the system to be changed to a multi-party system or if they want to continue using (and enhance as needed) the current two-party system. (Also intermediate forms are possible, like allowing presidential elections to sometimes pick a candidate outside of the two major parties - but that is maybe a separate topic for discussion.) it is an imposed system that the party names are on the ballot at all That could also be called information (at lest in MultiGroup in multi-party countries). The act that the two major parties of a two- party system dominate e.g. the candidate nomination process may be a source of irritation though (and arguably even a factor that limits the responsiveness of the political system). If there is some structure for allocating votes, something, perhaps that Juho is designing now, that's a top-down, imposed system. I mean that it is not created from the bottom, contrasted with how Asset creates seats or delegable proxy selects top-level proxies. One idea behind MultiGoup is to soften the monolithic party model by allowing them to show different flavours and colours within them. In principle also political parties (especially in dynamic multi-party systems where parties come and go) should be seen as organisations that are created bottom-up by citizens to represent them and their viewpoints/ideologies/targets. Associating candidates and parties formally on the candidate list is maybe not that different from use of informal associations between candidates and parties (I'm assuming that parties or similar groupings will exist in any case in country size political systems). in MultiParty candidates declare their affiliations/preferences/policy before the election, Is that a difference? Can't candidates do that in Asset? Are candidates *required* to do this in Multiparty? Voluntary declaration of links to parties is possible in Asset Voting. Declarations are also fully voluntary in MultiGroup. The candidates may or may not belong to existing parties. (The society may however set some limitations on who is accepted as a candidate (one may e.g. need some fixed number of signatures of supporters before one is accepted on the formal candidate list) and if each candidate has to represent some limited region.) One difference is that in MultiGroup the declared associations to different
[EM] MultiGroup voting method
). It is of course also possible to do the same with respect to sexes, age groups, ethnic groups etc or to make the votes favour some set of voters. Finding the optimal outcome as defined above is computationally complex. Therefore the calculation process could be approximate. It could find the elected candidates e.g. sequentially in some kind of a preference order. This method may not always produce a good enough result, and therefore the result could be further optimised after the first round of calculation. Also other options like finding the candidates in parallel (e.g. for each party or for each region) and then optimising, or just to use a generic optimisation algorithm from the start are equally ok. One interesting approach is to allow any interested entity to demonstrate a better outcome than the first official outcome is within a week after the elections and make that outcome the final outcome instead of the first approximation (assuming that the preference order of possible outcomes is well defined and can be calculated easily). In the example above it seems that election of three candidates would lead to allocating two seats to party P2 and one to P1 (the s function could be e.g. largest reminder or d'Hondt). Within the P2 party subgroup P2S1 should get one seat (= C6). The remaining two seats should go to the I1 group or to the individual candidates with most votes (C1 and C7). One of the seats should go to I1 since it has 21 votes, but should we elect C3 (from party P1) or C4 (from party P2)? If we elect C3, then it seems that the third elected candidate should be C7. If we elect C4, then it seems that the third elected candidate should be C1. Maybe the first option provides the optimal outcome since then the 16 votes strong support to C7 can be satisfied (and the highest remaining unsatisfied opinion strengths would be lower than in the second option). When compared to pure individual candidate based methods like STV MultiGroup style methods (if the votes are to one candidate only and the possibility to cancel links to groups is not supported) have the limitation that it is not possible to support some set/chain of individual candidates without supporting also their groups/party. One benefit of the MultiGroup approach is that candidates need to openly declare their policy. It is thus not possible for the candidates to tell to all voter groups yes, I support especially you and your targets. The elected candidates are (morally) bound to the groups/targets that they have indicated to support and it is not as easy to forget all the (vaguely) given promises after the election day. The messages to the parties are also clear. If large part of the voters indicate support to policy X, the party can not ignore that wish. There will of course also be a corresponding (proportional) set of representatives supporting policy X. The most typical use cases where this voting method would provide additional benefits could maybe be party internal overlapping groupings in different dimensions. Individual candidates could e.g. support independently green values, initiative to build a new library etc. Also different options/balances (more or less strict) to combine party and regional PR are interesting. I hope the presented concepts are in reasonable shape although I didn't yet verify all of this by programming it (which often reveals some gaps in thoughts). Any feedback on potential weaknesses will be appreciated. Juho ___ Copy addresses and emails from any email account to Yahoo! Mail - quick, easy and free. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/trueswitch2.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Is Alabama Paradox needed in MultiGroup elections?
- Four groups: L=Left, R=Right, N=North, S=South - Four candidates (or smaller groups): LN, RN, LS, RS - LN belongs to L and N, and similarly RN, LS and RS and belong to corresponding L, R, N and S groups - Votes: LN:30, RN:30, LS:30, RS:10 Case 1: One candidate elected - L gets more votes than R - N gets more votes than S - It makes sense to elect candidate LN (or candidate from group LN) Case 2: Two candidates elected - Electing RN and LS seems to be the best outcome - Electing LN and RN seems worse since N would get all the seats - Electing LN and LS seems worse since L would get all the seats - Electing LN and RS seems worse since RS got so few votes - Therefore it may be better not to elect LN although LN was maybe the best choice in the case where only one candidate was elected Pure serial (monotonic/serial) allocation of seats doesn't seem to work well in the described setting. Does this mean that in MultiGroup style of elections where candidates may represent multiple groups that all should be proportionally represented the Alabama Paradox (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Alabama_paradox) should be considered a feature whose presence is not a problem but maybe even a requirement? Juho ___ Inbox full of spam? Get leading spam protection and 1GB storage with All New Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] MultiGroup voting method
On Apr 7, 2007, at 0:34 , James Gilmour wrote: Juho Sent: 06 April 2007 22:25 Also, to give more power directly to the voters, while maintaining an easy way to vote, easy understanding of what the candidates stand for, and with accountability. If that is what you want, why not just use STV-PR? Then there would be no party-controlled voting at all. James Gilmour I like STV-PR but its properties are somewhat different. to give more power directly to the voters - STV-PR and MultiGroup are both reasonably strong here (Asset Voting gives part of the power to the (trusted) candidates) - Direct democracy and continuous elections are stronger than representative democracy with periodic elections - In STV-PR the votes are very flexible and expressive and this might give them some additional power in some situations (to be defined) easy way to vote - MultiGroup (vanilla version) uses just one bullet vote, STV-PR requires more - ease of voting is good if one wants to maintain wide involvement among the citizens and direct individual level decision making among the voters in public elections understanding of what the candidates stand for - In MultiGroup the candidates clearly state their position (or at least some key points of it) - In STV-PR voters need to follow and then form their own opinion on all major candidates to understand their targets - The clear announcement of targets in MultiGroup makes it harder for the candidate to give different kind of promises to different audiences accountability - MultiGroup nails down the key promises for the next election period (voters will know what they vote and candidates know and have to remember what they promise to work for) party-controlled voting - I don't oppose the party system as such. I rather think it is a key component and basic tool of democracy to offer people the right to organize themselves and to influence in the development of their society. - The fact that in some markets the parties behave badly or have achieved (or appear to have) more power than the some citizens would like them to have is a problem but maybe not a reason to abandon the party structure altogether - There can be too much control, there can be control as intended in a representative democracy In one of my recent emails I wrote: I think STV is good for elections where we don't want to emphasize the grouping of candidates to separate parties and for elections where the candidates are quite well known by the voters (their viewpoints are well known). When compared to that MultiGroup may be well suited for large scale elections for general public when we want to present the targets of the candidates clearly to them, and to influence the development of the political parties by giving them clear (simplified) guidance. STV-PR is maybe at its best in small elections where the candidates are well known. In large systems I'd expect some kind of groupings and associations to emerge and be part of the management structure even if the voting method would not formally recognize them. STV-PR is possible and works also in large systems but I haven't really carefully thought what the benefits of keeping the voting method party-free while still expecting some interest groups (parties) to be present in the background would be. The MultiGroup method is also direct evolution from some existing multi-party systems and therefore possibly a reasonably acceptable way forward. Juho ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] final support
most promising I got a bit stuck with these words. Is there a good definition what the target of the search is? Word immune gave one hint on what the targets could be. I don't know if there is an exact definition of the targets or if it is just good in all aspects in all elections, maybe to pick he best winner and to avoid strategic attacks, maybe a general purpose method that can be recommended for all possible (computer counted) single winner elections, maybe even a method that can be promoted without fear of opponents finding nasty failure cases, but if there is a (some more) exact definition for the targets of the search that'd be good to know. Also the set of methods to be considered could carry a message. = Maybe ranked ballot methods or Condorcet compatible methods with option to include also approval or other small additional information (maybe limitations too). I'm somewhat familiar with the history of the discussions on this ,ailing list so I know what kind of methods these discussions usually refer to. Just checking if there is a clear definition of the target state where the most promising methods might take us. Juho ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Free Associations (was: Trees and single-winner methods)
On Mar 24, 2007, at 6:28 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 01:31 PM 3/23/2007, Juho wrote: Are you saying that FAs would not succumb to the old hazards? Yes. I think it is probable that many FAs would drift towards more formal structures, strict leadership and rules (especially if the ideology that they promote makes that has a positive attitude towards such control). I'm considering an FA to be an organization that has formal rules that prohibit the association from developing precisely those things. Ok, it seems that the FAs are in fact not without rules but have quite strict rules (to keep them free). Power attracts power hungry people. The rules you mentioned (quite rigid and well tested ones) and separation from power may be needed to keep the FAs free. (A side observation. One option is to keep all the conclusions/ recommendations/outputs of a meetings anonymous (not tied to any of the members) to keep the discussions neutral and to reduce the use of a meeting as a tool for personal career/image booster.) the owner of the FA domain decides to become a little tyrant The proxies and other active members who don't agree with this can simply recreate the FA with an altered name. This doesn't sound very good (if common). It'd be better to avoid this cycle and keep the rules such that (in most cases) the old structure can be kept free. The FA traditions are a vast protection, even without DP. With DP, I strongly expect, the structure becomes extremely robust and extremely difficult to corrupt. What is the property of DP that gives this protection? How much do you refer to the chained voting mechanism? How much to the continuous election that gives immediate feedback? What other properties? What we need is world communication, coordination, and cooperation. One World Government is really a bad idea, if taken literally and thoroughly. Agreed. Global discussions and more local decisions makes sense. (One interesting claim from history. China was at one point in time technically probably more advanced than Europe. Why was it then Europe that became such a concentration of world conquering super powers? The claimed answer is that being fragmented to competing small countries was the competitive advantage of Europe. Even if one country got a bad government or got stagnated, there was always another one that by its example forced also others to move forward, evolve or sometimes perish. The outcome was maybe not the best possible (lots of small and big wars in Europe and later also elsewhere) but the key point was that discussion was kept alive all the time since there was no single power over the others that would have set fixed rules for the system and thereby would have stopped the process of evolution. I think the structure of evolution of the democratic systems is quite isomorphic to this (also with positive values, not only with wars and power game). The problems world governments and any too wide de facto only way of thinking for a large part lie in the risk of losing the second and third viewpoints.) Some kind of body to create and enforce international law makes sense, though. Present structures are pretty inadequate. Some level of enforcement is needed but I'd be careful not to establish a one centrally controlled unit to do that. I'm not proposing FAs as the main working method, i.e., the main method of carrying out the business of government. FAs are thoroughly libertarian, an FA government would pretty much be an oxymoron. But large FAs would essentially be able to keep governments in check. It could be pretty interesting. Ok, a method for keeping check of the decision making process, not part of that process. You should state this clearly when promoting the method and when justifying the details of it. Rules and optimisation criteria for the legislative and other decision making structures may be often different. Okay, suppose the employees of the FBI form an FA/DP organization. This example points out that FA style structures can be used also inside otherwise closed organisations. Companies and bureaus differ from democratic decision making in that they are centrally and hierarchically led. FA style approach probably will have somewhat different role here. One of the demonstration projects that has not advanced more than making a few noises has been the Cummington Free Association. Cummington is the small town I lived in until last year. The purpose of the CFA is to facilitate communication between the citizens of the town and the town government. Essentially, it is to advise the town government, in the one direction, and to advise the citizens, in the other. Cummington, like nearly all small towns around here, is a Town Meeting town. That means that nominally it is a direct democracy. However, it is rare that more than five or ten
Re: [EM] Free Associations (was: Trees and single-winner methods)
On Mar 23, 2007, at 5:00 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: Setting aside the possible uses of proxies within formal power structures -- which is actual practice in corporations and really ought to receive more attention -- formal parties, if organized traditionally, have been tried over and over again. They are subject to certain hazards, and ultimately they succumb to them. But hope springs eternal hey, let's roll that stone up the hill again. Are you saying that FAs would not succumb to the old hazards? I think it is probable that many FAs would drift towards more formal structures, strict leadership and rules (especially if the ideology that they promote makes that has a positive attitude towards such control). I don't exactly know if you propose the FA structure to be adopted as the main working method or if you only want to keep the formal rules (of the political machinery) such that FAs are allowed to operate. You used FA to name the method but maybe you didn't intend to ban the use of more formal associations too. Or maybe the intention is just to establish a structure that is parallel (or sequential) to the traditional political decision making process. I think the goal of keeping the political structure responsive to the needs of the citizens and keeping the discussion process productive is a good goal (I think this is what you are looking for). There is always space to improve the methods that we use to govern ourselves. There are people claiming that the system they have or promote is the ultimate best system, but probably the ideal system has not been developed yet, and possibly never will be. The FA model (and DP) sets some positive targets and may have some positive impact but I'm not sure it would work so well that it would automatically lead us to a better future. There are many risks, like getting infiltrated with the old politicians as soon as it gets some power. Maybe there will be trials and fine-tuning of the theory. Juho ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Free Associations (was: Trees and single-winner methods)
On Mar 23, 2007, at 17:23 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: traditional powers and responsibilities are appropriate, largely, for control structures, not for those which maximize intelligence. The proxy could end up being at the center of a natural caucus that contains significant numbers of members. The proxy would make an ideal candidate for office, or for nominating someone for office. The body of supporters is already created. Even if the FA/DP organization is not a directly political one! In my other mail I wondered what the intended use of the FA/DP is. These comments seem to point in the direction that FA/DP would be an intelligence adding preprocessing system that is independent of the actual political decision making process (but proxies could jump to the political side too) (and probably the politicians could as well jump to the FA/DP side). This phenomenon could be also closely related to free mailing lists like this. Or to public press, the scientific process etc. Same tools could be applied in all these arena. I have sometimes wondered how to keep mailing lists like this in order and fruitful to all. One approach would be to have a proxy like or other voting/support system that would give at least feedback, maybe also control to the contributors on how wide support their opinions have, how much bandwidth they should use, if they should be more or less verbose, more formal/exact/practical/real life oriented, and if their attitude towards their fellow contributors is appropriate. :-) Juho ___ Yahoo! Messenger - with free PC-PC calling and photo sharing. http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Trees and single-winner methods
are of direct democracy, and how they can be addressed and ameliorated without losing the strengths. Do you mean direct democracy in its traditional(?) meaning - a system without representatives / direct decisions by the citizens? (Note that one of the targets of representative democracy is also to increase the level of expertise among the decision makers.) Solve the decision-making problem *outside of government* Careful with this :-). In a working democratic society the current decision making practices should ideally be seen as the rules that *we* set :-). Solve that problem and apply it to, say, a political party. If the theory of the solution is correct, this party will be more successful than competitors, and thus it will be more able to mobilize votes and resources more effectively. And thus win elections or change laws. If necessary. I agree that all established systems have the risk of stagnation and maintaining current power positions. Good generic ways needed to avoid and fix such phenomena to grow too strong. Juho ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Trees by Proxy
This is a different way to assign legislative power - no elections. Still, this could be implemented first at village, or village+town levels, without involving higher levels of government until/unless it was accepted. That a proxy becoming effective is heard instantly all the way to the top - region or country - means that it does not take long for a rep's power to reflect quality. A positive thing in continuous elections and instantaneous effect of voter decisions is that the delegates will respect the wishes of their supporters, voters may influence the developments also between election days, and representatives can not do bad or unwanted decisions (e.g. raise their own salaries) and hope hat they will be forgotten before the next election day. The negative side of this is that representatives may become overly populist and will be not be able to drive long term plans that include both popular and less popular parts. It is for example possible that the community needs more money and the representatives make a 60%-40% decision to raise taxes. But as a result large pat of those representatives that voted for the tax raises will be kicked out of the office the very next day. Maybe there would be some hysteresis in kicking them out, but in general, those populists that voted no even if they thought yes will maybe keep their seats with better probability. In the traditional system with elections every few years the time between elections can be used so that first taxes are raised and before the elections the benefits (if any) of the tax raises are already visible and can be explained to the voters. One should thus plan the balance between these targets carefully for each environment where the continuous elections are used. One could e.g. use hysteresis and delays where needed. --- If one wants to maintain the close personal links between the voters, and at the same time keep the number of representatives and layers small, and still keep good proportionality, then allocating different voting power to different representatives (as proposed) is one possible tool in trying to achieve this. --- I lean in the direction of (as a main rule) letting the votes determine who will be elected and letting the candidates/ representatives decide after the elections (on other matters than the outcome of the election). Safer so. Good justification needed for using extra layers. (Not out of question though - I can imagine e.g. some complex and expertise and scientific background requiring decision to be made by first electing experts whose only task is to elect the best proposal.) Juho On Mar 18, 2007, at 10:59 , Dave Ketchum wrote: Abd has good ideas under the labels Assets and Delegable Proxy, but they are buried in so many books of words that extracting useful value is difficult. Here Juho offers a useful framework to build on, so I will try some building. Guidelines: Tailor numbers as further thought dictates - I am just trying for ideas. Juho's village, town, etc. are nominal goals for sizes - given 350 people they should be around 3 or 4 villages. Borrow proxies fresh from corporate stockholder usage. Their effectiveness starts at midnight 10 days after filing; ends 10 days after a replacement is filed or signer dies. Representatives, such as Juho's 5 from a village in a town government, have power according to how many effective voter proxies they hold, directly or indirectly: Must hold 1% of a legislature's proxies to be able to vote there. Must hold 2% of a legislature's proxies to have full capabilities of being a legislator - offering bills, debating, etc. Limit on voting power is 40% of proxies voted in any vote - no czars allowed. Sideways proxy - possible for representatives to be too weak above. Such can pass what they hold to others for legislature participation. This does not release anyone from the above limit, nor does it affect what anyone passes up to others via proxies. Thoughts: This is a different way to assign legislative power - no elections. Still, this could be implemented first at village, or village+town levels, without involving higher levels of government until/unless it was accepted. Citizens can be 2 years old. Need to fit them in. Given 70 czar votes and 30 non-czar votes, a 40% limit would mean counting 20 czar votes for 50 total votes counted. Given a 2000 voter town 2% would be 40. Assuming 40 voters thinking alike, but scattered around the town, gave 40 proxies to 3 reps, the reps would not each have power to participate in town government, but could use sideways proxies to give one of them power of a full rep. When you get to region you both keep size of legislature manageable and give small groups some chance
Re: [EM] Trees and single-winner methods
On Mar 15, 2007, at 18:20 , Chris Benham wrote: How about multi-winner elections - do you say that open and closed list elections are no good and only flat candidate structures like in STV, are ok? I regard STV as vastly preferable, but list systems can be partly excused because they achieve approximate party-proportionality with much greater simplicity and maybe philosophically we can regard a whole list as a candidate with the special feature that it can be fractionally elected. Also the tree based Condorcet method can be seen this way. A group will be handled as if it it was a single candidate. The method is of course also Condorcet compliant if the subgroups are seen as single candidates. Juho ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Trees and single-winner methods
On Mar 15, 2007, at 17:18 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 01:45 AM 3/15/2007, Juho wrote: I see candidate withdrawal related problems to be quite different from what I see in the proposed three based method. The biggest problem I see in candidate withdrawal is that if the person/group that makes the decision on withdrawal already knows the given votes, then it is possible to decide the winner in a small group, partially bypassing the opinions that the voters expressed in the ballots. This also opens the door to horse trading or even blackmailing. The proposed method at least is based on giving full information to the voters already before the election and letting the voters decide. One person's horse trade is another's sensible compromise. I agree that the horse trading has also some potential to lead to good results. It however carries the risk that some of the negotiated topics might be related to the very personal needs of the candidate. This potential is of course in some form present everywhere where the representatives can make major decisions. In this case they however play with their personal interests (to become elected) and the candidates are expected to trade (no clear ideological driver that would force them to vote in some predetermined way). I also think that the following scenario is not nice. Based on the ballots some candidate seems to win the election, and all the supporters are already celebrating - until some of the candidates announces his withdrawal in order to get some candidate that suits him (personally) better elected. Suppose that an election is held and there are three candidates. Let's suppose that the rules are approval and/or rull ranked, perhaps Condorcet, but, as alleged by some could happen, everyone bullet votes. And the three candidates have equal support. What would you do with this election? Elect the candidate with the most votes, even though that would mean electing a candidate who was only approved by one-third of the voters? Or if there was an exact tie, choose the winner by lot, which still has the same result -- a minority-approved winner. And it could be a lot worse if there were more than three roughly equal candidates! Now, suppose that a candidate can reassign his or her votes to another. If any two of these candidates can agree on who should win, we'd have a winner who, for two-thirds of the voters, it is true that they either chose the winner or the winner was chosen by someone who they preferred as the winner. That seems to me to be *far* better than choosing without such a reassignment. Note that the votes could have been: 17: ABC 17: ACB 17: BAC 17: BCA 16: CAB 16: CBA Candidates A and B agree than the winner is A. The BCA voters may be very angry to B. Note also that the tree based method that I proposed has the option that A and B could have agreed BEFORE the election that they form a team (a branch in the tree). Maybe they are two Democratic candidates and candidate C is Republican. It is probable that either of them will win (without negotiations, just based on how the voters voted). The ACB and BCA voters may need to rethink if they are happy with the possibility that their vote to the AB alliance may benefit also their least liked candidate. In this case it is however probable that the sizes of those factions are less than 17 (since Democrat oriented voters are likely to have the second best Democrat candidate ranked second). And it could get even better if the candidates holding redistributable votes are not limited to candidates who were in the original election. That is, two of the original candidates could possibly agree on a *different* candidate who, had this candidate been in the election, would actually have gained a majority. Or at least the two think that this is a good compromise. Note that voters that would have voted ABCD, ABDC etc. could be very angry if A and B agreed to elect D. Now, with Asset Voting, all this could be possible. I expect that there would be *many* candidates and others perhaps holding write- in votes; Asset Voting essentially creates an ad hoc electoral college, without the inequities and other problems of the existing electoral college. With many holders of vote assets, we essentially have a new election process, but it can be fully deliberative. (I generally consider bargaining to be an aspect of deliberation, but some political scientists classify it as a third process, along with aggregation and deliberation.) In places where direct democracy or electing the representatives (directly) is not wanted but more indirect decision making structure is needed, then a true electoral college is an option. I think such need of indirectness in democracy is not that common. Bargaining will happen anyway already between the elected representatives. The electoral
[EM] Tree based Condorcet strategies
Here's one basic example on how tree based Condorcet methods might work in practice. Sincere preferences: 40: A 35: BC 25: CB B would win (Condorcet winner). Strategic votes: 40: A 35: BC 25: CA (strategic) C would win. When looking at the sincere preferences we see that B and C are clones. All B supporters think that C is the second best candidate. All C supporters think that B is the second best candidate. They look like coming from the same party or same bigger grouping (e.g. right wing). It seems that it would be natural for the B and C parties to form an alliance. Together they will get 60% of all votes. All B and C supporters think that the alliance is ok since it will be made with the second best party. All of them think that A should not win. If B and C form an alliance (tree branch) the candidate tree will look like (A (B C)). At the top level the election will be a race between the (B C) branch and candidate A. Branch (B C) will win 60-40 (even if C supporters would use the now useless strategy). Within that branch B has more support than C (even if C supporters would use the now useless strategy), so B wins. Forming the alliance stripped away the possibility of C supporters burying B. Even if C supporters were planning to do so they maybe would agree to form the alliance if asked (otherwise their plans could become obvious, and B could e.g. seek for a deal with A). The end result is very fair from the sincere preferences perspective. The alliance was quite natural. And it led to elimination of a risk of strategic voting. So, at least in some cases tree based Condorcet methods seem to bring happiness to the world :-). Juho ___ Copy addresses and emails from any email account to Yahoo! Mail - quick, easy and free. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/trueswitch2.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Possible Approval Winner set/criterion (was Juho--Margins fails Plurality. WV passes.)
On Mar 14, 2007, at 8:31 , Chris Benham wrote: I'm not suggesting that PAW be explicitly made part of the rules of any method, and the PAW criterion is met by most methods including the simplest. So I don't see how it adds complexity. Ok, if the election method already meets the criterion and the criterion is not used as part of the rules, then there is no impact. The Plurality criterion is about avoiding common-sense, maybe simple-minded but nonetheless very strong and (IMO)sound complaints from a significant subset of voters: the supporters of a candidate that pairwise beats the winner: X ranked alone in top place on more ballots than Y was ranked above bottom clearly equals 'X has more support than Y', so how can you justify X losing to Y?!. I think there are different kind of elections with different kind of rationale behind selecting the winner. For example the Condorcet winner could be different than the one with best average rating. = One has to decide which needs to respect. Similarly the complaints of the voters could be based on different arguments. Some voters may complain about the number of above bottom votes (as above) but other voters might complain about the fact that the voters would like to change the winner to another candidate with a large majority. There are other other rational measures that can be used as a basis for complaints. The plurality criterion is thus just one way of tying to characterise what kind of a candidate should be elected. It is typical that in the presence of cycles some rules that look obvious when there are no cycles, but things get more complicated and intuition easily fails when the cycles are present, and one needs to violate some of the criteria. I liked the rationale you gave in support of the plurality criterion, the description of the situation after the election has been held. I think this is a good way to evaluate the methods (more natural than e.g. winner changing path based arguments) since typically we are seeking a candidate that would work well with the society and that would lead to a stable and happy state. Note that the corresponding state after the election based justification of minmax(margins) (that fails the plurality criterion) for its behaviour is that it minimises the level of interest to change the winner to some other candidate (to one other candidate at a time). I think that property can be seen as a benefit for the society and as one possible justification to violate the plurality criterion. I don't claim that this minmax(margins) style of measuring utility is ideal, but at least it makes quite a lot of sense since it clearly provides best possible protection against one type of after the election risk/complaints. I ended up again in discussing the benefits of different methods with sincere votes. But so did you :-). (I didn't yet catch if there are also some strategic issues that are closely linked to the plurality criterion.) Juho ___ All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] divided house problem of close vote (50%+1)
On Mar 14, 2007, at 12:15 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Doubtless this won't thread correctly. Juho said Some observations. The description talks only about the yes votes. Is the assumption that the no votes mean no action will be taken? If we are talking about approving a new law then this is quite typical, but if we vote for example about whether we should send our rocket to Mars or Venus, then both sides should be treated in the same way. In the described method repeated 45% yes, 55% no results do not lead to final no (assuming super majority and new referendum levels 60%/ 40%). If we have only one rocket to send, voting first on sending the rocket to Mars, then on sending it to Venus, then to Mars etc. is not fair either. But maybe the method is not intended for this kind of elections with two similar alternatives to choose from. I get the impression the vote would go something like: Initial scores = 0 Round 1 Mars: 45% +0 = 45 (-50 = -5) Venus: 55% +0 = 55 (-50 = +5) Round 2 Mars: 45% -5 = 40 (-50 = -10) Venus: 55% +5 = 60 (-50 = +10) Round 3 Mars: 45% -10= 35 (-50 = -15) Venus: 55% +10= 65 (-50 = +15) Round 4 Mars: 45% -15= 30 (-50 = -15) Venus: 55% +15= 70 (-50 = +15) Venus wins as 2/3 Yes. You seem to assume that the Mars and Venus votes would take place more or less simultaneously. Howard Swerdfeger's xls sheet btw doesn't behave exactly the same way as the written description of the method says. It doesn't let the Mars results drop below 45%. Thanks to Howard Swerdfeger for providing the sheet. Tthat is a good method to give clear (operational) definitions to the methods. Note that it is possible that the sum of Mars and Venus votes need not be 100%. It is possible for example to have a faction that is eager to send a rocket to any planet. As a result both planets may get !50% results. In this case I don't know what happens if both planets reach the super majority limit at the same round. One could also make the rules such that there is only one Mars vs. Venus vote at each round and the decision will be made when the balance will go from 50% to some threshold % to either direction. This way the election would be a symmetric election between two similar options (not a status quo vs. change type of election as in the original version). This means that a majority can get anything past if they stick to their guns, however, it will take lots of votes (spaced say 1 day apart). It also naturally scales the time spent debating based on how controversial the decision is. Handling multiple choices could be handled with approval voting. Using multiple rounds means that the tactics for approval are easier to use. Yes. Even Condorcet could be used - just keep increasing/decreasing the elements of the comparison matrix. I think there could be also electronic election methods where results are calculated in real-time and voters may change their vote when they see what the current results are. The behaviour of a method in this situation could be also used as one criterion to evaluate the stability of the method. This kind of situations could make also the Nash equilibrium of strategic voting states more meaningful (I have earlier criticized them as not being a good measure for typical (non real-time feedback) elections). Juho For example, if you could use the following formula New Approval = 2/3 * ( Old Approval*3/4 + approval from vote ) if 50% approve of an option, it will get Round 1: 2/3*( 0 + 50) = 33% Round 2: 2/3*(25+50) = 50% Round 3: 2/3*(38+50) = 59% Round 4: 2/3*(44+50) = 63 At round N (with N - inf) Round N 2/3*(50+50) = 66 and 2/3 Round N+1 2/3*(50+50) = 66 and 2/3 I would suggest rounding upwards to the nearest percent. Ignoring rounding an option cannot get the supermajority unless it has 50%+ approval. Alternatively, rounding down could be used and the supermajority could be set to say 65% required. Raphfrk Interesting site what if anyone could modify the laws www.wikocracy.com Check Out the new free AIM(R) Mail -- 2 GB of storage and industry- leading spam and email virus protection. 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] divided house problem of close vote (50%+1)
On Mar 14, 2007, at 16:07 , Howard Swerdfeger wrote: You are correct, It was not originally intended to choose between two similar alternatives. but I believe it could serve this purpose. You wouldn't actually send it to mars or Venus until the score reached a super majority, and then you would stop voting. I just commented in another mail that the method could be also modified so that it would make the decision in either direction if the accumulated deviation from 50% to either direction exceeds some threshold value. In this case the method should behave in a symmetric way in both directions / towards both alternative options. As for debate, Typically I would Imagine a situation where a decision making body (legislature or citizens) exists in a currently almost evenly divided state. I would further imagine that the division of this body would change over time at some rate. possibly because of debate and people changing there minds, or possibly because of the actual people in the decision making body changing (Bi-Election, full new elections, demographic change of citizens). I would guess that enough time needs to pass to typically allow 1-3% total state changes in decision making body, But that is just a guess. You need time to allow for honest debate. In a legislature this could be 1 week or 1 day with debate and backroom deals in the middle. In a referendum this could be months or years to allow for some small demographic shift, or to account for some random variation in voter opinion. One could in principle also have voting chains that go on forever. If the timing and threshold parameters are well designed it would be ok to vote once every year or every month on whether it makes sense to send a rocket somewhere. No problem if the yes decision would never come. Maybe it would be too expensive to send the rocket. Your original description included the possibility of reaching a conclusion that no additional round is needed (support below an agreed threshold, but no cumulative effect in the downwards direction (the symmetric method that I mentioned above would have similar cumulative effect in both directions)). It is possible to combine somehow also the length of the delay between elections in the equation (try again after x hours/days). Then the method would not only say if other votes are needed but it could also say something about when the next vote should be held. Maybe this would not be symmetrical. Maybe getting only 5% support would mean that new vote would be arranged earliest after some relatively long time. A concrete decision on time could be needed if there was a tendency to propose a new election with similar content right after the previous one led to a don't try again conclusion. (This is getting a bit complex = maybe recommendations and good practices and/or chairman's discretion would be enough :-).) Juho ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] reply to venzke - range random skewing effect is not a problem
On Mar 13, 2007, at 3:51 , Warren Smith wrote: http://rangevoting.org/StratHonMix.html Venzke: These simulations purport to show that Range does relatively well by SU when voters are a mixture of strategic and sincere. This is pretty tangential to what I wrote. --what Venzke wrote was: Venzke: If I don't want to assume that voters will courteously vote sincerely (even when this limits their power to affect the results), then I wouldn't use Range, as the result will be rather randomly skewed based on who chose to exaggerate and who didn't. --My simulations addressed exactly this. They were not tangential. They were a study designed to examine exactly this question. The plan was to set up a situation with maximal random skewing due to some voters (50%) exaggerating and some (50%) not, and choosing who was who randomly by coin toss, and having a small total # of voters (61 and 13 voters in the two tables) exactly to make sure there was a large typical variation in the numbers of honest strategic voters in each political camp. EXACTLY the situation Venzke was worried about. Kevin Venzke's words maybe left space for interpreting them to include also a situation where each voter would toss a coin to decide whether to vote strategically or not. I think the interesting scenarios are elsewhere. My understanding is that he had something quite different in his mind. I guess you, as a Range expert, pretty well know what the anticipated problematic scenarios are. Problems may arise e.g. when opinion polls tell that Democrats would get only 49% of the votes (against 51% of the Republicans) and therefore their supporters decide to put some additional weight in their votes and vote strategically in Approval style. This would make the Democrats win. It is possible that Republicans would counter by applying the same strategy and the situation gets balanced again. But as a result of this race on whose voters are more strategic Range elections may become in essence Approval elections. The achieved results of Approval voting are not very bad in terms of achieved social utility. The worst scenarios are ones where some parties/groupings vote in Approval style while others do not. In these cases it seems obvious that the social utility would not be good. The essential improvement in the simulations would thus be not to toss a coin in the same way for each voter (I believe that is what you did) but to study situations where voter groupings with different opinions have different percentage of strategic voters (maybe having different coins with different strategic and non-strategic voting probabilities). Those different percentages may be a result of seeing different poll results and/or getting different advice from the parties on how to vote. (It is possible that in real life the voting behaviour of different groupings would gradually become similar, having roughly the same percentage of strategic voters. In this case the equilibrium of recommended voting styles is however likely to be close to Approval style voting in elections that are competitive by nature, i.e. when voters are happy to vote strategically to make their own alternative win.) One could thus use the Range method in different ways: 1) use it in non-competitive elections, 2) allow strategic/exaggerating/sincerely strong opinion voters to have more say and make their favourite win with improved likelihood, 3) accept the elections to turn into Approval like elections as a result of widespread Approval style voting. Juho ___ Now you can scan emails quickly with a reading pane. Get the new Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Possible Approval Winner set/criterion (was Juho--Margins fails Plurality. WV passes.)
On Mar 13, 2007, at 18:35 , Chris Benham wrote: The definition of the criterion contains a function that can be used to evaluate the candidates (also for other uses) - the possibility and strength of an approval win. This function can be modified to support also cardinal ratings. In the first example there is only one entry (11: AB) that can vary when checking the Approval levels. B can be either approved or not. In the case of cardinal ratings values could be 1.0 for A, 0.0 for C and anything between 0.0001 and 0. for B. Or without normalization the values could be any values between 0.0. and 1.0 as long as value(A) value(B) value (C). With the cardinal ratings version it is possible to check what the original utility values leading to this group of voters voting AB could have been (and if the outcome is achievable in some cardinal ratings based method, e.g. max average rating). This concept looks vulnerable to some weak irrelevant candidate being added to the top of some ballots, displacing a candidate down to second preference and maybe thereby causing it to fall out of the set of possible winners. It probably has other problems regarding Independence properties, and I can't see any use for it. It seems, as usual, that you discuss more strategy resistance and criteria and I discuss more behaviour with sincere votes and achieved utility. Nothing wrong with that. Both are needed. I didn't yet find out a scenario where the difference between rating and Approval style evaluation would lead to strategic problems. Let's see if I can find scenarios that would demonstrate some essential differences. In general I'd still say that the two criteria bring almost identical results. My motivation was just to present the (about) same criterion in a way that directly links to some well known social utility function and thereby give some sincere vote behaviour beased explanation to why some elections could decide to use the PAW criterion. The strategic problems of Range / ratings based methods are not problematic here since one talks only in theory what kind of outcomes would be possible (with sincere votes). I don't see any strong need to use the PAW criterion (or corresponding ratings variant) for strategy resistance or for election target reasons but they seem possible. They add complexity, but if justified for some reason, then why not. I'll try to think more and come back if needed. Juho Yahoo! Photos is now offering a quality print service from just 7p a photo. http://uk.photos.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] reply to venzke - range random skewing effect is not a problem
On Mar 13, 2007, at 21:20 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 03:00 AM 3/13/2007, Juho wrote: I guess you, as a Range expert, pretty well know what the anticipated problematic scenarios are. Problems may arise e.g. when opinion polls tell that Democrats would get only 49% of the votes (against 51% of the Republicans) and therefore their supporters decide to put some additional weight in their votes and vote strategically in Approval style. This would make the Democrats win. Why? I really think this should be realized: I expect, at least initially, major party supporters to vote under Approval exactly the same as they currently vote under Plurality. Almost all will bullet vote. This sounds to me like you are close to the third style of using / seeing the Range method (that I defined in my mail). = 3) accept the elections to turn into Approval like elections as a result of widespread Approval style voting. With two major parties Approval and bullet voting are about the same thing. One could thus use the Range method in different ways: 1) use it in non-competitive elections, 2) allow strategic/exaggerating/sincerely strong opinion voters to have more say and make their favourite win with improved likelihood, 3) accept the elections to turn into Approval like elections as a result of widespread Approval style voting. I don't know how many times this nonsense has been repeated. Range becomes Approval. No, Range will *never* become Approval unless you can somehow get all the voters to not express intermediate ratings. This however confused me. In the beginning of the mail you assumed that almost all will bullet vote (which I interpreted to be in line with Approval). But here the interpretation is maybe that a considerable part of the voters will vote with intermediate ratings. For me majority voting in Approval style and some voting with intermediate rankings means close to Approval. Btw, note that also in Approval voters are allowed to cast weak votes, that is empty votes. Ratings based methods are just more fine grained. The achieved results of Approval voting are not very bad in terms of achieved social utility. The worst scenarios are ones where some parties/groupings vote in Approval style while others do not. In these cases it seems obvious that the social utility would not be good. It is not obvious at all. I referred to cases like 35:D=100,R=90 65:R=100,D=90 where the social utility of R can be claimed to be higher than the utility of D. If strategic voting is used only by D supporters (35:D=100,R=0), then D wins and achieved utility is considerably worse than with sincere votes. Juho ___ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] divided house problem of close vote (50%+1)
Some observations. The description talks only about the yes votes. Is the assumption that the no votes mean no action will be taken? If we are talking about approving a new law then this is quite typical, but if we vote for example about whether we should send our rocket to Mars or Venus, then both sides should be treated in the same way. In the described method repeated 45% yes, 55% no results do not lead to final no (assuming super majority and new referendum levels 60%/ 40%). If we have only one rocket to send, voting first on sending the rocket to Mars, then on sending it to Venus, then to Mars etc. is not fair either. But maybe the method is not intended for this kind of elections with two similar alternatives to choose from. You also didn't set a rule on when the new election should be arranged. Using term referendum refers to a situation where for practical reasons there has to be at least one week time between two consecutive elections. The proposed method might however be used also in smaller elections like in the legislative body to accept laws (maybe at its best in smaller scale elections due to the costs etc.). There are countries where required super majority can be replaced with simple majority and another simple majority after the next elections. In this case the time span is months or years. You mentioned allowing for debate and discussion in between votes. That could mean 15 minutes. Any time is ok with me but probably the rules need to be defined (to avoid e.g. 10 votes in one minute). Juho Laatu On Mar 14, 2007, at 1:13 , Howard Swerdfeger wrote: There is a conflict that exists between some people when counting a simple yes|No ballot. Some would say that a simple majority is all that is needed, while others would suggest an absolute majority or super majority should be required for some decisions, still others would argue for some element of randomness to obtain true democracy. To some degree all of the above methods have been discussed on this list so I will not repeat arguments here. Personally, I see problems with making major decisions based on a slim simple majority, but I also do not long term effects that result from super majority rule. So here is my solution to the divided house problem of close vote with only a Yes|No option. Define an iterative solution. For every vote there are 3 possible outcomes: 1. It passes with a super majority. 2. It fails with a super majority. 3. It is 'close', and a new vote is auto-magically triggered * scheduled to allow for debate and discussion in between votes. The First vote is conducted as normal with a super majority criteria, for passing. In all subsequent votes the yes side is given a score. Score = 'Old Score' + 'Yes%' - 50% This score is then compared with the super majority and super minority thresholds to determine if it will: 1. Pass into Law 2. Be forgotten 3. Trigger another vote Some advantages of this system are that: * It avoids making decisions based on a number (50%+1) that could easily have been (50%-1) based on factors that have nothing to do with the question at hand. * It avoids making decisions based on minority rule. * if a majority consistently approve of a system it will eventually pass A disadvantage would be that a group using this method would not react as quickly to changes in situations, as a simple majority based group. I would like any comments, criticisms, or thoughts you might have of the above system. Notes: -- I thought up this method after learning a very simple Neuron Model called the Leaky Integrate-and-Fire Model * http://icwww.epfl.ch/~gerstner//SPNM/node26.html simple spreadsheets to calculate results can be found here * http://www.swerdfeger.com/howard/referendum-leaky-integrate- fire.ods * http://www.swerdfeger.com/howard/referendum-leaky-integrate- fire.xls I have never heard this system advocated before so I have given no credit. Howie. election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ Now you can scan emails quickly with a reading pane. Get the new Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Possible Approval Winner set/criterion (was Juho--Margins fails Plurality. WV passes.)
The Possible Approval Winner criterion looks actually quite natural in the sense that it compares the results to what Approval voting could have achieved. The definition of the criterion contains a function that can be used to evaluate the candidates (also for other uses) - the possibility and strength of an approval win. This function can be modified to support also cardinal ratings. In the first example there is only one entry (11: AB) that can vary when checking the Approval levels. B can be either approved or not. In the case of cardinal ratings values could be 1.0 for A, 0.0 for C and anything between 0.0001 and 0. for B. Or without normalization the values could be any values between 0.0. and 1.0 as long as value(A) value(B) value (C). With the cardinal ratings version it is possible to check what the original utility values leading to this group of voters voting AB could have been (and if the outcome is achievable in some cardinal ratings based method, e.g. max average rating). The max average rating test is actually almost as easy to make as the PAW test. Note that my description of the cardinal ratings for candidate B had a slightly different philosophy. It maintained the ranking order of the candidates, which makes direct mapping from the cardinal values to ordinal values possible. The results are very similar to those of the approval variant but the cardinal utility values help making a more direct comparison with the original utilities of the voters. Now, what is the value of these comparisons when evaluating the different Condorcet methods. These measures could be used quite straight forward in evaluating the performance of the Condorcet methods if one thinks that the target of the voting method is to maximise the approval of the winner or to seek the best average utility. This need not be the case in all Condorcet elections (but is one option). There are several utility functions that the Condorcet completion methods could approximate. The Condorcet criterion itself is majority oriented. Minmax method minimises the strength of interest to change the selected winner to one of the other candidates. Approval and cardinal ratings have somewhat different targets than the majority oriented Condorcet criterion and some of the common completion methods, but why not if those targets are what is needed (or if they bring other needed benefits like strategy resistance). I find it often useful to link different methods and criteria to something more tangible like concrete real life compatible examples or to some target utility functions (as in the discussion above). One key reason for this is that human intuition easily fails when dealing with the cyclic structures (that are very typical cases when studying the Condorcet methods). In this case it seems that PAW and corresponding cardinal utility criterion lead to different targets/ utility than e.g. the minmax(margins) required additional votes to become the Condorcet winner philosophy. Maybe the philosophy of PAW is to respect clear majority decisions (Condorcet criterion) but go closer to the Approval/cardinal ratings style evaluation when the majority opinion is not clear. You may have different targets in your mind but for me this was the easiest interpretation. Juho P.S. One example. 1: AB 1: C Here B could be an Approval winner (tie) but not a max average rating winner in the ranking maintaining style that was discussed above (since the rating of B must be marginally smaller than the rating of A in the first ballot). On Mar 7, 2007, at 16:28 , Chris Benham wrote: Juho wrote (March7, 2007): The definition of plurality criterion is a bit confusing. (I don't claim that the name and content and intention are very natural either :-).) - http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Plurality_criterion talks about candidates given any preference - Chris refers to above-bottom preference votes below If the number of ballots ranking A as the first preference is greater than the number of ballots on which another candidate B is given any preference, then B must not be elected. Electowiki definition could read: If the number of voters ranking A as the first preference is greater than the number of voters ranking another candidate B higher than last preference, then B must not be elected. Yes it could and to me it in effect does (provided last means last or equal-last) The criterion come from Douglas Woodall who economises on axioms so doesn't use one that says that with three candidates A,B,C a ballot marked ABC must always be regarded as exactly the same thing as AB truncates. He assumes that truncation is allowed but above bottom equal-ranking isn't. A similar criterion of mine is the Possible Approval Winner criterion: Assuming that voters make some approval distinction among the candidates but none among those they equal
Re: [EM] Are proposed methods asymptotically aproaching some limit of utility?
On Mar 11, 2007, at 18:44 , Matthew Welland wrote: I can't follow every thread but I'm starting to think that the search for some perfect voting method is asymptotically approaching some sort of limit. Theoretically that may be the truth. In practice I see many experts with often quite different opinions on where the asymptote is about to lead us :-). Note also that there may be also different targets on what kind of utility the method tries to maximize. Seeking for a compromise candidate with wide support may be a good target in most elections but one could also have different goals like minimizing number of really disappointed voters or giving a chance also to candidates that are not widely supported (e.g. random ballot). Allowing the majority to decide vs. seeking for best average utility is also another decision on what kind of utility to seek. And of course in some environments strategic voting is a bigger threat than in others and one needs to pick the voting method accordingly. There are however some good general purpose methods that work well in most typical elections. That doesn't mean that the pursuit isn't useful but there is an academic path and a pragmatic path. Yes, this list discusses both theoretical questions and pragmatic questions. Both are of course good topics to cover. It would be good to be clear when one claims something about the theoretical properties and when about the practical properties. I want to know what to advocate in various forums and what to implement on my own web site. My current choice would be range voting. It is simple (only slightly harder to expain than approval) and it seems to do a good job at leaving voters satisfied. It offers some really nice properties with sincere votes. It however has the potential to lead to disasters if used in a mixed way so that some voter groups mark their sincere preferences while some others mark strategically only largest and smallest values. Juho Laatu It is hard to imagine that more than 50% of the voters would be dissatisfied with the results of a range vote. I see several important qualities to consider: 1. How hard is the system to describe to others and to implement. 2. Will the ratio of people satisfied to dissatisifed with the results be greater than 1. A satisficity(*) ratio if you will. 3. Voting effort. How much effort does it take to express your vote? Voting system Complexity Satisficity(*)Voting Effort -- --- --- Pluratlity simple terrible low Approval simple ok to goodlow Condorcet complex good? medium Range simple good medium Based on what I know now I would settle on Range Voting. However for a while I was dead set on approval voting and before that I was advocating IRV. Is Range Voting satisficient or are its flaws or limitations serious enough that there are many scenarios where it will fail to meet a satisficity ratio of greater than one? (*) My definition is degree to which it satisfies which may differ from definitions found out on the web :-) and yes, I know I should be using Bayesian Regret but a) don't really understand it and b) I like the sound of satisficity. Matt -- http://www.kiatoa.com, a self-governing site where *you* can be the boss! You make and choose the stories and the classifieds are always free. Also, many best of polls. Come join in the ballot stuffing! election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ Inbox full of spam? Get leading spam protection and 1GB storage with All New Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] D2MAC
On Mar 10, 2007, at 21:31 , Jobst Heitzig wrote: Dear Forest, you wrote: At the other extreme, suppose the election is presidential, and one voter bullets for write-in X, and no other voter even approves X, and that the first ballot drawn is the bullet for X. Then under D2MAC candidate X wins. The reason I suggested D2MAC was foremost to show that democratic methods are possible in theory. I think term democratic is not a good term to describe the fact that methods like D2MAC and random ballot give all candidates some positive probability of winning. I think e.g. term proportional would be more accurate (since the fairness of these methods will be demonstrated after multiple candidates have been elected sequentially, in the same way as multiple winners can be elected proportionally in multi-winner elections). Not being proportional doesn't necessarily mean that the method would be less democratic (see e.g. my further comments below). In practice, one will have to make sure only such options that are in a certain sense feasible are on the ballot. Write-ins would not automatically pass as feasible unless the electorate is small and voters trust each other not to suggest unconstitutional options. Feasibility of all options on the ballot could be checked by an independent institution, say a high court or mediator. A different approach would be to combine a democratic method like D2MAC with some kind of supermajority veto: all suggested options must be registered before the decision, will appear on the ballot, and each voter can mark an option as unconstitutional; options which are thus marked by more than, say, 90% of the voters are considered infeasible and are removed. This, of course, requires responsible voters who really mark unconstitutional options. If one adds new such criteria to the method that have an influence on who will be elected, that combination of methods could be called a new voting method (that may take place in two phases as in your examples above). It is also possible to see the target social utility function to be different then, not giving all candidates the possibility to win but always favouring the centrist candidates (or constitutional, non-vetoed, feasible, or simply the more liked ones). Note also that in some elections it may make sense to allow only very few strongest candidates to win (i.e. not only the worst ones would be denied the right to victory but also some relatively popular ones). As an example consider presidential elections in a country where president has lots of power (police, military). 1/3 of the population supports a candidate that wants to do something really bad with the power he would have. In this kind of countries the rules of presidential elections could well be such that the 2/3 majority that strongly dislikes the plans of the 1/3 candidate could make it impossible for that candidate to be elected. This can be said to be one of the benefits of the majority rule. My point here is just to demonstrate that elections methods that automatically limit the winning probability of some marginal candidates to 0 can be useful and natural in many elections. This does not mean that all elections would be like this. Random ballot and D2MAC (and their different utility targets) may well be good methods for some other elections. Juho Yours, Jobst election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Trees and single-winner methods
P.S. Neutrality maybe needs some additional words. The candidate tree makes the behaviour of the method slightly different with respect to different candidates. Otherwise similar ballots but with different names do not always behave the same way. The method is neutral as a whole (candidate set-up is seen as part of the method) although the ballots calculation process is not (when candidate set-up is seen as an external input to this process). Juho On Mar 11, 2007, at 22:50 , Juho wrote: Here's one more election method for you to consider. I often represent the view that in public large scale elections the risk of successful strategic voting is not that big (at least in countries where strategic tricks are not widely used). This one however tries to study the other extreme - what kind of tricks would we need to eliminate as many of the discussed strategic voting scenarios as possible. Please check it and tell what it is good for (and what not). Let's start from a Condorcet method (it doesn't matter much which one). Then we allow the candidates to form groups. Each group will be handled as if it was a single candidate. The group will be considered as good as the best candidate within it. In one ballot the group will be considered better than another group (or candidate) if the best of its members is considered better than the best member of the other group (or the single candidate). These groups are typically alliances of similar minded candidates. Their members could be called clones (but in another meaning than what term clone typically refers to in the EM list). In order to reduce the vulnerability to strategies the ultimate thing we could do would be to arrange the candidates in embedded small groups so that the in the end the candidate set-up would become a binary tree where each level contains just two alternative groups (or candidates). The individual candidates and groupings and parties are expected to make decisions on what the tree (binary or not) looks like. The election organizers maybe would create the root part of the tree if the groups/candidates/parties were not able to provide just one tree that would already contain all the candidates. Creating just a flat list at the root level is maybe not a good idea if maximum defence against strategies is sought since in that case other parties/groups/ candidates could leave those parties/groups/candidates that they intend to bury to the flat list. (One could arrange the biggest subtrees closest to the root, or maybe just make a random binary tree (with balanced root part).) The tree structure limits the way voters can express themselves. With candidate tree structure (A1, A2), (B1, B2) vote A1B1A2B2 and vote A1A2B1B2 have the same impact. Voters are only allowed to tell which branch they prefer. And then within the winning branch which one of the candidates of that branch they prefer. (The tree structure will also not respect the Condorcet criterion in all cases.) On the other hand having a structure among the candidates is informative to the voters. Especially if the number of candidates is big, then having a grouping between them has some value. It is also possible to vote for a group. In the example above one could vote A1A2B where B represents the whole branch (B1, B2) (B is the name of that branch). In the extreme binary three format this method becomes in practice a majority vote between two candidates at each level. This is what I meant with the idea to eliminate as many strategic voting scenarios as possible. Would the binary variant of the method solve some of your worst nightmare scenarios where laws of jungle rule today :-) ? Additional observations: - It would be also possible to use the tree structure for tie breaking only (but strategy elimination would not be as strong) - I have recommended the tree structure also for multi-winner elections (tree voting) = maybe more natural there, but not without benefits in the single-winner case either - It is possible to use also bullet style or Approval style ballots in addition to the ranking style ballots discussed above (also multi- winner) Juho Laatu ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
[EM] Electronic voting in Estonia
Electronic voting in Estonia, in case you haven't read about this yet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estonian_parliamentary_election%2C_2007 Juho ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] What is the ideal election method for sincere voters?
that yourself :-). Juho ___ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] D2MAC can be much more efficient than Range Voting (corrected)
On Mar 9, 2007, at 0:43 , Jobst Heitzig wrote: Dear Warren, you wrote: Aha, that explains it. The phrasing of the definition was very poor since it can be parsed in several ways. You have to try to define things in ways that can only be parsed in one way. It helps to use short sentences. With long sentences you start wondering which word pairs up with which antecedent. I must certainly apologize for my poor command of the English language. After all, it's a foreign language for me. I try to do my best, but it is not always as clear as formal mathematical definitions. Hopefully, most people know what I mean, otherwise please tell me. Yours, Jobst Never mind :-). Actually also the reverse is true. I have in few occasions experienced that the descriptions of the non-native English speakers are better for me than those of the native speakers. One reason for this is that the native speakers may use different words that have some detailed language or (more local) cultural area bound differences in their meaning (and associations). Non-native writers often write the definitions more in a fool proof wireframe model style (using the words in their very basic meaning). Of course sometimes also they carry cultural and language related influences from their own languages/culture to the English language based discussions. Waiting for the emergence of sufficiently good formal languages to discuss theoretical topics in an exact manner ;-) BR, Juho P.S. I read your definition as intended - don't know if this had something to do with the discussed topic above - reading word also very literally etc. ___ All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] it's pleocracy, not democracy
On Mar 6, 2007, at 8:56 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: At 04:50 PM 3/5/2007, Juho wrote: On Mar 5, 2007, at 7:02 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: How, indeed, it occurs to me to ask, are we to know who got their way in a secret ballot system? The presumption might be that the way was gotten by a party. It would be just my luck that by the time I wised up and became a Republican, the Democrats would get their turn. (Make no assumptions about my personal politics from this.) It is possible to link the information that is carried from one election to another to parties or candidates as well as to the voters, depending on the characteristics of the environment. I think that Juho did not get the implications of what I wrote. If we are going to link the randomization that allegedly eliminates injustice to minority voters, we must have open voting, we can't have secret ballot. If we have secret ballot, and there is some hidden process that randomizes the results, well, tell me, would *you* trust that such a process was not being manipulated? After all, there would be no way to check. Ok, I appreciate also these concerns. One needs to consider in which situations each variant works as wanted. My intention was to point out also that when the carry over points are tied to the parties that doesn't yet reveal who voted those parties. Juho ___ All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho--Margins fails Plurality. WV passes.
The definition of plurality criterion is a bit confusing. (I don't
claim that the name and content and intention are very natural
either :-).)
- http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Plurality_criterion talks about
candidates given any preference
- Chris refers to above-bottom preference votes below
There seems to be (potentially) some sort of an (approval style)
cutoff 1) before the non-listed candidates of each ballot, or 2)
before the least preferred candidates of each voter.
Let's assume the following slightly modified ballots.
11: AB
07: B
12: CA=B
If there are three candidates, A, B and C, then the disapproved
candidates are
- {C}, {A,C} and {} (respectively) with rule 1
- {C}, {A,C} and {A,B} with rule 2
(Note also that existence of a fourth candidate D may have an
impact on which candidates are considered disapproved.)
If the voter given approval to the listed candidates is intentional
then rule 1 seems to be the intended interpretation. Otherwise
interpretation 2 might be correct. Since the cutoff is not explicitly
mentioned, maybe interpretation 2 makes more sense. In this case the
Electowiki definition could read: If the number of voters ranking A
as the first preference is greater than the number of voters ranking
another candidate B higher than last preference, then B must not be
elected.
Juho
On Mar 5, 2007, at 19:49 , Chris Benham wrote:
Michael Ossipoff wrote:
In a posting to a different mailing list, Markus pointed out that
margins fails the Plurality Criterion, and that wv Condorcet
passes the Plurality Criterion.
Yes.
11: AB
07: B
12: C
A Woodall example that applies. Margins elects A, yet C has more
top preference votes than A has
above-bottom preference votes.
Chris Benham
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Re: [EM] What is the ideal election method for sincere voters?
On Mar 5, 2007, at 6:41 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: It is also questionable if it always makes sense to select the favourite alternatives of those votes that have strong feelings and not to respect the opinions of voters with milder feelings that much. If we were deciding a series of choices, and the strong and mild feeling voters were always the same people, then, I'd suggest, as the strong got their way each time, the mild voters would begin to consider themselves unjustly deprived. They would become strong in their feelings and votes. Unless they agreed that that the strong getting what they want was just. You are getting dangerously close to the often stated claim that Range would turn to Approval in the presence of insincere voter groups. :-) I don't think that Condorcet methods were developed to maximize utility; rather I think that the idea of the pairwise winner was seen as intuitively correct. Probably a typical person studying Condorcet does not see it as a better utility function than Range. I believe it is typical that Condorcet sympathies are based on its ability to reach pretty good utility and strategy resistance at the same time. Maybe many also think that due to the varying sincere preference strengths it is better to give each voter one vote (all of same strength) (=one man one vote principle) (ABC means AB, AC and BC, all with strength 1). This can be considered ideal by some although this does not aim at maximising utility but at minimising the number of voters that are unhappy (=never mind how unhappy they are) with the selection. (Condorcet typically compares only one pairwise decision at a time, which may be considered a weakness, but I leave that discussion to another time.) Juho ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] it's pleocracy, not democracy
On Mar 5, 2007, at 7:02 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: How, indeed, it occurs to me to ask, are we to know who got their way in a secret ballot system? The presumption might be that the way was gotten by a party. It would be just my luck that by the time I wised up and became a Republican, the Democrats would get their turn. (Make no assumptions about my personal politics from this.) It is possible to link the information that is carried from one election to another to parties or candidates as well as to the voters, depending on the characteristics of the environment. Readers may know that I favor Range Voting as an election method, which does not automatically choose the preference of the majority, for it considers preference strength, if the voters choose to express it. I've said it before and I'll probably say it again: The majority properly has the right of decision, but it wisely exercises this carefully, with consideration of possible harm done to minorities. I wouldn't go that far (away from the Range ideal :-). Often the majority has the power to do so and often it may be well justified to allow and support that but I wouldn't give them the right as a general rule. Juho ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] it's pleocracy, not democracy
one election to the next). These methods would work also in multi-winner elections (also and especially when the number of elected alternatives is small). One more observation on possible alternative approaches. Divisor methods like e.g. d'Hondt provide and ordering of the candidates. And fractions quotas may be a good values to be carried between elections. So far, we see that an asymptotically democratic method without randomization is possible when there is a whole sequence of decisions, but this method suffers from strong incentives for strategic voting. Of course, WITH randomization allowed, there is a perfectly democratic and absolutely strategy-proof method: random ballot. Random ballot is a good method for some elections (but maybe not e.g. in the genocide example above). However, both methods have another problem: They do not easily support cooperation between voters since it is either optimal to vote for the favourite or for the strongest competitor, while there is no incentive to vote for compromise options. Therefore, the results are just but not particularly efficient with respect to utility. Here again the society needs to decide if they want proportionality (each voter group one day gets a winner that has similar opinions to those of this group of voters) or if they want to elect every time an alternative that represents as many of the voters as well as possible. I'd be quite happy to accept also semi-heuristic methods where we somehow try to live between these targets. That could mean e.g. losing some of the credits in time (=old credits gradually lost). The major parties would get their candidates elected in an alternating pattern but extremists maybe would get only reasonable compromises (maybe a more extreme candidate of the closest party of reasonable size). The target utility functions could be quite different for different elections. Juho The method D2MAC aims to improve upon this. It is: Draw two ballots at random; the winner is the most approved option of those approved on both ballots, if such an option exists, or else the top option on the first ballot. Yours, Jobst __ XXL-Speicher, PC-Virenschutz, Spartarife mehr: Nur im WEB.DE Club! Jetzt gratis testen! http://freemail.web.de/home/landingpad/?mc=021130 election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho--about unreversed Nash equilibria
On Feb 27, 2007, at 11:46 , Michael Ossipoff wrote: But your smiley suggests that my examples are not what you mean by “real life example”s. Well, since margins isn’t in use anywhere, it would be difficult to find real life examples. All one can do is show what can happen. Well, actually I didn't mean the really real life with real life, just examples that can be thought to have occurred in some typical elections, not ones that are so theoretical that they are not likely to ever occur in (real) real life. I have tried to direct the discussion to on type of typical examples, namely large public elections. So, I'm interested in examples that have concrete numbers that could happen in some typical elections and that can be discussed using arguments on relate probabilities in real life situations (e.g. what is the probability of a certain strategy in a certain situation to make the outcome of the election more favourable to the strategic voters, how much, what are the risks etc.). You know, the person who should be expected to defend his claim is the person claiming that Nash equilibria won’t matter. You claimed that Nash equilibrium is an important problem. In addition to the theoretical claim I'd like to understand what that might mean in real elections. Therefore I'd be interested in an example where the problems materialize (to potentially become convinced that the Nash equilibrium kills the margin based Condorcet methods). I don't know what the worst identified scenarios are. I'm interested e.g. to see the dynamics of the voter decisions. What will happen when they apply strategies and what will happen then as a result of not having any Nash equilibrium? You’re proposing a voting system that will often have situations in which the only Nash equilibria, the only stable outcomes, are ones in which people order-reverse. Do you realize how far you’re going in order to forgive that big fault of margins? I'm not yet convinced tat stable strategic states would be the only reasonable way forward. Juho ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use – The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho, unexplanable strategy attitudes
On Feb 27, 2007, at 17:36 , Michael Ossipoff wrote: I don’t know what you mean by “attitudes”. I gave two rather extreme attitude examples (with the intention to define the discussion space) 1) In some countries strategic voting may be taken as granted and voters may expect to be given recommendations on how to apply the most efficient strategies 2) In some other countries recommending strategic voting would be seen as an attempt of fraud and voters would immediately change their opinion of that candidate Juho says: My learning is that it would be good to always state one's assumptions clearly. I reply: That particular statement itself could be a bit clearer. If you believe that I didn’t state an assumption that I should have stated, then shouldn’t you say what it is? In the next sentence of my mail I tried to answer this question on my behalf: My tradition is more on the second scenario side, but I try to cover also varying levels of strategy centric thinking My comments on the discussed winning votes and margins examples were based on assuming an environment where strategies are used very extensively but not by all voters (some even got irritated when others used strategies trying to beat their favourite). I however assumed that people would prefer (and be happy with) sincere voting to extensive use of strategies, i.e. there would be not interest in strategic voting unless it would give them clear benefits or if it would be a clear threat to them. In short, I assumed that 1) voters tend to favour sincere voting but 2) many of them are ready to use (counter)strategies if they are forced to and 3) a considerable number of them are interested in using strategies to gain personal benefits and to cheat the system. I'd be interested to know if you assume some particular type of atmosphere in the environment in which you are eventually planning the discussed election methods to be used (in general or in some particular example). The vulnerability to strategies is stronger in the environment of example 1 above. I'm not sure if there are countries where the situation is that bad, but I know there are countries where many voters vote in a way that they were advised to (by more knowledgeable trusted people/groups). Juho ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use – The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho--about unreversed Nash equilibria
On Feb 26, 2007, at 3:42 , Michael Ossipoff wrote: Juho said (about margins poor properties with regard to unreversed Nash equilibria): This one did not change my feelings much. If you'd say something similar about sincere votes I reply: Here I believe that you’re saying you want something said about complete sincerity rather than just the absence of order-reversal. That would be nice, but no non-probabilistic method would comply. With even our best methods, if everyone is voting sincerely, sometimes someone can gain by order-reversal, and so it won’t be a Nash equilibrium. I didin't take position on what to prove, just wanted to say that the factors that take an election from sincere voting to strategic voting are interesting. In most cases going to strategies and counter strategies makes the usability of a voting system poor. There may be exceptions but I assume poor usability until I see the opposite demonstrated. (You can fix my problem by giving good general rules on how voters are supposed to vote. One answer might be that they are not supposed to think but just vote as told by the party strategists (not a perfect one).) So we talk about whether, when there is a CW, there are always un- reversed Nash equilibria. And with margins there often are not. Juho continues: , and would provide examples I reply: Ok, I’ll provide examples. But the margins order-reversal example that I already posted is an example. With wv, the order-reversal is thwarted and regretted merely by the B voters truncating. With margins it takes more than that. Often it takes order-reversal to protect the CW. But, if that isn’t so in that particular example (sometimes equal ranking will do it, sometimes it takes order- reversal in margins), then I’ll post an example tomorrow or soon after. But, for now, do you seriously think that there isn’t an example? An example of what? Juho continues: that demonstrate that this can happen in real life I reply: And in what sense do you claim that I haven’t shown that it can happen, when I’ve posted an example of it happening? You’d have to tell what is improbable about my example. I think I already replied to the examples and commented e.g. that with the given numbers they need a lot of strategic voters to succeed. That would make their success less probable at least in large public elections. Juho continues: and that the game theoretic choices would be obvious to the voters It’s well established that, if there’s a Nash equilibrium, people will find it. You should maybe describe how you expect the correct voting patterns to be found in real elections (by regular voters). Juho continues: maybe then. But now this seems a bit like one addition to the long list of theoretical claims about the properties of different methods. I reply: No. Demonstrated facts about what can happen, and sometimes will happen. There are some scenarios that can be said to never happen if the probability is low enough. Much depends on the assumptions (number of voters, recommended strategies, level of sincere/strategic orientation,...). For example making all the voters of a large group vote strategically according to some plan sounds quite theoretical to me (in most environments). Juho continues: This criterion sounds a bit tailored to me. I reply: first described that test several years ago. This wouldn't make it less tailored. Juho continues: I find the no strategies/sincere border line more interesting target of study than the no reversal border line. I reply: But we don’t choose the border line. You’re not going to find a non- probabilistic method for which, when there’s a CW, there are Nash equilibria in which the CW wins and everyone votes sincerely (as I define sincere voting). Sincerity is an interesting border line since voting methods behave nicely when we are above that border line. I'd be more interested in strategic voting below that line if the method in question would fail in keeping sufficient part of the voters sincere and there wouldn't be any better methods available. I mean that I'd first like to check the assumption that voters would stay sincere enough, and if needed, alternative methods that can do it. The best that can be done is to separate methods according to which ones, when there’s a CW, always have a Nash equilibrium in which no one reverses a preference. But you’re the one who chose to post an order-reversal example first, you know. So how come now you don’t consider it as important? smiley I think those were studying the borderline between sincere and strategic voting, and margins and winning votes. In any case, the fact that, with margins, there are situations in which the only Nash equilibria involve order-reversal says something about margins and its stability and its strategy ridden
Re: [EM] Margins examples
and the probability of electing C increases if the number of A supporters following the strategy is high. Summary. At least with these numbers the two strategies don't seem to work in practical large scale public elections. Winning votes seemed less vulnerable to these attacks than margins but that property is not needed unless the strategies are a real threat. Juho Mike Ossipoff election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho: Your other examples
On Feb 24, 2007, at 13:31 , Michael Ossipoff wrote: Juho-- You said: Here's my example. It is in principle the same one I already used but now presented as a bit more realistic scenario. I reply: Ok, if it’s effectively the same as your first example, then doesn’t everything that I said about your first example apply to this one too? Pretty much so. One difference (in addition to increased realism) is maybe that now also Democrats clearly prefer the CentristRepublican over the RightWingRepublican. Mainly, I just used some more realistic numbers. But I’d like to make a few comments: We have three candidates: D=Democrat, C=CentristRepublican, R=RightWingRepublican. I don't have any small party candidates, and that's maybe a deviation from realism, but let's do this simple scenario first. Sincere votes: 21: D 21: DC 03: DR 03: CD 26: CR 26: RC Many Democratic voters truncated since they were not interested in the Republican party internal battle between R and C. The R supporters note that they could vote RD and get R elected (with winning votes). They spread the word among the R supporters and press to to reach the required number of voters. I reply: The obvious problem with that is that such a strategy campaign would also inform the intended victims, who would refuse to rank the candidate whose voters were trying to steal the election from them. The result would be that the offensive order-reversal would backfire. Yes. If two BC voters would change their opinion to BC the strategy would fail and the worst candidate A would be elected. A has 49 first preference supporters and is quite close to winning the election if the Republicans (or the RightWingRepublican) give a bad impression of themselves. Offensive order-reversal, for that reason, won’t be a problem. But truncation will be a problem with methods (such as margins) that let it be a problem. If you refer to problems related to the examples you gave in the other mail, I answered to this in my other reply. 6 out of the 26 R supporters follow the recommended strategy (= 20: RC, 06: RD). R wins (with winning votes). Is this scenario a credible real life scenario? I reply: No, because the intended victims would refuse to rank the perpetrators’candidate, and so the offensive strategy attempt would backfire. That can be likewise said of your first example, but it’s more obvious in this one, in which you mention the press campaign for offensive strategy. Ok, very good. Condorcet methods seem to be rather strategy resistant in public large scale elections. You ask: Is there a risk that this strategy would backfire? I reply: Of course. Why would the strategy’s intended victims rank the perpetrators’ candidate? How often does it happen that supporters of one candidate have the possibility to influence the outcome of the election? I reply: Examples suggest that that will often be the case. You said: P.S. One more example on winning votes and truncation. 49:AB, 48:BC, 2:CA. A supporters truncate = C wins. I reply: No method can help voters who won’t help themselves by voting for a compromise that they need. You continued: Or alternatively sincere votes are 49:AB, 48:BC, 2:CB. In this case truncation by A supporters makes it possible for C supporters to vote strategically 2:CA = C wins (instead of B that was A supporters' second favourite). I reply: The same comment applies here. Additionally, doesn’t everything that I said about your first example apply here too? Ok. My point with the last two examples was just to demonstrate that truncation is not all safe with winning votes. Summary. There are good chances that strategic voting will backfire in large public Condorcet elections. The winning vote examples that I gave have the problem that the required number of strategic voters is quite small and therefore under appropriate circumstances the strategies may be successful (only few votes needed, the strategy could be kept secret, the elections are not that large, reliable polls available). Note again that my ideal results from this discussion are to demonstrate that successful strategic voting is very difficult in real life large public Condorcet elections. And in addition to that I'd be happy to see margins to be approximately as good or better than winning votes, if possible. (If that can be proven, then it is easier to discuss which pairwise result comparison function gives the best performance with sincere votes.) When defending Condorcet methods in public it may be a good strategy to ask for concrete real life examples where Condorcet methods would fail. My understanding is that Condorcet methods perform better in such cases than when focusing on some theoretical extreme cases and and proofs/criteria that indicate those theoretical vulnerabilities
Re: [EM] Juho reply, 21 Feb., 1053 GMT
On Feb 24, 2007, at 2:22 , James Gilmour wrote: Juho Sent: 22 February 2007 06:29 On Feb 22, 2007, at 5:50 , Dave Ketchum wrote: STAY AWAY from US Presidential elections. The Electoral College offers too many complications to live with for this effort. Ok, let it be UK then, electing a MP (excluding at least the Scottish Parliament to stay in the two-party domain). :-) Someone's a little out of date with the state of UK politics! At the 2005 UK general election (Westminster, House of Commons), Labour got 35% of the votes, Conservatives 32% and Liberal Democrats 22%, with 11% spread across a wide range of other parties. MPs from 12 different parties were elected. Changed days from 1951 and 1955 when the two largest parties together took 97% and 96% of all the votes!! The UK is the exception that proves Duverger's law. James Gilmour Ok, it would maybe be safest not to refer to any country with an existing voting system and political history :-). The examples should work as described for any large scale public Condorcet elections (of one district) that use winning votes to measure the strength of the pairwise comparisons. Juho ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why does IRV but not delayed top-two runoff lead to 2-partydomination?
On Feb 25, 2007, at 2:05 , Jan Kok wrote: Are there any Australian web sites, blogs, newspaper or magazine editorials, etc. that criticize IRV? http://australianpolitics.com/voting/systems/preferential.shtml is not strongly critical but does say It [IRV] promotes a two-party system to the detriment of minor parties and independents. I've asked the author of that site why he said that, but haven't received a response. Also this list has had discussions on the Australian system. It has some peculiarities that are relevant in the two-party domination related discussions. With a quick search I found the following mail by Chris Benham that has further links to older mails. http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/ 2005-June/016136.html Juho ___ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Why does IRV but not delayed top-two runoff lead to 2-party domination?
The web page listed some interesting factors that may have effect but I think it didn't provide a complete plausible explanation to the two party domination questions and the role of IRV and top-two runoff in this. Why do those two methods, which seem strategically quite similar, lead to such different results? I think the methods are behaviourally closer to each others than what the web page said. There are also other reasons behind two party domination. I'll try to address some of them below. 1. Different strategy calculations by voters under the two systems. I didn't find convincing evidence here. There are many strategies the voters could try, sensible and less sensible. Some of them, like part of supporters of one candidate voting another one, are very hard to control successfully in large public elections. 2. ... last round ... attention from the media This may have some impact but I don't expect this influence to so big that it would clearly differentiate the two methods. Some other observations: The number of analysed IRV countries was small and many of them have their own peculiarities. A more detailed analysis would be needed to make conclusions from them. The page indicated that the listed top-two runoff countries use that method for some presidential elections. I guess most of them use other methods to elect the (multi-party) parliament. The parliaments (and their multi-party members) are often elected in multi-winner elections, not single-winner (like IRV and top-two runoff). I'd say that the division to countries using single-winner districts vs. multi-winner districts (+ a proportional method) is a more important explanation to why some countries become two-party systems than the election method that is used in the single winner (president or parliament) elections. I believe this is the situation in many of the listed multi-party countries. In the US the president forms his own government (that is typically a single-party government) but in many other countries the government is not linked to the presidency (and may be a multi-party government). Therefore the presidential elections in many cases don't have much impact on the two-party vs. multi-party question. The discussed two methods both favour large parties. Favouring large parties may lead to two party domination but not necessarily. In the case of the top-two runoff method there could be e.g. 3 or 4 parties that can make their way to the second round (depends on the country, its history, and the nature of the election). In countries where the president forms the government people are probably more loyal to their favourite big party than in coutries where the presidential post is more ceremonial or just one man's post (and the government will be elected via other routes). In the second type presidential elections the personal characteristics of the candidates play a bigger role (which leads to more parties having a chance). In summary I'd say that IRV and top-two runoff favour big parties but having single-winner districts is a more important factor in making the two-party countries what they are. Condorcet, Approval and Range may elect centrist small party candidates quite easily but the two discussed methods tend to eliminate them. The differences between the two discussed methods are maybe not that radical. Combinations like single-winner districts + Condorcet would probably lead to compromise candidates in some districts but major parties (and centrists) would still have an advantage (when compared to fully proportional multi- winner methods). Juho On Feb 23, 2007, at 13:17 , Jan Kok wrote: The statistical evidence at http://rangevoting.org/TTRvIRVstats.html seems pretty good that IRV leads to two party domination in IRV elections, while (delayed) top two runoff tends to lead to a strong multiparty system. Why do those two methods, which seem strategically quite similar, lead to such different results? The above mentioned page has links to some speculations/explanations, which I find less than convincing. The main proposed reasons are: 1. Different strategy calculations by voters under the two systems. Voters who like a third party candidate seem more willing to vote for their favorite in the first round of TTR, than corresponding voters under IRV are willing to rank their favorite 1st. Why, why?!? Most IRV supporters in the US have no clue that voting their favorite 1st can ever hurt them. From my limited discussions with Australians, it seems most of them have no idea either. So why aren't Australians voting for third party candidates as their first choices, enough that they might occasionally win? While at the same time, voters in TTR countries feel free to vote for whoever they want, often enough that TTR countries tend to have flourishing multiparty systems? 2. Under IRV, if a third party candidate makes
Re: [EM] Juho reply, 22 Feb., 1548 GMT
On Feb 22, 2007, at 17:49 , Michael Ossipoff wrote: Juho replies: One thus needs to add one to the worst margins defeat of a candidate to get the number of additional voters that the candidate needs to become a Condorcet winner. I reply: So to find out what it would take to make A the CW, in general, would be to add up how many pair-wise preference votes would have to be changed, summed over all the voters, to make A the CW. That’s Dodgson, or something very similar. I used the needed number of friendly additional voters to measure the distance to being a Condorcet winner since that is a simple way to do the measurement. Changing existing votes would be a much more difficult task (since it is difficult to anticipate what kind of ballots the voters will cast). In general, looking at A’s worse pair-wise defeat isn’t enough. Didn't get this. Was my formula (see above) wrong? Maybe an example would clarify where the difference between our thoughts is. Juho replies: I think the best way forward would be to give practical examples of situations where the methods fail due to strategic voting. I reply: I’d be glad to. I’ve posted those examples many times since the EM list began. I’ve posted them for every “generation” of EM membership. I’ll post them again in a subsequent posting. The subsequent posting looked identical to the one that I'm replying to now. I hope the old examples are real life ones, or mappable to real life. You know that, in countries that use Plurality strategy is rampant. It’s discussed and recommended, virtually coerced, by the media. As people find out about margins’ strategy needs, they’ll publicize and recommend them. That would be good input for the discussion. I mean if you are able to write general(?) rules for regular voters on how to vote strategically. Juho continues: Here's my example. It is in principle the same one I already used but now presented as a bit more realistic scenario. We have three candidates: D=Democrat, C=CentristRepublican, R=RightWingRepublican. I don't have any small party candidates, and that's maybe a deviation from realism, but let's do this simple scenario first. Sincere votes: 21: D 21: DC 03: DR 03: CD 26: CR 26: RC Many Democratic voters truncated since they were not interested in the Republican party internal battle between R and C. The R supporters note that they could vote RD and get R elected (with winning votes). They spread the word among the R supporters and press too to reach the required number of voters. 6 out of the 26 R supporters follow the recommended strategy (= 20: RC, 06: RD). R wins (with winning votes). I reply: Notice that the only reason why the R can succeed at that is because the C are helping R. As I said, the only way you can succeed in stealing the election by offensive order-reversal is if your victims are trying to help you. Offensive order-reversal isn’t a natural way of voting, and it would require organization and public discussion. It would be impossible to conceal it from its intended victims, who’d then be unlikely to rank R. If the intend victims don’t try to help the perpetrators, helping with their own victimization, the offensive order-reversal will fail, and will result in an outcome worse for the reversers than the CW. These are kind of good news to me. One reason why I'm talking about public large scale elections is that then all major strategic intentions would probably be known by other voters already before the election. In the example I gave I'd expect the popularity of R to decrease. The voters that would change the way they vote would not necessarily be insincere or strategic but just voters that have sincerely changed their opinion about R (and her tactics) before the election. Many C supporters maybe would rank R last (sincerely). You see, I'm trying to get a conclusion this strategy (and others) would not be feasible in large public elections in the first place. You had also several comments about the higher vulnerability of margins. Maybe I'll get the chance to comment when I get the examples. Replying to all the criteria and their properties in different situations is a too tedious and EM bandwidth consuming task to try. One or two good examples should demonstrate the worst vulnerabilities well enough. I hope you noted that the example I gave was intended to point out a situation where winning votes are vulnerable to a strategy and margins are not. Juho ___ All New Yahoo! Mail – Tired of [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho reply, 21 Feb., 1053 GMT
On Feb 21, 2007, at 12:53 , Michael Ossipoff wrote: Juho replies: Do you mean that margins would be so strategy inviting that most voters would turn to strategic voters (in practical real-life elections) if margins are used? I reply: Yes, voters would be more likely to regret sincere ranking in margins than in wv. This and many other points referred to various differences between margins and winning votes and related criteria. My proposed way forward is at the end of this mail. WV is much more strategy-free. The difference is unidirectional. I doubt the unidirectionality. I think the example I gave (Sincere votes: 49:A, 49:BC, 1:CB. Strategic votes: 49:A, 49:BC, 1:CA.) was an example of a situation where WV is vulnerable to a strategy and margins is not. But Minmax only scores the candidate according to his worst defeat. That doesn’t tell what it would take to get rid of all of his defeats and make him the CW. I think minmax(margins) does give information on how many votes a candidates needs to become a Condorcet winner. I'll use an example to visualize what I meant. A loses to B 40-50. A loses to C 30-45. A wins all the other candidates. If there would be 16 additional voters that would rank A first the 30-45 defeat would change to a 46-45 win and the 40-50 defeat would change to a 56-50 win. 15 additional voters would be too little and 17th additional voter is not needed. One thus needs to add one to the worst margins defeat of a candidate to get the number of additional voters that the candidate needs to become a Condorcet winner. One of the advantages of wv over margins is that, in wv, offensive order-reversal is easily thwarted by simply not ranking the reversers’ candidate. Does this mean that voters that are not sure what strategies other voters will use but who believe that strategies will be used should bullet vote their own favourite? :-) As I said, I'd prefer sincere ballots to strategic defences. Offensive order-reversal, the only thing that could cause a strategy problem in wv (truncation causes a strategy problem in margins), requires lots of co-ordination, many strategic voters and has great risk of failure--especially in wv, where it’s so easily thwarted, merely by not ranking the perpetrators’ candidate. In margins, a CW could be defeated by truncation even if it is inadvertent, lazy, hurried, or otherwise non-strategic. But of course the election could be stolen from the CW by strategically- intended truncation too, in margins. I think the best way forward would be to give practical examples of situations where the methods fail due to strategic voting. This would demonstrate that the theoretic vulnerabilities are also practical vulnerabilities. And this gives us the opportunity to estimate the probabilities too. Maybe you can provide an example that demonstrates some really bad case where margins fail. I'll try to do the same for winning votes. I have no intention to prove that winning votes would be worse than margins in all scenarios. I'd like to see them roughly at the same level with respect to vulnerability to strategies. In addition to that I hope that the strategy related problems would stay at levels where they are not a probable threat in typical large scale public elections. Since US presidential elections are a well known study item on this list I propose to use that framework (nation wide Condorcet election). Here's my example. It is in principle the same one I already used but now presented as a bit more realistic scenario. We have three candidates: D=Democrat, C=CentristRepublican, R=RightWingRepublican. I don't have any small party candidates, and that's maybe a deviation from realism, but let's do this simple scenario first. Sincere votes: 21: D 21: DC 03: DR 03: CD 26: CR 26: RC Many Democratic voters truncated since they were not interested in the Republican party internal battle between R and C. The R supporters note that they could vote RD and get R elected (with winning votes). They spread the word among the R supporters and press too to reach the required number of voters. 6 out of the 26 R supporters follow the recommended strategy (= 20: RC, 06: RD). R wins (with winning votes). Is this scenario a credible real life scenario? Do you expect 6 out of the 26 R supporters to vote strategically? Opinions will be different in the poll that was used for planning the strategy and in the actual election. Does that make the strategy less credible? Is there a risk that this strategy would backfire? How often does it happen that supporters of one candidate have the possibility to influence the outcome of the election? My target is to point out what the approximate probability level of minmax(winning votes) to fail as a result of strategic voting is. I don't consider counter strategies yet since I'm mostly
Re: [EM] Juho reply, 21 Feb., 1053 GMT
On Feb 22, 2007, at 5:50 , Dave Ketchum wrote: STAY AWAY from US Presidential elections. The Electoral College offers too many complications to live with for this effort. Ok, let it be UK then, electing a MP (excluding at least the Scottish Parliament to stay in the two-party domain). :-) Juho ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] RE : The list's complete rejection of the poll
Few thoughts about wiki and public voting: - I guess people will be more mainstream when their votes can be seen by others = extreme groups that are not generally liked (in the media, by friends etc.) will get less support - Some voters don't want to state their opinion in public at all (strong tradition in many places) - Public votes with information on who voted what may make voters less strategical = methods like Range may perform better (more utility oriented) that they otherwise would - I guess also emails are quite public and reveal one's opinions either to the list or to the vote counter Juho On Feb 20, 2007, at 18:59 , Michael Ossipoff wrote: Mike, I guess a wiki would be the best way to do the poll then... The votes could be posted in a single place, changed at will, and discussed on a talk page. I reply: ...changed at will is the part that I don't quite like. I've never understood the appeal of a wiki, where what you send might be different next time you look. I suppose people might be honorable enough not to change other people's ballots or comments, and, if that's so, it would be workable. Anyway, as always with voting systems, my purpose is to do my part, and I did so when I posted the poll. Mike Ossipoff election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Chris BC reply
I agree that minmax is not a good name. It refers maybe too much to the algorithm that can be used to seek the winner. Voters should not worry about that. And if one adds the (margins) part in the name gets even more complicated and algorithm oriented. For me minmax and minmax(margins) are a quite practical names since I'm interested in the algorithmic approach but I agree that the general audience is not. Therefore public promotion campaigns might benefit of using some other name. Simpson-Kramer is more human oriented but a bit long. I don't know it's history. Did those guys invent the method or was it covered maybe already by Condorcet and Llull? The name gets even more complex if one adds the margins part to it = Simpson-Kramer(margins). If we are looking for a name for minmax(margins) then one could use some name that refers to the specific characteristics of that method. I sometime ago used name Least Additional Votes but I'm not sure if that is a good enough. Also simpler Additional Votes could do, or maybe Additional Votes Method, or something on the pairwise comparisons like Beats All :-). Plenty of names to choose from if one needs to popularize the method. Juho On Feb 20, 2007, at 14:11 , Markus Schulze wrote: Dear Dave Ketchum, you wrote (20 Feb 2007): Could there be a better name than minmax? I recommend the name Simpson-Kramer. Markus Schulze election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ Inbox full of spam? Get leading spam protection and 1GB storage with All New Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho reply
On Feb 20, 2007, at 15:39 , Michael Ossipoff wrote: Juho wrote: My sympathies towards minmax(margins) come primarily from the way it handles sincere votes. I reply: But there won’t be sincere votes for it to handle, to the extent that it doesn’t allow sincere votes. That’s why the defensive strategy criteria, and the wv Condorcet methods were proposed. Do you mean that margins would be so strategy inviting that most voters would turn to strategic voters (in practical real-life elections) if margins are used? And that WV would solve that? (I'm under the impression that this kind of impacts are not very big and that they may work in both directions.) Juho continues: Elect the candidate that would beat all the others. If there is no such candidate, elect the one that would need least additional votes to beat the others. I reply: That sounds similar to Dodgson. If it’s Dodgson, or like Dodgson, it is vulnerable to clones, and it doesn’t meet the defensive strategy criteria. I think Dodgson counts the sum of defeats. I'm not talking about that, just basic minmax(margins) (that actually implements additional votes needed to become the Condorcet winner). “Minmax isn’t a good method name, because it’s used with more than one meaning. Also with other meanings than minmax(margins), minmax(winning votes) etc? The defensive strategy criteria and wv Condorcet were proposed for a reason. ... As I already mentioned I don't like counter strategies to much. If real-life elections end up in media and parties proposing various counter strategies to voters one day before the election (to strategies that some groups are planning or might try) I'm sure that election method would receive some criticism. I'm more interested in methods where strategic voting stays at levels where no counter strategies need to be considered (and where strategies are not a serious risk in the first place). The wv Condorcet versions are much more free of strategy-need, and much more resistant to offensive strategies (for instance, offensive truncation isn’t a problem in wv Condorcet). There are also examples in the other direction. - Sincere votes: 49:A, 49:BC, 1:CB = B wins - Strategic votes: 49:A, 49:BC, 1:CA = C wins if winning votes are used I however hope that we are discussing rather small differences in strategic performance here (since my basic thinking is that Condorcet methods are at their best in situations where strategic voting will not become a major issue due to the natural strategy resistance of all Condorcet methods). Juho continues: The criteria also would force me to discuss the difficulty of implementing the strategies, the probability of success, the probability of certain vulnerabilities to appear in real elections etc. I reply: Criteria don’t force you to do that. They tell, in brief and simple language, what will never happen, or what will always happen, with a method. They speak only of kinds of outcomes having a probability of zero or unity. Yes, good criteria are exact. But too often I see argumentation that refers to scenarios that are possible in theory but that maybe never occur in practice and/or whose impact is minor and/or requires lots coordination, many strategic voters, has risk of failure etc. Juho ___ All New Yahoo! Mail – Tired of [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Chris BC reply
On Feb 19, 2007, at 10:42 , Michael Ossipoff wrote: Juho wrote: (There are good methods also on the other side of the fence, like minmax(margins).) I reply: But, when saying that minmax(margins) is good, you've got to say what it's good for. I've told what the wv methods are good for: The best ones meet SFC, GSFC, and SDSC. Mike Ossipoff Ok, fair enough. My sympathies towards minmax(margins) come primarily from the way it handles sincere votes. I'll address the behaviour with sincere votes based on the two categorization criteria that I mentioned in my previous mail. A) how to measure preference strength between two candidates Margins is a quite natural way of measuring the preference strength. When comparing to winning votes I must say that defeat 0%-50% feels worse than defeat 49%-50%, and that defeat 25%-75% feels quite similar to 0%-50%. (One can always discuss what the intentions of those voters that indicated a tie are, or if there are other better ways to measure the preference strength than these two, but in any case margins is quite decent.) B) is there a philosophy to fix only the cyclic preferences and keep the straight ones Minmax does not follow this principle. It rather evaluates each candidate in turn. I like this approach since trying to linearize the preferences that are circular doesn't sound to me as natural. The result that minmax gives is as follows. Elect the candidate that would beat all the others. If there is no such candidate, elect the one that would need least additional votes to beat the others. This sounds like a natural utility function to me - at least for some purposes (I accept that different utility functions may be best for different elections). I also find the path based explanations a bit clumsy since in real life after the election it does not appear very natural to think that the elected candidate is bad because there is a path where she could be changed to X that could be in turn changed to Y etc. It is maybe more natural to just see how the elected candidate looks with respect to the other candidates (without imagined winner change paths). Respect of the Smith set sounds natural when one images a picture of the canidates and their preference relations drawn on a paper. The most natural way to draw the figure is to draw the Smith set candidates first in a group and only then the others below the Smith set. It looks natural that one elects the winner from the Smith set. But while respecting the fact that candidates outside the Smith set lost to the Smith set candidates the description above totally ignored the cyclic defeats. From minmax point of view they are just as bad as the non cyclic defeats. The disrespect of the Smith set leads to the possibility of electing even the Condorcet loser in some extreme situations. This is the case e.g. when there is a very strong loop between three candidates (Smith set), and all these candidates beat a fourth candidate with a very small margin. Electing the Condorcet loser sounds quite irrational at first sight. One must however note that the Condorcet loser would in this case need only few votes to beat all the others, i.e. it is not that far of being a Condorcet winner. The others are much farther from that target. The minmax utility function measures the distance to being a Condorcet winner, and as already noted above this is a quite natural utility function (at least for some uses). Electing the Condorcet loser can thus be seen as a positive thing in some situations (and methods that do not do so could be rejected based on this criterion). C) other stuff Minmax is good also in the sense that it is easy to explain. Least number of additional votes to beat all others is an explanation that most peope understand and may agree to. It is better to have this kind of understandable explanations to the results of the election than just saying that there was a cycle (people don't understand what that is) and it was solved by a very complex algorithm in favour of some candidate (people don't understand this either). The fact that the result for each candidate is a single number is good since then people can see e.g. how much their favourite lost to the winner. Referring to a complex algorithm and complex conditions that would have changed the outcome is not as helpful and does not explain which candidates got good/bad results. One value for each candidate makes it also easy to display the results, e.g. the intermediate results in TV during the vote counting process. One can also easily see if some candidate still has possibilities to win with the remaining votes that have not yet been calculated (luckily with minmax(margins) one can actually see the exact answer: number of additional votes needed (to beat all or at least to pass the best result so far)). The comments above discussed
Re: [EM] Chris BC reply
On Feb 18, 2007, at 2:32 , Chris Benham wrote: There is group of pairwise methods that use winning votes to measure defeat strength that as I understand it always give the same winner unless there are more than three candidates in a top cycle. That situation would be very very rare and almost certainly would never happen in a public political election, so for practical intents and purposes the differences between them are insignificant and they are one method. The most prominent member of this group is Schulze (aka Beatpath), but others are the Winning Votes versions of Ranked Pairs, River, and Smith//MinMax. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this all that you are referring to by a set of methods? Good description. This nicely defines one category of Condorcet methods that are almost identical (for most practical purposes). My simple categorization of the basic Condorcet methods is as follows. A) how to measure preference strength between two candidates = margins and winning votes are the common alternatives (but I don't exclude others) B) is there a philosophy to fix only the cyclic preferences and keep the straight ones = leads e.g. to respect of the Smith set In this categorization Chris Benham's set is A = winning votes, B = yes. (There are good methods also on the other side of the fence, like minmax(margins).) Juho Laatu ___ All new Yahoo! Mail The new Interface is stunning in its simplicity and ease of use. - PC Magazine http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] RE : Re: A few concluding points about SFC, CC, method choice, etc.
On Feb 15, 2007, at 23:29 , Kevin Venzke wrote: --- Abd ul-Rahman Lomax [EMAIL PROTECTED] a écrit : Thus, we conclude, the Condorcet Criterion *must* be violated in some elections by an optimal method, and thus this theoretical optimum method must fail the criterion and others similar to it, such as the Majority Criterion and SFC. I agree with this, although I don't think this theoretical optimum method exists. If it does exist I suppose it's pretty complicated. I'm not ambitious enough to try to define a method that would give optimum results in all cases. Even proving this for one case is too difficult. I however think that it is a good practice to choose one utility function that the society agrees to approximate the real world needs accurately enough. There need not be one such function. Different targets may apply in different situations (one could seek best median utility or minimize worst utility to one individual, width of opposition, take into account strength of opposing opinions, strong first preference support to the winner etc.). And sometimes one the society may be satisfied with some other than the theoretically best utility function to make the system better in some other aspects (e.g. simplicity, strategy resistance). Too often, when we consider methods by election criteria, we assume that a criterion is desirable, entirely apart from whether or not it chooses the optimum winner. I would guess that most of our criteria *do* coincide with higher utility. All things being equal you couldn't expect that a method that fails majority favorite would produce higher utility. There are other issues besides utility of course... There's the question of what the public will accept and understand how to use, and there's all the questions of how to give the voter incentive to vote sincerely. Yes, all such criteria need to be considered. Abd ul-Rahman Lomax mentioned that also the majority rule could be violated. I agree that with some excellent utility functions that gives the best overall utility (e.g. Range style). One reason why the majority rule is popular is that it is hard to develop voting methods that would not respect it and still be strategy resistant. Or maybe majority rule is in some cases in line with the targeted utility function (e.g. to avoid a mutiny of the majority). (There are also other reasons, like simply the tradition.) One reason why I think it would be good to always mention the target utility function is that then it is easier to compare the impact of the strategy resistance related modifications to some voting method against the basic utility function. It is typical that when strong anti-strategy measures are applied they make the achieved utility a bit worse. These two aspects, strategy resistance and good performance with sincere votes, need to be balanced. (I have often used the example of winning votes and ballots 49:A, 49:BC, 1:CA.) Juho Laatu ___ To help you stay safe and secure online, we've developed the all new Yahoo! Security Centre. http://uk.security.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho's idea
On Jan 9, 2007, at 2:25 , Simmons, Forest wrote: Juho wrote: How about the smallest number of ballots on which some alternative that beats A pairwise is ranked higher than A? Juho If I am not mistaken, this idea is equivalent to electing the alternative A with the greatest number of ballots on which A is ranked higher than any alternative that beats A pairwise. Yes, seems so, if we don't care about the ties. I'll explain a bit more my interest in this particular method. The vote of a voter in a way says: I object the election of alternative A since voters prefer B to A (and I do so too). We thus do not try to seek the alternative that beats A most (directly or in chain) (as typical in the Condorcet methods), but we try to count the number of justifiable objections (that may be based on losing to any of the other alternatives). This reasoning is mainly based on trying to achieve good performance with sincere votes using an alternative utility function. The strategic defence properties may or may not be there. Here's a variant that could be used with cardinal ratings/range ballots: Elect the alternative A with the greatest number of ballots on each of which A is rated above the expected rating of the alternatives that beat A pairwise. Aha, that's an interesting approach. And the same with the replication of names on the ballot. I'll also explain a bit more the thoughts I had on how this method could be developed further (to better or worse :-). Instead of seeking the candidate with the smallest number of ballots on which some alternative that beats A pairwise is ranked higher than A one could sum up the margin comparison values (= instead of just adding 1 per each vote). This would make the largest possible result n*n where n is the number of votes (1 in the typical EM elections with 100 voters). The idea is to go closer to margin style results instead of the quite winning vote style results of the method where just the number of votes is counted. (Also (WinningVotes-LosingVotes)/ WinningVotes is an option.) Juho Laatu Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Strategic polls in Approval
On Jan 8, 2007, at 6:23 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: I find it odd that IRV proponents would claim that IRV can save money by eliminating the need for primaries I just note that in principle primaries are different from the actual election in the sense that in typical primaries the _party_supporters_ elect their candidate for the actual race. This means that you will get an average compromise candidate from the party. In the US the difference could be that in a situation where democrats have the majority the primaries would first elect a median democratic candidate that would then be elected in the actual election by majority (at least if the Republicans followed the same practice and elected their median candidate in their primary). If all the democrat candidates would participate directly in the actual election, a probable outcome would be to elect not the median democratic candidate but one that is relatively close to the republicans. In the political system of the US where most of Washington is replaced by the new president to members of his own party electing a candidate that is the choice of the party that will rule makes some sense. But if one would seek for a president that represents the whole population (over republicans and democrats), a compromise candidate could make sense. Note also that if one party goes directly to the election with several candidates and the other one arranges a preliminary it is possible that the one with multiple candidates will win since it is likely to have a more centrist candidate among its candidates than the other party. , and eliminating primaries could make more likely the conditions under which IRV would select a winner against the preference of a majority. Didn't quite understand this scenario. The basic method is to select and vote for all candidates who one judges as acceptable as winners. This is why it is named Approval. If voters are fully honest in this, and make reasonable accomodation for the views and satisfaction of others (In other words, A is my favorite, but I know that B is preferred by many who don't like A so much, and I think of B as a reasonable choice for the office as well), then the method clearly works to find a good winner. I think the name of the Approval method is not a very good one since the best (and quite sensible from sincere point of view too) strategy is not to vote based on which candidates one agrees but based on which candidates are probable winners and how one's own preferences relate to that. Maybe it should be renamed to something like pick the winner and the your favourite candidates :-). The end result may not be a very good one even if all voters would vote sincerely vote according to their view on which candidates are approvable. In this case the votes of those voters who find most candidates (especially the major ones) acceptable and those ones that strictly accept only some non major candidates would be wasted (from the point of view of deciding who the winner is). (Maybe someone thinks that excluding the extremists or those who are happy with any choice is a good thing, but this sure violates the one man one vote principle.) Strategic voting in Approval may thus be a good recommendation both from strategic and sincere point of view. For a poll to move a candidate from not-close to frontrunner status, it would have to be drastically distorted. As I've mentioned, there are more subtle, more serious, and less provable forms of lying than this. I really don't think it's a matter for special concern. Ok, I don't claim that this vulnerability would be the most critical one. But making propaganda is common and generally accepted or understood. Light propaganda has similar but maybe weaker effect than a forged poll, but it is more acceptable and therefore risk of backfiring may be smaller. I have seen also promotion/claims of two leading candidates in a multiparty setting. Often it is beneficial to make some (or lots of) propaganda even if there were no guarantees that it will make the difference on who wins. As I mentioned, it could backfire. We don't know whether distorted polls like this would improve or hurt a candidate's chance of success, because only one of the possible effects was considered, one which is thought to move the result in a direction favoring those who distorted the polling. We would also have to consider the effects which could move the vote in the opposite direction. Ok, I didn't pay too much attention to this yet. Let's see if someone identifies some new properties. Juho Laatu Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho's idea
I generated one example to demonstrate the difference between basic mimax and the proposed method that seeks the candidate with the smallest number of ballots on which some alternative that beats A pairwise is ranked higher than A. All the votes in this example rank all the candidates to eliminate the impact of margins vs. winning votes. 12: abcd 13: acdb 12: bacd 13: bcda 12: cdab 13: cdba 12: dabc 13: dbac The basic idea of the example is that there is a cycle AB C D AB. B also beats A with a small margin. The difference between the two methods comes from the difference of one bad defeat vs. wide front of defeats (to any candidate). With minmax the largest defeats (margins) are: A:26, B:26, C:24, D: 50. C wins since it loses to A and B only with margin 24. With the proposed method the results are: A:75, B:63, C:75, D:75. C's result is now worse than in minmax since there are 75 voters that think that A or B or both are better than C. The opposition against C is thus wide (in number of voters who have justified reasons to object C) although C doesn't lose that much to any single candidate. Note also that although A and B lose to D in the same number of ballots, there are also some additional voters that feel that B should win A, and this makes B the winner. Minmax and the proposed new method both have a reasonably justifiable utility function (with sincere votes) that is just different - looking for either the worst defeat or the worst number of opposing voters with well justified opinions (=someone would beat the candidate also in pairwise comparison). Juho Laatu On Jan 13, 2007, at 14:46 , Juho wrote: On Jan 9, 2007, at 2:25 , Simmons, Forest wrote: Juho wrote: How about the smallest number of ballots on which some alternative that beats A pairwise is ranked higher than A? Juho If I am not mistaken, this idea is equivalent to electing the alternative A with the greatest number of ballots on which A is ranked higher than any alternative that beats A pairwise. Yes, seems so, if we don't care about the ties. I'll explain a bit more my interest in this particular method. The vote of a voter in a way says: I object the election of alternative A since voters prefer B to A (and I do so too). We thus do not try to seek the alternative that beats A most (directly or in chain) (as typical in the Condorcet methods), but we try to count the number of justifiable objections (that may be based on losing to any of the other alternatives). This reasoning is mainly based on trying to achieve good performance with sincere votes using an alternative utility function. The strategic defence properties may or may not be there. Here's a variant that could be used with cardinal ratings/range ballots: Elect the alternative A with the greatest number of ballots on each of which A is rated above the expected rating of the alternatives that beat A pairwise. Aha, that's an interesting approach. And the same with the replication of names on the ballot. I'll also explain a bit more the thoughts I had on how this method could be developed further (to better or worse :-). Instead of seeking the candidate with the smallest number of ballots on which some alternative that beats A pairwise is ranked higher than A one could sum up the margin comparison values (= instead of just adding 1 per each vote). This would make the largest possible result n*n where n is the number of votes (1 in the typical EM elections with 100 voters). The idea is to go closer to margin style results instead of the quite winning vote style results of the method where just the number of votes is counted. (Also (WinningVotes-LosingVotes)/ WinningVotes is an option.) Juho Laatu Send instant messages to your online friends http:// uk.messenger.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Election methods in student government...
I support raphfrk's thoughts that the basic methods might be the best choice. Open list and PR-STV are two quite well working basic PR methods. Raphfrk proposed also asset voting. Also that one is quite simple and natural. It may add some asset trading, which might be a bad thing in this environment that I understood was quite interested in plotting. Well, maybe they'd really like that second negotiation round of asset voting and be happy to use this method. Or alternatively they should not be given the chance to start this kind of horse trading. I have also another less common method that I have promoted on this mailing list. Open list methods can be extended to cover also hierarchical candidate settings. The lists are no longer lists, so tree voting is a better name for this method. The candidates (and parties and other groupings) thus agree a tree-like structure where candidates are leaves and branches of the tree may have descriptive names (party names, party branches, interest groups). Voters vote simply one of the candidates. The seats are allocated to the branches of the tree (based on the number of votes received by each branch) starting from the root using some suitable PR allocation method. This process is then repeated towards the smaller branches until all the seats have been allocated to the candidates in the leafs. Tree voting gives candidates some more information on the candidates than traditional open list does (from party alliances to small interest groups). Also the division of seats within each party is more fair (not plurality based but proportional also within parties and party alliances). Tree voting doesn't allow giving her personal inheritance order in the ballot (in STV style). But the candidate given order of inheritance (in the form of the tree) is there, and it may reflect the true thoughts/intentions of the candidates quite accurately (=not much space for the candidates to tell each voter group that the candidate would promote especially their values). In elections where there are numerous candidates expecting all voters to know the candidates well enough to give them a STV like preference order may be too much. In elections where all candidates are well known that might be ok. Juho Laatu On Dec 21, 2006, at 14:34 , [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anyway, I have been investigating alternate systems for single- winner elections and (especially) multi-winner elections. Party list is out - the less rigidly-defined party structure makes it even less fair that it would be in a national election. There is a system called open party list. Basically, the voter votes for 1 candidate. The party that that candidate represents gets the vote and the seats are split on that basist between the parties. However, the party member that actually fills each seat is determined by how many votes the candidate obtained for the party, e.g. the party's highest vote getter gets the first party seat and so on down until all the party seats are filled. This allows the voters to choose the parties but also choose which party member gets elected. I have also investigated STV (and IRV for single-winner) However, the lack of monotonicity is quite troubling - the fact that you can help elect a candidate by ranking them LOWER seems almost undemocratic. In the multi seat case, I don't think PR-STV is that bad. This, coupled with the fact that the current system *replaced* STV some 20-odd years ago, dampens my enthusiasm for that method a bit. That doesn't mean that STV is bad, it just means that it is bad for the majority. Any PR system is bad for the majority. Look at what the new system actually does ... it give most of the seats to the majority party/faction. Who decided the current system? Presumably, it was the majority party/faction. I have also seen plenty of other election methods that look interesting - Concordet methods especially. However, these methods are quite complex and don't have any good multi-winner variant (there is CPO-STV, but it is extremely complex and is still non-monotonic). I would suggest asset voting as a really simple way to get PR. In its most simple form, each voter votes for 1 candidate. Any candidate who gets the quota is elected and can transfer his excess to any other candidate. All the other candidates can also transfer votes in order to bring one of them to the quota. Right now, I'm kind of at a loss as to what the best voting system would be. It depends on your objectives. There is no 'best' system. It's obvious that the current system isn't it Yeah, it does seem pretty bad. I also don't like the idea of using a system that is so complex that it can't be reasonably explained to non-technical types. I also don't like the idea of using a system that is so
Re: [EM] Clone proofing Copeland
Ok, the method that I proposed is not as defensive against burial as the original one. My target was just to make the method better with sincere votes (not to seek the ultimate most strategy resistant method). I'll come back with this method and also some other variants when I find some more time (they require some more processing, I'm not quite happy with the one that I proposed either although it shows my intended direction very well). But I'll however mention some random observations that the example that you used made me think. - One could also claim that these votes are a result of strategic voting but in another way than what you described. Instead of having 49 voters that strategically changed their vote from BA (or B) to BC one could have had just one voter that strategically changed her vote from CA to AB. As a result numbers 25 and 26 were swapped and counting the first place votes gives a different result. The strategic voter was not able to get her #1 favourite but she could easily help her #2 favourite become elected. - In addition to strategies one of course also has to pay attention to the sincere votes. What would be the best candidate to elect if the votes in the example were all sincere? There is thus always a balance on how much one needs to protect against strategic voters since all such changes in the methods (in most cases) make the achieved utility with sincere votes a bit worse. If there is no significant risk of strategic voters spoiling he election = use methods that pick good candidates with sincere votes. Lots of risk = use all necessary means and modify the method so that the impact of strategies stays tolerable. Different rules apply in different voting situations (e.g. public large scale elections vs. contentious elections among the members of this list :-) ). Juho Laatu On Jan 2, 2007, at 17:37 , Chris Benham wrote: Juho wrote: How about the smallest number of ballots on which some alternative that beats A pairwise is ranked higher than A? Juho No, that would have nothing like the same strength or resistance to Burial. 26: AB 25: CA 49: BC (sincere is BA or B) The Simmons method narrowly elects A (the sincere CW), while your suggestion easily elects the Burier's candidate B. Chris Benham Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Clone proofing Copeland
How about the smallest number of ballots on which some alternative that beats A pairwise is ranked higher than A? Juho On Dec 31, 2006, at 3:52 , Simmons, Forest wrote: Here's a version that is both clone proof and monotonic: The winner is the alternative A with the smallest number of ballots on which alternatives that beat A pairwise are ranked in first place. [shared first place slots are counted fractionally] That's it. This method satisfies the Smith Criterion, Monotonicity, and Clone Independence. I'll leave it up to Chris to tell us which of Woodall's criteria are not respected by this method. I also like the stochastic version that chooses by random ballot from the set of alternatives S, such that for each A in S, at most fifty percent of the first place slots are taken up by alternatives that beat A pairwise. Forest winmail.dat election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ___ Yahoo! Messenger - with free PC-PC calling and photo sharing. http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Strategic polls in Approval
On Dec 30, 2006, at 18:37 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: The particular vulnerability alleged here is actually applicable to *all* election systems, it happens to be here stated in a specific way that could make it appear that AV is more vulnerable than, say, IRV or IRRV. The interesting part is that the regular optimal strategy recommendations for Approval and opinion polls can be used to change the way individual voters will vote (if voters use the recommended strategies, if only some parties use this strategy etc.). This is an election where there is something close to a three-way tie. That's rare, for starters. This strategy requires at least three candidates that can be claimed to be leading candidates. In two-party countries having three candidates of about equal strength would be exceptional. Im multi-party countries or if parties have more than one candidate that is not exceptional. I don't think the poll would have much effect. For this strategy to work at all, the election has to be close, there must really be some doubt about which of the three candidates will actually turn out to be in third place. So voters will consider that. In the example it was ok if voters were uncertain of which opinion polls are reliable. The plotters were happy with the confusion (as long as they could avoid having polls where A was not among the leading candidates). The strategy works (partially) even if only some voters get fooled. If A and B were close to equal then already a small change may bring victory to A. Where there are three frontrunners, this strategy does not exactly apply. That's the situation proposed. There are really no frontrunners in this race. In the example the first (correct) poll showed that A and B had more support than C (but only so much that the A supporters could claim that also C could be a lead candidate). The protection would be a requirement that the winner obtain majority approval. Many elections require this. With that requirement in place, a different strategy is proposed that is much simpler and not vulnerable to this polling deception, because it does not involve determining the frontrunner. For each candidate, make an independent determination: would you prefer the office to remain vacant or for this person to be elected? If you'd prefer the office to remain vacant, don't vote for the candidate. If you would prefer the candidate to be elected, vote yes. The winner, with approval, then, is the candidate most widely acceptable, or there is no winner. I've learned a great deal by thinking of the deliberative process used under Roberts Rules as the basic *deliberative* election method: sequential nomination and vote. Someone moves that A be elected as the officer. If the motion is seconded, it is then open to debate and amendment. If I move that B be substituted in the motion for A, and my amendment is seconded, *this* can then be debated, and, presumably, will ultimately come to a vote. The vote essentially determines if the members prefer B to A or not. If they prefer B to A, then the amendment will pass. This process continues until all reasonable nominations have been made and accepted or rejected. At some point, debate is closed, typically by a two- thirds vote, and the main motion proceeds to vote. If it passes, we have elected an officer. If not, the post remains vacant or is otherwise filled temporarily according to the emergency rules that apply when a post becomes vacant for some reaso *This is a Condorcet-compatible method,* but what may be easily missed is that preferences, in a deliberative process, are not fixed things. This is the difference between deliberative and aggregative process. Aggregative process, i.e., voting, simply attempts to take a snapshot of preferences, and possibly preference strengths as with, for example, Range, at one point in time. It includes preferences that would change if exposed to debate. It includes preferences that would shift if people knew what others preferred. Because of our continual exposure to preference systems, and a lack of exposure to Approval and Range methods, we tend to think of elections as a contest, with voters being opposed to each other if they prefer different candidates. But in real organizations, where people care about each other and about the health of the organization, it can matter very much that a candidate is not merely the preference of a majority, but also that the candidate is more widely *acceptable* than that. And I have seen voting in small groups where the majority set aside its preference in order to make a decision that was actually approved by consensus. Range methods can collapse this process into a single vote, but the give-and-take that is typical of deliberative process is missing. Range is still
Re: [EM] Strategic polls in Approval
In pressed the send button too early in my previous mail. Here's a more complete version of that mail. On Dec 30, 2006, at 18:37 , Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: The particular vulnerability alleged here is actually applicable to *all* election systems, it happens to be here stated in a specific way that could make it appear that AV is more vulnerable than, say, IRV or IRRV. The interesting part is that the regular optimal strategy recommendations for Approval and opinion polls can be used to change the way individual voters will vote (if voters use the recommended strategies, if only some parties use this strategy etc.). This is an election where there is something close to a three-way tie. That's rare, for starters. This strategy requires at least three candidates that can be claimed to be leading candidates. In two-party countries having three candidates of about equal strength would be exceptional. Im multi-party countries or if parties have more than one candidate that is not exceptional. I don't think the poll would have much effect. For this strategy to work at all, the election has to be close, there must really be some doubt about which of the three candidates will actually turn out to be in third place. So voters will consider that. In the example it was ok if voters were uncertain of which opinion polls are reliable. The plotters were happy with the confusion (as long as they could avoid having polls where A was not among the leading candidates). The strategy works (partially) even if only some voters get fooled. If A and B were close to equal then already a small change may bring victory to A. Where there are three frontrunners, this strategy does not exactly apply. That's the situation proposed. There are really no frontrunners in this race. In the example the first (correct) poll showed that A and B had more support than C (but only so much that the A supporters could claim that also C could be a lead candidate). And poll results are *not* essential for good Approval Voting. I stated an alternative strategy that could easily be used in a three- way race, and I suggest it is an appropriate one there. The Approval optimal strategy descriptions refer to the poll or expected results of the election. That opens one possibility to influence how voters vote - at least in theory. I don't claim that this strategy would somehow dramatically change the way I see Approval. But it is good to cover also these possibilities and prepare for them, and to make the voters and politicians and media aware of these risks. Juho Laatu ___ Now you can scan emails quickly with a reading pane. Get the new Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] FAVS
On Dec 17, 2006, at 20:45 , Warren Smith wrote: Range Voting was recently derided (in THE NATION magazine, Dec 25, page 22) as a strategic mess. What does that mean (I wonder)? Anyhow, the fact that range satisfies FAVS whereas other systems do not, seems to me to make it LESS of a strategic mess, not more, than other systems. And in general Range Voting has sipler strtagey than almost any other system, plus provably nice properties under strategic voting As a Range Voting expert and promoter you probably know its properties very well also yourself but here's my quick characterization. - RV is a wonderful method for dominantly non-competitive elections and polls - RV utility function is very good when compared to most alternative methods - RV is very vulnerable to strategic voting - but strategic voting is indeed simple, just vote as in Approval - also the FAVS properties of RV make it a nice and understandable tool for the voters - in competitive situations where most voters vote in Approval style RV may still elect the Condorcet winner with quite good probability (but only with probability) RV is certainly one of my favourite methods for seeking answer to question which one of the clouds on the sky is the prettiest (assuming that we want an exact result and are not afraid of doing some calculations while lying on the grass). But when we move to competitive elections in a traditional (typically competitive) democratic society RV is not my first choice e.g. to electing a president (this kind of large public elections are my default use case when discussing the properties of voting methods). The reasons are: - RV does not support the idea of one man one vote very well (well, in theory yes, but...) = strategic (Approval style ballot) voters may gain multiple times the weight of a sincere (Range style ballot) voter = radical voters (the competing candidate is all bad) voters may have multiple times the weight of a moderate (the competing candidate is not quite as good) voter - if RV becomes in practice Approval, then the RV side is a trap for voters (that are competitive but) who don't know that their vote is more effective in Approval style - RV rewards individual voters that vote strategically by giving them more power - strategic voting is beneficial in practically all situations (not just in extreme cases and/or requiring detailed information and/or coordination and/or having risks of failing and/or causing damage instead of benefit to the voter) In highly competitive situations one could use Approval (RV 0..1) instead of normal RV (=when one doesn't want to recommend the voters to use Range style). But if one does so, then one could also consider using Condorcet or other corresponding methods that have been designed to cope in competitive environments (like Approval does) but that are more expressive than Approval. My understanding is that Condorcet methods are seen by many experts as emerging from the need to recover from the known strategic vulnerabilities of RV like more straight forward (expressive and good utility but vulnerable) methods. I guess these observations are quite obvious to many readers of this mailing list. But maybe listing them helps in developing a wording that would be acceptable to all. (an optimist? :-) Juho Laatu ___ All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Is there a criterion for identical voters casting identical ballots?
I thought mostly use scenarios where the favourite candidate is not involved in the cycles and the voters know very little about the anticipated results. Another example in this direction would be situation where there are n parties that each have 3 candidates. Voters would then vote so that they first put their own candidates in the front (in some order (ffs)) and then the other parties in the order of preference but arranging the individual candidates within the parties so that they will form cycles (between each others within the parties). Note btw that this failure of FAVS (as Warren Smith named it) is not really related to the calculation process of the Condorcet methods but to the ballot style. In the typical ballots voters give the candidates a linear order, which prevents them giving cyclic preferences. If they were able to give cyclic preferences then all voters could vote the same way. In principle (to be general) one could allow voters to fill a matrix instead of giving a linear order. This would make it possible to use also cycles and all kind of partial orderings. A related topic is the tied at the top and tied at the bottom rules where the top candidates may all win each others (or at the bottom lose to each others). Support of the tied at bottom feature would make it unnecessary to vote loops since this way all unwanted candidates would lose to each others. This feature could also be added in the matrix preference votes to eliminate some strategic loop considerations. Also the linear order based ballots could have explicit ways to mark both lose and both win etc. (instead of the default rules tied at top,...), but of course this makes voting more complex to the voters (just like allowing full matrix preference votes would do). Using + and - a ballot might look e.g. a+bc=de-fg-h-i. Just for your consideration. Different ballot styles may have an impact on strategies too. Juho Laatu On Dec 15, 2006, at 15:02 , Dave Ketchum wrote: How did we get here? I assume no ties to simplify the discussion - not to change the rules. If there is a cycle, such as XAYX, A backers have no control as to XA, but they can influence whether there is also a YX to create a cycle. Else, assuming more voters back X than A, A loses and it matters not what ordering A backers choose for others. If there is no such X, A wins and it matters not how A backers sort those losing to A. LOOKING CLOSER - If A backers want to be neutral as to B/C/D, they can simply vote for A as they would in Plurality. On Fri, 15 Dec 2006 00:01:04 +0200 Juho wrote: Here is one very basic case where a group of voters has identical preferences but they benefit of casting three different kind of ballots. In a Condorcet method there is an interest to create a loop to your opponents. In its simplest form there are four candidates. One of the candidates is our favourite and the others we want to beat. The others may or may not be from one party (this influences the probability of being able to generate a cycle at least if there are more than 4 candidates). Let's anyway assume that all the candidates will get about the same number of votes. Also in a zero info situation this may be a good voting strategy. The A supporters vote according to three patterns as follows. ABCD ACDB ADBC If all candidates have same number of first place supporters (and other preferences are mixed) and B, C and D supporters don't try to create loops, A wins. Juho Laatu -- [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. ___ Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. The New Version is radically easier to use The Wall Street Journal http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] reply to Juho Laatu on range voting
On Dec 18, 2006, at 1:05 , Warren Smith wrote: Juho Laatu: Here's my quick characterization [of range voting]: - RV is a wonderful method for dominantly non-competitive elections and polls - RV utility function is very good when compared to most alternative methods - RV is very vulnerable to strategic voting - but strategic voting is indeed simple, just vote as in Approval - also the FAVS properties of RV make it a nice and understandable tool for the voters - in competitive situations where most voters vote in Approval style RV may still elect the Condorcet winner with quite good probability (but only with probability) RV is certainly one of my favourite methods for seeking answer to question which one of the clouds on the sky is the prettiest (assuming that we want an exact result and are not afraid of doing some calculations while lying on the grass). But when we move to competitive elections in a traditional (typically competitive) democratic society RV is not my first choice ... reasons: - RV does not support the idea of one man one vote very well (well, in theory yes, but...) = strategic (Approval style ballot) voters may gain multiple times the weight of a sincere (Range style ballot) voter = radical voters (the competing candidate is all bad) voters may have multiple times the weight of a moderate (the competing candidate is not quite as good) voter - if RV becomes in practice Approval, then the RV side is a trap for voters (that are competitive but) who don't know that their vote is more effective in Approval style - RV rewards individual voters that vote strategically by giving them more power - strategic voting is beneficial in practically all situations (not just in extreme cases and/or requiring detailed information and/or coordination and/or having risks of failing and/or causing damage instead of benefit to the voter) In highly competitive situations one could use Approval (RV 0..1) instead of normal RV (=when one doesn't want to recommend the voters to use Range style). But if one does so, then one could also consider using Condorcet or other corresponding methods that have been designed to cope in competitive environments (like Approval does) but that are more expressive than Approval. --REPLY by Warren D Smith: First: A theorem ( http://rangevoting.org/AppCW.html ) indicates that range and approval voting both return the honest- voter Condorcet winner if all voters act strategically. Basically, if we are not in the prettiest cloud but rather in the I love/hate Nixon emotional mode, then we vote max or min on Nixon. Assuming all voters do that with their threshold placed somewhere between the two candidates they judge as most likely to win, (which they do because they are not strategic idiots) and assuming one of these two happens to be the honest-voter Condorcet winner, then theorem: Range Approval both will elect the honest-voter Condorcet winner, but meanwhile Condorcet methods often will fail to do so. [Juho Laatu claims misleadingly that RV may still elect the Condorcet winner with quite good probability (but only with probability). Actually, under these assumptions, the probability is 1. Further, Condorcet methods with strategic voters will elect the honest-CW with merely a probability strictly below 1.] Ok, you made some additional assumptions (all voters strategic, one of uniformly identified top candidates is the Condorcet winner) that I didn't make. With some appropriate assumptions RV behaves as described. Second: The claim that honest Range Voters can have their votes outweighed by large factors by strategic ones, is correct. However, (1) at least their honest vote will never actually work against them (e.g. compared to not voting at all) and Yes but when compared to voting strategically (Approval style) their honest vote works against them (=reduces the strength of their vote). (2) their honest statement X is my favorite in their vote, will never hurt them. With every Condorcet method, by theorem, both of those properties are false. Yes, Condorcet methods have some characteristics that are uglier than those of RV. This doesn't mean that their overall usefulness/ usability would follow the same logic. Anyhow such outweighing (a) does not matter if strategic and honest voters have the same political distributions, If this same political distribution is caused by clever and strategic people having more weight and others having less weight that would change the one man one vote towards clever man several votes which I don't find very tempting. And even if we were lucky with the statistics already relatively small changes in the balance could change the outcome of the election considerably. I also would like to point out that the incentives for each individual voter are strong. If you voted A=99, B=98 changing your vote to A=99, B=0
Re: [EM] Is there a criterion for identical voters casting identical ballots?
On Dec 18, 2006, at 8:31 , Dave Ketchum wrote: How did we get here? You talk of a method in which ONE voter can say BOTH AB AND BA. Yes, either in the sense that both lose to each others or in the sense that both win each others. Assuming such a method could claim useful value to justify the headaches of implementing it and making it understood, I have seen nothing to suggest Condorcet might have such an ability. See e.g. http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Tied_at_the_top_rule. The reason I discussed this possibility is the fact that it frees the voter from creating an artificial loop and deciding in which direction it should run. In Condorcet the sum of all the ballots in an election can be a combination of some voters voting each preference in a way to, collectively, create a cycle - a problem to solve but not a feature to brag about. Agreed. The tied at top/bottom rules are tricks that may relieve this a bit. (Their other characteristics would need to be discussed more to tell if they are good or bad in general.) You also use the word loops in a manner I do not understand. I don't know how but I think I referred to artificial intentionally generated circular preferences every time. Juho Laatu DWK On Sun, 17 Dec 2006 21:40:02 +0200 Juho wrote: I thought mostly use scenarios where the favourite candidate is not involved in the cycles and the voters know very little about the anticipated results. Another example in this direction would be situation where there are n parties that each have 3 candidates. Voters would then vote so that they first put their own candidates in the front (in some order (ffs)) and then the other parties in the order of preference but arranging the individual candidates within the parties so that they will form cycles (between each others within the parties). Note btw that this failure of FAVS (as Warren Smith named it) is not really related to the calculation process of the Condorcet methods but to the ballot style. In the typical ballots voters give the candidates a linear order, which prevents them giving cyclic preferences. If they were able to give cyclic preferences then all voters could vote the same way. In principle (to be general) one could allow voters to fill a matrix instead of giving a linear order. This would make it possible to use also cycles and all kind of partial orderings. A related topic is the tied at the top and tied at the bottom rules where the top candidates may all win each others (or at the bottom lose to each others). Support of the tied at bottom feature would make it unnecessary to vote loops since this way all unwanted candidates would lose to each others. This feature could also be added in the matrix preference votes to eliminate some strategic loop considerations. Also the linear order based ballots could have explicit ways to mark both lose and both win etc. (instead of the default rules tied at top,...), but of course this makes voting more complex to the voters (just like allowing full matrix preference votes would do). Using + and - a ballot might look e.g. a +bc=de-fg-h-i. Just for your consideration. Different ballot styles may have an impact on strategies too. Juho Laatu On Dec 15, 2006, at 15:02 , Dave Ketchum wrote: How did we get here? I assume no ties to simplify the discussion - not to change the rules. If there is a cycle, such as XAYX, A backers have no control as to XA, but they can influence whether there is also a YX to create a cycle. Else, assuming more voters back X than A, A loses and it matters not what ordering A backers choose for others. If there is no such X, A wins and it matters not how A backers sort those losing to A. LOOKING CLOSER - If A backers want to be neutral as to B/C/D, they can simply vote for A as they would in Plurality. On Fri, 15 Dec 2006 00:01:04 +0200 Juho wrote: Here is one very basic case where a group of voters has identical preferences but they benefit of casting three different kind of ballots. In a Condorcet method there is an interest to create a loop to your opponents. In its simplest form there are four candidates. One of the candidates is our favourite and the others we want to beat. The others may or may not be from one party (this influences the probability of being able to generate a cycle at least if there are more than 4 candidates). Let's anyway assume that all the candidates will get about the same number of votes. Also in a zero info situation this may be a good voting strategy. The A supporters vote according to three patterns as follows. ABCD ACDB ADBC If all candidates have same number of first place supporters (and other preferences are mixed) and B, C and D supporters don't try to create loops, A wins. Juho
Re: [EM] Hamilton vs Webster (Sainte-Lague)
Yes, this one works. But there are still some interesting peculiarities. Example: We have three sates with population A:5, B:3 and C:3 (millions I guess). Seats will be allocated in the following order: A, B*, C, A, B*, A, C,... - Three first seats go to the three states either based on the at least one seat per state rule or by starting the algorithm from zero seats - I used * to indicate where B wins the seat by lottery (instead of C) The strange thing is that the fifth seat goes to B by lottery but C will not get the next seat although it was already entitled (tie) to the previous seat (and B and C are identical states in the sense that they have exactly the same population). Divisor methods like SL/Webster provide ordering of the candidates/ seats by default and they may be nicer to use in places where such ordering is needed. I however tend to think that the Alabama paradox is not a sufficient reason to abandon use of LR/Hamilton in seat allocation to the states. LR/Hamilton does the allocation in a perfectly rational way that can be considered to be ideal (at least from one point of view). LR/Hamilton (Alabama paradox) may look bad to the audience if presented so, but it is another question if it is bad or if it looks bad to mathematicians. Juho Laatu On Dec 14, 2006, at 6:16 , Dan Bishop wrote: MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote: ... Are there other reasons why LR/Hamilton is not favoured? I reply: That's reason enough. Two kinds of nonmonotonicity: Population nonmonotonicity and House-size nonmonotonicitly. Your state can lose a seat because of a population change favoring your state with respect to the others, or because of an increase in the House's total number of seats. There's a pretty simple modification to LR/Hamilton that would eliminate the Alabama Paradox. Give seats one at a time (except at the beginning, when each state is assigned one seat), such that the nth seat goes to the state for which the quantity (state's proportion of population) * n - (state's seats so far) is the greatest. election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Apportionment (biased?) let me add some more confusion to the mix :)
). Maybe they could keep some of their extra votes in storage for the next election but not more than some fixed amount. One seat allocation method for different voting rights would (roughly) be to start from the root of the tree and allocate voting rights to each branch in proportion to the number of votes. The process would proceed always first in the largest still unallocated branch and would stop when all seats would be filled (= n branches have voting rights). After this the voting rights that were not allocated to individual candidates yet would all be given to the most popular sub-branch and finally the most popular candidate of a sub- branch. Additional rules on how to handle situations where one runs out of candidates or for maximum or minimum level of voting rights may be used. A hierarchical structure may also lead to some natural arrangements. If one of the candidates in a small branch gets so many votes that also some other candidates will be elected from that branch, then that favourite candidate probably takes a leadership position within that branch even if the rules would not mandate that. Juho Laatu Check Out the new free AIM(R) Mail -- 2 GB of storage and industry- leading spam and email virus protection. Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Apportionment (biased?) let me add some more confusion to the mix :)
Yes, random allocations are yet another way to balance the situation. Since the population of a state changes quite slowly some fixes (random, time division, voting power) may be wanted to reduce the risk of continuously getting less seats than the population would give right to. Changes in the support of political parties are maybe faster and therefore do not need similar fixes as badly. One more tool that can be useful in some situations is the hierarchical structure of the states/parties. To guarantee that certain set of states/parties will not be underrepresented they could form a team/alliance. When seats are allocated to that team they could lose (in typical allocation methods) only one seat to rounding errors instead on many of them losing a seat. Geographic alliances would maybe be more natural than e.g. an alliance of small states. I already mentioned the different voting power. A simple method in that direction would be to elect one representative from every state and give her voting power in relation to the number of people she represents. Or maybe large states would be given n seats with 1/n of the voting power of the state etc. Maybe the building where these representatives will work has a fixed number of physical seats = fill those seats and allocate voting power according to that. Juho Laatu On Dec 11, 2006, at 0:43 , Warren Smith wrote: Actually, I claim EVERY apportionment method so far discussed is biased, in the sense it will, under the right circumstances, systematically always-down-round one class of states and always-up-round the other. (Just make the small states all have exactly the right sizes and the large states all have the right sizes, and voila, this'll happen. You can make pretty much all the methods prefer larger or prefer smaller states, at your whim, by setting up the populations right in your contrived scenario.) Is there a way to get around that? Yes: randomized rounding. The idea would be you use a random number generator as part of the input into your decision to round a state up or down, and in such a way the expected net gain, was zero. Example: 5.3 -- 5 with probability 0.7 and -- 6 with probability 0.3. (That is for absolute unbiasedness. Also important is ratio- unbiasedness, which you can also assure by the same kind of method.) OK, so, here is a possible such method: do this kind of rounding. If the total number of congressmen comes out wrong, then try again, and keep trying until it comes out right. The end. This method seems totally unbiased. (Incidentally, the same idea was suggested in the 1980s for rounding floating point numbers inside computers. Biases can build up and result in large errors, and randomized rounding prevents that. This is a good idea but no computer hardware I know of implements it. The round to even approach is often used, which tries to get unbiasedness but isn't perfect.) Only problem with it is, it is randomized!! Warren D Smith http://rangevoting.org election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Juho--Why Largest-Remainder/Hamilton is unbiased
Sometimes small portion of randomness is nice. People play cards and are happy with he idea that random cards are dealt to the players. In a two-party system the time each one of the parties stays in power roughly corresponds to the value the parties are able to bring to the people. In PR methods a small random component doesn't bother me much. As you said, none of the discussed methods are really terrible. But of course in general I feel most comfortable with methods that respect the voice of the voters as exactly as possible. When trying to reach maximum PR it may be good to count the votes of the whole country and agree the number of seats based on those numbers. If one arranges a separate counting process for each district one probably introduces more randomness (rounding errors) to the PR than what the selection between e.g. LR and SL does. Regional PR is however quite ok, just like (the normal) ideological PR. One can provide both of these very accurately at the same time. But when doing so one probably has to push the rounding errors somewhere else, e.g. so that although each party gets the number of seats it is entitled to based on national votes and each region gets its fair share of seats, the candidates that will be elected at each region do not exactly correspond to the opinions expressed by the voters in that region. Let's say that a small party got 10% of the quota in all of the 10 districts. In principle it is entitled to one seat (in a quota based method). Now we must pick one of the regions where this party gets its seat even if there would be unelected candidates that got better results than the candidate of this small party in all regions. Sorry about the long paragraph. My only intention was to demonstrate that there will be some rounding errors in any case and we just need to decide where we want as exact results as possible and where some more rounding errors can be allowed. There may also be other desired properties like ability to order the candidates as discussed later. Now back to the individual quota and divisor based PR methods. Each one of them has some nice features and some less nice features. Many of them have already been mentioned. I'll list some more of the to point out some interesting features of them. (I hope I don't make too many mistakes with the tricky details.) LR and d'Hondt can guarantee that if I get 1/n of the votes, then I'll get one of the n seats. SL and d'Hondt can order the candidates for me, and I can then pick m best ones from the queue. The missing support of the second feature makes the LR a bit jumpy. There is no fixed ranking of the candidates but the set of winners / order depends on the number of seats. In many elections the number of seats is however fixed and as a result the behaviour of LR is quite stable. LR would maybe not be the best method when electing a team that will get a new member every day since it would no be easy to decide in which order the candidates should be chosen. Calling one candidate back in order to replace her with two new ones doesn't sound like a nice procedure. But for something more regular like parliamentary elections where the number of seats has been decided before the election I find LR very good (fair/unbiased and not jumpy). There could be some what ifs with LR like what if there would have been one seat less in this region and my party would have gotten one extra seat but these problems exist also in other methods. For example if we had had LR instead of the current method my party would have gotten the remaining seat with its larger number of extra votes than the other partes had after the 1/n quotas were filled. Other methods have their own verbal justifications. I however tend to think that LR is a quite natural measure of justification (of fair seat allocation). Its surprising features are just surprising features of mathematics and not really a fault of the method. For me SL is a smoothened version of LR. It is ok when smoothness (or ability to order the candidates) is what we want. And it is ok in general as a PR method. But I just can't help seeing LR as the basic method and the others as methods with additional tricks to tune the method in some direction (e.g. to order the candidates or to favour big parties a bit). Sorry about the long and philosophical mail. I hope I managed to describe why I find LR quite natural despite of its peculiarities. And as you already noted, all the discussed methods are very proportional. Some favour big parties a bit but otherwise I'd mostly talk about unavoidable small rounding errors. Juho Laatu On Dec 9, 2006, at 22:35 , MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote: I'll speak of it in terms of PR, because that's where LR is used. A party's remainder can be from 0 to almost 1, and, on average, it's .5 That means .5 quotas of remainder for each
Re: [EM] Sainte-Lague, part 3
On Dec 6, 2006, at 4:33 , MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote: There was later another bill to enact LR/Hamilton. It passed and wasn't vetored, and LR/Hamilton was used for a while--till someone pointed out the bizarre paradoxes that it's subject to: Some people move from another staste to your state, causing your state to lose a seat. We add a seat to the House, and that causes your state to lose a seat. When that was pointed out, LR/Hamilton was immediately repealed and discarded. (IRVists please take note). I understand that LR/Hamilton may lead to the Alabama paradox and people may dislike LR/Hamilton because of this. But I think LR/ Hamilton is quite proportional and unbiased. Are there other reasons why LR/Hamilton is not favoured? SL/Webster is close to LR/Hamilton and avoids the Alabama paradox, but LR/Hamilton might still be considered more exact in providing proportionality. Juho Laatu Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Hamilton vs Webster (Sainte-Lague)
On Dec 7, 2006, at 3:50 , MIKE OSSIPOFF wrote: You continued: and avoids the Alabama paradox, but LR/Hamilton might still be considered more exact in providing proportionality. I reply: Why? Hamilton's nonmonotonicity paradoxes are instances of unproportionality. And, as I said, Webster, and only Webster has the transfer property that I described. For example, given a Hamilton seat allocation, it could well be, due to Hamilton's random caprice, that if we take a seat from one state, and give it to another state, that seat transfer could reduce the factor by which those two states' votes per seat differ. Showing that the Hamilton allocation was suboptimal and need of improvement. Joseph Malkevitch pointed out the Balinski-Young Theorem in another mail. That's what I was actually looking for. I don't think this is too dramatic since we are only talking about rounding errors. But if voters can influence the outcome, then this is more serious. In the Alabama case I think LR/Hamilton is quite harmless since people sure do not move or give birth to children in the assumption that it might change the political balance (especially since you don't know if other people are moving too). But if someone is able to influence the outcome of the census (after knowing the results of the other states), then there is space for doing tricks. My assumption is that in most cases LR/Hamilton works ok and people should in a way be happy with the paradox since that gives them the fairest possible result. In practice SL/Webster is close enough (and monotonic), so I find it ok as well (the difference is anyway only at rounding error level here). And SL/Webster would be a good choice if there is a risk of foul play. Btw, in the case that one intentionally wants to favour large parties I find methods like d'Hondt/Jefferson better than setting a hard limit (e.g. 5%) that parties must reach to get their first candidate through. Juho Laatu ___ The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
